This is a very concise and thought provoking book. Dr. Andrews addresses issues that are still challenging us today while at the same time, giving the reader an excellent historical guide with fascinating information not only about the events and sites of this exciting part of our Country's history, but also by giving us glimpses of the part played by many diverse people (which, unfortunely, is not fully explored in most of our American history textbooks). The introductory section "Modern Myths and Revolutionary Realisties"and "Prelude to the American Revolution" sets the stage for what follows--a truly readable introductory history/guide book about the area! Of special interest to this reader were the sources listed at the end of every chapter as well as the chapter explaining some of origins of Colonial idioms still in use: "skin flint", "mind your P's and Q's", "pot luck". This book is a winner and deserves to be in everyone's bookcase or back pocket to be read and used and savored and given as gifts.

Joseph Andrews' Revolutionary Boston, Lexington & Concord: The Shots Heard Round the World! offers the unusual combination of being a quick read yet containing factual, compelling information. The author has done his homework on this one. The content is succinctly written and contains many interesting anecdotes, actual quotes from the patriots and British, little known facts and myths that all add up to a little jewel of a book. If you are traveling to the Boston area or just want to bone up on this most historic area, without reading tomes of history, this book is for you.

Being a former student of Dr. Porter's and a graduate of Muskingum College (1989), I was very impressed with the history of New Concord. There were lots of places (stores, businesses, etc.) that had existed long before I arrived. The old pictures made this "history study" quite interesting. Thank You, Doctor Porter for reminding how special a place New Concord, Ohio really is.

Ron Jager has used his considerable store of dry wit and keen sense of observation to create a book that wonderfully portrays life in a small New Hampshire town. His book is consistently entertaining, whether meditating on nature as observed near his pond or contemplating the ups and downs of life in a town that still practices the most basic form of participatory democracy - the annual town meeting. Mr. Jagers rural life does not begin in New Hampshire however. He also gives us glimpses of his own boyhood in the midwest; a background that makes him uniquely qualified to write about rural life in a very different part of the United States. Clearly the people that appear in this book are not just subjects but neighbors and friends and his affection for them and for his "last house on the road" come shining through.

Susan Wilson has done a wonderful job writing essentially a "travel" book in an approachable and compelling style. Her instructions and "trails" are clear and logical and take you into some of the prettiest areas in Boston and the surrounding towns. Yet while she is directing you in and among the alleyways, Wilson manages to weave a compelling history of characters and places that has you heading for your local library to check out long-forgotten authors. I've drawn up a whole "Boston" reading list to reacquaint myself with some old friends and maybe make some new ones.

I own an older edition of this book (published in 1989), and it helped to get me through my freshman year of college. Granted, it isn't an all-encompassing compendium, you can't expect that from a 1,400 page book that covers 15,000 subjects. However, I found it to be a wonderful resource when all you need is a short, general introduction to a topic.

I highly recommend a copy of The New American Desk Encyclopedia for everyone's desk. I guess that's why they call it the "Desk Encyclopedia"!

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.

This extraordinarily accessible palm-sized book contains excerpts from Emerson's various essays. From Self-reliance to Friendship the passages capture the inspiration of Emerson.

I knew Emily for a very short time when I lived in Boston. She and my sister were friends, along with a group of people whose lives centered around a triple decker on Wendell Street.

A new book from Emily is like a long letter. I get to catch up on her life and comings and goings. I always feel sheepish about not staying in touch when I'm through with it. She writes such beautiful and thoughtful things, I think. I really need to write her back.

Reading her prose is exactly like having a conversation with her. I can hear her light, sweet voice as if I'm at a reading, and can summon her laugh in my mind's ear too.

It's impossible for me to separate my acquaintance with Emily from her work, but I will say I'm always astounded with her descriptions and way with words. She is at once erudite and approachable, and her work is always informed by both these things. Being a poet, Emily brings thoughtful cadence to her essays, and very often I will read them outloud to myself.

For those of you who don't know Emily personally, you will after you read this book, and what's more, you'll want to know her better. You'll also learn that New England watersheds are not only interesting but epic in their own way, and that stories are told in the details.

Thanks Emily. I'm doing quite well and think of you often.

[An] enchanting new book of essays.... Many personal essayists today try to capture our interest by being confessional but run the risk of revealing, like clumsy strippers, what we'd really rather not see. Hiestand has taken the more unusual risk of writing about the quotidian, and produced a tour de force. "Oooouuuweee!" as her cousin Bill would say. What a good book this is. --Boston Sunday Globe Book Review

Angela the Upside-Down Girl is about how to live creatively, see life through an artist's eye. With a subversive sense of humor and a wicked ability to pierce convention, [Hiestand] takes us on her journey to discover a meaningful sense of place in a chaotic world. Her place turns out to be North Cambridge, which she describes with the freshness and originality of Joyce in Dublin...

Angela the Upside-Down Girl reveals Emily Hiestand's exceptional talents which include an artist's eye for color and form, a cu! ltural anthropologist's ability to get people to tell their stories, and a poet's facility to express what is felt but not seen. --Cambridge Chronicle

Rich, revealing, and often hilarious... This book travels between only two places...but it travels so deeply into each place, both their pasts and their presents, that you come away from it feeling enlightened and enticed, and ready to hop on the next train heading north or south. --Hope Magazine

...and I say, also, "What a good book this is!"

-Chuck Eisenhardt

Angela the Upside-Down Girl is a revelation. Emily Hiestand is one of Robert Frost's true poets, "one upon whom nothing is lost." As she trains an eye of the rarest perception on the world we thought we knew, we discover the heart of light within ordinary and not-so-ordinary things. I marvel at her scope: her Weltyesque Aunt Nan Dean; her eloquent witness to the power of faith and community at Union Baptist Church; her love affair with automotive neon, which manages (as Emerson never could) to be both transcendental and funny; and, of course, there's Angela, whose gravity-defying grace can be seen as a figure for the whole book. But perhaps most engaging of all is the voice of our guide--Hiestand herself--the unifying principle through the book's many travels, wise, witty, shimmering in its clarity, a wonderful companion.

I vascillated between really loving parts of this book, and being annoyed at others. The book discusses the history of the Merrimack Valley in northeastern Massachusetts, weaving in stories about the author's parents' lives there as immigrants from Italy and Lebanon. It also compares descriptions of the area written by Thoreau, and others, in the 19th century.

While most of it was fascinating, some aspects of the book bothered me. First, as the book progresses, it becomes evident that it is a collection of prior essays; some portions are repetitive, almost down to the exact language. Second, I felt that the author was trying too hard to be "lyrical." Some of the writing seemed "forced," convoluted, and grammatically awkward, to the point that I had to reread sentences to figure out what she wanted to say.

Despite these criticisms, it is an interesting read about an area that has changed so much over the last 150 years.

Jane Brox's second book is masterful: a cross between social history and memoir, a book that is devastatingly clear about the future of the family farm and yet without a trace of rancor. Even if, like me, you're a city person, you should READ THIS BOOK for its pervasive, gentle wisdom; for its stunning prose; for everything a book should offer to its reader--access to a beloved world.

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.