Do we always choose people that remind us of our parents? An interesting look a marriage & friendship. And how the past does not have to dictate our present.

Although a little lengthy, 'Chesapeake Song', is an excellent, honest story of love, heritage, and marriage. It depicts how your upbringing and adolescent environment capitulate many aspects of your adult life. This story will tug on your heart, and make you think. Read this book on a sunny day, at the park, under a tree, with a cool glass of lemonade.

On the surface, Tamra and Charles Lane seem to be living the American lifestyle. They were childhood sweethearts in Maryland and in spite of different dreams for their future, are happily married. Yet after thirteen years of wedlock and having children, Tamra leaves her spouse, not an easy decision since she still loves him.

Tamra looks to her heritage to help her finalize her decision. She turns to her own mother Virginia who left her own spouse, a school administrator. Tamra also looks back at the family powerhouse her grandmother who kept everyone together while the world collapsed around their family. Still, Tamra needs to learn what she can from her immediate female antecedents while Charles struggles with why since he feels he has given her everything she wants.

CHESAPEAKE SONG is a well-written character study that centers on how the lessons of childhood impact the adult as family patterns and histories repeat itself in each generation. The story line employs flashbacks to provide insight into the relationship between Tamra's parents and the influence of her grandmother as well as how Tamra and Charles have reached a critical fork in the road. Though not paramount to the main theme, but an added bonus, the audience observes African-American relationships over the last four decades. Readers who want action need to go elsewhere, but anyone interested in family dynamics will enjoy the insightful debut of Brenda Lane Richardson.

Harriet Klausner

I just finished reading "Taken at the Flood: Robert E. Lee and Confederate Strategy in the Maryland Campaign of 1862"
by Joseph L. Harsh.

Ouch!!!! Talk about painful!!! Harsh (a history professor who grew up in Hagerstown) simply cannot write!! Some people can write well; others write poorly. Harsh is at the bottom of the latter group. (I feel sorry for his students -- they probably suffered severe ear and brain trauma from his lectures. And he writes as if he were lecturing!!)

He LOVES R.E. Lee. (According to Harsh, everything that went wrong was someone else's fault -- without exception!!) Then there are Harsh's numerous "moments" when he tells you what a particular person MUST have been thinking at any given time -- as if Harsh (or anyone else!!) could know! Finally come are his analyses of various events and situations. In Harsh's eyes, all ideas that contradict his opinions OBVIOUSLY MUST be wrong -- it's just plain "foolish" to think otherwise.

It's too bad that Harsh just didn't tell what happened and allowed us to form our own judgements. (By the way, he plays pretty "fast and loose" with the facts. Plus, he omits vital information that doesn't correspond to his interpretation.)
In his preface, Harsh even has the audacity to state that, besides his book, there are only one or two other books that cover the Maryland Campaign in depth. Well, I have been studying Antietam for over 35 years, have been there several hundred times, and have read literally thousands of books, articles, and documents about Antietam. Harsh is full of it!!

If you were thinking of buying this book, don't bother. You can gain just as much by pulling out all your teeth with a pair of pliars, then dropping a 200-pound lead weight on your foot.

I agree with much the prior reviewers have said. Although I am not a Civil War buff, I found the book readable. I appreciate his methodology also. Harsh attempts to reconstruct the intelligence available to Lee when he made crucial decisions and to assess his decisions based on the moves he could have made given what he knew and in light of his strategic aims for the campaign. All historians should stick by this method. He also does a very creditable job in his attempt to ascertain what Lee knew. On balance very well researched and well argued. I especially enjoyed the end in which he places his argument within the context of existing historiography on the subject. One criticism I have relates to the maps, which is discussed in the review of one of Dr. Harsh's other books. I bought Landscape Turned Red as the result of reading Taken at the Flood. And the maps are much more helpful in that Sears's book. When you are dealing with a lot of different place names and different corps moving around, it makes the flow a lot easier.

