Maine Books

John Haley went to war with a Maine infantry regiment and wrote down his experiences in this book. Overall, the book is an interesting account of one average soldier in the biggest war America has ever seen. Many tidbits of information are tossed out making the reader re-read them again. One such piece is a reference to a Confederate sharpshooter who was killing many Union soldiers. The person is finally killed and he turns out to be a BLACK man. This book is good for Civil War buffs, for those wanting a "feel" of what it was like to fight for the Union, and those who think that no blacks fought for the Confederacy.

for a Maine volunteer and army private John Haley was incredibally articulate. He had a wry wit and sharp sense of humour. He paints a vivid picture of day to day life in the field. Haley has a self depreciating manner that lends credibility to his accounts as you don't feel he is embellishing in order to elevate his own status. I really felt this was an honest account of the hardships of the war as well as the mundania. If you love civil war history or like myself have a fondness for Maine history you should put this journal at the front of your list.

This collection is a marvelous compilation of short stories. I first read O. Henry as an undergraduate student of American Literature and was pleasantly surprised in discovering a most incredible story teller! I couldn't get enough. I was telling his stories to my friends and they began buying his work. We started a discussion group and attracted others to our meetings. My class was absolutely saturated with O. Henry. This particular collection offers the best selection for O. Henry samplers as well as for true fans. One favorite is "Friends in San Rosario". One cannot know American Literature without knowing O. Henry.

G. K Chesterton observed, "He is a sane man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head." If that is true, the O. Henry is probably the only sane man in the history of the world. His optimism and sense of providence in guiding us foolish creatures to an unexpected (but happy) ending is his enduring and endearing legacy.

This collection has the well-know favorites--"Ransom of Red Chief", "Gift of the Magi", "After Twenty Years"--plus many of the lesser known tales. This is an acceptable mixer, giving you want you want, and exposing you to things you didn't know that you needed.

So why is O. Henry so endearing? In addition to reaffirming the divine, guiding province, these stories capture a moment in time. We get a second look on the world at the turn of the twentieth century. This is the world of the Wright Brothers, Henry Ford, and the Great Gatsby. We see the trailing edge of the Gay 90's, prior to the disillusioning horror of the World War I Lost Generation. To coin a phrase, this is the carefree--even garish--dawn before the darkness.

Style-wise, O. Henry's gift is also a curse. He is an unquestioned genius of the short story. He has vibrant prose, charming characters, and a flair for ironic dénouements. Additionally, His eye for both the gritty realities of high and low society, the twisty affairs of the heart, and a soft touch for the happy ending is unparalleled. You always finish his stories with a smile.

His curse is that his stories are formulaic. Now, I admit that his formula works. But if you read more than three of his stories in a row for a week, then midway, you can guess the ending, which destroys his punch line.

So when reading this book, nibble one or two stories, then set it aside for a month, and then return. This will give you enough time to forget his formula, and experience his style fresh. With 45 stories, you will have plenty of time to savor these stories and laugh.

Being from Maine and also being familiar with the locale of this book made this even more fun to read. This is the first of Crossman's series about Winston Crisp (a retired code-breaker with the National Security Agency) which takes place on Penobscot Island. Winston unwittingly gets drawn into a local murder even though he (sort of) tries to stay out of it. Crossman does a wonderful job of bringing readers into the story with his descriptions of the island and the cold (and sometimes unmerciful) Maine island weather in winter. This is definitely a great book to settle in with when you feel like spreading your wings and trying a new author.

"A SHOW OF HANDS" is cleverly written. Need a gift for someone? I suggest this book. It suits all ages and it refreshing. After reading this sketching allegory, I'll read every book that David Crossman writes. He has a true talent of introducing you to people you can visualize and seemingly know. Winston Crisp must appear in all future books. I like this gentleman! The story is gripping, and just when you believe you have untangled the secrets, you discover that you are dead wrong, and the intrigue continues. Until the last pages, you are unsure of the culprits. Mr. Crossman has a skilled talent of giving birth to his characters. As you learn to know these colorful people on the island and their idiosyncrasies, one instantly perceives to embrace or distrust them. Could they have committed the murder? What is still to be discovered about them? Discover "A SHOW OF HANDS" for yourself before someone makes the movie!

