Here's a look at some of the latest work by New Hampshire Writers' Project members. We try to review as many member books as possible, and we will list all member books sent to us in our "Books by Members" feature in Ex Libris, our bimonthly newsletter. A list of member books is also collected in BookSampler, our annual book catalog. See below for our full book review policy.

Christmas Remembered
Written and Illustrated by Tomie dePaola
reviewed by Lisa Jackson

Reading Tomie dePaola’s memoir, Christmas Remembered,is as comforting as a physical embrace from the man himself as he welcomes us into his home, decorated for the holiday season.  Through his words and illustrations, dePaola touches our spirits in a way that has us feeling as though we are sitting in front of a roaring fire, sipping on hot cider, and watching soft, crisp, white snow falls against the windows. 

Christmas Remembered contains fifteen of dePaola’s holiday memories told in his charming style. He begins the book with his first Christmas memory.  In “The Miraculous Christmas Fireplace,” dePaola writes about a crape-paper and electric fireplace that his parents set up so Santa Clause could come.  They did not have a “real” fireplace.  This is when his love of the holiday is born.  Some of his other stories include “A Fairmount Avenue Christmas,” “A Nan Fall-River Christmas,” and “A San Francisco Christmas.” The vivid descriptions transport readers back in time to a feeling, dreamy and wistful, of what the Christmas holiday is truly about.  Christmas Remembered encompasses religion, tradition, and family yet it’s dePaola’s passion for the holiday season that he shares.  The short stories express what it means to be truly joyous, giving, and absorbed with the happiness of sharing the season with family and friends.  It’s more than the anticipation of one particular day where presents are unwrapped in a hurry and quickly abandoned.  Christmas Remembered is about love—the love one person shares with many, during the holidays, but also throughout the year

Whether you feel you are a friend of dePaola’s before reading this book, or not, once you finish the last page, there is no doubt that he has invited you into his home.  He has shared a warm seat, a hug, and his passion for the holiday with you in a way you will always remember.

Reading and sharing Christmas Remembered with your family this holiday season will become a holiday memory for you and your children to share for years to come.  Christmas Remembered is Tomie dePaola’s love for the holiday spirit wrapped up in a portable easy-to-share format so we can pause and remember our own precious holiday memories, or inspire us to create anew.

G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2006, ISBN 0-399-24622-3, $19.99.

Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of New Guinea 
by Sy Montgomery, photographs by Nic Bishop
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Mi likim kapul longpela Tel!  That’s Tok Pisin, one of the languages of Papua New Guinea, for “I like tree kangaroos.”   In her new book, Quest for the Tree Kangaroo: An Expedition to the Cloud Forest of  New Guinea, Sy Montgomery educates and entertains young readers with the true adventure story of an expedition led by scientist Lisa Dabekto study the tree-dwelling Matschie’s tree kangaroo, among “the rarest, strangest, and least understood creatures on the planet.”  They look like little bears, climb like monkeys, and have pouches.  They are gentle, arguably cuter than Koalas, and vulnerable--especially to the loss of their rain forest habitat.

Montgomery, who lives in Hancock, describes a dedicated group of naturalists--some local, some from the US and England--as they seek the illusive critter to study its ways so they can help it survive.  The team includes a veterinarian, an artist, a reptile expert, a zookeeper, Montgomery herself, and photographer, Nic Bishop, who took the pictures with which the book is generously illustrated.  Besides shots of the team in action and the natives who welcome and assist them, Bishop depicts the lush old-growth rain forest and its exotic inhabitants, including the cassowary, green tree python, bird of paradise, long-beaked echidna, harpy eagle, jumping spider, and, of course, the tree kangaroo. Readers learn what fieldwork entails, especially when the field is 10,000 feet above sea level.

When is a tropical rain forest not hot and steamy?  When it’s cool and misty.  Then it’s a cloud forest--a rain forest found only on tropical mountains. 

In the cloud forest, warm, humid air from the lowlands rises, cool, and condenses.  These special weather conditions create a beautiful, always green forest where the trees grow thick, gnarled and ancient.  Bathed in mist everything is covered with dense moss, thick ferns, and beautiful orchids.

