Maine Books

Bought this book on tape for a 6 year old and fell in love with it ourselves. It's nice to have BOT that we can listen to along with kids. I wish he would write more Newberry stories

I would recommend this book for children and adults. Newberry the clam had a friend, the barnacle. He was pretty nice. On his clam birthday, he didn't have a cake or candles, so he had a big personal feast. It didn't work out so well because he got a big bubble of gas in his stomach and floated out to Blue Hill. I don't want to give away the whole story, but his advdentures were very fun to read about.
I thought it was cool how he figured out that little cells in the ocean light up.
The person who loaned this book to me, also loaned me two clam shells glued together (still able to open). A friend who gave it to her, sewed a pink clam to fit inside, and crocheted a purple muffler to go around the clams neck... This little Newberry clam was fun to have around while I was reading the book.
I wish Vincent Dethier would write more childrens books about Newberry.

This is a delightful work. The writing is superb. It is a quick read, too quick. I wish it went on for several hundred pages more. It is one of those books that once you finish it the next book you read seems flat and dull. It is about a year he spent on his farm in Maine. It is filled with wonderful, arftul, inciteful, descriptive glimpses into this world and humanity. It stirs the soul and has a way of making one want to go right outside and plant something. A great read for anyone who likes nature or great writing in general.

Henry Beston is best known for writing about his solo Cape Cod beach experience in "The Outermost House." A few years later he married author Elizabeth Coatsworth, and they bought a farm in Maine. First published in 1948, "Northern Farm" recounts a calendar year's worth of rural life in that northern clime. Brrrr.

The chronological narrative begins as the Bestons return to their snow-covered fields and ice-capped pond after celebrating the Christmas season with friends in New York. Each chapter combines factual events with entries from Beston's farm diary, plus his summary philosophical statements. And boy, does winter sure seem to last a long time! It frames the progression of the book. Thankfully Beston takes the opportunity to describe the wildlife he's able to encounter between snowstorms. An overwhelming sense of community surfaces here as well. Remember: this story takes place in a farming landscape just after WWII, before a television could be found in every living room, and when people relied on each other for help during challenging times. They were the kind of times when you left a lantern burning in the front room so that you could more easily find your way home after attending a church supper on a rainy night. "The good old days," for some.

In addition to his notes about managing a small farm and following Nature's course, Beston ruminates about international issues. The war is still fresh in his mind, and he needs to speak about it. Read in post-9/11 times, his comments strike an eerie chord of familiarity. For example:

"No age in history can afford to lay too much emphasis upon 'security.' The truth is from our first breath to our last we inhabit insecurely a world which must of transitory nature be insecure, and that moreover any security we do achieve is but a kind of an illusion. While admitting that a profound instinct towards such safety as we can achieve is part of our animal being, let us also confess that the challenge involved in mere existence is the source of many of the greater virtues of human character." (page 47, in my paperback copy)

Wow! And that's just one of his astute observations.

"Northern Farm" describes a simpler time and place that we'll never see again, regretfully. This is a book well worth tracking down. Just be prepared for A LOT of winter!

As usual, Fodor's Gold has the best in guide books for visiting away from home. My copy is well thumbed and much used (if not abused). I strongly recommend this guide and all others like it.

I am planning a trip to the Canadian Maritimes the summer of 2002. I purchased Fodors Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, PEI guide to assist in my plans. So far, I have found this book to be a valuable resource. It is arranged first by province, then by towns/sites within each area. For example, in the Nova Scotia section, there is basic opening information about the province (its history, culture, climate, etc), then there is a large section just for Halifax. Within that listing, you find numerous places for site seeing, place to eat, to lodge, to shop. One aspect of the book I especially like is called "Off the beaten path", where you can find unusual places worth visiting. The guide is print-only, with maps, so the only thing that could make it better would be a few photographs. I would recommend this book for anyone planning a visit to the Maritimes this year.

