Virginia Books

{This is} a brief book that doesn't fetishize fifty and that collages different voices. Though its contributors rarely object or probe or mention negatives--nor ask how and why 'women' are changed into 'older women'--some present important facts and perspectives succinctly. Gwen Yeo, director of the Stanford Geriatric Education Center, notes that 'Women over fifty are less prone to epression than any other age or gender group.' Artist Claire Falkenstein, trying to undermine the prejudice that creativity wanes with age, says that before her eighties she had never been able to use 'a symbolic language in the way I do now.'

From Margaret Morganroth Gullette - Women's Review of Books

{The} candid conversations found in this volume inspire, amaze, and challenge attitudes about women and aging. . . . Skillfully woven by the authors, discussions cover sexuality and enopause, beauty, eccentricity, housing, politics, careers, mentoring, risk-taking, and more.

Despite the acknowledged lackof socioeconomic and ethnic diversity reflected here, these proceedings make an important contribution to understanding women's place in the world today. Thoughtfully designed with large clear type. Detailed participant biographies appended.

From Paulette Bochnig Sharkey - Small Press

This is a great personal account of the struggle to desegregate Norfolk's school system during the Civil Rights era...told by someone right in the center of it all. This makes history come alive for those of us too young to have been there...

So often the real, personal accounts of history are never heard and instead we learn of a select few's vantage point. Mr. Heidelberg LIVED desegregation and has graced us with a powerful, first-person narrative of what life was like for African-Americans striving to get only what their white peers were receiving - a quality education with opportunities.
You must get this book! This is a story about desegregation and human rights that you probably have not heard before.

This collection of short poems is an ode to the person whose age is sixty or better. Some are light, describing the pleasures of age and how your perspective changes. When that hurdle is jumped, many of the things that were so critical before now become superficial. This is summed up in the last two lines of the last poem in the book.

But now that I'm sixty I've got to confess
That more often than not, I couldn't care less.

Some of the others are less light hearted, describing the downside of aging. Financial fears, forgetting simple things, having to face young criminals and ways to try to recapture some of the exuberance of youth are all mentioned. However, even these topics are dealt with in a light-hearted manner, so there is never a point where the tone turns depressing.
Whatever your perspective is on turning sixty, this book will make you smile at some of the consequences of reaching that mark. Matthew is a very good poet and his prose will lighten your feelings, no matter how dark they are.

my son gave me this book on my 60th birthday. I grew up with the milne books and read them to my boys. In fact, our oldest, Christopher, is named after Christopher Robin. Get out your old book of Now We Are Six, and keep it next to you while you read this book. So charming. So clever. Makes me feel like a kid again and it makes me smile....alot.

This book can be a dry read a t times, there is a lot of information in parts but it helps focus your observing of young children.

If for research or documentation you have the need to observe children, this book will serve as a detailed guide to that process. It includes recording routines, a children's use of materials, peer interaction, child-adult interaction, play, adult-directed behavior, language, and finding patterns.

During several summer vactions on Virginia's eastern shore, I've enjoyed researching and piecing together information about this special peninsula. I purchased "Off 13" in a local museum during this summer's vacation and spent a day devouring it. I now consider this my key quick reference book to one of my favorite places. Off 13 provides succinct and accurate guidance for exploring off the shore's beaten path. It also provides fascinating appetizer bits of history for an 'oldcomer'. Simply a wonderful book. It can be purchased at the Cape Charles Museum off 184 in Cape Charles, VA.

But I ask a favor... please don't tell too many people about this wonderous world off the 'mainland.'

Kirk Mariner's book "Off 13 - The Eastern Shore of Virginia Guidebook" offers a highly informative and entertaining guide to an overlooked but tranquil peninsula bounded by the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean, not far from the Nation's Capital. Many people know of Chincoteague but may not be aware that the rest of the Virginia eastern shore is well worth exploring. "Off 13" is full of interesting anecdotes and historical information about the area and its many little towns as well as useful and practical information for travellers.