And where your socks never dry.
Field work means packing in--on foot, for miles, uphill--supplies like “3 bales of rice,”  “10 big white bags full of chairs, batteries, and scientific equipment (radio collars, telemetry receivers, Global Positioning System units), veterinary supplies, solar panels, and satellite phone,”  “3 five-liter containers of ethanol, to preserve scientific specimens like kangaroo dung,”  and “48 rolls of toilet paper.” 

Field work sometimes means catching a tree kangaroo! When someone spots a long golden tail hanging from the branches of a Saurauia tree, the action grows intense.

One of the trackers takes off his tall rubber boots.  Barefoot, he begins to climb a smaller tree near to the Saurauia. Within two minutes, he’s as high as the tree kangaroo.

“Joel, do you see where she is?” asks Lisa.  Joel has the ‘roo in his binoculars.  “She’s still there,” he assures.

But the tree kangaroo isn’t happy to see a human approaching.  She climbs another 30 feet up to get away.  If she jumps, it’s a 110-foot drop. 

Suddenly, she leaps, her forearms outstretched.  She drops 30 feet. She grabs a smaller tree on the way down. And now she begins to back down the tree.

She’s almost to the ground when one of the trackers grabs her by the tail and puts her in the burlap bag.

“Pikinini! Pikinini!” the men call.

Quest for the Tree Kangaroo combines a great story about dedicated naturalists --heroes, I’d call them--with a realistic look at the science in action, set in one of the most beautiful places in the world.  Readers learn fascinating science, geography, and history facts. Oh yes, “The local people sometimes had newcomers for dinner--literally.  Headhunting cannibal tribes sometimes ate people clothes and all--except for their shoes.”  Not any more.  (Whew!)

Montgomery, as always, has much to say about the joy of learning, the beauty of this earth, the sanctity of life, and the deep connections among all of us that must be respected and exploited (in a good way).  To save these animals and their habitat, Lisa Dabek partnered with the people who share the rain forest with them, particularly the villagers of Yawan, near the site of her research, a remote location where the tree kangaroos thrive.  Traditionally, natives hunted them.  “Almost everyone ate them.  They almost ate every last one.”  Not anymore.  Lisa’s work over the years helped put a stop to the hunting--now they eat chickens.   The village elders honored her in a ceremony in which they “presented all the village’s bows and arrows and spears.” 

“You take them,” they said.  “We don’t need them any more.”

Local teacher, Pekison Kusso, considers conservation an important part of curriculum. “If we don’t learn how to conserve, the teacher explains, we could lose everything--the tree kangaroos, the forests, even the vines to build houses.” When nine-year-old Ali learns that the Matschie’s tree kangaroo is found only in his home place, “not anywhere else in Papua New Guinea.  Not in Africa or Europe or America,” he says:  “It’s good it’s found only here. Our place has something special. Something we can be proud of.”

Sy Montgomery, author of many wonderful books for children and adults including The Good Good Pig, once again grabs the tail of an amazing story and bags it, in a most entertaining way. 

Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2006. $18.00. (review posted 11/13/06)

Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Presents
Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense
edited by Linda Landrigan
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

The heartbreaking part of compiling Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense, editor Linda Landrigan told me, was cutting the last few stories.  (And I thought editors were supposed to be tough!) Landrigan, who lives in Haverhill, spent four years, give or take, reading through every story ever published in the history of Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, which she also edits. She managed, with lots of reader advice, to narrow hundreds to just fifty (fifty stories to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary). Then came the bad news -- fifty was too many, the book would be obese. Some of her darlings had to go. So, with great difficulty, she winnowed the stories to just thirty-four, bringing the book in at a hefty 542 pages.

I took one look at it and thought:  Hammock! This is my for-fun summer reading (and as someone who reads and writes for a living, I choose for-fun books with care). Having read, as of this writing, about a third of the stories in this anthology, I’m confident that I’ve chosen wisely.

