I was very, very disappointed in the lack of color in the newest addition. They are such washed out prints when compared to the original book. ...

My mother owned a first printing copy of this book, and I can remember reading it all my life. I was thrilled when I discovered that my mother kept the book all these years, and I was also next to tears when she told me I could keep it, along with the numbers and alphabet books of Tudor's that she had. This book is a celebration of the memories of a happy childhood, and it's appropriate that it was such a huge part of mine. I'm buying a new copy of this book for the children I hope to one day have, while my mom's copy is going to be locked away somewhere safe. This is a truly, thoroughly beautiful book, and one that every family should own.

This delightful book of holidays begins when a little girl asks, "Granny, what was it like when Mummy was me?" Tasha Tudor goes on to treat us to a year's worth of wonderful holiday traditions from her life in New England. Charming quotations from literature open each month and herbaceous borders surround each page of nostalgic illustrations depicting myriad family celebrations. The borders start with brown and frozen grasses and flowers festooned with icicles that bud on subsequent pages and send out catkins, then blossoms, then flowers and leaves, then fruits, all in splendid realistic detail. The pictures invite one warmly into the fun and rekindle one's own memories. Tasha reminds us of the delicious foods, the antics of the children, the activities and games, the decorations, the weather, the homespun plays and puppet shows, and the joyful seasonal work. We see big families caught up in living through the wonders of the wheel of the year. Holidays are depicted as the accents to each season, but equally important are the birthdays, the county fairs, cider and maple syrup making time. The people and animals from Tasha Tudor's own experience grace these lovely pages and offer us a glimpse into lives that are filled with love and wonder and appreciation for the beautiful and gentle nuances of living the good life. Simplicity and tradition make the holidays magical and we can all take our cue from this wonderful book and re-examine how we celebrate our traditional holidays. Co-operation and sharing the workload seems to have eliminated stress in these pictures. Creativity and family participation take the place of materialism. Home crafts and delightful cooking and a visible delight in children seem to have banished excessive "partying" and keep the focus on love, comfort, and gratitude. This book is such a treat and it is virtually guaranteed to help put whatever holidays you celebrate into thoughtful perspective.

....is what the author shows you throughout this highly readable tale of Scratch Flat, a mile-square locale near Concord. The history of its geography, botany, and inhabitants unfolds here in lucid prose devoid of technical jargon. For the ecopsychology course I'm putting together I plan to make this book required reading.

A recommendation: the word "primitive" ought to be removed from future editions when used in reference to American Indians. Many regard it as derogatory, and even white readers may well wonder who is more primitive: those who inhabit the land with care or those who kill its inhabitants and "develop" it out of existence.

I have lifted whole lecture topics from this book, and passed on copies to numerous students and friends. The idea is lovely -write an ecology based on an intimate history of one square mile of land-and Mitchell delivers it up in excellent prose that keeps one reading even when the material turns a tad dry. Why only 4 stars? I am not sure if this book will have "legs" beyond the landscape and history that it celebrates. It would be great to have a few more Mitchells do something similar to the westward and southward, so that we could expand our perceptions beyond the deliberate confines that the author has set. For those of us within a day's drive however, this is definitely a book to read.

Mitchell goes far beyond "reading the landscape" of his town. He analyzes the history, anthropology, architecture, agriculture, geology, botany, and zoology of an area northwest of Littleton, Massachusetts, called "Scratch Flat." As if that's not enough, he goes one step further by investigating and uncovering the ancestral *spirit* of the place. This book is an easy, enlightening read that will not only have you looking differently at your own neighborhood but also contemplating our traditional notions of time. "[W]e are the future of the past, and the past of the future." (p. 200) Certainly food for thought.

The map and information provided are quite good, but the illustrations are disappointing, I would have rather seen photographs.

In June of 2000 I used this map to visit Lighthouses in Maine. This map was very useful. On one side is a map pointing out the locations. On the other side there are details for each individual light such as: directions, hours, and phone numbers. I am from Michigan so I was not familiar with New England at all. Some of these lights were hard to find even with the map because some roads are not clearly marked. But I did find everything I was looking for. The price of these maps is an incredible bargain. Some people buy two of them so they can hang one on the wall to display the watercolor images and get another to use.

the book made it very easy to find where the lighthouses are located. nice article about each one.

