"A Hedge Away" brings alive the people and institutions of one small, but vibrant New England community in a way that challenges our preconceptions about what Victorian American small towns were like.

Refreshingly free of heavy-handed political interpretation, Lombardo's text gives us enough detail to draw our own conclusions.

Though I live only a few miles away from the small town that is the subject of this book, until I read it, I had no idea of the richness of the characters who populated its streets a hundred years ago, or of the many tragedies and scandals they endured.

This book is a "must read" for anyone interested in 19th century New England!

An immigrant from Japan and an impressionist artist whose work later reflected his exposure to the Mexican muralists, Sugimoto's work documented the Japanese-American experience. Drawing on his unpublished autobiography, as well as other source documents, Kristine Kim appropriately delivers Sugimoto's art within the historical context that so strongly influenced his style and subject matter. Each chapter in Sugimoto's life is followed by the artwork created in that period. The most significant period being World War II.

WWII was a dark time for Japanese-Americans (and for US citizens, as a whole). Sugimoto was incarcerated: first at the Fresno Assembly Center and later at concentration camps in Arkansas. While in the camps, where cameras were forbidden, Sugimoto used his brushes and canvas to document the existence of persons imprisoned solely for their ethnicity. His work is filled with the emotions of that time - hope for the future, sorrow at injustice, longing for freedom, pride in country, sadness at the thought of sons fighting far away. On the surface, many of the paintings seem to show "normal" everyday life but subtle signs (pink ration book, guard towers, mess hall) hint at the fact that the people in the paintings are incarcerated.

Having seen several times the Sugimoto exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum, I have seen many of the paintings included in this book. The panels of those works represent them well. Be sure to check out his painting titled "When Can We Go Home?" It is remarkable in that it's startling, emotional and bold and subtle at once. It struck my heart in a way that's difficult to put into words.

Never one to cease growing in his art, in the 1960's Sugimoto experimented with woodblock prints. They are amazing! Beautiful, detailed, with depth of feelings.

Henry Sugimoto was a talented artist whose work reflects not only his experiences but his wondrous humanity and compassion. He is not well known. Hopefully the current exhibit and this book will rectify that!

This book was a real thriller.It kept me on the edge every step of the way!!

I know I read last year, but its really good. You learn a lot from Emily, her stand point. This for kids, but parents you read this before you let your kids read it. Thank you.

Also recommended: Her sister Sarah Hughes, I Skate, by Margot Falkner (I forgot if thats her name, its out of print now), A Young Skater, by Jill Kientez (I think thats the title, I think spelt the author last name right, its also of print now)

What do we mean when we speak of "an Emily Dickinson poem" ? If you think about it, we could mean one of at least five different things. We may be referring :

(1) to her poems as they are found in her original manuscripts;

(2) to their photographic facsimiles as in the present edition;

(3) to the Variorum editions of Thomas H. Johnson or R. W. Franklin which attempt to get over into typographic form as much as they can of her highly idiosyncratic manuscript drafts - with all of their variants and their peculiarities of line breaks, spacing, punctuation, and of alternate words about which she never made up her mind but placed neatly alongside or beneath many of her poems;

(4) to the reader's editions of Johnson and Franklin which offer what these Dickinson scholars and expert editors feel is _one_ (of many possible) sensible and acceptable readings out of the mass of variants;

(5) or finally we may be referring to her poems as altered, revised, regularized, tidied-up and smoothed out so as to be made to look more 'normal' and acceptable to ordinary readers. At this fifth and furthest remove from ED's own drafts, we are given a text by a towering genius as modified by someone who was far less than a genius, and who has usually damaged the poem in various ways.

The present 2-volume set of 'The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson' brings us as close to the real thing as most of us will ever get. It gives us photographic facsimiles, with full scholarly apparatus, not of all of her poems but of those she bound into forty fascicles, tiny hand-stitched manuscript-books that she squirreled away in her room and that were not to be discovered until after her death many years later.

Here you can see how her strange handwriting changed radically over the years. Here you can see all of the peculiarities of her spelling. Here you can see all those little asterisks which she used to indicate an alternate word elsewhere on the page, usually at the foot. Here you can also see all of her line breaks and her idiosyncrasies of spacing, both of which are often highly significant. Here, in a word, you can see the hand of a genius at work.

Personally I think we are extremely fortunate to have these two volumes, and that all lovers of ED's amazing poems, poems that are one of the wonders of the world, should be grateful to R. W. Franklin for the arduous labors that must have gone into his impeccable edition, an edition with full scholarly apparatus that provides a wealth of fascinating information about the forty fascicles.

The two large, heavy and sturdy volumes are stitched, bound in half cloth, beautifully printed on a very strong, smooth, ivory tinted paper that we are told is the finest paper in the world and I can well believe it, and they come in a buckram-covered box.

It's clear that no pains have been spared to give us, not only accurate and annotated photographic facsimiles of every page of the Manuscript Books, but also to give them to us in sturdy and beautiful volumes that are a fitting vehicle for the works of the amazing woman we know as Emily Dickinson. How astounded and gratified she would have been to have seen this set, a set that would warm the heart of any bibliophile, and that belongs in the collection of all Dickinson enthusiasts.