John Haley went to war with a Maine infantry regiment and wrote down his experiences in this book. Overall, the book is an interesting account of one average soldier in the biggest war America has ever seen. Many tidbits of information are tossed out making the reader re-read them again. One such piece is a reference to a Confederate sharpshooter who was killing many Union soldiers. The person is finally killed and he turns out to be a BLACK man. This book is good for Civil War buffs, for those wanting a "feel" of what it was like to fight for the Union, and those who think that no blacks fought for the Confederacy.

for a Maine volunteer and army private John Haley was incredibally articulate. He had a wry wit and sharp sense of humour. He paints a vivid picture of day to day life in the field. Haley has a self depreciating manner that lends credibility to his accounts as you don't feel he is embellishing in order to elevate his own status. I really felt this was an honest account of the hardships of the war as well as the mundania. If you love civil war history or like myself have a fondness for Maine history you should put this journal at the front of your list.

Being from Maine and also being familiar with the locale of this book made this even more fun to read. This is the first of Crossman's series about Winston Crisp (a retired code-breaker with the National Security Agency) which takes place on Penobscot Island. Winston unwittingly gets drawn into a local murder even though he (sort of) tries to stay out of it. Crossman does a wonderful job of bringing readers into the story with his descriptions of the island and the cold (and sometimes unmerciful) Maine island weather in winter. This is definitely a great book to settle in with when you feel like spreading your wings and trying a new author.

"A SHOW OF HANDS" is cleverly written. Need a gift for someone? I suggest this book. It suits all ages and it refreshing. After reading this sketching allegory, I'll read every book that David Crossman writes. He has a true talent of introducing you to people you can visualize and seemingly know. Winston Crisp must appear in all future books. I like this gentleman! The story is gripping, and just when you believe you have untangled the secrets, you discover that you are dead wrong, and the intrigue continues. Until the last pages, you are unsure of the culprits. Mr. Crossman has a skilled talent of giving birth to his characters. As you learn to know these colorful people on the island and their idiosyncrasies, one instantly perceives to embrace or distrust them. Could they have committed the murder? What is still to be discovered about them? Discover "A SHOW OF HANDS" for yourself before someone makes the movie!

A well written and illustrated history of one of America's better liberal arts colleges. The book is large. The black and white and colot illustrations are very good. The author has also written a very good travel book about Maine. My only criticism is that the book lacks recent photos of the campus and a campus map. The campus is usually rated as one of the 10 most beautiful in America. An earlier book about the architecture of the buildings is out of print. This book is well worth the modest price.

For those who have a connection to the College, this book offers an excellent history of Bowdoin, its founding principles, and challenges overcome. For those who have trouble pronouncing the word Bowdoin (Boe'-din), prepare to be introduced to an institution that is every bit what makes some people swear by the magic of a classical New England liberal arts education

In this book the author, who is head of archeology at University College Dublin, gives us a great insight into the current research on this period in Ireland. There is so much pseudo-history and myth that gets repeated over and over again that this book offers a rare insight into what Irish scholars actually know about Celtic Ireland. It deals quite effectively with the issue of the mythological "Celtic" invasion of people and explains the circumstances surrounding the arrival or development of the Celtic culture in Ireland.

It is written from an archaeological point of view but should also be of interest to general readers. I highly recommend it as a source for scholars of this period and readers who want to know more about the Iron Age in Ireland.

This book is extremely useful in that it is the only complete synthesis of the Irish Iron Age archaeology. It is also simple to read and illustrates to the layman the differences between Ireland and Europe during the time of the Celts. However, many people are misled by the mystical title - this is a purely archaeological book!

I've read many works that address the Holocaust and World War Two. Maybe too many. In all those mountains -- or maybe sand dunes -- of pages, few single volumes stand out. (One stand-out would be Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning.") Rather, what has tended to stand out for me are episodes within volumes, rather than entire volumes.

"The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald," John Guzlowski's book of poems addressing his father's experience as a Nazi slave laborer, is one of the few books I've read about World War Two that stands out as a volume. After reading this book, I wanted to read it aloud to other people. I wanted to distribute copies. I wanted to say, "See? See?"

We've all heard the formula that there is to be no poetry after Auschwitz. We've all heard the pronouncements that no one who wasn't there can speak or understand what it was like to live and die under Nazism.

