Massachusetts Books

This book was a page-turner from the first chapter to the last line. I was sad to see the end of the book because I wanted more. This book was gritty and humorous and I loved this combination in a mystery book.

Thea Kozak is back, and as feisty as ever! In this newest installment of Kate Flora's Thea Kozak Mystery series, Thea is still working on the healing process. With her gentle giant, Andre, close by, she takes aim, literally, at her insecurities and puts the past where it belongs. Great symbolism. Thea might be down, but she's far from out. She's not invincible, so while she falters at times and loses her edge, she is pugnacious to a fault and never concedes defeat. Much like an old Timex timepiece, Thea "takes a licking and keeps on ticking." I absolutely love that about her!

Thea is hoping to enjoy the rest of her weekend with her new hubby, Main State Police Detective Andre Lemieux, when she receives a call from Suzanne, her partner at EDGE Consulting. It seems there is a sticky situation at St. Matthew's, a private New Hampshire boarding school. A female student athlete has accused another student (who just happens to be the grandson of one of the school's most generous benefactors) of stalking - and the school is in dire need of help to defuse the situation. What Thea discovers is that the school really just wants her to rubber stamp her approval of a letter they hope to send out to the parents, basically accusing the female student of fabricating the entire story and thereby holding the school blameless.

A very cursory investigation reveals that the school neglected to follow its own procedures for dealing with accusations, and those who could corroborate the accuser's story were no longer at the school and hadn't even been questioned. Thea smells a coverup and steals herself to sticking around for awhile to sort things out. The school, however, isn't interested in real answers and sends Thea packing. The rejection gnaws a bit on her self-confidence. Has she read the situation correctly or is she completely off base?

When the accused is discovered on campus with the female athlete's older brother standing over his dead body, things at St. Matthew's really heat up, and the school once again calls EDGE Consulting to help avert a crisis. This creates a quandary for Thea. Should she ignore the role those in authority at the school appear to have played in this tragedy, or should she just do her best to cover their behinds no matter what? She is conflicted about just how much useful information she can impart to the police without serving up her clients on a silver platter. She decides that the most ethical course of action is for her to investigate on her own so that she won't be offering up little more than gossip and innuendo.

Thea quickly learns that searching for the truth at St. Matthew's is an unhealthy proposition, and she becomes even more worried about the welfare of Shondra Jones, the 16-year-old accuser. She has no idea that the things she has uncovered thus far are only the tip of the iceberg, and that something far more sinister is festering just below the surface, putting her life, and the lives of those around her, in jeopardy.

Ms. Flora has created palpable suspense and a heart-pounding denouement! The issue of stalking is timely and is handled quite well. I beseech the publisher to bring us the next Thea Kozak Mystery as quickly as possible - her adoring public awaits!

Carol Ann Hopkins 5/24/2008

A preliminary aside: take the whiny tone of the Kirkus Reviewer's comments (above) with a very large grain of salt. Then read this book. It goes far beyond the depth of others with similar goals. Its power resides not only in its subject matter but also in its empathetic and thoughtful treatment of those who have provided the interviews on which the book is based. Fine, fine work indeed.

In recording the stories of one community's response to the AIDS pandemic, the authors have captured the essense of the human spirit as it faces catestrophic circumstances. Starry Night is not just the record of Provincetown's response to AIDS; it is a wonderfully written account of how people embrace people when confronted by adversity. It is a story of place and of people and it transcends both of these to chronical something much larger than one community on a 'spit of land' at the edge of America.

Barton Whaley is respected as the foremost expert in the field of deception, and his book "Stratagem" is by far the very best single publication on the subject. His work was exhaustively researched and provides the clearest and most detailed explanations of theory, principles, tradecraft and case studies on deception.

This book is an absolute 'must have' for any military historian (amateur or professional) or any military officers with any interest or responsibility for intelligence or counter-intelligence.

This book is written in the form of two books, and somewhat less obviously, three books.

Book 1 has six chapters of text that discusses the general concepts of deception from a theoretical standpoint and it's value in warfare. He points out the analysis of 27 wars where in only six of these was a decisive result obtained by a direct approach.

Book 2, the biggest part of the book is Appendix A. This consists of 115 known instances of surprise and/or deception from 1914 to 1968 (this book was first written in 1969). To list just two examples:

Case A30 - Details the efforts that the Japanese went to in order to obscure the fact that they were preparing to attack Pearl Harbor. This view puts an entirely different light on the question about what the Americans knew about the pending attack. Suppose the Japanese knew or even suspected that we might have broken their codes.

Case A45 - The deceptions directed at the Germans regarding D-Day. As Churchill said, the facts regarding the invasion were to be protected by 'a bodyguard of lies.' This details the well known aspects such as the appointment of Patton to head up the ficticious army. But it also reports the FBI, back in the US having one of their agents (code named ND98, and still not publicly identified) send signals to the Germans attempting to direct their attention to an attack in the Med.

