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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
