Maine Books

This is a great introductory field guide for tidepoolers and beachcombers. I grew up on the west coast but was still able to use this reference on Pacific sea life. Perhaps my favorite aspect of the book is the author's willingness to eat just about everything he finds, evoking a marine Euell Gibbons. (If you plan to do this yourself, please research local regulations for collection permits!)

If you love strolling on the beaches of the Atlantic Coast but want to make some sense of where you are & what you are seeing, seek out a copy of this book. You won't be disappointed. Zinn shows how the world of the beach, from the water to the dunes, is packed with life seen & unseen. & he shows us where to look.

When was the last time you read a good relationship book? This one is unique. All the descriptions of nature made me want to go there, and provided wonderful visual pictures for the story to unfold. I've never been to Maine and this book gave me a hunger for lobsters and the blueberries of summer. The storyline covers all aspects of relationships extramarital affairs, to gay men being in the closet, to finding and sustaining true love. I didn't want to stop once I started reading.

If you've never been to Maine, you can go this summer via the pages of "Hatchet Harbor" by Jane E. Hartman. It's an old fashioned love story and it includes vivid descriptions of nature, wild life and the ecology -- with a plea for saving the environment. As you read about each character's history and involvement, you'll begin to understand the mistrust that is brewing in this tiny fishing village. Here's where love of nature collides with human greed and the locals and *summer people* take sides in a brewing environmental conflict.

The author captures the true essence of the craggy Maine coastline as well as its sometimes, just as craggy, Maine characters. Even if you read this book in your backyard in Kansas -- you'll be able to smell the salt air.

As a former English major, I have learned to be wary of "confessional" poets. After reading a few of their pieces, I rather feel like telling them to get over themselves and get out the house more often. "Heading Home" has the opposite effect, however. After reading all of the poems, I was sorry that there were not more. And I wanted to get out of the house more often; to experience the world that this brilliant poet sees and describes so perfectly.

Donna Doyle*s impressive first collection, Heading Home, takes a journey to reclaim and reconcile a world lived, a world lost. *The fairytales are wrong,* Doyle writes, *Death finds us / by taking what we love.* As she mines the heart*s darkness, Doyle*s narratives rend richer and deeper for their humor and subtle telling. And through story, loss is often transformed * *What begins as emptiness fills us,* Doyle writes, *until we can fill ourselves, each other.* Poignant with epiphany and surprising language, Doyle*s poems head home to a place that might not be your home, but it will be when you read her book.

*****Bill Brown


Donna Doyle's Heading Home is rare in its unaffected diction, its honesty and wild spirit, its combination of humor and sorrow. This work * a constant source of discovery * is laced with surprises. Poetry at its best and most original.

*****Marilyn Kallet


With a heart both aching and overfull from the world*s many sorrows and joyful noises, Donna Doyle*s poems are *a daring act of love* where she faces how absence transforms us, joins hands with the dead and the living who sustain her life and work. In Doyle*s debut collection, we are lifted beyond grief of inevitable losses into the ripe readiness of childhood blackberries and shadowy fears, the ghost muses of her dog, Sydney, and her father scarecrowed by cancer, and her native east Tennessee landscape equally haunted and holy ground. Through it all, the poet*s *chanting tongue held hostage by memory* reminds us that *true love and grief are like a marriage* and that the weight of these precious, passing lives added to our own can only be a blessed union.
*****Linda Parsons Marion

I loved this book. The adventures happened on an island in Maine like ones near where I live. Mrs. Katherine says the twins can keep a treasure of "enormous value" that is hidden in her house, if they can find it! There is lots of excitement and a surprise ending.

I loved this book. The adventures happened on an island in Maine like ones near where I live. Mrs. Katherine says the twins can keep a treasure of "enormous value" that is hidden in her house, if they can find it! There is lots of excitement and a surprise ending.

Copleston's series, "The History of Philosophy", is quite possibly the best introduction to the history of philosophical thought that has ever been published and certainly the best currently in print.

You will be hard pressed to find a better collection of solid philosophical surveys in one place. The beauty of the series is that Copleston has clearly done his research on each period and each thinker of Western philosophy.

I cannot recommend this series any more highly. It is a must-have collection for anyone who is a scholar (professional or casual) of philosophy, theology or any of the arts.