Take this guidebook with you to Colonial Williamsburg, and it's almost like having a private tour guide showing you the high-points, and saving you wasted time getting around.

Buy it as a souvenir, and you'll have the perfect refresher of all that you've seen, with some in-depth information about the buildings and people of the town.

It's important to know that Colonial Williamsburg is, indeed, a living CITY, and there is more than can be seen in one day. The Official Guide to Colonial Williamsburg is a valuable tool for that visit.

If you are planning a trip to Colonial Williamsburg, this is the book to have! It includes detailed drawings of each building, shop, tavern, and official hotels in the historic area. This book tells about each point of interest and ticket options. If you want to read up about the historic area before or after your trip, buy this book you won't regret it

This is one of the most useful guides I've ever read. Virginia was host to nearly 1/3rd of all Civil War engagements, and this guide covers them all like a mini-history of the war. Unlike travel books that are organized geographically, this guide organizes them chronologically. Each campaign is prefaced by a detailed overview, followed by concise (from 1 to 4 pages, depending on the battle's importance) but engrossing descriptions of the individual engagements. These descriptions make this a great book to browse through when you're not in the car. Most sites' summaries touch on their condition--whether they're threatened by development (as too many are) and whether they're in private hands or protected by the park service.

But the maps are where this book really stands out. Each battle features a very clear map designating army positions and historical roads, as well as historical markers (the author also wrote the /A Guidebook to Virginia's Historical Markers/), parking, and visitors' centers. Best of all, though, many battles are illustrated with paintings or photographs of the sites, and the point-of-view of these pictures is marked on each map!

If you are familiar with either or both of the two editions of the excellent "Civil War Battlefield Guide", then you should add "The Official Virginia Civil War Guide" to your collection. This book has the advantage than in focusing on about 1/3rd as much of the war, it can do so in far greater depth.

Many small conflicts that don't receive more than a mention in the other guides are prominently and competently presented here. This makes the work a handy reference tool and an interesting read in its own right.

The layout is an improvement over the previously mentioned guides in several ways. Not only is there increased depth, but tactical maps are included for every event covered--rather than just the major ones. In addition, simple campaign maps are also included (something missing in many battle monographs even.) One weakness is that the tactical maps are not overlaid onto topographical maps, so in cases where the guides both have maps the general work is preferable in most instances.

The information on visitor centers, directions, and interesting background is very helpful as well. Also of note, the introduction states that all royalties from the book will go towards preservation efforts in Virginia.

One can only hope that similar works will be produced for other regions. This guide sets a fine standard for others to follow.

I read this book 25 years ago and it is still the best study skills book out there. Every high schooler headed to college should own a copy.

One of the first (if not THE first) appearances of this title, Ms. Voeks' work is concise yet commanding. With a soundly expressed point of view, she offers in this slim volume a much greater reward to her readers than can be found in subsequent, and more emptily-massive, publications with the same or similar title. In it's brief, yet kindly, tell-it-like-it-is manner, her book will be a welcomed -and valued- gift to any young person about to leave "the nest".

While the projects involve time and effort, the end results are beautiful quilted wall hangings that depict the stories of our childhood. These are beautiful artist-quality products that you can recreate for your home. I found the instructions, patterns and illustrations to be very direct and informative.

This is a very hard book to find but it's worth the money. Bonnie Kaster is a master applique artist and has done a fine job with these patterns. I have over 200 quilting books and this one is still THE ONE I choose to show people. If you can't get the book, at least check out Bonnie's other patterns from Sweet Memories. They are equally as stunning.

I re-read this book from time to time, the focus on different essays depending on where I am in my own life. The chapter on Virginia Woolf is one of the best essays on Woolf for this Woolfian scholar. Fraser describes how Virginia and Vanessa Stephen's father, Sir Leslie Stephen, wandered around their Victorian house weeping after his wife died. "I am a man without a skin," he said. He reportedly told his fragile, beautiful, and talented daughters: "When I am sad, you should be sad. When I am angry, you should weep." According to Fraser, Virginia Woolf believed her father "the model of the patriarchal family, with men given license to bully and rant while women and children submitted and served...." Fraser says Woolf believed that when such conditions are tolerated in private life, in public they can lead to fascism. "The tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other."