(Disclaimer: I sat in on a few classes of Dr. Harsh's as an undergraduate).

Much praise has been heaped on Dr. Harsh for this defining work on the Maryland Campaign of 1862. Awards have rolled in - perhaps the setup for the Pulitzer Prize for his planned upcoming works on the Union Side of the first two years of the American Civil War in the eastern theatre. Certainly, Harsh's approach of - what did they know, when did they know it, what did they do with information? - represents a step forward in understanding this critical campaign. Perhaps this method is taken a little too far, perhaps the author is too contrarian, eager to dispel existing notions and overturn previous judgements, but that's the fun of it - great academic arguments will result. Harsh's academic method - he is currently Professor of History at George Mason University, a school that he originally lobbied to be called "The University of Northern Virginia" (non-ACW fanatics didn't get it) - is unquestioned. A critical, thorough survey has been conducted of available original source material as well as established secondary sources. All told, it is an amazing story. This work is the result of decades of labor on this subject (Harsh is a native of Hagerstown, MD). One of the great points to be made here is that Lee was human after all, he made some significant mis-judgements. If you didn't know it from other exposures to Dr. Harsh you couldn't deduce from this work that Harsh consider Lee to be one of our countries finest soldiers. Even the best have their bad days - or campaigns, in this case. This is an absolutely first rate work on one of the most important (Harsh obviously believes the most important) campaigns of the ACW. Unfortunately, because of its academic format and size, it will not reach wide audiences. For those willing to make the effort, they will be richly rewarded.

Just tried to use this book for hike in North Point State Park and found it difficult to follow. Luckily, we had another guide with a map. This guide often does not have maps and the directions lack points on the compass, i.e. north, south, east, west.

I have been looking for a book just like this for some time now. Having hiked a fair amount in and around Washington I was running short on ideas for new hikes. I had tried the Appalchian Trial Guides and some other books that are out there but felt that while they were great on trail details they didn't provide much of the practical information that you want when heading out to a new destination. Especially enjoyed the author's editorial comments and trail descriptions which combined to make the book a pleasure to read. The author must be a dog lover as well which earns her points in my book. She marks each trail to let dog owners know if their pooches are welcome.

Having been on many trails in the region (and now many more thanks to this guide), I highly recommend100 Easy Hikes. It's as good as it gets for hitting all the hot spots in the Washington DC area- from nearby jaunts on the trails of Rock Creek Park to the lesser known gems in the Shenandoah. Additionally, the author's insider tips and her clear directions to the trailheads make this guide exceptional.

I was particularly impressed the "best of" recommendations. They were right on target. Neither bluebells nor waterfall classics escaped her attention. The maps, as you'd expect from the National Geographic Society, are clear and easy to follow. Anyone looking for a basic resource on the area should have this guide.

Besides this book, I purchased at the same time The Insiders' Guide to Baltimore, which is $2.00 more and 150 pages longer. I give this City Smart guide 2 stars, compared to a 5 star rating on the Insiders' Guide. The reason for the wide difference in rating the two books: This book, City Smart, is trying to be hip, flippant, and tounge-in-cheek. Instead, it comes off as very negative. I purchased the two books at the same time, read this one first, and when I was done I really wasn't sure I wanted to visit Baltimore. And that would be a mistake because Baltimore is indeed Charm City, and the other book really brings that out. It has a much more upbeat, positive, optimistic, good-natured style; as well as more depth and details in the extra 150 pages. The Insiders' Guide was true to the Baltimore I discovered, this City Smart guide was off-putting and off the mark.

This guide is sweet!
Again Joe Sugarman, in a light and appropriate tone for a city guide, points out the best in town... If you want to visit Baltimore without fear of loosing time and wasting money walking in circles: read this guide.
Read it and you will enjoy Baltimore; loose it and you will not be aware of the beauties you're loosing in this marvellous city.

