Massachusetts Books

I just returned from my first trip from Boston (5 days of sight-seeing), and this book was priceless! It's compact, so I was able to easily carry it everywhere with me. The maps are terrific, and it gives just enough information about each attraction, restaurant, etc. to help you decide if you want to include it on your itinerary. The descriptions of each location are concise and accurate. I found the ratings to be helpful and accurate, too. There are great suggestions no matter what your interest--for shoppers, walkers, families with children, art lovers, history buffs, etc. I looked in my local bookstore at Boston travel guides before I left and decided on this one--it turned out to be a great choice!!

I am traveling to Boston each year for the last 15 years. I though that I know most of the city. Well, this book is a short and very informative city guide and you can read it without big "fuss".

This is a great little guide for Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. It has all the essentials (eating, sleeping, travels), but also has those little insights about when and where and why. It is small in size (not like some other "small" books that are three inches thick), easy to read, and certain to be useful.

This guide was perfect for my short trip to Martha's Vineyard. Leave it to Frommer's to offer a pocket-sized guide that still offers everything the full sized guidebook has.

best authoritative source for Cape Cod gardening available. CL is knowledgeable about soils, weather and plants that do well in zone 6 and has a no nonsense approach

This book is just what I needed. I consider myself of an intermediate level of a gardener, but out here, things are different. With the sandy soil, and the salt air, gardening on the Cape, is like no where else. Even within the Cape,the towns have their own micro-climate. HERE within these beautifully photographed pages are the practical hints and tips to maintain a beautiful garden for each season of the year.

Judith Farr is the preeminent Emily Dickson scholar alive today. This is a worthy companion to The Passion of Emily Dickson, also published by Harvard Press. If you are unfamiliar with Farr's work and love Emily Dickinson, you owe it to yourself to read both works. Farr's insights are bold, well-defended and entirely convincing. Her writing is crisp, direct and immensely readable. Also, this is without a doubt one of the most beautiful books I have ever seen in presentation. The color plates are worth the price of the book alone. Better than 5 stars.

Emily Dickinson continues to fascinate the literary world, not only because of her unique, eerily beautiful poetry, but also because of the delicious mystery that cocoons her life well over one hundred years after her death. Some have painted her as a looney eccentric, some as a recluse shrouded in sexual ecstasy: she has been seen on theatre stages throughout the world as the Belle of Amherst, and her works have been incorporated into songs and symphonies - the most poignant being John Adams' "Harmonium".

Yet few investigators have the quaint, informed pique as the highly admired Dickinson scholar, Judith Farr. This book THE GARDENS OF EMILY DICKINSON maintains the level of biographic study that began with her THE PASSION OF EMILY DICKINSON in 1994 and continued with the elegant, aptly eccentric epistolary novel I NEVER CAME TO YOU IN WHITE in 1996. Like the previous books, Farr does not confine her writing to academia (though she obviously has consumed every bit of available information on her subject and footnoted these books extensively): Farr prefers to open doors and windows of imagination to make the factual data supplied have a semblance to the radiance of Dickinson's gifts to posterity.

During Emily Dickinson's lifetime (1830 - 1886) the poet was better know for her commitment to the oh-so-proper Victorian art of gardening. Books on Botany from that period held dominion over reading tables and bookshelves and Dickinson was as astute a garden scholar as the best of them. Flowers are frequently referenced in her poetry, her letters, her life, and Farr has used this other half of Dickinson's life as a means to explore the meanings of her poems. 'Flowers - Well - if anybody/Can extasy define -/Half a transport - half a trouble -/With which flowers humble men:...' She divides her writings into chapters 'Gardening in Eden' (the more spiritual aspect of the garden), 'The Woodland Garden' (the exploration of her natural garden on the grounds of the Homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts), 'The Enclosed Garden' (the conservatory where exotic looms were coddled), and 'The Garden in the Brain'. In each of these chapters Farr takes almost every reference to flowers in Dickinson's poems and discusses their significance both herbally and philosophically and passionately. The characters that played significant roles in Dickinson's odd life are all addressed (Susan Dickinson, Bowles, Higginson, etc) by referencing letters to and poems about each , and each bit of evidence breathes floral dimensions. Almost as an intermission to this theatrical diversion, Farr has placed a chapter by Louise Carter "Gardening with Emily Dickinson" which is well written and serves to ground the ongoing growing tales of the Belle of Amherst with a sophisticated diversion on the techniques of the Victorian Gardener - a chapter which could easily find its way into all Garden books! And aptly, in a manner that would no doubt find Dickinson's approval, Farr ends her book with an Epilogue, which indeed places all of her information in perspective and is enlightening to both the scholar and the occasional reader of the Poetry of Emily Dickinson. Judith Farr is a solid scholar, a fine writer, and if at times she cannot resist the tendency to 'personalize' her data, then that is merely her style and for this reader is only additive. The preface page of her book quotes the words of Thomas Wentworth Higginson: "There is no conceivable/beauty of blossom/so beautiful as words -/none so graceful,/none so perfumed." This lovely thought is a fitting introduction to the writing of Judith Farr, too. I wonder which aspect of Emily Dickinson she will explore next....

Where they get 6000 of the hopeful vying for 150 places. Where none of the courses are taught by physicians. Where you are presumed to have mastered biochemistry, bacteriology, virology and genetics *before* you arrive. Oh, you'll be a great doctor, all right, but this is because you were *always* gonna be a great doctor. Harvard seems incidental. You might as well pick a more meat-and-potatoes kinda med school.

Trouble is, if you go to Harvard you'll end up getting the pick of the residencies. But then, you were gonna be this great doctor anyway, so you'd get the pick of the residencies anyway.