The insistence that we can't, adequately, speak or understand words spoken about Nazism strikes me similarly as does the insistence that we can't apply the Geneva Convention or the US Constitution in a world with terrorists in it. We invent laws exactly so we can deal with dark episodes. We have language not just to talk about rapture, but also to talk about hell.

It is the reader's great good fortune that poet John Guzlowski insists on using language to communicate hell. He deserves our gratitude.

I wasn't eager to read this book. I never am eager to read yet another book about the World War Two era. I always have to buck myself up before cracking the cover.

"The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald" is, in its physical form, a lovely volume. The beige cover features Vojtek Luka's ink drawing of concentration camp inmates, in various stages of disolve, peering stoically out through barbed wire.

On the back cover, John Guzlowski's healthy, handsome, well-fed face is in thoughtful profile against a striated window. One doesn't normally focus on the skin tone of a poet, but the poems within chronicle Guzlowski's father's near starvation and disfigurement at the hands of Nazis.

The striated window surface, besides which Guzlowski sits with a thoughtful look on his face, echoes the striations of the barbed wire in the cover illustration. Guzlowski is not *in* the inmates' world, or the survivor's world; he is an alert, dedicated outside observer.

The frontispiece is lovely beige and gold marbled paper.

Turning pages, the reader then confronts the first poem. His father dreams about fire and bricks, Guzlowski reports, about a Warsaw church bombed by Nazis, a church left "bleeding and praying"

for death the way a woman
in labor will pray when she knows
nothing will save the baby
waiting in her womb to be born.

Guzlowski had me with that first poem. I surrendered my faith to him. "He can write about this, and I can read it," I thought.

Hunger is one overwhelming sensation these poems aroused. With hunger came the reminder that we are slaves to our bellies. Your friend, a poem reports, can steal your hidden bread while you sleep. You won't remember, or even register, you certainly won't have nightmares, years later, about vast, epochal military maneuvers or signatures on documents. You will be nailed to your own craving belly, and you will remember that sensation of hunger till you die.

Guzlowski has the courage to record "pieces, each piece small, pebble size." Guzlowski speaks in fundamental images and basic vocabularly and sentence structure. There are no words here you need to look up in the dictionary, and you don't need to have mastered poetry theory. Just read the poems, and feel their impact.

This is what it was like to be one human being in the way of history. Guzlowski's father spoke, Guzlowski speaks; it is our turn to listen and understand.

(Review cross-posted from JMWW.)

At his blog, John Guzlowski reports being awakened by his father's screams at night. With just a few sentences, he gives a chilling description of these occasions: "Screams, in my experience, are usually accompanied by an explosion of air. My father's nightmare screams were drawn in. Even in his sleep, it was almost like he was afraid to scream." This is the objective correlative for his wretched and sublime chapbook The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.

Guzlowski's poems are a meditation on his father's experience as a laborer in a Nazi camp. The holocaust always strikes me as a questionable medium for artistic enquiry, because its weight as a singular actuality always overwhelms the product. It seems right to feel intimidated and wary when confronting it as a spectator. After all - whoa - this happened and who can fully harness it? And yet, its power rarely misfires; the holocaust, as source material, is at once too fertile to admire and too fertile to find disappointing.

This chapbook is no exception. Despite the handsomeness of the volume, a beige, staple-stitched pamphlet put out by Finishing Line Press, I was initially skeptical of the subject matter. No doubt this is partly due to the haunting cover drawing by Vojtek Luka, which signposts that I am about to confront the worst of human experience, and I'll have no choice but to be moved.

The 26 brief poems (including the Prologue and Epilogue) concern the father's days spent digging up bricks among heaps of murdered bodies while dreaming of his own death at night. Guzlowski recounts these borrowed memories in short, unadorned verses. The poems are numbered, but their arrangement doesn't follow a straight narrative line, which imbues the reading with a fragmentary, nightmarish sensibility of its own. This is effective enough to make me rescind any prejudicial skepticism I felt, and it also makes me realize that Luka's picture is the ideal cover art. Just as his war prisoners are eliding out of view, we encounter the father's experience through a palimpsest of Guzlowski's poetry.

