Massachusetts Books

This series is excellent for teaching my ESOL students to read English while allowing them to continue to learn American History with their peers. Paul Revere's Ride is a great example of the series. It is a comprehensive graphic novel which tells a good story and includes some details which were unknown to me. I highly recommend this series.

Prior to reading this book, I'd not known much about the Northern Irish problem--just that there was one. Shillue has opened my eyes to the culture and the deep-seated and intractable issues at play here. She perfectly captures the warmth, natural intelligence and enormous humor of these people. One comes to know and appreciate people on both sides of the divide and realize how difficult this situation will be to reconcile. A wonderful place to begin learning more about this culture and issue.

It's 1846 and you find yourself in Concord, Massachusetts. Who's there? And what's it like to live there? Those questions and more are answered by Paul Brooks in this fine book. He uses a humanities approach to uncover the history of culture, politics, education, literacy, and women's lives in this one particular area of New England. And you won't run into just the usual familiar families -- the Emersons, Hawthornes, Thoreaus, and Alcotts -- but will learn of other folks of Concord as well: farmer George Minott, lawyer Samuel Hoar, doctor Josiah Bartlett, and constable Sam Staples, to name a few. One chapter is devoted entirely to the operation of Brook Farm, a utopian community founded by Dr. George Ripley that was beginning to struggle by the year in question. Photos of key people and period illustrations augment the very readable text. If you like pre-Civil War American history or are enamored with any of the authors mentioned above, pick this title up at the nearest used bookstore. You won't be disappointed.

Sometimes you want a satellite photograph of a region. You want the big picture showing only the main features. At other times you want to walk the ground yourself. Then you need the ordinance survey showing every rise and fall of the locality. George Harper's book is the ordinance survey of the religious life of Boston in the 1740s. This book is a model of meticulous scholarship. It has a clear, significant thesis. The thesis is supported by a mountain of primary data. The thesis corrects past misunderstandings. All further study of the subject will have to take his findings into account.

The thesis of this book is that there was a Great Awakening in Boston in the 1740s, that it was welcomed by the ministers who were pastors and opposed by those who were preachers, and that the pastors' congregations grew and the preachers' congregations did not.

Harper supports his conclusions with membership data from Boston's eleven congregational churches interpreted in the light of the pastoral practices of the various ministers of those churches. He finds that the ministers who followed Cotton Mather's precept and example of visiting among their people--ministers who catechized, discipled, and trained the members of their congregations--saw their churches grow as a result of the Awakening, and that those who hid in their studies all week and only emerged to read impressive sermons saw their churches stagnate or decline. He also finds that support for the Awakening does not follow doctrinal lines as so many previously assumed. The received wisdom about the Awakening was that those who were moving in a liberal direction, toward Unitarianism and moralism, did not support the Awakening, while those who upheld Trinitarianism and individual conversion welcomed it. Harper reveals that at least in the 1740s there was no incipient theological divide and that even Awakening opponents like Charles Chauncy could urgently preach the necessity of individual conversion.

Harper's is a work of micro-history, revealing the brute facts that are the foundations of all megahistories. If you want a accurate understanding of the Great Awakening, this is the place to begin.

Charles White
Professor of Christian Thought and History
Spring Arbor University

This is a book whose time has come! Never before has such an interesting set of essays on American print culture been collected in one place. It was a stroke of genius to supplement it with a CD-ROM. In this way the book in itself is a testament to the amazing journeys American print culture has taken!

The editors have done a terrific job of ensuring readability and compatibility throughout the essays included here. At [money], it's not exactly a steal, but still worth every penny. Destined to become the benchmark against which all other books on the topic are measured.

Every vegetarian society should have one of these in theirlibrary. If you thought vegetarianism started with PeterSinger or even Henry Salt, think again. The ancient Greeks have already said it all: the health argument, the ethics argument, the religious argument, they're all there. If you're a vegetarian and you really want to know why, this is where you start, not Animal Liberation or Animal Rights. Instead, take Dombrowski's advice and look up Porphyry's On Abstinence, which you can also order from Amazon Books!