With a subscription base of about 40,000, and readership estimated at 150,000 (people pass this magazine around), Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine has a relatively small (in the grand scale of magazine sales) but loyal readership. You’re not going to find it at the grocery checkout; you might if you’re lucky spot it among literary magazines at a bookstore. “I always think we should be (shelved) with the literary magazines, with a capital L,” Landrigan told me.

Readers of the magazine will find their favorite stories -- old and new -- here. Those who’ve never seen the magazine will discover a riveting collection of the best crime fiction published in the last half century. If you love short stories and mysteries, you’ll be in hog heaven.

The stories go in order from old to new, 1957 through 2004, beginning with “The Frightening Framis” by Jim Thompson. Thompson, like many of the featured writers, wrote often for AHMM. He also wrote twenty-six novels including The Grifters. In “The Frightening Framis,” hitchhiker Mitch Allison better think twice (but of course he doesn’t) before accepting a ride with the beautiful redhead in the big black Cadillac convertible. And he better think again (of course he doesn’t) before agreeing to her scheme to pass himself off as her husband and cash a pile of traveler’s checks.

“Like me mister?” she said softly. “Like to stay with me?”

“Huh?” Mitch licked his lips. “Now look lady--”

“Like to have this car? Like to have half of fifty thousand dollars?”

Mitch always had been a fast guy on the uptake, but this babe was pitching right past him.

“Now look,” he repeated shakily. “I--I--”

“You look,” she said. “Take a good look.”

This is fiction noir, and, fifty years after publication, it may be even more fun than when it was fresh off the Remington manual. Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense represents the history of crime and suspense writing in this country. It’s not only fun to read, but provides thirty-four lessons in how to write a rip-snorting page turner.

I read a lot of mysteries, mostly novels, and many of the writers here were unfamiliar, though some I ‘d heard of – Donald E. Westlake, Sara Paretsky, Ed McBain.  When Landrigan appealed to readers for suggestions, the name Stephen Wasylyk came up often. “Anything by Stephen Wasylyk,” one reader wrote. Wasylyk made his publishing debut in AHMM  in 1968 with a story called “The Loose End.”  He published more than a hundred stories during his long career. Landrigan chose “The Search for Olga Bateau” from 1987. And I can see why – it’s a gem. Columnist Whit Conner seems to have lost his spark. His columns just aren’t as good as they used to be.  Nothing fresh. Nothing innovative. (Hey, it happens.) Maybe solving a decades old missing persons case will re-ignite his creative flame. At the request of a dying man, Conner tries to figure out what happened to the woman he’d loved so many years ago. Did her husband, the famous sculptor, do away with her when he discovered their affair? And if so, what happened to the body?

Like so many stories in this collection the ending both surprises and satisfies. How have the stories changed over the years, I asked Landrigan.

“The early stories, a lot of them,” she said, “had those very twisty endings, and were actually bought for the Alfred Hitchcock t.v. show.” The emphasis then was on the tight story line and clever ending. “It’s hard to pull off,” she said. “A surprising ending still has to be earned.” Now, she says, “the emphasis is less on cleverness and more on character.” Reading these stories, this evolution becomes clear. Much has changed; and, thankfully, much has stayed the same. The last story, “Voodoo,” by Rhys Bowen, from November 2004, like all the stories, begins in the middle of a puzzle. A man has died maybe from natural causes, but the widow suspects voodoo. Set in pre-Katrina New Orleans, the city holds its own as an exotic character, while the motives of the murderer – not for the murder but for subsequent actions – create the deepest mystery.

My favorite, so far, is just a little bit of a story in which point of view drives the action and suspense. Written by Jack Ritchie in 1958 and called “#8,” it begins:

I was doing about eighty, but the long flat road made it feel only that fast. The redheaded kid’s eyes were bright and a little wild as he listened to the car radio. When the news bulletin was over, he turned down the volume.

He wiped the side of his mouth with his hand. “So far they have found seven of his victims.”

Who will “#8” be?  Oh, you’ll be surprised! Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense makes for great summer reading – a big book for a long (we hope) hot summer.  Hammock, here I come.

