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.
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.
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.
THOUGHTFUL, 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.
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.
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.
COMBINING 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.
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.
