Massachusetts Books

Vale's marvelously detailed history of public housing in Boston from the early Puritan settlements to the present day tells the story of our "alternating current of compassion and hostility" toward the poor in the U.S. Through his exploration of public housing in Boston, Vale writes a compelling sociological history of the tensions inherent in the American dream of home ownership, government subsidy vs. free enterprise, and most valuable of all explores the ideology of homeownership and its bearing on citizenship. Dense, meditative, often wryly humorous, this is a deeply researched work which yields uncommon insights about mythic American values of community as expressed through public housing and public spaces.

Particularly well-rendered is the recurring theme of how the government used its powers to dispense and dispose of land to reward certain Americans. The U.S. soldier was the first, and continues to be, a singular actor in this drama of service and reward. In the Jeffersonian post-revolutionary war period, veterans were rewarded with grants of land. In so doing, the government empowered these men to do the work of settling the frontier -- who better to perform such a task than those already trained in war? Civil War veterans were similarly rewarded.

From there, other "deserving" populations were rewarded with housing -- those who demonstrated their commitment to an American standard of behavior: industriousness, cleanliness, responsiblity being some of the key attributes for qualification for early public housing. Vale describes, for instance, how public housing developments in the Depression and postwar era were also used by politicians to reward their supporters, especially deserving working-class poor families who fit a traditional dual parent, father/provider schematic.

The early chapters exploring the city fathers erection and administration of jails, insane asylums, shelters for the poor, and the concomitant rise the settlement movement and the social worker are particularly well-rendered. Great illustrations, too!

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.