New England Books

The Wordy Shipmates

Sarah Vowell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 83 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Wordy Shipmates is New York Times–bestselling author Sarah Vowell’s exploration of the Puritans and their journey to America to become the people of John Winthrop’s “city upon a hill”—a shining example, a “city that cannot be hid.”

To this day, America views itself as a Puritan nation, but Vowell investigates what that means— and what it should mean. What was this great political enterprise all about? Who were these people who are considered the philosophical, spiritual, and moral ancestors of our nation? What Vowell discovers is something far different from what their uptight shoe-buckles-and- corn reputation might suggest. The people she finds are highly literate, deeply principled, and surprisingly feisty. Their story is filled with pamphlet feuds, witty courtroom dramas, and bloody vengeance. Along the way she asks:

* Was Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop a communitarian, a Christlike Christian, or conformity’s tyrannical enforcer? Answer: Yes!
* Was Rhode Island’s architect, Roger Williams, America’s founding freak or the father of the First Amendment? Same difference.
* What does it take to get that jezebel Anne Hutchinson to shut up? A hatchet.
* What was the Puritans’ pet name for the Pope? The Great Whore of Babylon.

Sarah Vowell’s special brand of armchair history makes the bizarre and esoteric fascinatingly relevant and fun. She takes us from the modern-day reenactment of an Indian massacre to the Mohegan Sun casino, from old-timey Puritan poetry, where “righteousness” is rhymed with “wilderness,” to a Mayflower-themed waterslide. Throughout, The Wordy Shipmates is rich in historical fact, humorous insight, and social commentary by one of America’s most celebrated voices. Thou shalt enjoy it.

The Last Fish Tale: The Fate of the Atlantic and Survival in Gloucester, America's Oldest Fishing Port and Most Original Town

Mark Kurlansky

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The bestselling author of Cod, Salt, and The Big Oyster has enthralled readers with his incisive blend of culinary, cultural, and social history. Now, in his most colorful, personal, and important book to date, Mark Kurlansky turns his attention to a disappearing way of life: fishing–how it has thrived in and defined one particular town for centuries, and what its imperiled future means for the rest of the world.

The culture of fishing is vanishing, and consequently, coastal societies are changing in unprecedented ways. The once thriving fishing communities of Rockport, Nantucket, Newport, Mystic, and many other coastal towns from Newfoundland to Florida and along the West Coast have been forced to abandon their roots and become tourist destinations instead. Gloucester, Massachusetts, however, is a rare survivor. The livelihood of America’s oldest fishing port has always been rooted in the life and culture of commercial fishing.

The Gloucester story began in 1004 with the arrival of the Vikings. Six hundred years later, Captain John Smith championed the bountiful waters off the coast of Gloucester, convincing new settlers to come to the area and start a new way of life. Gloucester became the most productive fishery in New England, its people prospering from the seemingly endless supply of cod and halibut. With the introduction of a faster fishing boat–the schooner–the industry flourished. In the twentieth century, the arrival of Portuguese, Jews, and Sicilians turned the bustling center into a melting pot. Artists and writers such as Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, and T. S. Eliot came to the fishing town and found inspiration.

But the vital life of Gloucester was being threatened. Ominous signs were seen with the development of engine-powered net-dragging vessels in the first decade of the twentieth century. As early as 1911, Gloucester fishermen warned of the dire consequences of this new technology. Since then, these vessels have become even larger and more efficient, and today the resulting overfishing, along with climate change and pollution, portends the extinction of the very species that fishermen depend on to survive, and of a way of life special not only to Gloucester but to coastal cities all over the world. And yet, according to Kurlansky, it doesn’t have to be this way. Scientists, government regulators, and fishermen are trying to work out complex formulas to keep fishing alive.

Engagingly written and filled with rich history, delicious anecdotes, colorful characters, and local recipes, The Last Fish Tale is Kurlansky’s most urgent story, a heartfelt tribute to what he calls “socio-diversity” and a lament that “each culture, each way of life that vanishes, diminishes the richness of civilization.”

Changes in the Land, Revised Edition: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

William Cronon

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Total reviews: 21 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Much historical writing is far more concerned with the players than the stage: narratives of kings and cabbage-merchants, although acted out in fields and forests, typically include nature only as a convenient prop to provide the occasional splash of color. In Changes in the Land, Cronon treats the land of New England with the same sensitivity and attention to detail as the lives of the American natives and the colonists--he depicts the effects of changing land-use patterns on the texture of the New England landscape, and gives voice to the changing communities of trees, rock walls, and rivers. The chapter on the effects of changing notions of "property" on the ecology of New England are especially strong.

Changes in the Land is almost the equal of Cronon's masterpiece, Nature's Metropolis, a monumental study of the ecological effects of Chicago on the entire central portion of the United States in the 1800s. Highly Recommended to specialists and general readers alike.

Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

Nathaniel Philbrick

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Total reviews: 284 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea—winner of the National Book Award—the startling story of the Plymouth Colony

From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as bestselling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a fifty-five-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.