This guide might not be the *most* extensive, but all the info that has been packed in it is selected: I don't want to see everything there is to see - I want to see the *best* there is to see!

The thing I like about this guidebook is its honesty. I've lived in Baltimore all my life and I recognize my city in this book's pages. It's genuinely entertaining and exposes a few warts as well as the good stuff. Plus, it has top 10 lists from Gov. Shaefer and from John Steadman, my all-time favorite Baltimore sportswriter.

The author gave a birth of her daughter in ' 89, so did I deliver my third kids . This may be only one common thing to share between her , except both are Shubertian.
Jewish and Japanese are often compared, and they are conspicuously differnt in the spiritual distance of each individual from the history of their own people. We , Japanese ,are genious of forgetting and we could change the attitude toward US so dramatically that Ruth Benedict couldn't help studying Japanese war captives. Whereas Jewish people,language wise, music wise , are trying to carry on the tradition, even though great constraint between the host country culture and also between generations of their own people.
And 'an die Music'. Tan Dun, a Chinese composer living in NY,once said,' Western music develops horizontally'. I also admit, music are differnt in East and West, maybe because of Eastern ear VS Western ear. But when lyrics intermediate sounds and internal reality that words evoke , what type of ears you may have, you can enjoy music of differnt culture. So many operas, lied, Italian songs and hymns apperared in this books have told me so.

"A Joyful Noise," Deborah Weisgall's serious and brooding memoir, is far from a fluffy celebration of music and Judaic heritage. Its subtitle, "Claiming the Songs of My Fathers," more accurately captures the sense of conflict and struggle which permeates the life of a talented, tormented and frustrated young woman, who at once soars with the rich musical background of both her father and grandfather but simultaneously is denied participation and validation because of her gender. "A Joyful Noise" elicits both compassion and anger from the reader; one senses that had the author been born some twenty years later she would have had much more direct access to both her own talents and her clearly-articulated love for her heritage. The author does not disguise the central theme of her memoir. After a disappointing experience at a Passover seder, Deborah expresses her yearning to join her father and grandfather as full participants in both music and heritage. "I hummed the songs as quietly as I could, aching to get them right, afraid that my father would hear my wrong notes and correct me. They ran perfectly through my head but not from my mouth. I loved them. I wanted them." Yet, she understands that her ambition does not correspond with the very heritage she so deeply desires. Segregated, minimized and isolated due to sexist traditions and practices, Jewish women have had to sublimate their otherwise honorable ambitions into other avenues of expression. Sensing that possibility, even as a child, Deborah laments: "My desire was as strong as theirs; my voice was not. My breath stalled against my vocal cords, and the back of my throat throbbed from stopped-up songs and angry tears. I wanted to sing. I wanted to be heard." Weisgall's quest for authenticity, for voice, occurs during a period of national affluence and cultural indifference in the 1950s and on the cusp of our nation's profound social revolution of the 1960s. Deborah comes of age in a tension-riddled family; her non-religious mother, Nathalie, is indifferent to housework, and her beloved father, Hugo, consistently produces operas which are artistically gifted but critical failures. The Weisgalls constantly move from their Baltimore roots, whether it be to Maine for summers, or from college town to another, where Hugo can sustain his family's material needs while he tries to fulfill his own battered expectations as an artist. Deborah realizes the discord in her family is real; her mother's physical beauty cannot hide her bitterness just as her father's rapture with musci cannot hide his own frustration with failure and betrayal. Looming like a dense cloud over the family is the Holocaust, whose disruptive horror has created a permanent sense of dread and loss. In a desultory search through her parents' closet, Deborah discovers a shoe-box stuffed with raw and brutal photographs of cocentration camp victims. She understands in a visceral sense the impact of genocide on her father, who directly witnessed the horrific scenes while he served as a translator for the liberating United States Army during World War II. The Weisgalls are derivative survivors, having lost their past, their roots, their culture through the Holocaust. The author is able to trace the genesis of family friction to this loss of place. Nathalie, a lover of beauty, flounders in America; Hugo, linked in memory to his childhood in Czechoslovakia, wrestles with his own struggle to match his father (Abba) without the support of cultural stability and identity. The memoir is not without its faults. Unless one has a solid grasp of opera and classical music, Weisgall's detailed descriptions of her artistic passion tend to overwhelm the reader. Deborah's ultimately successful climb to identity occurs too abruptly, as well. Her ultimate chapters, which recount her experiences as Radcliffe and her emergence as an independent, secure woman, appear rushed and lack the elegant detail so prevalent throughout descriptions of her childhood. Nevertheless, this serious and introspective work deserves the critical praise it has garnered. "A Joyful Noise" deftly interweaves music, religious heritage and family into a tapestry both instructive and inspiring.