As a priest, I read plenty of spiritual books. I was skeptical about this book through the first few pages, wondering if it would be another dreary discussion of depression and spirituality. Yet, I was grabbed within a very few pages (maybe 5) and I enjoyed reading the entire book all the way through. I felt good reading it. I liked the characters I met in this book. This book is a nice treatment on the subject of coming to faith despite intellectual and personal objections to "religion". I thoroughly recommend this book to parishioners.

I found Blue Hope to be worthwhile and hopeful. It is a gem of a book, reads easily and develops well, notwithstanding the comments in the editorial reviews above. If you have read this far you should purchase the book. I just wish I could find more like it. The author is giving the reader a small gift of hope and his story successfully conveys the gift. I was moved.
PS- the book is beautifully designed and printed.

i haven't read the book but he's my english teacher. He's awsome.

Michael Bell's Food For The Dead is not only a great book about American history and folklore, it is a very entertaining read as well. Though a non-ficition book, it does not fall victim to an overought style like most books in the genre can. Bell's writing is very easy to read and very informative. He does not shy away from the truth and always gives his opinions (and justifies them!).

Bell investigated (for nearly 20 years) the vampire legend which began in New England (and still exists there) starting in the late 1600s. It seemed that people believed that the consumption, a deadly desease at the time, was caused by vampires. Bell takes many scenarios and cases he has found throughout New England and investigates them, trying to explain the origin of the legend as well as its outcome.

The book lags a little when Bell tries to link the whole phenomenon with popular myth. This vampire legend differs greatly from the Dracula legend we are used to these days. These vampires are not night-walkers and blood sucking fiends, they kill from their grave! His short lesson in pop culture history is a little too long and a little too obvious for my taste.

I really enjoyed this book. It is a great lesson in history and in American folklore. This is one book that I will want to come back to again and again. This is one of the rare non-fiction book about vampires which does make sense and which does take the reader somewhere we haven't been before. It offered me something new and different, which is rare in this day and age. And for that, Bell's Food For The Dead deserve to stand on a high pedestal on top of all the other paranormal/non-fiction books out there.

In "Food for the Dead" folklorist Michael Bell brings to life tales of terror based on events that took place long ago in the rural cemeteries of New England.
Bell writes of evil spirits and vampires with candor, explaining why bodies were exhumed by rural folk in desperate attempts to thwart the ancient plague of tuberculosis. His style is scholarly without being pondereous. Down to earth, if you'll pardon a pun.
Stories of digging up bodies, removing and burning hearts are well documented. But what would lead ordinary folk to such drastic remedies? Tape recorder and camera in hand, Bell has traveled the back roads of Rhode Island, Connecticutt, New Hampshire and Vermont for 20 years seeking answers to that question.
In the first chapter Bell introduces his readers to Lewis Everett Peck, a descendant of Mercy Brown, whose grave was opened on March 17, 1892, in the hamlet of Exeter, Rhode Island. Peck tells in graphic detail how Mercy's body had turned over in the casket, how her heart still had blood in it and how her heart was burned and the ashes fed to her consumptive brother, Edwin.
Nowhere in Peck's story is Mercy identified as a vampire. But the gruesome details are accurate. And of such fabric are folk tales woven.
With the skill of a practiced story teller Bell soon makes his readers comfortable with his grisly subject. One trail leads to another as he connects first with Mercy, then with Nellie Vaughn, Nancy Young and the Tillinghast and Rose families. He uses newspaper files, countless interviews, family and church histories to build his case.
That bodies were exhumed and corpses mutilated is without question. But why resort to such extremes? Why give credence to ghosts and evil spirits? Bell offers one opinion with these words: "We derive comfort from giving tangible form to phenomena beyond our understanding...By personifying death and disease, we can more easily identify, objectify and perhaps forestall one and eradicate the other."
Did vampires once prey upon innocent country folk? You'll have to read Bell's book "Food for the Dead -- On the Trail of New England's Vampires."
(Carroll & Graf, 337 pp.)