The Mayflower’s religious refugees arrived in Plymouth Harbor during a period of crisis for Native Americans as disease spread by European fishermen devastated their populations. Initially the two groups—the Wampanoags, under the charismatic and calculating chief Massasoit, and the Pilgrims, whose pugnacious military officer Miles Standish was barely five feet tall—maintained a fragile working relationship. But within decades, New England would erupt into King Philip’s War, a savagely bloody conflict that nearly wiped out English colonists and natives alike and forever altered the face of the fledgling colonies and the country that would grow from them.

With towering figures like William Bradford and the distinctly American hero Benjamin Church at the center of his narrative, Philbrick has fashioned a fresh and compelling portrait of the dawn of American history—a history dominated right from the start by issues of race, violence, and religion.

Dark Tide: The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919

Stephen Puleo

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Total reviews: 33 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

"Dark Tide is the definitive account of America's most fascinating and surreal disaster." —John Marr, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Shortly after noon on January 15, 1919, a fifty-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a fifteen-foot-high wave of molasses that briefly traveled at thirty-five miles an hour. Dark Tide tells the compelling story of this man-made disaster that claimed the lives of twenty-one people and scores of animals and caused widespread destruction.

Dark Tide has been selected as a "town-wide reading book" for five Massachusetts communities including Holliston, Mass.

"Narrated with gusto . . . [Puleo's] enthusiasm for a little-known catastrophe is infectious." —The New Yorker

"Compelling . . . Puleo has done justice to a gripping historical story." —Ralph Ranalli, Boston Globe

"Thoroughly researched, the volume weaves together the stories of the people and families affected by the disaster . . . The cleanup lasted months, the lawsuits years, the fearful memories a lifetime." —Randolph E. Schmid, Associated Press

"Giving a human face to tragedy is part of the brilliance of Stephen Puleo's Dark Tide . . . Until they were given voice in this book, the characters who drove the story were forgotten." —Caroline Leavitt, Boston Sunday Globe

American Transcendentalism: A History

Philip F. Gura

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

American Transcendentalism is a sweeping narrative history of America’s first group of public intellectuals, the men and women who defined American literature and indelibly marked American reform in the decades before and following the American Civil War. Philip F. Gura masterfully traces their intellectual genealogy to transatlantic religious and philosophical ideas, illustrating how these informed the fierce theological debates that, so often first in Massachusetts and eventually throughout America, gave rise to practical, personal, and quixotic attempts to improve, even perfect the world. The transcendentalists would painfully bifurcate over what could be attained and how, one half epitomized by Ralph Waldo Emerson and stressing self-reliant individualism, the other by Orestes Brownson, George Ripley, and Theodore Parker, emphasizing commitment to the larger social good.

By the 1850s, transcendentalists turned ever more exclusively to abolition, and by war’s end transcendentalism had become identified exclusively with Emersonian self-reliance, congruent with the national ethos of political liberalism and market capitalism.

Disaster in Lawrence: The Fall of the Pemberton Mill

Alvin F. Oickle

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

History that reads like fiction 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Disaster in Lawrence: The Fall of the Pemberton Mill is a fascinating book about the little-known collapse of one of the major mills in late 19th century Massachusetts that resulted in the deaths of many workers, including young children put to work to support immigrant families. The tragedy is the tremendous loss of life when women and children were forced by poverty to work long hours six days a week for wealthy mill owners. Occurring in the Robber Baron era of the late 19th century, the disaster is movingly brought to life by Oickle 's amazingly detailed account. The book includes loads of illustrations from contemporary sources--I found it very sad but compelling reading and highly recommend it to those who love history and anyone interested in social justice as well as those who just enjoy a good read.

Editorial Review:

The destruction was unimaginable. Workers in nearby factories watched with horror as the Pemberton Mill buckled and then collapsed, trapping more than six hundred workers, many of them women and children. Word of the disaster spread quickly and volunteers rushed to the scene. As survivors called out for help, a lantern fell, and within minutes fire engulfed the building, burning those trapped inside. It took days for rescuers to complete the grim task of removing the charred bodies of the dead. Alvin F. Oickle's riveting account illustrates why, nearly a century and a half later, the Pemberton collapse is still considered one of the worst industrial calamities in American history.

Weird New England

Joseph A. Citro

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Fantastic Weird edition 4 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

This is an excellent edition in the Weird series, mainly due to the author's enthusiasm for the subject. He tackles a sprawling amount of New England history and folklore, and will definitely give you a ton of travel ideas for your next road trip. My only complaint is that Citro hails from Vermont and devotes too many pages to it over other states - here's hoping Volume 2 is in the works! I bought this volume along with Weird New York (by a different author) and can say this is significantly better.

Weird 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Weird New England (Weird) Very interesting book! Being from New England, I had to have it!

Excellent 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I was very pleased with the delivery of this book. It arrived in really good condition. An excellent book!