I LOVE this book! Before I read this book, a family friend of mine read it and highly highly recommended it. When I started this book, I couldn't put it down, thats the kind of book it can be for certain people. The reason why this book was a huge page-turner for me, was because I felt relate to the author in many different levels. (...)This book isn't just text on a few pages to me, it is guidence for my life.

Eric J. Horst violated local land owners by publishing their private properties against their expressed wishes not to. In the climbing world access is always a big issue, and Mr. Horst is [messing]it up for us all. Help keep our area's open for business, and [skip] this bood. If you need help in virginia, try Virginia Climber's Guide. It is a good enough substitute, but please support our community by finding a substitute for this book.

This book provides accurate access and route information for over 25 climbing areas in the mid-atlantic region. And contrary to the previous review's comments (obviously "gabriel3493" has some personal issues), this book provides directions and route info only for OPEN climbing areas. In fact, the author spends a lot of time discussing access considerations and climber advocacy, and he definitely does not even encourage trespassing. Read the book, use the book, and you'll see it's "right on."

This book has all the crags I climb at. Only guide to several area with photos/topos. While you really need the PATC:MS Guides for Carderock and Great Falls if those are your primary climbinng areas, this guide is nevertheless very helpful.
While written guides for Annaplis Ricks and Sugarloaf are online, the visual clues make the difference.
Just too heavy to carry in whole book, but a quick editing with an Exacto knife gives you several smaller sections for easy carry.

Winston Churchill wrote this book when he was still in his twenties ; this intrigued me enough to read the book. It is a novel that focuses on the life of Richard Carvel ; a wealthy young man from a prominent Maryland family just before and during the Revoloutionary War. Although sweeter and more sentimental than the modern approach itis still a captivating and exciting story.

Book was written by Winston Churchill, an American from St Louis. He also wrote The Crossing, The Crisis, and a nukmber of others. Richard Carvel may be his best. Highly recommended.

I read this book just after I got out of college in 1976. My father read it when he was in prep school in the '30's and had been pestering me for years to read it. After I finished it, I scoured every antique shop and used-book store to find other titles by this American author. Three of his books: Richard Carvel, followed by The Crisis and then The Crossing, team up to form what could be one of the first trilogies in American fiction.
This is the story about a young Marylander in pre-Revolutionary America and his journey to independence. Anyone who likes historical novels will love reading this author. I will advise you, however, to have a good dictionary nearby as some of the words are archaic and need looking up - but that's half the fun of it.

As is typical of many of the current trough of poorly written "true crime" books, Sudden Fury begins by almost immediately letting you know "who done it". After that, it becomes just a dry recitation of the facts, including the background of the "abused" murderer. It leaves the reader wondering why she would bother writing a book when a simple magazine article could give almost as much factual information.