I rescind my initial skepticism because it's not hard to find The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald to be genuinely moving. Guzlowski earns credit by not shying from a smear of comedy among the horror, as when the father remembers a movie featuring two men lost at sea. ". . . they look at each other in hunger and cry. // Then fatty smiles, and skinny cries harder." This Gary Larson-esque gag is made awful by the context, of course, but the poem's expositional couplet makes it even harder to bear: "He remembers a movie he once saw/when he escaped from the camp."

Then there is the simile, "He is as hungry as a dog in winter," which isn't a joke at all except that it suggests the straight man's line ("How hungry is he?") that it just ran over. In fact, the simile starts running and doesn't stop:

He is as hungry as a dog in winter
in a forest filled with so much snow
that all the woodsmen and their wives
and children have fled to the village.

What happened to the dog? He got buried in the stampede of the next three lines - and what the image forgets completely is the real subject, the father. The metaphor has gone on without him, and he is back on his bed (actually, Guzlowski terms it a shelf), thinking about sausage and his dead family until he falls asleep to a dream of drowning. All of this is in The Third Winter, and then: "He dreams a comedy - " It's about men loading up a cart and slipping in manure. "He laughs until someone kicks him." Colorless jokes seep furiously.

There is a textured humanity to these characters; the father wakes at night to think of the men sleeping around him - they're in the muck together, yet would steal the hunk of bread hidden at his groin. We're familiar with need as a motivation for theft - this world is shot through with hunger - but it indicates Guzlowski's mastery that the stealing isn't due solely to lack of food, but that the men are sad: "These thieves are like his brothers,/but at night loneliness and sorrow/will turn your brother against you."

Guzlowski says he wrote this book in order to understand his father's screams. It's up to him to decide if the poems work on that level, but what he has done is provided a compelling and believable dimension for outsiders to contemplate another person's experience. That's the first and final goal of poetry. Read this book loud, like the Adagio for Strings, like night screams.

Mr. Hall always has a point to make in each of the sketches. But it is always subtle, difficult to summarize, and appears gradually as the incident unfolds, emeerging from the interaction of character, opinion, orneriness, colorful local speech, and the lore of the sport he loves.

He has evidently chosen a certain way to spend his time (fish bum), and though some more dedicated to the Protestant Ethic may quarrel, here the grasshopper of the parable clearly has a song to sing and music to make. Can one find fault with that?

Hall is a great writer and I have loved his previous books. This new book is every bit as good, and a delight to read especially as another fishing season opens before us. These are great stories sensitively written and a treat for non-fishermen as well.
And, as if to invite everyone to the sport of fly fishing, Hall has put a neophyte on the cover -- note his low back-cast. A wonderful subtlety, as is his writing.
Don't miss this one!

Michael LaCombe
Augusta, Maine

Being an enthusiastic amateur treasure hunter myself, in years past, I diligently read each and every volume of Mr. Terry's exhaustively researched works. Although I found some the information erroneous or far from exact - for instance many locations cited as "ghost towns" are FAR from being one - there are so many intriguing stories of legends, factual evidence & stories of past recoveries that any true TH'r will be enthralled. Treasure hunting is supposedly America's fastest growing hobby: it's uniquely enjoyable for the adventure, historical aspects & healthy outdoor recreation. And when you really find something decent...Boy Howdy!! Not as easy as it sounds, though. To be a professional TH'r, one has to have patience, applying oneself with the perseverance of a detective: because that's what it takes to be successful. Exhaustive research is the key: going where people gathered long ago (old picnic grounds & abandoned schoolyards, for instance) will be beneficial for coin shooters who are after more than modern coins....for me, finding modern coins was a complete waste of time & energy. Going for the gold? Go where it is KNOWN to be & be creative: the better your equipment - i.e. a decent detector which finds gold & common sense makes this a most fascinating hobby. For some, it's a life's career. Good luck!!

Found this to be a very interesting paperback book for anyone dreaming of treasure hunting/finds. But, I wish it was updated. I'm sure there are more interesting things about Florida. Not all of Fla. treasure finds are in the sea as this book notes. Worth reading.Open anywhere and begin reading.