Massachusetts Books

I update my Frommers annually to keep as a resource in my home. My guests appreciate the way this book is sectioned. I have discovered places and sights I never would have thought of by perusing this book. Would recommend this for travelers as well as residents of the area.

Among the MANY B&B guides to the Northeast, I found this one the most helpful for deciding where to go from Boston. Helfpul facts include travel times to the destinations, Nantucket vs. Martha's Vineyard, and other off-the beaten track locales (outside of Massachusetts). The book has helpful editorial, but more meaty that the general "quaint inn, hospitable couple serves muffins".

This book is really fun to read and quite interesting. The contrast between the two journals drives home the fact that LMA was just a little girl embarking on this experiment with her family. What a good sport she was! While based on actual events, the story is fictional. I think this is a good place to start if your not quite sure you want to read Little Women (you'll want to!). This book would be a great jumping-off point if you were looking to get someone interested in LMA and her works.

I pulled this book at random from the library recently and have been quite impressed. Donovan throws everything into the mix of her poems, reminding me of Goldbarth in a way. The collection begins with a quote from Stephen Hawking which seem appropriate since it delves into biology and astronomy. But Donovan keeps the theoretics clear and grounded so that we can follow the metaphor all the way through. Good stuff.

A reader from Newburyport: This was both a fun and a great learning book.This book presents interesting, sometimes obscure facts about Massachusetts. Subjects covered include historical figures, legends, geography, wildlife, stories,and other little known facts about the state. You can learn a lot by reading it and another interesting feature is that the book is designed so that you can also use the book to play a family or group trivia game! Well worth the price! It is a great book for adults, young readers, or teachers.

This is far more than your coffee table antiques book. The author provides a facinating social history wrapped around John seymour's early life in England and the move to Maine and Boston. Through the window of the ups and downs of furniture making we can get an understanding of the times. This aspect reminds this reviewer of Morison's Pulitzer Prize winning book, John Paul Jones, A Sailor's Biography, which addressed the same time period and began with Jones early life in Scotland.
But the book is really about the furniture, some of the finest and most significant to have been made during the Federal period. To understand the Seymour's work Mussey devoted ten years and didn't look at just a few exampls-he looked at and studied just about every suggested example. From this he developed a construction and aesthetic dictionary that allowed him with some confidence to identify pieces that are really made by Seymours, father and son. In chapter 5 he lays out these criteria. My only very slight quibble with the book is that I would like to have seen a page of say lunette-inlays and say a page showing many examples of Seymour dovetail joints. This would better allow the reader to come to his own conclusions.
The remainder of the book, basically the last two thirds, is a catalogue of the furniture. The photographs are beautiful and the descriptions are far more interesting and informative than the norn for this type section.
The book qualifies as a coffee table book because it is a big, has significant weight and is beautiful. But this is not the reason that it should be in the library of those who appreciate American furniture. Rather it is because this is in this reviewer's opinion the most significant American furniture book to have been written in recent years.

Dominic Spinale's gripping tale comes face to face with the fact that member s of The FBI consider their careers more important then the law.
The FBI was obsessed with bringing down The Mafia.
John Connoly an FBI agent who grew up in Boston, and was a boyhood friend of Whitery Bulger, a notorious Boston criminal, who's brother was The President of The State Senate of Massachusetts. (and later The President of The U of Massachusetts)
He made Whitey Bulger and his cohert Steve Flemmi FBI informants.
The problem was that Whitey commited robbery, rape, and murder, with The FBI's knowldege and in some cases participation.
This compelling well written book shows how corrupt The FBI was/is
It's a great read

As a beginning student in graphic art, I heard Leonard Baskin speak at the opening of a printing exhibition at Washington University in St. Louis. That experience made The Gehenna Press and Baskin's work alive for me in a way that simple research could not.

This book contains a bibliography of Gehenna's work which is annotated by Baskin, and that in and of itself makes it beautiful and invaluable. It took Amazon two years to locate the book for me, but it was well worth the wait. If you can find a copy, buy it and cherish it!

an undeniably comprehensive understanding of what it is to be male, female, heterosexual, homosexual, peasant, dubliner, etc., in contemporary ireland, placed in historical, political, economic, and academic contexts as appropriate, this collection of essays grants the reader insight into the most engaging aspects of gender and sexuality in a country where they have historically been marginalized by an overriding theme of nationalism and religion. only in recent years have studies of gender and sexuality reached the irish, as a result of many factors, perhaps most noticably the entry into the EC and the influence of modern media that followed, and this book provides an absolutely comprehensive encapsulation of the different views and interpretations of literary forms that these studies have taken on in recent years.

"The Genesis and Evolution of Time" by J. T. Fraser

Fraser's central thesis in this book asserts that time, rather than constituting the undifferentiated medium of classical philosophy and physics, consists of a hierarchy of interrelationships between aspects of the physical and mental universe.

In his first chapter Fraser outlines the history and philosophy of temporal measurement, culminating in a subtle and precise staement of the requirements for such a measurement. This provides his answer to the question:

"What do we do when we measure time? We test the validity of transformation equations. More generally, we search for order among clock readings and, when found, we express them [sic] in laws of nature."

In the second chapter Fraser, after a brief introduction and justification of application of the concepts of 'Umwelt' and hierarchy in science and philosophy, introduces his fundamental thesis. Briefly, he postulates that the universe exhibits several distict stable integrative levels, i.e., 'Umwelts' within which distinct sets components and their relationships may be described, and which possess distinct 'temporalities', or temporal components of these relationships. Fraser identifies six such levels:

1 Atemporal - the world of particles of zero rest mass, always moving at the speed of light.

2 Prototemporal - the world of particles of non-zero rest mass, always moving, but at speeds less than that of light.

3 Eotemporal - the world of large masses, gathered into stars, galaxies, groups of galaxies, etc.

4 Biotemporal - the world of living organisms.

5 Nootemporal - the world of man as a species and as individual member of the species.

6 ? - the world of collective human institutions, to the extent that they function as semiautonomous structures

Fraser's next four chapters elaborate on the first three levels through extended discussion of the four theories describing phenomena at these levels. The atemporal world is associated with special relativity, the prototemporal with quantum theory, and the eotemporal with thermodynamics and general relativity.

The seventh chapter addresses theories of biogenesis and organic evolution as the source of the biotemporal world, and the role of complexity and organisation in giving rise to the new temporal relationships.

The brief eighth and last chapter reviews the classical notion of time in the context of its role in the sciences and indicates Fraser's position regarding changes in that role necessary to achieve unification and coherence within and among the sciences.

Portions of this book work will seem dated to those keeping up with modern physics, and his views on complexity, while not invalid, seem crude in the light of recent work, particularly that of Stuart Kauffman and others of the Sante Fe Institute. Nonetheless, much of this recent work would appear to support Fraser's conceptual framework. Fraser's use of these concepts is original and important, and possibly the most carefully thought out approach to the problem of time available prior to Julian Barbour's "The End of Time". Fraser's concepts, moreover, as extended by him and others under the auspices of the 'International Society for the Study of Time' , are morelikely to prove applicable to current research in the near term. Barbour's theories are as yet more speculative, and their application as yet difficult to conceptualize.

In all, a book which will reward careful reading with ample food for thought, and provide powerful new tools to anyone seriously interested in the study of time.