Great Urban and Rural legends you may have heard of. 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Got this as gift, not sure I would have bought it on my own. Was a fun if not weird read. Some of the tales I had heard myself many years ago unfortunately they did not add much closure to what I already knew. Not for kids, I'll be keeping it away from my younger ones till they hit 12-13 or so. Still worth a look to relax and daydream a bit.

The Old Leather Man: Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend (Garnet Books)

Dan W. DeLuca

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The Old Leather Man 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Very informative and enjoyable. Brings local history alive for us. Service was excellent as usual.

Editorial Review:

In 1883, wearing a sixty-pound suit sewn from leather boot-tops, a wanderer known only as the Leather Man began to walk a 365 mile loop between the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers that he would complete every 34 days, for almost six years. His circuit took him through at least 41 towns in southwestern Connecticut and southeastern New York, sleeping in caves, accepting food from townspeople, and speaking only in grunts and gestures along the way. What remains of the mysterious Leather Man today are the news clippings and photographs taken by the first-hand witnesses of this captivating individual. The Old Leather Man gathers the best of the early newspaper accounts of the Leather Man, and includes maps of his route, historic photographs of his shelters, the houses he was known to stop at along his way, and of the Leather Man himself. This history tracks the footsteps of the Leather Man and unravels the myths surrounding the man who made Connecticut's caves his home.

The Paradise of All These Parts: A Natural History of Boston

John Hanson Mitchell

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In 1614, explorer John Smith sailed into what was to become Boston Harbor and referred to the wild lands and waters around him as "the Paradise of all these parts." Within fifteen years, the Puritans were developing the tadpole-shaped Shawmut Peninsula, as members of the Massachusett tribe fled. Now, nearly four hundred years later, one must wonder what remains of John Smith's "Paradise."

Equipped with wit, intellect, and an innate curiosity about people and places, John Hanson Mitchell strolls through Boston's streets, chronicling the nonhuman inhabitants and surprisingly diverse plant life, as well as the eccentric characters he meets at various turns. Using his modern observations as a starting point, he tells the fascinating stories of the tribal leaders, naturalists, community activists, and organizations who worked to preserve nature in the city over generations, from the Victory Gardens of the Fenway to the expansive woods of Franklin Park.

But much of the history is in the land itself. As he battles traffic on notorious Route 128, Mitchell considers the ancient origins of the rocks that line the highway and those that form the city's foundation. A walk across Boston Common calls to mind the Tremount Hills, flattened by seventeenth-century newcomers; only Beacon Hill remains. A stroll through the Back Bay allows Mitchell to imagine the Charles River, so polluted by sewage that it became a public nuisance and was partially covered over with a massive nineteenth-century landfill. With this natural history in mind, Mitchell explores both ancient and new green space from Chelsea to South Boston, including the greenway formed by the Big Dig.

Endlessly readable and full of personality, The Paradise of All These Parts offers Boston visitors and residents alike a whole new perspective on one of America's oldest cities.

"Hands-on and eloquent – a lover's rhapsody."
—Edward Hoagland

"A wonderful, surprising, and gracefully written exploration of Boston's true nature. If you love this city, you will love this book."
—Eric Jay Dolin, author of LEVIATHAN: The History of Whaling in America

"A wonderful piece of work: lively, thought-provoking and totally absorbing. The city of Boston has been chopped to pieces, riddled with tunnels, and surrounded by fill, but as Mitchell reveals in The Paradise of All These Parts, it is still a place of wonder."
—Nathaniel Philbrick, author of MAYFLOWER: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

"Like Vladimir Nabokov, John Hanson Mitchell is a writer with an eye for nature's curious details, rather than a naturalist who practices writing. His new natural history of Boston is actually more a history of naturalists, explorers, conservationists and others at play on nature's grand stage with lots of juicy subplots and a large cast of engaging eccentrics. Irresistible."
—Christopher W. Leahy, Gerard A. Bertrand Chair of Natural History and Field Ornithology, Massachusetts Audubon Society, and author of The Birdwatcher's Companion to North American Birdlife, Peterson First Guide to Insects of North America, and more

"The history of urban areas is often framed as the march of human mastery: culture replacing nature tree by tree. John Hanson Mitchell tells the story of how geology, nature, Natives and new arrivals have continually made and remade the place we call Boston. His amiable tale rambles easily from rocks to rivers to red light districts, interweaving natural and human history in a way that's quietly but deeply meaningful."
—Ginger Strand, author of Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies

"There is plenty of history, natural and otherwise, in The Paradise of All These Parts, but there is also wit, narrative, and vision. Like Thoreau, Mitchell has a genius for sauntering, and I can't imagine a better rambling companion. As we stroll through Boston with him, he points out the place's deep history, its returning wildness, its migrating birds and flowering plants, and of course, since this is Mitchell, its quirky characters. The journey is a grand success, and John Hanson Mitchell proves once again that he is one of our very finest writers about place."
—David Gessner, author of Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond