Maryland Books

In Baltimore's Cast-Iron Buildings & Architectural Ironwork, James Dilts and Catherine Black effectively collaborate to present a collection of knowledgeable essays on Baltimore's unique architectural heritage. These commentaries include J. Scott Howell's The Founder's Art; David G. Wright's The Sun Iron Building; Phoebe B. Stanton's The Peabody Library; and Robert L. Alexander's Architectural Ironwork. Highly recommended for personal, professional, and academic architectural studies collections, Baltimore's Cast-Iron Buildings & Architectural Ironwork is further enhanced for architectural students with a directory of buildings, ironwork catalogs, bibliography, and an index.

As a Paranormal Investigator, I seek more places to check out for activity in the Maryland area and we will be working several places around the harbor found in this book - like Bertha's Mussels and the USF Constellation.

Normally I read mostly history, not fiction. This book however caught my eye for a few of reasons. Firstly, as I have already mentioned, I like history. I also have a great interest in the Naval Academy and have always been interested in Key West.

While I don't usually read fiction, I have to say this one was exceptional. It has helped open my eyes to the fact that you can learn by reading fictional accounts.

Baseball historian James Bready has researched professional baseball in Baltimore for more than 50 years and served for many years as an Editorial writer for the Baltimore Sunpapers. In "Baseball in Baltimore" Mr. Bready combines his colorful, enjoyable style of writing with his wealth of knowledge on the subject resulting in a topnotch account of baseball in Baltimore from the 1850's up to (but not including) the modern American League Orioles. Bready had already authored three editions of "The Home team" that were the forerunner of this excellent book. Jim has also collected many hard-to-find photos over the years and many of them are featured. Subjects include amateur Baltimore clubs of the 1850s and 1860s, the Orioles of the American Association and the National League pennant winners of the 1890s, the American League Orioles of 1901 and 1902, and the Orioles of the minor leagues (Eastern league and International League). Mr. Bready gives an interesting account of Jack Dunn's minor league Orioles that won 7 straight Int. league pennants from 1919 thru 1925 and Baltimore-born Babe Ruth's first stint in professional baseball (Jack Dunn's 1914 Orioles)> Highly recommended for any baseball historian or reader interested in baseball in Baltimore.

An entire ecosystem is revealed in this work; a look inside a true "natural wonder", the Chesapeake Bay. I picked up this nature/local interest book at a small store on Smith Island, Maryland, and began reading it on the boat trip back to Crisfield. I found "The Bay" to be a surprising page-turner -- along with detailed descriptions of the life cycles of familiar wildlife such as ospreys, eagles and great blue herons, and the ubiquitous Maryland blue crabs and jellyfish, there are facets of bay life in this book which I'd never even considered -- sea creatures that light up with natural phosphorescence, animals that regress as they develop from infancy to adulthood, and one beautifully descriptive chapter entitled "The Chesapeake Marshes" which came alive as I read it! I loved this book! One need not be a scientist nor a naturalist to appreciate this superbly written tribute to one of the most beautiful places on earth. The final chapter, "Compensation", clearly illustrates the symbiotic relationships of living creatures within an ecosystem and their interdependence upon one another for the continuation of life, not only in the Chesapeake Bay region, but as a representation of life systems everywhere. The writing was spellbinding; Mr. Klingel wrote so well that I found myself reading on and on for the sheer pleasure of experiencing his words. Although "The Bay" was written nearly 50 years ago, its story is as timeless as the nature it so aptly describes.

"Bay Country" does justice to the many legitimate claims on the Chesapeake Bay. Horton loves the bay, its grasses, oysters, crabs, and rockfish; the watermen who live off it and exploit it, and the ways of life and physical artifacts -- bridges, old roads, cabins -- people have built around it. He also knows its lovers, including him, are killing it. He portrays the bay and its life, its tributaries(including a wonderful essey on how hard it is to wring every last pollutant from sewer water) the watermen, their traditional (and tight) communities, and the hard life they make from its resources. He has chapters on wind and energy use by people and animals. Horton poetically evokes the bay's charms, in a book that is part nature writing, part sociology, part ecological economy, and part a gloss on Pogo's famous remark, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Not a particularly hopeful book, but a very realistic one, fair to all sides and to the glorious bay itself.

For anyone who has lived in Berwyn Heights or is interested in its history.
It has great photographs of both the present and the past. I enjoyed it immensely.

I live in this part of the country, and I absolutely loved this compilation of recipes. The Mid-Atlantic is a varied region, but the authors have included recipes from cookbooks that cover many of the area's specialties. As always with this series, I have yet to find a recipe that does not come out well. I have made several of the cakes and they were all superb (esp. the One-Step Poundcake). There are also several very good crabcake recipes and one of the best Eggplant Parmesan recipes I've ever tried.

The seafood recipes in this book are a particular strength, which is appropriate for this region. In addition to the crabcakes, I would recommend the Maryland Oyster Bake and the crab salad stuffed tomatoes (wonderful on a hot summer day).

If you want a taste of real Mid-Atlantic cooking, please give this book a try. You won't be disappointed!

These CDs are surprisingly fun. I've learned a lot about bird songs and bird calls and have come to recognize many of the birds that live on my farm by their sounds. The recordings are very well done. They include the various calls of lots of local birds as well as some interesting facts and mnemonics (phrases to help us humans remember particular calls).

Just when I got depressed about the direction of the social capital debate, this bookcame out. Orr, gets it right. Social capital explains a lot about how local politics unfold, but there are also other things going on, and social capital can applied in an intagroup or intergroup context. The social capital book to read this year. Forget Putnam, Read Orr!