Conclusion: Buy a copy of this book before it goes out of print again.

Mary Ann Caws, with her unique gift for drawing the reader willingly into her discoveries, is an invaluable scholar of Surrealism. In clear language, she unfolds and expands for us the imaginative realm of this man, who must be the most hilarious, poignant, and plain-spoken of the Surrealist poets. In Caws's hands, Desnos's unique brand of black humor--dare we say gallows optimism--is rendered all the more poignant by his use of it as a form of resistance against the Nazis, and ultimately in the face of his own death. This is a must-read for anyone interested in Desnos, and for all readers who, whether or not they like "poetry" (this is not the poetry that they pushed on you in school), are looking for a romantic vision that is not sappy, and who want to find a heroic figure that is credible in our modern era.

this is the only critical work on desnos in english to date. highly recommended for anyone interested in studying this amazing poet. caws goes into detail about desnos' symbols and language, and provides a good collection of the various periods of desnos' work both in poetry and prose.

Fabulous book. Dinerstein ties together architecture, tap dancing, West African drummers, the lindy hop, John Henry and Fred Astaire in this exploration of what he calls the "techno-dialogic" embedded in big band/swing music. He argues that African American artists put the industrial rhythms of the era in popular music. In this analysis, dancing to the big band wasn't just about entertainment, it was about using one's body to keep pace with the machine. Until you've read Dinerstein and considered how dance/movement/sound contribute to cultural change, you haven't understood American modernity.

This book weaves together several important and somewhat familiar stories in a startlingly new and brilliant way. We know that music and dance exploded in powerful new forms in the 1930s. And we know the "streamlined" and "futuristic" themes of techno-optimism dominated other cultural expressions in the 1930s. And we know there was a current of "techno-anxiety" that expressed itself in everything from Chaplin films to the Frankfurt School. But Joel Dinerstein has shown that these phenomena intimately informed each other. We will never view early-20th century American culture the same way after this book. Buy it. Read it. Assign it to your students. It should win many major awards.

"This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance" is an anthology of Johnson's work with a rich collection of supplementary materials. The book is edited with an introduction by Verner D. Mitchell.

This book includes the following: a foreword by scholar Cheryl Wall; 65 pages of Johnson's poems; a chronology; black-and-white photos of Johnson and her literary and personal circle; a selection of letters by Johnson and members of her circle (Zora Neale Hurston, Dorothy West, etc.); an afterword by Johnson's daughter Abigail McGrath, and a 2-page bibliography.

All the supplemental material is fascinating, and helps to put Johnson's life and work in historical and cultural context. But the centerpiece of this book is her marvelous body of poetry. Publication data is given for each poem; included are a number of previously unpublished pieces. Johnson was a true technical master of poetry, skilled at using rhyme, meter, and alliteration. She is as effective with a sonnet as with free verse.

Her work is passionate, witty, and bold. She is a keen observer and has some poems that really appeal to the senses. She is adept with vernacular language, as well as with more traditionally literary language. These poems cover an impressive range of subject matter: nature, religion, oppression, Black pride, urban life, war, growing old, etc.

I fell in love with Johnson's amazing voice years ago when I encountered her work in an anthology. I am glad to see a volume devoted to her legacy; I highly recommend this book for individual reading, classroom use, and book clubs.

Verner Mitchell's book is long overdue. Helene Johnson was a brilliant, up and coming poet of the Harlem Renaissance when she left the poetry circuit to make a living. Langston Hughes, among others, praised her poetry. Mitchell's book gives us previously unpublished poetry as well as further insight into her life. I highly recommend this book to one and all.

I just ordered this book and waiting for it to arrive. I have no clue as to what kinnda stuff this book deals with but i cant wait to see Dr. Walmsley's work. This guy is a genious and has a great sense of humour. I have a History test tomorrow in his class which I am definatley going to fail. Ahh i wish i would've studied.

This is a great book for anyone who is interested in a more dynamic view of politics in pre-revolutionary Boston. Walmsley demonstrates, in interesting and readable prose, how previous assessments of Hutchinson have too often been influenced by the biased and facile rhetoric of his Bostonian peers. Dr. Walmsley successfully portrays Hutchinson as a political and social actor and victim of the tumultuous Boston scene. Through his writing we are able to conceive of Hutchinson as a man who acted for both personal and political reasons. Hutchinson cannot be so easily characterized as simply a placeman for the British. Neither was he a villain who delighted in crushing Boston's radical crowd. Rather, Walmsley shows that Hutchinson was a very human figure who often found himself caught between the intransigence of British colonial policy and the self-serving rhetoric of the Boston radical elite. I recommend this book to both laymen and professionals alike.