If this isn't on your bookshelf, it should be!

Copelston is one of the pre-emienent thinkers of philosophical history. Every one should read his entire works including this fine volume.

The paperback History of Woolwich, Maine is available from The Woolwich Historical Society, P.O. Box 98, Woolwich, Maine 04579. This book is 355 pages with dozens of photographs. Historical facts and resident memoirs make this a great read.

This interesting and well-researched history of a small Maine town was written by members of the Woolwich Historical Society and is still available for purchase from them.

If you want to know what happened to the Maine, read this book. There's a little historical background, but not the hundreds of pages that some authors devote to this subject.

It deals mostly with the "nuts and bolts" of the explosion and what caused it.

The story of the U.S.S. Maine and the disaster it encountered has been written many times. The tragic loss of 266 lives was blamed on a mine, and it was a partial cause of the Spanish-American war. Admiral Rickover's couriosity was tickled by a newspaper article, which indicated that the original Court of Inquiry ivestigating the cause of the explosion and destruction of the ship had some peculiar irregularities involved. The Court did not call on existing experts in explosions and mines to testify or examine the available evidence, and the ship's captain who might have been responsible was allowed to attend all court sessions and question witnesses. Admiral Rickover assembled a team of historians and explosions experts to examine all original records and evidence to form his own picture of what happened in the light of modern day knowledge of explosions. The book is the rsult of his team's work, and the first, and so far only, work that has dealt accurately with the technical aspects of the ship loss. All his team members were competent in their field, drawn from Navy experts, and there can be no doubt that his finding that the cause of the explosion was internal and purely accidental is accurate. His book is the definitive verdict on the story, and it is presented very clearly, even the technical details are explained so a layman can understand them, although not proven in the sense that scioentists would demand. From a purely scientific point of view, the reader will have to believe in the expertise of Admiral Rickover and his team. But who is to doubt the father of the nuclear submarine?

Excellent for my summer program! It should teach children to be proud to be from the state of Maine. It also teaches children to be proud of their heritage, no matter what it is. We have Coon cats visiting us at the library. I can't seem to find any information about the author and would like to know more about her, where she is from etc. We have other books by her and are certainly keeping them as I see they are out of print.

This childrens' book about the life of a sea-going Maine Coon Cat should be in the library of everybody who loves Maine Coons. Delightful illustrations and lovely story.

If a Man Be Mad by Harold Maine is no light read. This 1947 autobiography of an alcoholic is a journey into a world of desperation and hopelessness. From his beginnings as a troubled youth to his eventual employment as an orderly in a psychiatric institution, Maine carries the reader through a saga of addiction and insanity, both on the behalf of the author and on behalf of society at large.

There are several perspectives one can take while reading this book. The clinical perspective is derived from Maine's surprise and disgust with the unorthodox treatment of the mentally ill within state and privately funded institutions. Specifically during the time Maine was admitted into these facilities, the main method of controlling the compulsions of the insane and addicted was incarceration and abandonment. Once inside the gates, patients were subjected to abuse on behalf of sadistic orderlies, looking for a punching bag and an outlet for anger, and egomaniacal doctors, determined to discover the concoction of medication and discipline that would ultimately cure the illness, at the expense of the patients' health and what little sanity they were clinging to.

Beyond the clinical perspective is the philosophical narrative of Maine's own descent into insanity, a gateway opened through drink. During Maine's bouts with instability, he was able to act as an outside observer at the same time his actions were out of control. He held a degree of detachment that allowed him to intelligently note when his behavior was dangerous, when he was hallucinating or when he was behaving criminally and unethically, yet he had no power to stop himself. His memory of events and dialogues throughout his various ordeals is incredibly vivid and astute, despite his revolving in and out of drunken stupors.

Maine's personal struggle with the shifting divisions between reality and madness provide a fascinating glimpse into the mind of an artist. This is not the type of story one plows through in one sitting and dismisses. Maine provides the type of content that must be digested in pieces, contemplated, and meditated upon. To accept anything at face value does an injustice to those suffering from mental illness. Maine possesses a gift in his ability to decipher the many facets of personality and the origin of a person's motivations.

