Massachusetts Books

I bought this book after taking classes in making lightship baskets locally, and must admit that without it I would not have been able to continue making them at home. The history of the baskets is excellent, and colored photographs of baskets as well as the island of Nantucket are numerous throughout the book. If you are at all interested in baskets, this book is a must!

I took a class by Martha Two yrs. ago that was great to. It was at the MBA in Grand Rapids MI. The book is just as good if not better. The history is something I always wanted to know about . Thank You Martha for such a wonderful book . C. M. Miller Bay City MI.

Love Bade Me Welcome is an extemely honest and interesting story of a painter and her spiritual connection with God in human form in our time, Meher Baba. I could hardly put it down!

I feel this book is very valuable for present and future souls searching for recognition of their right and opportunity to God. I consider Phyllis Ott to be much more than an "ordinary" human female but she writes of her own conflicts of being an ordinary woman on her spiritual path. Her journey is real and with contemporary conflicts that I could relate to which validated my own spiritual path and significance.

Full of intense longing and love for God, Ott's life is moving and inspirational. She lives for God through her work as a painter and so much more. Her chosen life of poverty is profound and a beneficial example of how to live in the world but not be of it. Her own "phyllisophia" and poetry is enlightening and heartfelt. I recommend this book for everyone spiritually inclined and for anyone looking for a good read, from someone who enjoyed it very much.

This collection of letters, journals, newspaper accounts and interviews of the young girls who worked in the Lowell Mills is balanced off by the thoughts of the Mill owners. Great background for the study of Lyddie, by Katherine Paterson.

Essays, journals, letters, and an interesting piece of historical fiction tell this story of the young women who worked in the textile mills in New England. Timetable of the workday and Boarding House regulations of the day are enlightening - especially if you think life is hard today!

I purchased 'M is for Mayflower' and 'C is for Centennial' for my niece. After reviewing the books, I found that they have several different levels of learning within the illustrations and text that will make these books readable for years to come for her. She seems to like them, and is attracted by the colorful illustrations. Because I live in MA and she lives in CO, she is eager to learn about the place where her auntie is. These books are good, fun learning tools that will help prepare a child for elementary social studies classes.

I purchased 'M is for Mayflower' and 'C is for Centennial' for my niece. After reviewing the books, I found that they have several different levels of learning within the illustrations and text that will make these books readable for years to come for her. She seems to like them, and is attracted by the colorful illustrations. Because I live in MA and she lives in CO, she is eager to learn about the place where her auntie is. These books are good, fun learning tools that will help prepare a child for elementary social studies classes.

Advancead students working in Renaissance literature, especially English (though there is a chapter on Montainge, and a glance at Cervantes) will find the information quite helpful. The final chapter on Browne is particularly memorable. The theme of an aesthetic of anamnesis (drawing on Neoplatonic understandings of knowledge being predicated on memory)are presented "performatively," in a lively way that mirrors the content being discussed, thus involving the reader in the Baroque flow of ideas. The author serves as a tour guide in the hall of mirrors reflecting the other side of being.

This book, to borrow from the jacket blurb by Arthur Kinney (series editor and founder of Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies), combines the history of ideas with the history of consciousness in early modern Europe. "Engel has produced a groundbreaking study that is boldly original, richly penetrating, and revolutionary in its implications. No student of early modern culture can afford to overlook this extraordinary work."

This "rich and varied work," so termed by Tom Conley (Harvard University, Professor of Romance Languages), makes use of the critical work of Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Eliade, to uncover subtleties of design in works ranging from Elizabethan broadsides, to Milton's epic poetry, to the essays of Thomas Browne. And yet, as the Review of English Studies noted, neither the wide range of topics nor the conjunction of old texts and modern critics should be read as merely fashionable gestures towards current academic obsession, "for the closely argued thesis has an overall cogency and a local subtlety."

Basically the book argues that early modern "metaphorics" was essentially mnemonic and emblematic.

George Rousseau in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine wrote: "Engel implies that an aesthetic of mortality lurked beneath the surface of the skin, so to speak, in that fierce world in which the death of the literal body was life's greatest certainty."

This was the most beautifully written and photgraphed decorating book I have seen. I own dozens of such books, and I seldom read all of the text, but I read this one from cover to cover. It made me want to lounge in the gardens and explore the house. I highly recommend this book for lovers of home decorating and gardening books. It is exquisitely warm and funny!

MARTHA'S VINEYARD: HOUSES AND GARDENS ALLOWS THE READER TO EFFORTLESSLY VIEW A MOST UNIQUE ISLAND. THE WELL THOUGHT OUT TEXT COMPLIMENTS AND HELPS ONE ENJOY EVEN MORE THE BEAUTY OF MARTHA'S VINEYARD. LISL DENNIS'S PHPOTOGRAPHS CIRCUMNAVIGATE THE ISLAND IN PICTORIAL SPLENDOR. THE AUTHORS OF THIS WORK SHOULD BE COMMENDED FOR THEIR ABILITY TO CAPTURE THE BEAUTY AND ESSENCE OF A VERY SPECIAL PLACE CALLED MARTHA'S VINEYARD.