This book not only gives you a true sense of Fred Holland Day as a man, photographer, book publisher and more...it gives you a sense of the era in which he lived, the town he grew up in, and Boston as it was during his lifetime. I say "Sensational"

This turn of the century Boston Photographer, Publisher, and Mentor is a fascinating character. One minor bit of information that was missing from this excellent biography was the history of F. Holland Day's middle name "Holland." This reviewer may be the only person really interested in this detail, because I like to point out that I'm not related to the subject or author of one of my reviews, but I can't provide that disclaimer in this review because the book didn't delve into the source of the subject's middle name. I'm certain that oversight won't bother any other reader.
What this book did among other things was give me my baptism into the cutthroat politics that existed between many of the pioneers of American Photography. I had no inkling of the competition between Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secessionists and other photography societies such as Curtis Bell's "First American Photographic Salon" or the "American Federation of Photographic Societies," First Chicago Salon and the Third Philadelphia Salon. I was aware of the competition between the Dadaists and the Surrealist movements in Paris that were often marked by fist-fights and brawls that had to be broken up by the police, but this open warfare among the pioneer photographers in America was an eye-opener for this reviewer.
Day was invited, pressured to join the Photo-Secessionists by his friends and admirers Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence H. White, but he chose to remain neutral and even stopped exhibiting his work with the Photo-Secessionists or allowing it to be published in that organizations "Camera Work." Fortunately, Stieglitz remained an avid collector of Day's photographs and after a Boston fire destroyed Day's Boston studio along with his photographs, negatives and priceless art collection, Stieglitz's personal collection became a major source of museum collections of Day's surviving work.
The political infighting among early American photographers was only a minor part of this fascinating and meticulously researched and footnoted biography. Pictorialism, symbolism, nude photography and sacred photographs were only one facet of Day's personality. He was a leading voice for considering photography an art. He wrote passionately in that quest. He considered beauty to be an important part of photography as art. He was one of the United States's earliest Aesthetic advocates.
A life-long Universalist who believed that good works included helping others, he mentored in various Boston Charities. Among his most important "discoveries" was a 13-year-old Syrian immigrant Kahlil Gibran who would later write "The Prophet." He formed a publishing company with a friend and they named it "Copland and Day" and during the company's relatively short time in operation it published the works of Oscar Wilde and Stephen Crane among others.
This is an excellent biography of one of the pioneers of American Photography and man who in his own time was considered a rival to Alfred Stieglitz.

Like the other Grayson books, this is a true delight to curl up with. I first "discovered" these books when I accidentally purchased the entire first edition set in a box of books at an auction. It was the best dollar I ever spent. Mr Grayson takes us to a day and time that we have overlooked. His keen observations are as valid today as they were when the author first published. I value these books as they give yet another lens to view life through thereby making life much richer. Recommend this work, and Grayson's other works highly.

In a world of turmoil and carking care, where every headline shrieks of battle and suffering, David Grayson's books, with their deeply felt appreciation of the joys of nature and of the simple life, have a real place.Mr. grayson has evolved a philosophy of life and an attitude toward the world which will give solace and encouragement to those of us who need a therapeutic escape from the grim realties of life today.You will enjoy sitting under David Grayson's stately old Elm....The illustrations by David Hendrickson make it a true beauty.

This book is a model for a relatively concise but thorough biography of an under-appreciated historical figure. The writing is skillful, and the text benefits immensely from extensive quotations from Wright's voluminous letters. Wright's voice is lively and witty and she makes very good company for the 7 or 8 hours required to read this book.

In the eyes of history, Wright has been overshadowed by her older sister Lucretia Mott and her contemporaries Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. But her central participation in both the woman's rights and anti-slavery causes secures her a place as one of the giants of the mid-19th century. Wright believed strongly in the benefits of free expression and complete tolerance even of shocking views expressed by others. She thus anticipated many intellectual currents of the late 20th century.

This book is very much worth reading.

I am a descendent of Martha Coffin Wright and I had not know about her illustrious history before I read this book. I felt compelled to educate myself about her and her daughter Ellen who is my great grandmother. I had received a call from the National Park Service to ask me how I felt about being a relative of Martha Coffin Wright and did I know about the National Monument at Seneca Falls, New York and that then Mrs. Clinton would speak at the official celebration of the signing of the Women's Rights Manefesto. I was ignorant of the association of my family with the signers of the Document as I had been blinded by the weight of my patriarchal lineage from the Garrison side. I was thrilled to learn of the depth of the involvement of Martha Wright and Lucretia Coffin Mott, her older sister, and her daughter Ellen and their many adventures with the Underground Railway, especially through their deep connection with Sojourner Truth.
I have since met James Livingston and connected with him about our relationship and I enjoy being open to a whole new aspect of my family history.