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.
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.
HALF A CENTURY ON, Nat Bickford revisits the predatory advances of two boarding school masters, one at Phillips Exeter, the other at Williston Academy, whose provocative behavior—sadistic in one case, tragic in the other—violated the genteel codes of prep school life in the late 1950s. Less cynical than Catcher in the Rye and more disturbing than A Separate Peace, the narrative benefits from the distance.
TOUCHING 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.
IN 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.