As he notes that most of the names within his autobiography have been changed, Harold Maine is actually the pseudonym for the author Walker Winslow. However, to retrieve much information on the true identity of this mysterious and private author is difficult. I was able to dig up another psychiatry related nonfiction release entitled The Menninger Story, published in 1956 by Doubleday. A novel, Man in Paradise, was published in 1941 by Smith and Durrell. Through the accounts of his writing in If a Man Be Mad, we know that he had various pieces published by magazines, but many of these were also published under pseudonyms. I found an article titled "A Lesson from History," but digging up the actual text has proved to be a challenge. If anyone can provide me with any more information on this intellectual, I would be very appreciative.

If a Man be Mad...there couldn't have been a more appropriate title for this gem hidden amidst the American literature. Walker Winslow, writing as Harold Maine, had written this fascinating book while living in Big Sur, at a time when other great writers, such as Henry Miller resided nearby. Whether it was Winslow's gift or the proximity of some of the greatest in modern American literature, Mr. Winslow has achieved what only but a few writers are capable of. He shook my world.
Comprised of two separated books, before and after, shall we say, the story follows Winslow on his quest to find himself. A man torn apart from early childhood, he struggles not only with his own shadows, but also with the society at large; mainly its arrogance and ignorance, lack of understanding and its unwillingness to change its ways, no matter how wrong they may be. Writing in first-person, Winslow recounts stories of men and women on both sides of the fence separating the insane from the sane, yet, he clearly portrays the malicious nature of the so-called sane, which the insane are incapable of. At times a psychological thriller, at times a downright horror, a human horror, the story moves swiftly away from childhood innocence to the first day in mental institution. An alcoholic, but above all, a vulnerable human being, Winslow experiences his first awakening -- the institutions are not meant to cure people, they are merely put in place to prevent them from being free. From the inhuman indifference the guards and caretakers display without any regard for the patients, to the accounts of brutal beatings when a patient gets out of hand, Winslow portrays his first stay at a mental institution with cruel honesty. When he gets out, uncured, yet a changed man, he goes from institution to institution. Touched by death more than once, Winslow recounts his hopes after discovering AA and his first pleasant experience at a hospital in NY, where the staff seems to care, giving the reader hope that the world is perhaps not as screwed up as it appears.
Bouncing between near-death incidents, (brought about by his drinking), marriages, divorces, struggle to be the artist he wants to be (not the artist he has to be to get paid), schizophrenia and consciousness, Winslow walks a dangerously thin line. When he tries his luck on the other side, whether to help himself or others, as an attendant in one of the dreaded institutions, he discovers that the whole system is flawed. His descriptions of the inhuman treatment of veterans returning from the war seemed almost unbelievable, until the recent scandal regarding a VA hospital broke out. It is sad to see that 60 years after this book was published, we, as a society, are still doomed by the same mistakes.
Without spoiling anything for the reader, Walker Winslow's story may not be unique in its core, but it is a uniquely told story. I have never read another book quite like this one; so poetic, so disturbing, so timeless. A mad man's account of the mad gathering we call civilization, a cry for help lost amidst the applause for politicians, a light of hope lost in the darkness. If a Man be Mad is a story worth reading over and over, for it does not get old, it does not get boring, it does not cease to disturb. One man's humanity against Humanity at large, philosophy, psychology and drama -- mixed together in a deadly cocktail of words -- bled onto the pages by an amazing author.

David Becker has written a wonderfully comprehensible book about a subject that is very broad. To be able to discuss so well such a variety of printmaking techniques, styles and skills over a long period of time is no easy task. He detects and explains commonalities when that is warranted, but does not stretch the point to fit the title of the book. The book is thoughtful and appreciative but not chauvinistic. It is also readable while being scholarly. The color illustrations are beautiful and true. This is a great book for anyone who cares about printmaking, Art history or Maine.

While THE IMPRINT OF PLACE: MAINE PRINTMAKING 1800-2005 would initially seem to be of very narrow regional interest, in reality it deserves a place in the holdings of any art library collection strong in printmaking representations. It represents a catalog celebrating some 200 years of printmaking with a large collaborative fine-arts project embracing a series of exhibitions and education programs, and as such provides the first chronological survey of the subject, standing as well alone as it does with the exhibit.