SINCE ITS INCEPTION fifty years ago, the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Massachusetts, has kept true to its original mission of training family doctors while defying the odds in becoming one of the nation’s leading centers of biomedical research.
LESS 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.
GILMANTON 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.
FAKE SMILES IS A GRACEFUL, moving and reflective memoir of a contentious father-son relationship set against the backdrop of the Eisenhower and Nixon eras.
In “HIGH TIME,” Abigail Trafford masterfully braids two worlds: the culture and history of an accomplished East Coast family well anchored in time and place, and the life of an adventurous journalist navigating her way through new territories—professional and personal in diverse locales including Paris, Washington, D.C., Houston and Australia’s Northern Territory.
WHILE 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.
AT 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.
TAKING AS HER CANVAS forty-plus acres on the west side of Worcester, Massachusetts, Susan Ceccacci has created a rich tableau that captures the city’s cultural and industrial development over the past two centuries.
“LOADED WITH DYNAMITE,” was the prescient reaction of Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state when he heard the president promote national self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference in 1920. Wilson’s call became a rallying cry to the many rather than the select few for whom it was intended.
IN 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.
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.
WRITTEN WITH GRACE, intimacy, candor, insight, and humor, Jonathan Larsen’s The Perfect Assignment is a timely, first-hand account of the ascendancy and decline of print journalism over the better part of the twentieth century.
MISSIONARY, 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.
NO 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.