Fraser interviewed the Russian ex-patriot Nina Berberova many times. Nina Berberova only became known to the English-speaking world in her eighties, and is a role model for those who hope to thrive to their final breath. Berberova was active, thinking, writing, and living on her own to her death at 92. Fraser quotes the questions Berberova poses to herself as a writer: "Did you try to look inside yourself, or did you play the victim and look to others to blame? ... Did you speak out and tell the truth? Were you bold in your work? .... Did you fulfill your promise, the talent you were born with? ...Were you cooperating with the life force, or were you willfully moving in the direction of suicide?"

Also of interest is Fraser's reading of Edith Wharton. After describing an attempted rape in The House of Mirth, Fraser poses the possibility the author knew enough about such events to portray this scene and its impact on the heroine so vividly. As happens with so many young women, the character, Lily, feels shamed. "I am bad--a bad girl--all my thoughts are bad." She keeps the attempted rape a secret even from her best friend. Again, Fraser hones in on the secrets, the "ornament and silence" so many women continue to observe.

"Lily, though a grown and sophisticated woman, is strangely spellbound, lonely, and unprotected, like a girl in an incestuous house," Fraser says.

The other evidence the author might have been molested include her childhood illnesses, and in young womanhood, "symptoms of what her Victorian doctors called neurasthenia but which contemporary diagnosis often links to early sexual trauma. Panic attacks, breathing difficulties...migraines, debilitating depressions. .... Nausea so severe...she became incapable of eating."

After citing the famous quote from Flaubert: "Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works," Fraser politely observes how easy it can be for some male artists and writers to pursue their art with mothers, wives, lovers, or daughters to cosset, cook, and keep the household quiet.

For example, Fraser says, "In the old, old female story, Penny embarked on the old, old course: trying to mend a wounded man in an attempt to heal the hurt little girl from her past." This refers to Penny Scott, who married Paul Scott, a British novelist. Penny Scott kept the world quiet for her husband even though he disdained and possibly abused her. She didn't "know" of his homosexuality or his alcoholism, though at least one of these should have been fairly obvious, and she later had to take refuge in a shelter for battered women.

"As an alcoholic who couldn't stop drinking, he was still committing suicide. The disease of alcoholism is as patient as a tiger; it will life in wait for its victims for years and years," Fraser observes of Scott. With this, Fraser astutely hones in on yet another "secret" many continue to believe in poor taste to discuss.

Fraser refers to women in their roles as ornaments to men's art, or their silence in the face of duty or shame. In her chapter on George Eliot, she writes: "To a woman writer, exposing family secrets can seem perilously close to going mad. Men have had the support of the culture as they recognized their own experience and laid claim to it by writing it down. On the whole, they have been able, without inhibition,to feed their creative ambitions with the details of other people's lives. Men had a mandate, after all, to inform the public about the nature of life. Things have not been--are not--so simple for a woman. Women have often withheld their stories, because honesty about emotions and about the family feels to many women like a sin. It means drawing aside the curtain, lifting lids. It means rencouncing the role of good girl....It may mean expressing anger....Women must set aside the bowl they have used to beg for approval and praise. George Eliot was not free as an artist until her respectable family had cast her out. Only a community larger than family, only powers greater than lovers or husbands, can sustain women writers....

Finally, of interest to anyone who has been a long-time reader of the New Yorker, is Fraser's memoir of her own arrival there in her early twenties, and her apprenticeship with William Shawn. Not only is the essay hilarious, with the author's description of flying up the stairs in her mini-skirt, her hair so long she could wrap it around her neck, but the reader gets to glean some of Mr. Shawn's wisdom about writing and writers as taught to someone who clearly learned her lessons well.

I read this book looking for something and I found in it the most strong women I could ever know. An inspiration in every way to my young mind I will be changed forever by this amazing collection. Kennedy Fraser captures the essence of each of the women (and the few men) that she writes about. She's amazing, it's amazing.