Boyd Books

Alice Adams writes fifteen stories ... each about some travel experience ... every story is different from the other and captures or explores some human emotion, self-discovery, personal quest, conflict or innner turmoil, or gradual awakening to some deeper aspect of being human and alive.

In "You are What You Own: A Notebook", a married couple inherit antique furniture after the death of one of their parents. The author explores the emotional ties of one partner to the furniture. The reader is drawn to how the author examines their marriage through the eyes of the other spouse who comes to unusual discoveries about her self and what she considers important in life. Ultimately, Helen totally surprises herself and the reader by her actions. The deeply engaging story "Return Trips" is about the romance between two people who are wildly in love. The reader learns it is a May/December relationship and Carl has a congenital heart condition, which essentially means ... he is dying. Oblivious to or blocking out the inevitable, they live a carefree existence on an island off the shore of Northern Yugoslavia. Told from the first person view, the main character revisits this island many years later, after she is married and has a successful career. She compares her current feelings and life situation to the memories of those idyllic times in the past. She resolves certain problems in her life by reliving the strong passionate emotions of the past. The story "Time in Sante Fe" examines the unexpected unusual friendship between a straight female and a gay male. They agree to meet in Santa Fe, New Mexico, stay at a hotel together and explore the city and sights. This trip renews their friendship and reinforces their positive feelings for each other. Most importantly it helps them transcend everyday reality to see life from new perspectives. It fulfills each of them in ways they did not imagine. Another extraordinairy story is "Elizabeth", a highly educated and cultured lady with a fine Austrian accent, who touches the lives of two people very deeply. Minerva, a law student, is "house-sitting" when her parents, both psychologists, leave town for a conference. Due to sheer boredom, Minerva invites Elizabeth, the neighbor, over for a swim. She becomes life-long friends with this world-traveler with whom she can share her cultural interests, intimate thoughts, everyday problems and hobbies - more so than with her own parents. Elizabeth buys a house on a beach in Mexico and invites, Judson,a poet, and Minerva, a lawyer ... The two are distantly cordial and each make assumptions about the other's relationship with Elizabeth. Elizabeth's intentions are not clear ... until an unexpected event draws Judson and Minerva closer together. All the stories are contemporary and thoroughly enjoyable to read.

Each story is deeply engaging and captures the readers interest from the beginning. The reader is magnitized and kept glued to the pages as emotions and events are explored, revealing nuances of meaning and transformational experiences. The stories are magical in how they portray the lives of ordinairy or extraordinairy people in either exotic locales or in everyday situations revealing perceptive insights.
Erika Borsos (erikab93)

I have used Chester successfully in my 4th grade classroom for years, and he never fails to capture the attention of my students, even my reluctant ones! I highly recommend Chester and all his adventures to history lovers of all ages. Boyd has an uncanny ability to uniquely illustrate historical issues using Chester and his friends which is fun and entertaining to read.

The Rio Grande River (Great River) is the third longest river in the United States that divides Mexico and the US. Peter Lourie travels the entire river from it's headwaters in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico. This is a wonderful account of his travels on this grand river. The history, rich land and people of the Rio Grande are captured in the detailed and colorful photographs. Each region that the Rio Grande travels through is unique and beautiful. I admire Peter Lourie because he is very respectful of the people and the delicate land of the Rio Grande. He did a wonderful job in illustrating the beauty and importance of this remarkable river. I absolutely enjoyed this book because the Rio Grande is very close to home!

Dana's account of life on a mid-1830's merchant sailship and his ensuing life in early California is unsurpassed in historical importance.
Richard Dana was a young Harvard student in 1834 and due to poor eyesight decided to undertake a position for two years as sailor on the ship Pilgrim. The purpose was to unload trading goods in California, secure hides there, cure them, and subsequently ship the leather skins back to Boston. The result was over forty thousand hides!
His detail of daily life on board a sailing ship, the dangers of rounding Cape Horn (twice), duties and responsibilities associated with his employment and what California life was like before the gold rush and population influx leaves the reader bewildered.
At times there are lulls in the narrative but these are soon overcome. A lengthy but notable read.

Anne (Marbury) Hutchinson, declared among some in her seventeenth-century world as a religious "heretic," defied many of the most powerful men in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, including Governor Thomas Dudley, in defense of her strong beliefs. She endured a "trial by fire," without benefit of a jury of her peers, in a highly charged court where these men challenged and mocked her views on religion. Her banishment from Salem and Boston drove her to a new colony called Rhode Island, which her mentor and friend Roger Williams co-founded.

Thousands of Americans can claim the Marbury family's lineal connections to their royal and noble ancestry, from William the Conqueror through Edward I. These ancestors include John, King of England, who signed the Magna Carta in 1215 at Runnymede, as well as many of the barons who witnessed his signature on that famous document. All later kinds of Spain, Holy Roman and Austrian emperors, most later English and French kinds, all kings of Prussia and Russian czars, beginning with Alexander I, are distant cousins as well.

This volume is the second in a projected multi-volume series dealing with Americans of royal and noble ancestry. Taking the colonial period as a point of departure, it focuses on two of Reverend Francis Marbury's daughters, Anne and Katherine, who immigrated with their husbands to the New World in the 1630s. It covers the first five generations of their descendants, carrying the various lines up to and beyond the Revolutionary War, into the sixth generation. The generational layout of the work follows a modified format of the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, with citations for all five generations based exclusively on vital records and approved family histories.

The book concludes with an every-name index of several thousand entries and a comprehensive bibliography. In addition, the author appended a "Lineage Society Index" with names of eligible ancestors in a number of hereditary societies, including the Colonial Clergy, Colonial Governors, Mayflower Descendants, and Revolutionary War Patriots.

This book has great little stories it, the kids just laugh over all of them! A very cute book!

Excellent book for children. It is easy for chilren to follow and has Great illustrations.

I have been using this book for about a month. I plan to purchase it. Right now I am using the one from the public library. It has wonderful poems! Please give it a try.

.. lost it for 5, and just found it again. It was my constant companion through undergraduate and graduate studies. Small and thin, it's easy to carry everywhere. My old 1987 edition had log and sin tables that I almost never used, but everything else was constantly in use. It has
- A complete SI/imperial conversion table
- Definitions of units
- All those trig functions you can't remember, like sin(a+b)
- Fundamental constants
- The greek alphabet
- A small but useful table of isotopes (MUCH smaller than carting around Lederer and Shirley)
- Properties of liquids and solids, like specific heat capacity tables, and so on

and lots more. I'd highly recommend this book for someone starting on a career in physics or the physical sciences.

This book is a collection of poems about sea animals. It includes a wide range of animals, from the well-known sea otters and beluga whales, to the less familiar sea cucumber and pipefish. Each poem has a corresponding picture, and there is a "looking deeper" section at the end of the book which gives more details about each animal.

The beautiful pictures make this book a must-see. The poems are short enough that they can be enjoyed by those with short attention spans, but they are detailed enough to interest more advanced readers. This book would be best suited for middle school readers because some of the vocabulary is difficult, although younger readers can still enjoy the pictures and the rhyming. The short poems and eye-catching pictures also make it an easy book to pick up and put down over and over. This would be a nice coffee-table type book for a classroom.