Of course, in the author's view, the victims' requiring their adopted sons to make decent grades, not steal, and obey society's rules is "abuse". The constant whining theme of "he just needs love" conveniently whitewashes the fact that the parents, though flawed themselves, adopted the children with the idea of doing just that, and the boys continually and willfully did wrong, often for no purpose other than to just show they could. Although it sounds like the father had a bad temper, even a patient parent would eventually get sick and tired of the antisocial behavior they were dealing with from two kids who, typical of adopted children, wanted "unconditional love" and continually pushed the limits to make their adoptive parents "prove" their love. (If you believe in "unconditional love", try cheating on or stealing from your spouse repeatedly, and then demand it.) These kids had free will, a great 2nd chance in life, and they stupidly threw it away with their selfish and sociopathic behavior. Not once does the author bring up the topic of "evil" or even mention in passing that perhaps if the young lad were so unhappy, he should have asked someone at his school to get him removed from that house.

Other incidents of "abuse" the author describes are: 1. not paying for his drivers ed class, and not letting him drive unless he passed all his courses. (Oh the horror!) 2. discouraging him from dating any girl more than once at 15-16 years of age to avoid problems with sex. (with over 60% of births now out of wedlock, not such an unwise idea at his age, and certainly not "abuse") 3. The father getting angry the night of the murder because the boy and his friends had ruined a computer disk containing countless hours of his father's accounting work and programming. I wonder what the author would say to her 16 y/o child if he had trashed her only copy of this book's manuscript after months of work. I'm sure she'd just smile and buy him an ice cream cone.

This "boy" will be getting out of jail before he's 30, probably, and god help the people who come accross him then. Unlike the theory of one person in the book, his problem wasn't his adoptive parents, it was his inability to understand that being adopted and having a tough childhood isn't carte blanche to vicimize the rest of us. If you want to prevent tradgedies like this, start making people who recklessly have children out of wedlock pay the price.

The victims' families should sue the author for libel, if they already haven't. Though perhaps overly rigid and imperfect, they were trying to help these kids, and the author used primarly the MURDERER'S point of view and that of their INSTITUTIONALIZED CRIMINAL older son to assasinate their character.

The final fact is, this "boy" CHOSE to murder two people because he didn't like their rules and "felt bad". Society is better off without such people and their excuse mongers as well.

Coming from someone who grew up in the neighborhood where this crime happened and knowing the murderer, I found this book chilling. For those of us who knew him, Larry was anything but antisocial. He tried hard to please. I think the book depicted the case in very factual details. It's difficult to read even now many years after the incident.

Not your typical whodunnit, Sudden Fury is one of the better true crime books I've read. It's an emotional whodunnit of sorts, a chilling account of a boy abandoned into the foster care system who grew up to be violent. I especially liked the alternating story lines--the present-tense crime investigation alternating with the child's upbringing. I found the writing style objective in a way that made it compelling. The tragedy, I felt, was heightened by the fact the adoptive parents were so well meaning, however misguided they may have been. I felt the author struck a delicate balance between blaming the adoptive parents, the boy and the social welfare system for the horrible outcome. While depressing, I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the psychology of violence.