I read this book after having just visited Plymouth, Massachussets, and studying about the Pilgrims. Even though the story is fiction it is woven into factual history and gives the reader an awesome look into the personalities and qualities of the people who lived this historical event. This book barely makes it back home before someone else asks to borrow it. I love history/fiction combinations and this is one of the best I have read.

Robert Finch combed the history and literature archives to compile this definitive sampler of more than 150 Cape Cod essays, poems, and book excerpts. Only a few of the selections run longer than a dozen pages, so this is a perfect volume for browsers. The writings are grouped by topic, and Finch first provides appropriate background and explanation for each section. More than mere introductions, these summaries draw on his vast knowledge of the genre and include asides that reveal his own wry wit. Skim through these pages and you'll proceed from early settlement histories and biographies, to whaling and seafaring, to Cape Cod nature and summer vacations. My favorite episodes are about the activities of the "mooncussers" and the "wreckers" who throughout the years salvaged remnants from the inevitable shipwrecks along the dangerous coastline. (Probably more than 3000 ships have been grounded and/or lost around the peninsula's circumference since 1627.) There truly is something for everyone here. Finch thoughtfully provides mini-bios of all 67 writers and always notes sources; so if a particular entry strikes your fancy, you'll be able to track down the original work for more in-depth reading. It's difficult to imagine how "A Place Apart" could be any better!

Selections are from the following authors: Conrad Aiken ~ Timothy Alden ~ Everett S. Allen ~ Gabriel Archer ~ Josef Berger ~ Henry Beston ~ John Peale Bishop ~ William Bradford ~ John Brereton/Brierton ~ Thornton W. Burgess ~ Douglas Carlson ~ Scott Corbett ~ Monica Dickens ~ Annie Dillard ~ Mark Doty ~ Alan Dugan ~ Timothy Dwight ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~ Robert Finch ~ Benjamin Franklin ~ Brendan Galvin ~ E.S. Goldman ~ Adam Gopnik ~ John Hay ~ Cynthia Huntington ~ Henry James ~ Herman A. Jennings ~ E.J. Kahn, Jr. ~ Alfred Kazin ~ Helen Keller ~ Edward Augustus Kendell ~ Henry C. Kittredge ~ Stanley Kunitz ~ James Lazell ~ Clare Leighton ~ Joseph and Emily Crosby Lincoln ~ Joseph C. Lincoln ~ William Martin ~ Herman Melville ~ Thomas Merton ~ Edna St. Vincent Millay ~ Susan Mitchell ~ G. Mourt ~ Howard Nemerov ~ Nosapocket ~ Mary Oliver ~ Amos Otis ~ Jacquelyn Holt Park ~ Charles H. Philbrick ~ Marge Piercy ~ Elizabeth Reynard ~ Shebnah Rich ~ Wyman Richardson ~ George Santayana ~ Thomas Shephard ~ Roger Skillings ~ Walter Teller ~ Lewis Thomas ~ Henry David Thoreau ~ Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. ~ Mary Heaton Vorse ~ Mary-Lou Weisman ~ Richard Wilbur ~ Alec Wilkinson ~ Edmund Wilson ~ David Wojahn ~ and Ira Wood.

Sarah Kelling Bittersohn has agreed to help her Aunt Emma put on her swan song, a production of Gilbert & Sullivan's "The Sorcerer," and is happily fetching and carrying and painting flats when one of the cast, who plays the small but significant role of the notary (the Plain Old Man of the title) dies at home alone. Other disturbing events are marring the production: Emma is being threatened, and a full-length portrait of a Kelling ancestor is stolen and held for ransom.

It soon becomes clear that Charlie's death was not accidental, and Sarah must unravel all the threads of the complicated case while bearing in mind that, for Emma's sake, "the show must go on."

I thoroughly enjoyed the backstage operations of the amateur dramatic company, the references to Gilbert and Sullivan, and the delightful characters that populated this story.

Roxbury, Massachusetts has a lot to be proud of with this collection of poems & poets which has been hidden on the shelves of the Boston Public Library for 18 years. Here you will find the heart's blood on what Roxbury is still about. Thank you to those who came before me and held the light so I could see the way to my being a Roxbury Power Of Example... Carol Cormwell brought this book back from the dead, she's a POWER OF EXAMPLE TOO. READ THIS AND FEEL ROXBURY MASSACHUSETTS!!!