Wow! Next to "Vampires, Burial and Death," probably the best non-speculative look at "real" vampires I've read.
They didn't use the word "vampire" back in the day. The ritual (described in detail by Michael Bell) for the treatment of consumption involved a little bit of exhumation, perhaps some dismemberment, maybe some cannibalism, stuff like that. Today, it would be tough to imagine your entire family dying one by one, and a local elder saying, "Hey, if you dig up Betsy, the first one who died, you may be able to save the rest of your family. Here's how ..."
The most interesting aspect of this book is that it gives an indirect sampling of what folklorists actually do. All the research, detective work, footwork and interviewing seems a lot more substantial than just collecting urban legends or whatever. Buy it!

This book chronicles the establishment, by Jeffrey Burke and his wife, of an the Keeper's House Inn, next to an old lighthouse in Maine on Isle au Haut, seven miles off the coast, with the only link to *civilization* being the daily mail boat.

With no experience and little money, the Burkes took a giant leap of faith when they decided to open this establishment. The book details many of the obstacles they had to overcome and how they dealt with them.

It is such an interesting story of ingenuity, especially how they managed to get water (having a well pounded, not drilled); survived without any electricity (except for a generator that was only sufficient for running the mini sewage-treatment facility); used a 60-year old gas-powered refrigerator; and painted the 796 windowpanes in the inn and lighthouse.

The vignettes about the guests and some of the local characters were both amusing and insightful.

Each of the 21 chapters ends with one of the inn's recipes and the book is illustrated with delightful engravings by a Maine artist. I really enjoyed this book and have bought it several times to give as a gift.

What a lovely, sweet book! I flew through it, enjoying every minute of it and wishing there were more! I agree with a previous reviewer that it should be published in quality paperback. I also would love to see a sequel from the author that goes into more depth and detail about their life as innkeepers in such a unique setting. I'm sure there are many more funny and heartwarming anecdotes about guests, as well as more trials and tribulations about their choice and experience of this life. It is my desire for greater depth that lead me to give it four rather than five stars. The recipes seem great (I have not tried any yet), although Judi sure seems to have a penchant for sour cream! Read this book and enjoy an armchair vacation!

I read this book twice last year before visiting The Keeper's House. Now that I've been to their fantastic inn, I'm reading it again. It's a great way to revisit and remember the wonderful times we had there. The recipes at the end of each chapter are very good--I've made several of them. I highly recommend this book (and the Inn!) to anyone with a sense of adventure and romance.

Wetherell writes lovely descriptions of the things he loves -- many times I said: "Yes" out loud as he nailed the particular qualities of a sunset or a river or a particular turn in a season. But he throws down a gauntlet when he insists that the modern world is "degenerate" the suburbs "monstrous" and the human beings of this century in general inferior to their ancestors. He doesn't think about the issues he raises; he just asserts. A certain type of manners and charactere are disappearing, he claims. How does he know this? Because his grandfather was an admirable person. Organized sports are dismissed in a paragraph. Why? Because Wetherell and his friends had such a great time playing in the schoolyard when he was a kid. Reading and writing are soon to vanish and he knows this because ......... he admits that huge numbers of books are sold, book clubs formed, and so on, but he just somehow knows that "real" reading is vanishing. Apparently this is clear to him because he read so passionately when he was a kid. Suburbia is a degraded life; this is so clear he barely feels the need to explain it. He ought to ask himself why more than half the country lives in suburbia. No-one forced them to. The past hundred-plus years has seen a massive move from the kind of "authentic" country life he reveres, to cities and suburbs. Could it be that the old country life was far harsher and lonelier than he wants to admit? He seems to suggest that moral fiber is lacking if people like good roads and shopping nearby. I suspect that there were Indians saying something similar when the first Natives bought iron pots and pans from Europeans. I don't like the suburbs either, and I'd love some clear thinking about how they came to be. Wetherell isn't interested in thinking. When I got to that preposterous comparison between writers and buffalo hunting, I began to suspect why he doesn't want to think. He's writing self-mythology. The hero of the book, after all, is Wetherell, who had the guts to pursue a life true to nature, go the hard road and follow his dreams, in a place without good roads and nearby shopping. If his kind of life is disappearing, it only makes him a more romantic figure. Actually, he is an admirable guy in many ways, but I find his disdain for the rest of humanity, and anyone who lives differently from him, unbearable. He is a curmudgeon, and that's not such a good thing. A curmudgeon is somehow trapped in their own narrow view of the world, unable or uninterested in seeing things through the eyes of others.

Somewhere Steve Martin says, "Some people have a way with words, and some - no have way."

W. D. Wetherell is one of those with a way. His newest book follows three novels, three books of short stories, and three previous collections of nonfiction essays, including [itals] Upland Stream and Vermont River. Wetherell's talent may accurately be called prodigious. For a young writer to have written so many remarkable books in a couple of decades begs the question of what kind of life fosters a literary sensibility in this age of the multi-media multinational mayhem.
North of Now aims to explain the place of writing in this man's life, and to place the man himself in a world he sees as assiduously hostile to that contemplative practice which yields works of art.

The book is praised on its jacket by Edward Hoagland as [ital] sui generis - one of a kind. There's no better way to acknowledge Wetherell's form and vantage point. Assembling the volume from a carefully sequenced set of meditations upon subjects such as "Remembrance," "Play," "Village Life," "Old-Timers," "Wild Trout," and "Genteel Poverty," Wetherell has written an anticipatory requiem for an existence many people in places such as northern New England still experience, day in and day out.

None of these topics is pondered by Wetherell as though it were of merely private importance. He is able to take the preoccupations of an self-avowed eccentric and turn them like lenses upon changes that press upon all of us. The chapter "Heavens," for example, is concerned with the diminishing darkness of our night sky - very few places on earth remain unbleached by glare from high-intensity lamps. This essay pivots upon the narrator's decision, at the birth of his child, to learn the names and shapes of constellations. Another essay, "Gravity," muses on the insight that bodily actions as well as aging are forms of [ital] falling. Wetherell's narrator has a voracious passion for physical exertion, and in the process of describing such exploits as hiking, biking, back-country skiing, and canoeing, he meditates in prose upon the tactile, irresistible pull of the earth. No athlete, even in the flush of pounding pulse, can break free of gravity's grasp. Yet our society is obsessed with speed, as though it were possible to efface the weight of the actual burdens we bear.

"Reading" and "Quiet" consider the possibility that - because the civilization around us, a civilization we've supposedly made, has devoted so much its efforts to consumption and destruction - we may be losing the capacity to concentrate, and therefore might be raising the last generation of readers and storytellers. Meanwhile Wetherell's detailed evocations of humans and animals, granite-veined landscapes and celestial expanses, are gorgeous reminders of those pleasures that reading makes intimate as no other medium can.

Wetherell is staunchly circumspect, invulnerable to simplistic faith. Certain passages are downright morose, and the vehemence of his lament now and then veers into effusiveness (antidote to bitterness?) that is treacherous in a book so astringent in avoiding emotionalism. Perhaps I don't feel as anachronistic, myself. From my perspective, there are countless hopeful signs, visible or intuited, that large numbers of people are struggling with these very questions. Many people in wide variety of circumstances are attempting to re-connect with other people, with physical work and play, with community mutual aid.

Trouble is, popular entertainment, including the publishing industry, titillates these widespread aspirations with a ceaseless flow of solipsistic self-help, personal "revelation," and pseudo-spiritual folderol.

Wetherell believes in his own tonics: no television, no computer, meals with family, and long spells of time in the woods, on the water, and in the solitude of his own mind. He is brother to Diogenes, the ancient Greek cynic who renounced civilized life and lived in a tub, climbing out at midnight to search with his haw lantern for an "honest man." Writing this angry, lucid book was a defiant act, which ought to embolden readers to take more seriously the prospect that what we love, we may be losing.

I first heard of Walter Wetherell at Red Dog Salon (a defunct Book Central board, which I founded with Jeffrey, Judy and Rodier, a group of prodigious readers known online as the "Ronettes"--Ron Hansen fans to whom there is a mocking allusion in Charles Baxter's novel, The Feast of Love). We wanted a place to conduct authentic discussions about literature. And Wetherell's name often came up in IMs from an onliner who claimed to be from Albany.

During a long car trip in the summer of 1998, I read whole essays from Wetherell's memoir/essay collection, North of Now: A Celebration of the Soon to Be Gone. And as my husband drove along the shore, tired and confused after hours stuck in traffic, I read the essay "Reading" aloud to him. "Reading, world-class reading, total reading, is never given the credit for being the hard emotional and intellectual work it is. A first-grader becomes a 'reader' and that's that; nothing is ever said past elementary school of a person's reading skill, unless they have none at all. But the term is granted too easily; it's as if someone who had the ability to make out a shopping list were called a 'writer.'"

We both loved his voice. Just like that: love. And I loved that particular quote so much that I shared it with an editor who aspired to change the content of a book review section.

I am eager to read all his work.

Let me start by saying that I am a big fan of Mitchell, and I really enjoyed CERMONIAL TIME. This lead me to look forward to the arrival of WALKING... and at one level I was not disappointed. AS in all his work Mitchell is adept at weaving together diverse strands of history, culture, and place and to get us thinking about the landscape in new ways. His taste in friends (or at least his way of introducing us to his friends) however seems somewhat flawed. While his other books are more solitary ruminations on ideas and areas, in WALKING he brings along two annoying Yuppies, who would serve as comic relief if any was needed. One is an incredibly PC Indian Wannabe, the other is the sort of Birder that gets some of us reaching for the shotgun, between them they serve only to distract the reader from what would otherwise be a pleasant cross-country ramble through a landscape made all the more interesting by Mitchell's knowledge of both recent history and geological "deep time". Overall Mitchell is at his best when he talks about the dead or the non-human, he can be downright cruel in his descriptions of the living people that he encounters as he approaches Concord. For all that I can sympathize with Mitchell's obvious concern for the rampant development that he must deal with I am not sure that this sort of meaness towards folks who may well be Fellow Travellers (in several senses of the word) does the story much good. In spite of my criticism this is probably a stroll worth taking though you may want to stuff two of your companions into a cedar swamp!

These 300 pages describe both a physical journey, lasting but a day, overlaid with historical, architectural, artistic, anthropological, and literary musings of a richly cultivated mind. He writes, for example, upon viewing a stark landscape, "...I made the connection...This hollow...looks very much like the fourteenth-century Tuscan forest as envisioned by nineteenth-century French illustrator Gustave Dore."

Making connections is Mitchell's forte. The narrative of a tramp through woods and sloughs brings to Mitchell's fertile imagination scenes enacted in the places they pass. He seamlessly inter-weaves the fascinating story of King Philip's War, described as "one of the first anti-imperialist efforts ... the first American revolution" alongside the war between the colonists and British regulars, "essentially a civil war."

Rather than re-hash Thoreau's meditations in "Walden," Mitchell shares his own stream-of-consciousness, touching on "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and "The Wizard of Oz," "The Inferno" and some of Melville's "chief harpooners." Additionally, he offers an in-depth account of the way that nineteenth-century landscape painters changed the view of society toward their environment, suggesting that "It is doubtful that the preservation of a wilderness park would even have been considered if the painters hadn't been there first." Indeed, his descriptions are painterly, but he also succeeds in carefully bringing his companions and those they meet on the way to believable life.

The book is divided into 18 chapters, fifteen of them given names of places traversed in each of the miles walked. These names, such as "Nonset Brook" and "Nagog" are less likely to register with the reader than the connections these places evoke in the mind of the author. Who can recall, for instance, that the etymology of "Key West" is to be found in "Mile 10: Thoreau Country?" Hopefully, an index in a later edition will make it easier for the reader to re-discover favorite passages.

The readers join Mitchell and his friends as they walk through an historical and artistic region of our nation. We discuss the history, nature, the people and the sights as we meet others along the walk. We walk along with Thoreau as well as Mitchell's fascinating friends. There are few books that I've enjoyed as much as this friendly hike. Mitchell is one of best of the current nature writers because he becomes a participant with the reader in enjoying nature and history.

The compiler, "a very senior figure in ... Thoreauvian studies," as another reviewer refers to him, has simply changed the title of his 1982 Farrar, Straus, Giroux book of excerpts from Thoreau's writings (relating to Thoreau in the mountains) and republished it with Beacon Press. There's nothing new here at all, just republished stuff from almost twenty years ago! One would think that this fellow of "impeccable" scholarship would have had the decency to at least mention somewhere in this compilation that it is, in fact, nothing more than a reprint.

