In 1947-having spent the better part of the war as a Red Cross volunteer with Patton's Third Army in Europe-Rosie Dresser returned to the coastal village of Somesville, Maine where she had spent long and idyllic summers as a child. Unmarried, thirty-eight years old and a Vassar dropout, she bought a decaying house built in 1852 that she named The Cobbler's and restored over the course of the summer with the active involvement of the community-summer and local. Summer Restoration:Rosie Dresser and The Cobbler's pivots around a series of fourteen letters she wrote home describing the restoration itself and the people-colorful, wry, prickly, resourceful, kind-who helped her. But resurrecting a nineteenth century house is only part of the story. Summer Restoration is about a quiet Maine village on the cusp of post-war change. And it is about Rosie Dresser, an uncommonly independent woman, whose life began in the privileged afterglow of New England's "Indian Summer" and led unpredictably to one of hard-earned accomplishment. Actress, director, front-line Red Cross volunteer, teacher, civic activist, world traveler, beneficent aunt, humorist-Rosie Dresser was very much of her time. And ahead of it, too.

Summer Restoration: Rosie Dresser and The Cobblers

Jock Herron

TidePool Press

Combining local history, family memoir and a naturalist's simple affection for place, John Jeppson recalls his family's efforts to adapt a well-loved property to changing times. Bought in 1925 and now hosting a fifth generation of the Jeppson family, Oakholm has been optimistically run as a commercial enterprise in Brookfield, Massachusetts during the better part of a century in which farming has virtually disappeared from the local landscape. John's father, George Jeppson, started with a well bred Guernsey herd and developed a lively equestrian stable. His son abandoned the dairy business and concentrated on hay, Christmas trees, forestry and berries. During the week, both George and John played key roles in a growing industrial empire. On weekends, Oakholm took charge. In Making Hay, a ram-murderous with envy, a TB-infected dairy herd, two devastating hurricanes, a visit from Swedish royalty, a family of bald eagles, lakeside flooding and a growing American family refreshing its Swedish heritage make weekends and holidays at Oakholm a complex respite for industrialists George Jeppson and his son John, each of whom led a leading abrasives manufacturer through two very different eras. Making Hay is filled with humor, insight and engaging tales. It looks back, but with a steadying eye on the future. Farms and families are sustained by tradition and change. In Making Hay, John Jeppson makes clear why.

Making Hay: Tales from Oakholm, a Farm in Massachussetts

John Jeppson

Missionary, educator, entrepreneur, and restless progressive, Andrew Atchison led a peripatetic 19th century life committed to the welfare of others - recently freed slaves, Indians on reservations, immigrant Chinese building the Panama Canal - in locales ranging from Kansas to New Mexico, Texas to Missouri, Louisiana to Panama. Orphaned at twelve in Ohio, Atchison left a mark that stretched West - "To the Stars," as told by Don Nelson in this engaging account of the distinctively American life of his maternal grandfather. Using unpublished primary documents, Nelson explores an under appreciated theme of our history - the ethnic complexity of settling the American West following the Civil War. Committed throughout his life to helping the "poorest of the poor," Andrew Atchison - a devout Presbyterian who graduated from the young University of Kansas in a class of ten - embodied the finer impulses of that uneasy settlement. He founded the Freedmen's Academy of Kansas to educate freed slaves following the collapse of Reconstruction. He was principal of the Haskell Institute, a federal, multitribe Indian school in Lawrence, Kansas. He founded a college in El Paso, Texas, and was fired from a professorship at the Louisiana State Normal for tutoring black children in the evenings. In Panama while the Canal was being constructed, he established the Yook Choy School for immigrant Chinese men. Andrew Atchison led an uncommonly rich life. The conflicts Atchison encountered and the opportunities he created presaged the American experience of the 20th century. His life has as much resonance today as ever - evidence, as Faulker famously claimed that "the past is never dead. It's not even past."

To The Stars: Over Rough Roads

Nelson, Donald F.

Half a century on, Nat Bickford revisits the predatory advances of two boarding school masters, one at Phillips Exeter, the other at Williston Academy, whose provocative behavior-sadistic in one case; tragic in the other-violated the genteel codes of prep school life in the late 1950's. Less cynical than Catcher in the Rye and more disturbing than A Separate Peace, the narrative benefits from the distance. A distinguished New York lawyer buoyed by the sustaining warmth of a forty-six year marriage, Nat Bickford explores two bewildering relationships that marked his adolescent life. Chilson Leonard-temperamental, demanding and a player of favorites-at Exeter and G. McCall Maxwell-gentle, refined, encouraging and repressed-at Williston powerfully influenced, and nearly ruined Nat's late adolescence. Nat went on to Harvard College and Columbia Law School, a successful career and a rich family life bearing no obvious teenage scars. Yet, the memories remained-unrevealed, unexamined and unresolved until he began sharing them with his wife who encouraged him to explore the separate invasions of Leonard and Maxwell, so at variance with the imagined sanctity of prep school life in the quiet years before the fractious exuberance of the 1960's. Written with restraint and grace, Late Bloomer reflects a time and place long gone, while exploring a theme that is as resonant as ever: the power of teachers to shape, inspire and, occasionally, disturb impressionable minds.

