Spinner Publishing has followed up on their first book magnificantly. THey have ince again found the soul of the people of southeastern mass and portrayted it via photos and history in a way that is entertaining as well as informative. Great for any one from Mass or interested in the history of this great state

I bought 2 copies, one for myself and one for my sister-in-law who lives in the Northeast. This is a great present. Jana does a great job! I can't wait for her next publication.

Having been born and raised in North Adams, I have been impacted by Manning's ability to paint "word pictures" of memories of my past. I felt as if I were standing with him during his interviews with North Adams residents. I eagerly await his sequel.

There are literally millions of Americans who claim some French heritage in their ancestry, due in large part to the proliferation of the French Canadians who migrated to the U.S. from Quebec and the Canadian Maritime Provences. America's Industrial Revolution stirred the overwhelming bulk of these migrants to seek work in New England textile mills and factories while a terrible depression was riveting their Canadian homeland. Although bits and pieces of the rich French history in North American are available in scores of mostly out of print books and academic literature, "Steeples and Smokestackes" is the only currently available, or at least, most recently published, English language anthology on a specific group called "Franco-Americans". Author Claire Quintal has dedicated most of her academic career in study of this very proud ethnic group that are responsible for sustaining the industrial infrastructure of New England since before the time of the American Civil War, during World War I and through World War II. The Franco-American culture is special by its history, language and strong dedication to Roman Catholicism even in the face of harsh discrimination from New England's staunch Protestant hierarchy. Besides all of the above, "Steeples and Smokestacks" is a very good read, enjoyable, to the point and, speaking from a cultural point of view, "C'est un tres bon livre".

In this book, Taber is successful in taking us through the year one month at a time, season by season. One can imagine themselves living at Stillmeadow in the quiet, country atmosphere.

Throughout the book, Taber muses on different subjects such as wildlife, cooking, bird watching, pets, flower arranging, weather, and other country items of interest.

This is a book for anyone who enjoys living in the country or who desires to live in the country. It is a book to read at leisure so that you can savor it page by page.

As a former country dweller and a now-reluctant city dweller, it brings back many fond memories of my childhood growing up in the country.

Gladys Taber writes of her home, Stillmeadow, in the Connecticut Hills, her parntership with college roommate, Jill, as they raise their children together, both widowed. Anything Gladys wrote is guaranteed to drop the blood pressure, calm the mind, center the heart and touch the spirit. The day I discovered Gladys was Christmas Morning in my soul!

This unusual,lively work of scholarship explains the changing use (and appearance) of the alphabet--in U.S. pedagogy and also in American fiction--between the late seventeenth century and today. The initial presentation of the alphabet to young readers, Crain argues, says much about American notions of pleasure and privacy on the one hand, morality and good citizenship on the other. Separate chapters first consider early American primers, hornbooks, and alphabet books, proceeding then to images of reading and letters in Susan Warner's best-selling novel _A Wide, Wide World_ and Nathaniel Hawthorne's _The Scarlet Letter_, which (Crain notes) is, among other things, the letter "A"'s most notorious appearance in classic American fiction. An epilogue extends the discussion to our own day, considering the guest appearance of alphabet-letters as "sponsors" on _Sesame Street_ as well as the use of letters in the contemporary paintings of Edward Ruscha. Equally valuable as a learned resource on early reading pedagogy in the U.S. and as an insightful and crucial contribution to cultural studies and literary criticism, _The Story of A_ is also beautifully designed--copiously illustrated with pictures of hornbooks, "cross-rows," and later images. The icons from the _New England Primer_, Crain points out, combine sober religious emblems with robustly secular images from tavern signs; while those from nineteenth-century alphabet books suggest by contrast a moralizing, middle-class takeover of the alphabet that still may permeate stuffy American attitudes about literacy. Few books this original are this solid, mature, and well-researched. _The Story of A_ offers a very useful synthesis of learned scholarship and sophisticated, theoretically informed interpretation. The book has changed my thinking about literacy and pedagogy, but not by polemics--simply by its definition of compelling American contexts (literary and social) that I had never noticed before. One final merit: this preserves in its energetic and lively style something of the exuberance of its variegated and colorful source-materials.

A remarkable journey of photographs and history. This book is an amazing journey of everything this wonderful New England town has to offer. It brings back great memories and inspires the anticipation of future visits to Classic New England.

Truely a charming addition to Sharon Snow Sirois's 'New England' series. This small town story was so enjoyable. Jack(Jacilyn)Miller and her sisters were a hoot! Jack meets the new pastor and she doesn't want to like him because she is engaged! She is keeping a promise to her late Grandfather,but is this what God has planned for her life?

Book #1. in the New England series:'Sawyer's Crossing'.

In Surnames and Genealogy: A New Approach, many readers will recognize the development of ideas that Dr. Redmonds - a leading authority on English surname origins, local history, and place names - has presented in seminars over the past decade. As Dr. Ralph J. Crandall notes in his foreword, the fundamental lesson of Dr. Redmonds's work is that each surname is unique, beginning with one person or family at a particular time and a particular place. Thus dictionaries of surnames may mislead when they provide a single origin as the explanation for a surname. The book's explanation of the ways in which surnames changed over time should aid American genealogical researchers in determining likely variants of surnames in their own ancestry (and variants to check in indexes).