A well written and illustrated history of one of America's better liberal arts colleges. The book is large. The black and white and colot illustrations are very good. The author has also written a very good travel book about Maine. My only criticism is that the book lacks recent photos of the campus and a campus map. The campus is usually rated as one of the 10 most beautiful in America. An earlier book about the architecture of the buildings is out of print. This book is well worth the modest price.

For those who have a connection to the College, this book offers an excellent history of Bowdoin, its founding principles, and challenges overcome. For those who have trouble pronouncing the word Bowdoin (Boe'-din), prepare to be introduced to an institution that is every bit what makes some people swear by the magic of a classical New England liberal arts education

In this book the author, who is head of archeology at University College Dublin, gives us a great insight into the current research on this period in Ireland. There is so much pseudo-history and myth that gets repeated over and over again that this book offers a rare insight into what Irish scholars actually know about Celtic Ireland. It deals quite effectively with the issue of the mythological "Celtic" invasion of people and explains the circumstances surrounding the arrival or development of the Celtic culture in Ireland.

It is written from an archaeological point of view but should also be of interest to general readers. I highly recommend it as a source for scholars of this period and readers who want to know more about the Iron Age in Ireland.

This book is extremely useful in that it is the only complete synthesis of the Irish Iron Age archaeology. It is also simple to read and illustrates to the layman the differences between Ireland and Europe during the time of the Celts. However, many people are misled by the mystical title - this is a purely archaeological book!

I found this book many moons ago as a teen, after reading it I was hooked on romance novels and especially took pains in finding everything written by Janet Daily! I now have to wait for each book to be published. I have bought the last printed copy of Summer Mahogany, as well as have my first! I am looking each month for a new title to search for, and I'm happy that Ms. Daily gives you a taste of the next upcoming book at the end of the one you're reading! Thanks so much, Kimber

This is my first Janet Dailey and I found it refreshingly simple and heart-tugging at the same time. Gina is a young, naive girl when she first meets the older, more sophisticated Rhyder. Gina falls in love with him but after one fateful night and a misunderstanding, they go their separate ways. Just when Gina feels her life is hers again, they meet again after 10 years and this time it is Rhyder who pursues Gina. Janet Dailey captures the essence of an idyllic summer in Maine as she meant to do. As a short novel, it is a very quick read that is worthwhile.

(Review cross-posted from JMWW.)

At his blog, John Guzlowski reports being awakened by his father's screams at night. With just a few sentences, he gives a chilling description of these occasions: "Screams, in my experience, are usually accompanied by an explosion of air. My father's nightmare screams were drawn in. Even in his sleep, it was almost like he was afraid to scream." This is the objective correlative for his wretched and sublime chapbook The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald.

Guzlowski's poems are a meditation on his father's experience as a laborer in a Nazi camp. The holocaust always strikes me as a questionable medium for artistic enquiry, because its weight as a singular actuality always overwhelms the product. It seems right to feel intimidated and wary when confronting it as a spectator. After all - whoa - this happened and who can fully harness it? And yet, its power rarely misfires; the holocaust, as source material, is at once too fertile to admire and too fertile to find disappointing.

This chapbook is no exception. Despite the handsomeness of the volume, a beige, staple-stitched pamphlet put out by Finishing Line Press, I was initially skeptical of the subject matter. No doubt this is partly due to the haunting cover drawing by Vojtek Luka, which signposts that I am about to confront the worst of human experience, and I'll have no choice but to be moved.

The 26 brief poems (including the Prologue and Epilogue) concern the father's days spent digging up bricks among heaps of murdered bodies while dreaming of his own death at night. Guzlowski recounts these borrowed memories in short, unadorned verses. The poems are numbered, but their arrangement doesn't follow a straight narrative line, which imbues the reading with a fragmentary, nightmarish sensibility of its own. This is effective enough to make me rescind any prejudicial skepticism I felt, and it also makes me realize that Luka's picture is the ideal cover art. Just as his war prisoners are eliding out of view, we encounter the father's experience through a palimpsest of Guzlowski's poetry.

I rescind my initial skepticism because it's not hard to find The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald to be genuinely moving. Guzlowski earns credit by not shying from a smear of comedy among the horror, as when the father remembers a movie featuring two men lost at sea. ". . . they look at each other in hunger and cry. // Then fatty smiles, and skinny cries harder." This Gary Larson-esque gag is made awful by the context, of course, but the poem's expositional couplet makes it even harder to bear: "He remembers a movie he once saw/when he escaped from the camp."

Then there is the simile, "He is as hungry as a dog in winter," which isn't a joke at all except that it suggests the straight man's line ("How hungry is he?") that it just ran over. In fact, the simile starts running and doesn't stop:

He is as hungry as a dog in winter
in a forest filled with so much snow
that all the woodsmen and their wives
and children have fled to the village.

What happened to the dog? He got buried in the stampede of the next three lines - and what the image forgets completely is the real subject, the father. The metaphor has gone on without him, and he is back on his bed (actually, Guzlowski terms it a shelf), thinking about sausage and his dead family until he falls asleep to a dream of drowning. All of this is in The Third Winter, and then: "He dreams a comedy - " It's about men loading up a cart and slipping in manure. "He laughs until someone kicks him." Colorless jokes seep furiously.

There is a textured humanity to these characters; the father wakes at night to think of the men sleeping around him - they're in the muck together, yet would steal the hunk of bread hidden at his groin. We're familiar with need as a motivation for theft - this world is shot through with hunger - but it indicates Guzlowski's mastery that the stealing isn't due solely to lack of food, but that the men are sad: "These thieves are like his brothers,/but at night loneliness and sorrow/will turn your brother against you."

Guzlowski says he wrote this book in order to understand his father's screams. It's up to him to decide if the poems work on that level, but what he has done is provided a compelling and believable dimension for outsiders to contemplate another person's experience. That's the first and final goal of poetry. Read this book loud, like the Adagio for Strings, like night screams.

I've read many works that address the Holocaust and World War Two. Maybe too many. In all those mountains -- or maybe sand dunes -- of pages, few single volumes stand out. (One stand-out would be Victor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning.") Rather, what has tended to stand out for me are episodes within volumes, rather than entire volumes.

"The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald," John Guzlowski's book of poems addressing his father's experience as a Nazi slave laborer, is one of the few books I've read about World War Two that stands out as a volume. After reading this book, I wanted to read it aloud to other people. I wanted to distribute copies. I wanted to say, "See? See?"

We've all heard the formula that there is to be no poetry after Auschwitz. We've all heard the pronouncements that no one who wasn't there can speak or understand what it was like to live and die under Nazism.

The insistence that we can't, adequately, speak or understand words spoken about Nazism strikes me similarly as does the insistence that we can't apply the Geneva Convention or the US Constitution in a world with terrorists in it. We invent laws exactly so we can deal with dark episodes. We have language not just to talk about rapture, but also to talk about hell.

It is the reader's great good fortune that poet John Guzlowski insists on using language to communicate hell. He deserves our gratitude.

I wasn't eager to read this book. I never am eager to read yet another book about the World War Two era. I always have to buck myself up before cracking the cover.

"The Third Winter of War: Buchenwald" is, in its physical form, a lovely volume. The beige cover features Vojtek Luka's ink drawing of concentration camp inmates, in various stages of disolve, peering stoically out through barbed wire.

On the back cover, John Guzlowski's healthy, handsome, well-fed face is in thoughtful profile against a striated window. One doesn't normally focus on the skin tone of a poet, but the poems within chronicle Guzlowski's father's near starvation and disfigurement at the hands of Nazis.

The striated window surface, besides which Guzlowski sits with a thoughtful look on his face, echoes the striations of the barbed wire in the cover illustration. Guzlowski is not *in* the inmates' world, or the survivor's world; he is an alert, dedicated outside observer.

The frontispiece is lovely beige and gold marbled paper.

Turning pages, the reader then confronts the first poem. His father dreams about fire and bricks, Guzlowski reports, about a Warsaw church bombed by Nazis, a church left "bleeding and praying"

for death the way a woman
in labor will pray when she knows
nothing will save the baby
waiting in her womb to be born.

Guzlowski had me with that first poem. I surrendered my faith to him. "He can write about this, and I can read it," I thought.

Hunger is one overwhelming sensation these poems aroused. With hunger came the reminder that we are slaves to our bellies. Your friend, a poem reports, can steal your hidden bread while you sleep. You won't remember, or even register, you certainly won't have nightmares, years later, about vast, epochal military maneuvers or signatures on documents. You will be nailed to your own craving belly, and you will remember that sensation of hunger till you die.

Guzlowski has the courage to record "pieces, each piece small, pebble size." Guzlowski speaks in fundamental images and basic vocabularly and sentence structure. There are no words here you need to look up in the dictionary, and you don't need to have mastered poetry theory. Just read the poems, and feel their impact.