Late Bloomer a Memoir of School Days

Bickford, Nathaniel

Thoughtful, funny, pointed and honest, A Liberal Education is an insightful scholar's memoir of the generation that came of age in the late fifties-an opaque generation hinged between the conformist fifties and the rebellious late sixties.

A Liberal Education

Abbott Gleason

Pitch Uncertain: A Mid-Century Middle Daughter Finds Her Voice

Maisie Houghton

Unstated, but evident in I Remember are the travails and accomplishments of a woman coming of age in a pre-feminist era, an era not quite prepared for strong-willed, independent women who refused to let gender push them to the ornamental edges of political life. As an author, artist and activist, Marian straddled diverse worlds. I Remember is an uncommonly appealing account of a thoroughly uncommon life that offers unexpectedly fresh glimpses into events and people-some illustrious, others forgotten- that have shaped our time.

I Remember: A Life of Politics, Painting and People

Marian Cannon Schlesinger

At once an intimate account of a young girl's coming of age during the tempestuous times attending the birth of Israel and a rare record of Jewish family life in Palestine under the Ottomans dating to 1809, Nitza Rosovsky's In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949 adds fresh insights into the narrative of Jewish migration from early nineteenth century Europe to the formation of a Jewish homeland. Author of the highly acclaimed Jerusalem Walks and a seventh generation sabra, Nitza Rosovsky writes with the grace, even-handedness, good humor, command and sharp eye of someone who knows her territory well. She tells the history of the Epstein, Ashkenazi, and Berman families and their early emigration from Moldova and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe to Tiberias, Safed and eventually Jerusalem. The pre-Zionist family history has been masterfully reconstructed over a thirty-year period from interviews with older family members and cumulative inferences from a host of eclectic sources including documentary fragments, inscriptions on a family bible and the Montefiore censuses. That introduction sets the stage for Nitza's often amusing, occasionally pointed and consistently poignant account of her adolescence in Jerusalem during the British Mandate and her mother's extended family, the Bermans, who established and operated the largest bakery in Jerusalem. From the vantage point of half a century, the story pivots around Nitza's mother, Leah Berman, a remarkable woman whose life, unrequited love and dedication to a family deeply rooted in Israel is in every sense the heart of the book. This unusual combination of historical perspective and personal narrative opens an irresistible window into seven generations of Jewish life in what was once Palestine and is now the modern state of Israel.

In the Land of Israel: My Family 1809-1949

Rosovsky, Nitza

Less extreme than the wartime experiences of J. G. Ballard or Jerzy Kosinski but in the same vivid tradition, Civil and Uncivil Wars is a profound, touching, occasionally disconcerting,unfailingly candid, and consistently engaging reminder that the full measure of war and domestic unrest cannot be appreciated without the telling insights of the young.As the bloody European war intensified across the continent, Greece, with Athens as its epicenter, was embroiled in the complexities of civil war with rightists, centrists, resisters, collaborators, moderate leftists, and Communists actively vying for local dominance when the German occupation began in 1941 and surreptitiously afterward. Against this tense and shifting backdrop, Nicholas Rizopoulos-decades later a discerning historian of European diplomacy-came of age, a challenging enough proposition in times of peace but that much more poignant and unpredictable during war.Greek to the core, the author's family was rooted in the complex cultural life of northern Greece-Macedonia and Thessaly, the fading Ottomans, the ghosts of the Balkan wars, and the re-ascendant Greek polity following the First World War. Athens became their stage, and the narrative beautifully captures the author's formative transition from his early childhood in pre-war Greece though his schoolboy years in an occupied and oftentimes menacing city. Lively and intimate, reflective and concrete, Civil and Uncivil Wars is both a boy's eye view of growing up in a complex family and a mature scholar's subtle insights into the larger context that had shaped his own life without his knowing it at the time.

Civil and Uncivil Wars: Memories of a Greek Childhood, 1936 - 1950

Nicholas X. Rizopoulos

Gilmanton was briefly the most famous town in America. Today the town, nestled amongst the hills of Central New Hampshire and along the curve of the Suncook River, is a microcosm of the changing ways and enduring values of rural life in the twenty-first century. Driving Backwards is a poignant exploration of the vividness of the everyday. Across twenty years of summers, Jessica Lander has come to know Gilmanton and its residents. Valerie, who tends sixtyfive goats,home-schools ten children and crafts artisanal goat cheese. Jim and Cheryl, who raise miniature horses, flocks of chickens and long eared rabbits all on two tiny acres. Duncan, a third generation farmer, who harvests thousands of pound of wild blueberries each year summer. Chuck, who runs a six-generation dairy farm. Lander's guide is David Bickford-a fireman, carpenter, town selectman and nearly one hundred year old storyteller. Through richly observed portraits and elegant prose Lander elevates the ordinary, and encourages a deeper appreciation for the stories that surrounding us. With grace, humor, affection and insight, Driving Backwards blends three hundred years of colorful history with the contemporary lives, seasonal rhythms and varied landscape of modern small-town America.

Driving Backwards

Jessica Lander

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