As a former resident of Mass. I bought this book as a kind of keepsake of some of the beauty of New England. It certainly does contain great pictures. The reader is taken from the capital, Boston all the way to the Berkshires covering just about everything in between. All the history and unique areas are covered. If you're interested in learning more about the state or just want to appreciate all it has to offer you need look no further than this book. Highly recommend and very reasonably priced.

We ordered this book right before moving away from Massachusetts in anticipation of being a bit home sick. We placed this book on our coffee table and look at it often. It is great. There are plenty of pictures, some text. The book is good size. I would highly recommend -- and have purchased more copies of -- this book to give as a gift.

This book contains lots of color pictures as well as histories and travel directions. I found it extremely useful as a guidebook and it has made a nice souvenier of a recent trip to some of the lights featured.

This book is an excellent resource to take on the road with you to Massachusetts.! Great pictures with easy to follow directions. I personally used it on a trip last summer and saw most of the lights in the book! Highly recommended.

I worked for a Divorce Attorney who used to recommend this book to her clients - I give the book to my friends, both female & male, to read before they act on Divorce and during their Divorce. Atty Jancourtz says it like it is and the book has a neutral tone, not favoring either male or female. I strongly recommend to anyone contemplating Divorce - read this book!!

The title of Ms Jancourtz's book is a bit misleading. The book is a concise and accurate guide to divorce law and procedures in Massachusetts. If both husband and wife are talking and anywhere near rational, the book can serve as a step by step guide to a self help divorce.

-Items covered include: -What are each parties rights in most cases. -How would a judge rule. -Where to go for protection or assistance. -Templates and sample forms..how to fill them out..where to file them. -Formulas and worksheets for calculating child support that conforms with state guidelines.

I used the book, and I'm a guy. When my ex-wife and I used this book with the assistance of a mediator, I took a draft of the separation/divorce agreement we put together to a lawyer for review. The lawyer was incredibly confrontational in his approach and I could see the dollar signs in his eyes. When I asked him up front what the letter of the law said about each issue he brought up, it turned out that Jancoutz (and the terms of our agreement)conformed with what a judge would probably have ruled. I consulted another, more rational lawyer and made only minor changes to our agreement. My impression is that if paid lawyers start butting heads its just the lawyers who come out ahead. Jancourtz gives a couple the tools they need to understand the law.

If your using mediation, hiring a lawyer, or want to do it by yourselves, Jancourtz provides an excellent tool.

Those who live on the North Shore of Massachusetts may know Argilla Road, the Goodale property, Hog Island, the town of Ipswich, and even "greenheads." They may even be fortunate enough to remember Kitty Crockett Robertson, her local newspaper columns, radio essays, and even The Orchard: A Memoir, the inspiring book about her attempt to save the family's apple orchard during the Great Depression. But this collection of essays is much more than "just" a story about a specific person or a specific place. Passionately committed to living life to the fullest, Kitty turns her memories into universal moments--from her tearful parting with her grandmother at age eight, and her conversations with her imaginary companion ("Mr. Patterson"), to her almost fatal science experiment with a borrowed key and a kite during a thunderstorm.

Telling about her life from 1901 to 1979, Kitty contrasts her staid existence as a school child living on Marlborough St., Boston, to her free and often wild life during school vacations and summers with her grandmother and family on Argilla Road, Ipswich, the place that was always Kitty Robertson's "home." Published in the Ipswich Chronicle between 1951 and 1979, and collected by Kitty and her daughter Betsy Robertson Cramer, these essays were prepared for publication by her daughter following Kitty's death just a few hours after writing her last column in 1979.

Thirty years have now elapsed since then, but Kitty's essays about life in Ipswich are still memorable--and important--not because they make us nostalgic about the past, but because they celebrate life's great joys--family, the freedom to be who you are, and the understanding of nature and one's connections to it--joys which sensitive people have shared for centuries.

Loosely organized by seasons, the essays are also loosely organized by time, and as Kitty's life stories show her growing up and eventually discovering that she is as old as her grandmother when her grandmother died, the reader also sees that Kitty is still as determined as ever to let no moment ever be wasted. She describes sailing Ipswich Bay alone and rowing to Crane Beach and beyond (as in the wonderful cover photo), well into her seventies, while observing the changes of scenery and nature--the loss of big, old trees, the growth of new ones in what had been pastures, the disappearance of the harbor seals, the effects of DDT on the clam flats, and the vanishing eel grass from the marshes. Though she relishes her life and her experiences, she also describes how hard life could be and how those hardships molded character. By sharing her exuberant life from 1901 to the 1970s, Kitty Robertson enables us all to recognize and treasure similar moments in our own lives, and to stop and appreciate on our own place in the grand scheme of things. n Mary Whipple

This just-published collection of essays is by the same author as The Orchard, A MemoirThe Orchard: A Memoir

A year or so after my mother's death, I collected some of her newspaper columns about growing up in Ipswich and Boston. This book is the result. The first edition was sold out quite quickly; I tried once again a POD with a spiral binding. Now the technology has improved. I scanned the spiral bound copy, correcting (I hope!) all the typos and Dog Ear Publishing has produced a readable attractive copy.

I can't really give a review of Measuring Time, that will be up to others, but I have heard quite a few times how much pleasure these impressions, these essays have given. I look forward to comments.
Betsy
(I have to give a rating --- and, of course, having put in many many hours of time over many years, I think it is worth five stars!)