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.
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.
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.
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.
FOR OVER 70 YEARS, Tony King attentively observed the world around him, capturing it with rare artistry as a photographer and elevating the ordinary in a way that can make anyone see their everyday world with fresh eyes. Known particularly for his iconic pictures of wildlife and the New England landscape, King’s greater breadth is definitively clear in Closer to Home.
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.
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.
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.