After returning this book to the library, I headed straight to a bookstore to order my own copy, which 25 years later I still own.

Author Charles LeBaron applied as a mature student to two med schools, one of which was Harvard. Acceptance from both presents him with an enviable dilemma, and everyone he asks advises him to choose Harvard.

Well, nearly everyone; the sole dissenter is a Harvard alumnus. Harvard is mired in its own tautological mystique; Harvard educated doctors are considered the best for no other reason than because they ARE from Harvard. Consequently the institution is content to rest on its laurels, preserve the status quo and do a lot more to preserve this reputation than to deserve it.

Unlike most of his classmates, LeBaron has not spent his entire life in a lab and so can afford a luxurious sense of wonder about the human body, evolution, bacteria, and the possibility of a Higher Power. He also very soon finds himself at odds with the very philosophy of this particular school; on the very first day he allies with a couple of classmates in circulating a petition to reschedule Saturday classes... little realizing just how cherished a tradition of Harvard this is.

LeBaron has worked at the Lower Manhattan Rehab by day while cramming science courses by night as preparation for med school. His experiences in the trenches of the medical profession and as the child of terminally ill parents give him a rare perspective on the fallibility of doctors. Only too familiar with their callous and distant side, he is determined not to allow the system to warp him. A man of rare compassion, he draws inspiration from several former clients, and these flashbacks provide some of the most moving material in the book.

And yet for all this insight, the author occasionally displays a stunning naivete. Feeling overwhelmed at one point, he asks his instructor where he would be better off concentrating his dwindling study time, and is told that only muscles and nerves will be on the final, none of the bones or blood vessels. (Hook, line and sinker!)

Somehow the author makes time to record his impressions of the first year of Harvard Medical School, and like all such memoirs, it includes often hilarious glimpses of student life: pressure cooker weeks relieved by drunken costume parties... the giddy, chaotic faculty-student Christmas party... in the middle of the night as everybody is cramming for finals, a power failure suddenly hits. His instructors and fellow students are so deftly drawn with such well-chosen and amusing details, you're left wondering if you could have met them in some of your own classes.

The book is occasionally relieved, or interrupted, depending on your point of view, by philosophical short essays. The subject matter can range from the evolution of life on earth to an outraged private rant at God for allowing horrible diseases to afflict people who couldn't possibly deserve such agony. One can easily skip over these parts without losing any of the story, but this supplementary material is well worth reading at some point.

Thought-provoking, funny, moving, and inspiring... in no particular order.

This is the best true accounts ghost story book I have ever read and I have been reading them since I was ten( I'm now 50). I don't know what universe Blue Ballitt wandered into when she was writing this but it has a real ring of authenticity to it and the stories are sometimes so downright strange-- A Red Freind comes particularly to mind--that the very bizarreness argues for some sort of belief. My favorite story and the scariest true life story ever is A Little Girl. Yikes. It is creepy. Not M.R. James with his strange elementals. Just very straight-forward human apparitons with a great deal of will! This is a very fun sort of book and the reader will not be dissapointed.

This is an extremely well written oral history--interviews with year-round and summer residents of Nantucket Island who have actually experienced ghosts. These are unembellished accounts from some rather unlikely and credible sources. A great read in summer, or any season, its sequel, "Nantucket Hauntings" is also available.

I am glass engineer I want to buy the magazine(glass industry

This is a superb tome, neatly documenting the history of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company's beginnings, struggles, and successes, as well as providing reference on glass whale-oil and burning-fluid devices. Photographs are many and clear, details amply given on the Company's products of the time, and pointers offered throughout on recognition between Boston and Sandwich items, other manufacturer's products, and reproductions. Any student, collector, or devotee of early lighting devices should own this volume.

Our two year old grandson vacations on Cape Cod where we live. We thought it the perfect gift to remind him of the Cape and us.

You don't have to be a toddler to enjoy this children's board book offering by Cape Cod author and publisher Adam Gamble. From the Cape Cod Canal to summer league baseball to cranberry bogs, Good Night Cape Cod is a treat for anyone who has been touched by the Cape's special aura. The artwork by Provincetown illustrator John Andert is truly a delight. Highly recommended.

I thought this was one of the finest books I've ever read. A great coming of age novel and very moving.

I devoured this book when it came out in 1975, and it still holds up: Anyone who was ever a teenage girl, who loves to read about New York or Boston, or the late 1940s. Anne Bernays is a master prose stylist, and this is still my favorite of her books.

We travel all over the world and use local guides for each region or city we visit. This guide covers the most visited sites as one expects. It also introduces the reader to Boston as the locals see it. We find the best memories of a visit to a new city are the small, colorful exciting places found amoung the well known landmarks. A small farmers market behind the Museum of Art where the neighborhood shops. A pub with authentic Irish music but without the tourist crowd. These flavor a visit and make it special. The author searches for these and helps make our visit better. If you can't see all the places in the book, he writes in a style that makes the book a good read in the hotel room or airplane.

Last year, anticipating the arrival of out of town family, I bought Jeff Perk's Massachussetts Handbook. I have lived in New England for 15 years but am still, of course, an outsider. I found tons of wonderful information and suggestions in the Mass. Handbook, so when the Boston Handbook came out I snatched that one up too. This is a great book for literate people visiting Boston. It covers the whole historical, literary, and artistic scene better than any of its competitors, and it is wonderfully well written as well. Beside highbrow information, he also includes wonderful material on Boston parks, as well as doing a great job with moderately priced eating places and hang-outs. The book assumes, it seems to me, that the reader is well-educated, interested in history and culture, without a lot of money to spend. If that fits your profile, you couldn't buy a better guide book. My only real gripe with the book is that he doesn't do the restaurants in East Boston where some of the most interesting cheap food is to be had.