I wish that the anonymous reviewer from Lincoln who is a Thoreauvian scholar in his own right had "faith in a deed" and had indeed placed his name here as he was willing to do in other reviews.

Henry David Thoreau is perhaps the most famous of the nineteenth century American naturalists and left behind a large body of work that is still very much read and appreciated today. Walking With Thoreau comprises Thoreau's writings about his own hikes up nine New England mountains including the Wachusett and Greylock in Massachusetts; Kathahdin and Kineo in Maine; Wantastiquet, Fall Mountain, Washington, Lafayette, and Monadnock in the White Mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont. Thoreau expert William Howarth enhanced Walking With Thoreau with insightful commentaries for the contemporary reader replete with historical facts and anecdotes on Thoreau that are relevant to his tales of mountain experiences. Replete with specially drawn sate maps and day-by-day itineraries, Walking With Thoreau readily lends itself to anyone wishing to hike the same routes as were once taken by Thoreau. Walking With Thoreau is a "must" for all students of his work and writings, outdoor enthusiasts seeking to retrace the great man's steps, as well as armchair travelers with an appreciation for observant essays on hiking mountains in a bygone era.

but I have to agree with the reviewer who felt that the first two books in this series were more entertaining.

One of the best aspects of this series is the glimpse that it gives the reader into the world of serious book collecting and the Goldstones' adventures therein. That being said, nearly a quarter of this 215 page book is taken up by the story of the New England forger - which has very little bearing on the Goldstones and their collection. A semi-interesting aside, it hardly deserved to dominate the book.

On the other hand, I really did enjoy reading about the visits to the Library of Congress and the Folger Library, which offered a glimpse into collections that few of us will ever have the chance to visit. Their take on the influence of the internet on the book trade was also interesting, but should there be a fourth book in the series, I hope that they will return to what they do best - relating personal stories of chasing down treasures.

The third of the Goldstones' collecting books (after Used and Rare: Travels in the Book World and Slightly Chipped*: *Footnotes in Booklore) is just as charming and whimsical--and educational--as the first two. The Goldstones are a delightful couple with a warm writing style that is easy to read and keeps you coming back.

Apart from the title of the book, which seems to have no relation to its contents, I have only one complaint: the central story of the New England forger goes on for too long. I was kept interested throughout, but I felt that it could have ended sooner.

Other than that, this is a terrific, quick read, and if you are fans of books and collecting you will not be disappointed.

"Warmly Inscribed" (Nancy and Lawrence Goldstone) is the third book by the Goldstones chronicling their experiences in the world of used and rare books. Just as "Slightly Chipped" was not quite as good as "Used and Rare", so "Warmly Inscribed" is just slightly more off the mark than either of the other two.

Which is not to say that it is not good.

What I loved most about "Used and Rare" was discovering the book trade along with the Goldstones - from the purchase of the first book (how to get a nice cheap hardcover edition of War and Peace) via falling for the temptation to spend way more that is sensible on a nice Dickens to starting to feel that they are finding their feet in this sometimes confusing trade.

In "Slightly Chipped" the focus shifted slightly from the Goldstones own experience to anecdotes of other people's adventures, and what they told us of themselves was more to do with book-signings and related events than with book-hunting along dusty shelves. Though still enjoyable, I could not but feel that part of the fun had gone out of the telling.

In "Warmly Inscribed" this shift away from actual book-hunting continues. A major part of the book is taken up with the history of the "New England Forger" - an interesting story, and certainly an instructive one for those of us interested in signed books, but from a secondary source. And a lot of the primary source stories have more to do with viewing books in libraries than with hunting for a copy for oneself.

As I said, this doesn't make it a bad book. The Goldstones are writing what is probably the most enjoyable series of books for bibliophiles at the moment. Their style is informal and very personal, and even events that are retold through several people gain a sort of immediacy. Their description of the Library of Congress certainly makes me want to visit the place more than
anything else I've read about it.

I do miss the bookstore stories, though. There are so relatively few books written about the actual buying and collecting of used and rare books from a personal point of view - there are manuals like "The ABC for Book Collectors", but so few "look what I found!" stories. I wish the next book would return to this viewpoint.

(Actually, what I really want to see is a "The Goldstones discover Hay-on-Wye, Wales" - now _that_ would be good!)