This is what it was like to be one human being in the way of history. Guzlowski's father spoke, Guzlowski speaks; it is our turn to listen and understand.

Being an enthusiastic amateur treasure hunter myself, in years past, I diligently read each and every volume of Mr. Terry's exhaustively researched works. Although I found some the information erroneous or far from exact - for instance many locations cited as "ghost towns" are FAR from being one - there are so many intriguing stories of legends, factual evidence & stories of past recoveries that any true TH'r will be enthralled. Treasure hunting is supposedly America's fastest growing hobby: it's uniquely enjoyable for the adventure, historical aspects & healthy outdoor recreation. And when you really find something decent...Boy Howdy!! Not as easy as it sounds, though. To be a professional TH'r, one has to have patience, applying oneself with the perseverance of a detective: because that's what it takes to be successful. Exhaustive research is the key: going where people gathered long ago (old picnic grounds & abandoned schoolyards, for instance) will be beneficial for coin shooters who are after more than modern coins....for me, finding modern coins was a complete waste of time & energy. Going for the gold? Go where it is KNOWN to be & be creative: the better your equipment - i.e. a decent detector which finds gold & common sense makes this a most fascinating hobby. For some, it's a life's career. Good luck!!

Found this to be a very interesting paperback book for anyone dreaming of treasure hunting/finds. But, I wish it was updated. I'm sure there are more interesting things about Florida. Not all of Fla. treasure finds are in the sea as this book notes. Worth reading.Open anywhere and begin reading.

I too read about this book in a Kindle forum.... now keeping in mind I purchased the Kindle because I love to read, but don't have time.

I have numerous books on my shelves, and I chose this book to read. It took me longer to read than I wanted, but that was NOT because of the story line, but time I had to read. This book kept me stealing moments here and there, I LOVED it!! Yes, the mystery and impending romance kept me coming back. Well written, I could not figure it out too early and I can't say there were any slow parts either, this whole book kept my interest.

I gave it 5 stars because I finished it with a satiated feeling. I will definitely be looking up more titles from Maureen!

I read the book because I read about it in the Kindle Forums - I am glad I bought it. It was a good read, although not 100% in my preferred genre (thus my inability to go the full 5 stars).

The plot was interesting to follow, I liked following the characters - and indeed, the characters were a wee bit devious and a wee bit convoluted, which made me want to discover what they were up to all the more. I am one of those who tries to figure out who the villain is, and I thought I pretty much had it figured out - but not very early in my reading, which was good (I HATE it when you have it figured out too early in the reading!).

Well done Ms. Miller - I hope many more will pick it up on a whim and read it!

I ordered this book USED/GOOD CONDITION. It came in Very good condition. I was very pleased and will not hesitate to order a used book again.

This book was great and was definitely more light-hearted than Angela's Ashes. You don't need to have read his first book (Angela's Ashes) to enjoy this part of his memoir; in fact reading the first book made me enjoy this one less simply because there was just no way for it to compare to the first.

although this book is long, and often times it shows the mundane life of a teacher, it truley makes me want to move to ireland! i love this book! it's so hard for me to put it down.

This book is a continuation of the story, Angela's Ashes. I enjoyed the writer's style and insight into Irish immigrant life. I recommend these two novels to anyone interested in real Irish life.

Many reviewers have noted that the first two-thirds of this book is strong, while the final third falls flat. I'd agree, and I think I know why: by the time the memoir reaches the late 1960s, McCourt has become a New Yorker and the book loses the premise: the fun of seeing New York and American society in general through the eyes of a naive outsider. The first two thirds are like all of Angela's Ashes: insightful, funny, bittersweet, tragic, and the book finds the power of its voice in the ironical gap between the perceptions of the naive young man and the understanding of the knowing older man who wrote the memoir. In the last third of the book, McCourt is not a stranger in a strange land -- he's your average New Yorker in a midlife crisis, with an increasing estranged wife, the difficulty of caring for an aging mother, questions about his career choice, etc. Nice to know how some of the story lines played out, but the final third is not really of any inherent interest in itself, and since there's less of a gap between what McCourt perceived at the time and what he perceives now, it is lacking in that quirky ironical voice that made what went before so captivating. On the basis of the first 2/3rds, I recommend it highly. The last 1/3 may be significantly less interesting, but is not objectionable.