Summer Restoration: Rosie Dresser and The Cobblers
$21.00IN 1947—having spent the better part of the war as a Red Cross volunteer with Patton’s Third Army in Europe—Rosie Dresser returned to the coastal village of Somesville, Maine where she had spent long and idyllic summers as a child. Unmarried, thirty-eight years old and a Vassar dropout, she bought a decaying house built in 1852 that she named The Cobbler’s and restored over the course of the summer with the active involvement of the community—summer and local.
Pitch Uncertain: A Mid-Century Middle Daughter Finds Her Voice
$24.95TOUCHING AND INCISIVE, Pitch Uncertain is a beautifully drawn account of Maisie Houghton’s struggle to find her own voice as the middle child of two parents whose marriage and lives she slowly decoded as she came of age in the 1950s. Growing up in the gentle ambience of Cambridge, Massachusetts, spending full summers in Dark Harbor, Maine, and regularly visiting her relatives in the socially polished reaches of greater New York, Maisie and her two sisters had the makings of an ideal childhood. But their parents were an enigma.
Making Hay: Tales from Oakholm, a farm in Massachusetts
$28.00COMBINING LOCAL HISTORY, family memoir and a naturalist’s simple affection for place, John Jeppson recalls his family’s efforts to adapt a well-loved property to changing times. Bought in 1925 and now hosting a fifth generation of the Jeppson family, Oakholm has been optimistically run as a commercial enterprise in Brookfield, Massachusetts during the better part of a century in which farming has virtually disappeared from the local landscape.
Civil and Uncivil Wars: Memories of a Greek Childhood, 1936 – 1950
$26.95LESS EXTREME THAN the wartime experiences of J. G. Ballard or Jerzy Kosinski but in the same vivid tradition, Civil and Uncivil Wars is a profound, touching, occasionally disconcerting, unfailingly candid, and consistently engaging reminder that the full measure of war and domestic unrest cannot be appreciated without the telling insights of the young.
Driving Backwards
$24.95GILMANTON WAS BRIEFLY the most famous town in America. Today the town, nestled amongst the hills of Central New Hampshire and along the curve of the Suncook River, is a microcosm of the changing ways and enduring values of rural life in the twenty-first century.
My City of Dreams
$28.00IN THIS CAREFULLY RESEARCHED and hauntingly written memoir, Lisa Gruenberg not only records her own life, but also that of relatives long lost to darkness, terror, and murder.
To The Stars Over Rough Roads: The Life of Andrew Atchison, Teacher and Missionary
$29.95MISSIONARY, EDUCATOR, ENTREPRENEUR, AND RESTLESS PROGRESSIVE, Andrew Atchison led a peripatetic 19th century life committed to the welfare of others—recently freed slaves, Indians on reservations, immigrant Chinese building the Panama Canal—in locales ranging from Kansas to New Mexico, Texas to Missouri, Louisiana to Panama. Orphaned at twelve in Ohio, Atchison left a mark that stretched West—To the Stars as told by Don Nelson in this engaging account of the distinctively American life of his maternal grandfather.
A Liberal Education
$26.95THOUGHTFUL, FUNNY, POINTED AND HONEST, A Liberal Education is an insightful scholar’s memoir of the generation that came of age in the late fifties—an opaque generation hinged between the conformist fifties and the rebellious late sixties.
I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and People
$24.95WHILE LUMINARIES from her father the physiologist Walter B. Cannon and the Kennedys to Adlai Stevenson and the Galbraiths have been influential forces in Marian Schlesinger’s very full life, I Remember is less an account of her celebrated family and friends than it is a refreshing, sometimes salty, always compelling account of a richly independent life, much of it focused on her art.
In The Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949
$26.95AT ONCE AN INTIMATE ACCOUNT of a young girl’s coming of age during the tempestuous times attending the birth of Israel and a rare record of Jewish family life in Palestine under the Ottomans dating to 1809, Nitza Rosovsky’s In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 adds fresh insights into the narrative of Jewish migration from early nineteenth century Europe to the formation of a Jewish homeland.
The Inventive Life of Charles Hill Morgan: The Power of Improvement in Industry, Education and Civic Life
$27.95
WHEN CHARLES HILL MORGAN learned how to use specialized drafting tools in the 1840s, his professional-grade compass precisely centered measurements for foundations and steam engines. His mastery of these tools led to a future of vast new possibilities.
Tower Hill: The First Twenty-Five Years
$28.95NO TYPE OF BUILDING—pyramid, skyscraper, palace—presents so many challenges as the design, construction and sustenance of a botanic garden. John Trexler’s Tower Hill: The First Twenty-Five Years traces the metamorphosis of a venerable urban horticultural institution, the Worcester County Horticultural Society founded in 1842, into the ever-evolving Tower Hill Botanic Garden, which opened in 1986.