This book is actually two stories--one takes place in the early 1990s Washington, D.C. and the other in 1738 Maidstone, MD. Marcy Heidish skilfully intertwines the two stories into one story with two parallel mysteries, characters, events, and with a touch of the supernatural thrown in for good measure. Other authors have tried this, and it often results in a choppy story, as the reader is pulled back and forth between the stories. Heidish is a success because I never had to go back to an earlier part of the novel to remind myself what had happened to the 20th century characters. The book begins ordinarily enough, with Alice Grey, owner of a bookstore in 1990s Washington, D.C. completing her novel about an 18th century midwife, Evangeline Smith, who is charged with witchcraft in Maidstone, MD in 1738. Alice is nearly done with her book when she feels compelled to do more research on her topic. (She literally receives a supernatural wake-up call from the past.) As she delves into the sources she should have read the first time, she begins to change her mind about Evangeline as she learns of multiple interpretations to events and to previously respected people. When she decides to find out the truth about Evangeline, that is when her life eerily begins to resemble Evangeline's final months, when she realizes that the people she thought were friends prove to be otherwise, and events in her life begin to parallel events in Evangeline's life 253 years earlier. There are some interesting and unexpected parallels done with the characters and their relationships, both romantic and platonic, in both settings. Heidish does a nice job in this book illustrating how people and events that may appear straightforward on the surface may actually be quite different once people decide to look below the surface.
This book is a good, fast read (I finished over a single weekend). I thought that the characters, both the heroines (& heros) and the villains were well developed, and I liked the storylines (both the 18th & 20th centuries).
What prevents me from rating this book 5 stars is the sense I have that the author (Heidish) had rushed to finish it and/or she had a page limit which she was close to exceeding when the novel ended. I found the ending to be rushed, and the destruction of the main character's (Alice Grey's) relationship with her best friend (who attempted a horrible crime against Alice) was brushed aside as if it were a matter of small consequence. The loss of any close friendship usually means some kind of introspection, and that was not demonstrated here. Readers are not given what Alice thought of this turn of events, nor how she dealt with it. I think that would have made a more satisfactory ending. Nonetheless, the positives outweigh the negatives, and if you like your mysteries with a twist, interesting characters, supernatural happenings to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up (but not so scary as to keep you up at night), and a well thought-out parallel story within the story, then this book is for you.

Marcy Heidish's book "The Torching" was an intricate web of the historical and the immiediate. She weaves a tale of a young woman, Alice Grey, who is obsessed with "rewriting" the history of an accused sorceress from the eighteenth century. There is an interesting twist as the events from the past come to parallel that which is occuring in the present. Heidish's see-saw between dream and reality makes this book a very tantalizing journey. However, many questions remain unanswered by the end of the novel. I felt it to be somewhat anti-climatic and I still wasn't entirely sure of the connections Heidish was trying to make. Despite this, it was still a fun read. Light but with enough thrills and suspense to give it depth. A pretty good book all around.

In this tale of history, horror and mysticism, events from more than 250 years ago take on a terrifying reality in the life of a 1990's woman.

Alice Grey inherited Wetherell's Rare and Used Books from her grandmother, who had taken Alice in after her parents were tragically killed. The shop was her community - she lived above it, provided a home to a nationally admired writers' group which attracted and nurtured both published and wannabe writers from all over the Washington area, and the people from the group and those who worked there were her friends.

Alice's latest book was the story of Evangaline Smith, an 18th century apothecary and midwife in a nearby settlement, who was sentenced to burn as a witch. As the investigation into Evangaline's life deepens, she becomes aware of startling parallels in their lives. It soon becomes apparent that the only way she can save herself and her reputation is to find out what really happened to Evangaline.

This well written book is skillfully and compellingly plotted, bringing the harsh, puritanical town of Maidstone in the 1730's as vividly to life as modern Georgetown. It seems greed, jealousy, and the lengths to which people will go to avoid being found out haven't changed at all.

If you like your thrillers with a bit of a spooky and mystical edge, this is for you.

I can't imagine why Marcy Heidish's entire fiction list is "out of print" - I borrowed this from my local library, and now I'm eager to read more of her work.

This book is the first I have read concerning the War of 1812. In this book the author covers the period from August 1814 with the British marching onto Washington. Walter Lord offers a spendid account of the fighting at Bladensburg, the burning of Washington and the subsequent campaign against the British. The use of first hand account offers a splendid insight into the people, soldiers, sailors and politicians caught up during this period of history. A well researched and finely told account of this dramatic time in America's past. An excellent story!

I have read "Dawn's Early Light" several times and have found it to be the single most readable and understandable writing on a subject that is suprisingly not well known to most American readers. Lord uses numerous primary sources- diaries, letters, and memoirs of the participants, as well as thorough research and a tightly written narrative to tell the story of the British invasion of 1814. Especially effective are his characterizations of the British and American leadership. Walter Lord has managed to convey effectively the professionalism and cockiness of the British forces and the hopelessly chaotic and desperate American defense. It reads very much like a novel.