Rhode Island Books

I've had the pleasure of knowing Howard Stone since I was a kid and there is no one more devoted to Bike Riding in Rhode Island. If you are a Rhode Islander and are taking up Biking or are a Biker moving to our area, this one is really worth picking up.

Scott P. Morin, WebMaster, [e-mail]

This is an excellent book with lots of great quality black and white photos. I think anyone interested in Rhode Island history, particularly Smithfield Rhode Island history will love this book. I grew up in Smithfield and have been away nearly 30 years and learned more about my hometown in a an hour than I ever did growing up.

Imagine seeing old buildings that you went by a thousand times but had no idea what they originally were for or driving up a street over and over again and not knowing that it was named after a WWI hero who died during the great war. After all these years I finally learned what at the time wasn't that important to me but is very important to me now.

It was a thrilling journey for me and what made it even better is that I actually know two of the three authors who were very kind to me growing up. They may not remember me but I was a Smithfield Police explorer in the 70's and all three of the authors were at one time police officers. In fact, I was actually in the building manning the phones at the time the group photo was taken of the police officers in one of the pages int he book. It was one of those, "I knew excactly where I was at the time of this photo" moments.

This book brought back a flood of memories for me. Those happy carefree times of my youth. I remembered my schools, my first love, those adults that were such a great and positive influence to me and many of them are in this book! I would like to congratulate and thank the authors for their hardwork and I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves the old town as much as I. Thanks for the memories.

The Smithsonian Natural Guides are my new bibles for travel. Who really cares about those guides for motels, restaurants and cheesy attractions anyhow? These guides take one to the real America behind (and often above) the tourist traps!

Finch and Wallen team up to the best of their expertise with splendid descriptive writing and photography (the latter always a trademark of this series!). Cape Cod, The Berkshires, the Connecticut and Rhode Island Coasts as well as other areas of natural interest are brought right to the reader and make you want to go there immediately and see what you've just read about.

Vietnam Veteran Frank Gryzb came up with an excellent way to convey the many details of the Vietnam war. He interviewed 15 Veterans ranging from infantry men to nurses to cooks and more. The Veterans tell us in their own words what they felt and experienced every step of the way. Gryzb's format took us from the day these kids first enlisted, or were drafted, to the day the book was published some 30 years later. There was a section on nearly everything you could think of. Gryzb would briefly preface each section with some quality information and then the various Veteran quotes would follow. All the bases are covered here, everything from smells to sights to comic relief and everything in between. There is no bias here whatsoever. It's very up close and personal. You really feel like you know these people by the end of the book. But, more importantly you have an accurate account of the various things that happened in that time period as a result of the war. What a great book! This book is highly recommended.

Mrs. Fiske has carefully sorted through early documents and developed a thorough and friendly history of the Thomas Cook line. She presents new thoughts, supports them with evidence, and makes this book a very valuable resource for those working anywhere along this line. Two fat! volumes may be obtained (be sure to tell Amazon which, or both, that you want) and you'll learn more than you ever dreamed possible about the Cooks. There are a few errors as can be expected in a work of this size (Grandpa's middle name was Orlando, not Oleander) but they appear minor in relationship to the vast number of entries.

A real Bargain at this price. I really enjoyed the book and Hopkins and Bailey did a great job. A very good look at a broad range of rugs and carpets. Draws heavily on the Rudnick, Paquin, and Varteresian, collections. Very good structural analyses included.

This book is not only excellent in the information given, but the manner in which it is given makes it enjoyable to read. I like the fact that it is student written and all the elements reviewed have a grade at the end of the section so you get a better idea of what the pros and cons of the school are. I also liked the details, for example, the cost of a meal plan and where I could use my plan, or where the best places to live are, and how good campus security is. All of these elements made the book well worth the purchase! I think even new students would get a lot out of it.

Ken Weber has done an excellent job describing these walks. His descriptions and difficulty assessments are usually dead on correct, so you can easily judge which hike to take and how hard it will be. I have done most of the hikes in this book in 2001, and the 3rd edition is quite up to date. The companion book is excellent too (More Walks and Rambles in Rhode Island).

This book provides detailed and accurate suggestions and advice for weekend rambles. It was a great way to introduce my 5 year old and 3 year old to the outdoors, and a good introduction to the lovely countryside of Rhode Island as well. Much better than some other similar guides which were not well researched and suggested trails that got us lost!

Working-Class Americanism, written by Gary Gerstle, is a truly fascinating and inspiring book. He focuses on the early-twentieth-century Woonsocket, Rhode Island, a city of textile industry and habitated mainly by French-Canadian immigrants from Quebec, Canada. Most of residents in the city were French Canadian, but there were other residents, especially Franco-Belgians. The culture of French Canadian workers was community-centered, devoted to Catholicism, and French language. On the other hands, workers from France or Belgium were radical, or socialistic, social democrats. Gerstle analyzes the process hoe these two working-class groups of diffenent culture and ideology made (and broke later) tenuous alliance under the Independent Textile Union (ITU), an CIO-affiliated labor union.
The author's innovative approach to the labor history of Woonsocket is his usage of the concept of Americanism. He treats Americanism as not as a consistent and monolithic ideology but as a fluid language which is open to appropriation by various social groups and individuals. In his view the language of Americanism consists of several dimensions---nationalistic, democratic, progressive, and traditional. He argues that in the severe economic condition of the Great Depression two different working-class groups succeeded in establishing the strong labor movement of the ITU by using the nationalistic, democratic, and progressive dimensions of Americanism in order to articulate their rights as workers.
Gerstle's treatment of the labor Americanism is very subtle and sensitive. He does not insist that the discourse of Americanism could have assimilated French Canadians and Franco-Belgians into one monolithic Americanized group of citizen-workers. He points out that whereas Franco-Belgian radical labor leaders embraced a dream of remolding America thoroughly in terms of social democracy, French Canadian workers accepted Franco-Belgian leadership in the ITU as an instrument to reinvigorate their ethnic community and family (Gerstle points out the patriarchal nature of French Canadian working-class culture). French Canadians and Franco-Belgians allied without a common vision of American society. As a result, he suggests, they abandoned the alliance based on the ITU when local Republicans, after defeated by Democrats in the late 1930s, solicited French Canadian workers by giving favor to their ethnic culture. The author's unique approach to Americanism makes Working-Class Americanism interesting both as social history of labor and political history at the same time.
Gerstle has succeeded in discovering multi-faceted and complicated experiences of Woonsocket textile workers and their politics of language by wide and intensive research including interviews. The interviews make his book highly vivid. For example, he proves the ITU's commitment to democratic delibaration by description of an interview with a old-aged ex-labor activist, who showed the author his "highly polished gavel" and "dog-eared paperback copy of Robert's Rules of Order" which had been used for debates among union members. The reviewer felt spellbound to an imagination inspired by this episode.
I should remark, in the recent advance of studies on ethnicity and race, especially so-called "whiteness studies," that Woonsocket was the city of white people, native or immigrants, therefore the author makes almost no mention to problems of race or color-line (relations of French Canadian or Franco-Belgian workers with non-white people). It mean that his analysis might not be applicable to other regions where we could find deep-rooted racial confrontations. It, however, does not undermine the value of Gerstle's excellent analysis made in this book.