Pegasus Books, 2006. $16.95. (review posted 7/23/06)

New Hampshire Then & Now
by Peter Randall
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Through December, the exhibition “New Hampshire Then and Now” will be on view in Concord at the New Hampshire Historical Society’s Park Street library. Peter Randall’s new book by the same title catalogues the exhibit – and stands on its own as fascinating look at how our state has changed over the last century and a half, and – even more fascinating – how it has stayed the same.

This is Randall’s third book of New Hampshire photographs. He has been publishing his photographs and words about our landscape and history since 1974, producing thirteen books on his own, and many more by others through his publishing house. He documents us, and in New Hampshire Then and Now he documents transformation as well as continuity. The photographs are paired. The photograph of the Acworth Church flanked by the school and town house c. 1900 looks almost exactly the same as in 2005. Randall writes:

For Acworth and many other small towns, time seemed to stop. As older residents died and their children moved away, the villages changed little for nearly a century. A few farmers held on, but others died or left. A walk in woods divided by stonewalls tells the story of long-abandoned hayfields and nearby cellar holes.

As I looked at the church and compared my planned photograph with one taken perhaps a hundred years ago, I marveled at how little has changed in the view. There are not many places where you can see this. There are no ugly power lines or traffic lights, and the town house still needs to be painted: no vinyl siding here. Even today, there is only one paved road into town; if you want to go north to Unity, take the dirt road next to the school.

Will Acworth be like this forever, Randall wonders. Even in Acworth the population is creeping up. It doubled between 1950 and 2000 to nearly nine hundred. 

Randall acknowledges the population deluge that has flooded Hillsborough, Rockingham, and Merrimack Counties. But he chooses not to show the fast food restaurants and orange-roofed Home Depots where cows once grazed. No panoramas of strip malls in this book. We see them every day, and we know they aren’t pretty. We enjoy their convenience, and we know they symbolize what we have lost.  Randall doesn’t have to remind us of that sad truth. Instead, he illustrates a few ways in which the more things change, the more they stay the same. The two photos of Milford’s Union Square, 1940 and 2004, show the same gazebo, different varieties of trees (the elms long gone), same church, similar store fronts, dirt paths newly paved with brick, new models of cars, wooden benches replaced by granite, and old folks – then and now – relaxing on those benches, taking a load off, taking a little sun. Instead of the horse-drawn stage coach pulled up in front of Fred Keyser’s store in North Sutton c. 1900, a 2003 photo shows a sporty red sedan, the Gulf sign over the gas pump, and a banner advertising Korean take out.

Besides these traditional – same place, different time – juxtapositions, he translates then into now with pairings that illustrate what something has become. Here’s a photo of workers in the finishing room of the W.S. & R.W. Pillsbury Shoe Shop, West Derry, 1899. The women, wearing long dresses with high collars, voluminous aprons, pose between shelves lined with shoes and an untidy work bench. Here’s Paul Mathews, proprietor of the Cordwainer Shop in Deerfield, 2005. In the foreground, three pairs of finished shoes; all around lie the tools of his trade, shoe forms, pliers, knives.  He’s slicing into a piece of red leather. The caption reads:

By age 17, Paul was designing shoes for his father’s custom shoe business. Cordwainer shoes all have round toes and low heels and the correct fit for health and comfort.  Shoe styles that Paul designed in the 1930s are the same popular ones he makes today.  At age 87, Paul still travels the country to participate in fine juried craft shows.  Paul’s wife and daughter make the shoes alongside him in the shop, which is attached to his country farmhouse. 

In another creative leap, a picture of the blacksmith shop at Abbot-Downing Company, Concord, c. 1880, where parts for Concord Coaches are being fabricated is matched with the assembly line at Segway Company, Bedford, 2005.  Besides swivel chairs, mirrors and men in white jackets, a Concord barbershop, c. 1898, boasts an ornate potbelly stove and a sleeping terrier.  Compare this with the interior of The Clip Joint in Portsmouth, 2005, where the clients are men and boys, the barbers are women, and the razors electric.

Randall’s collection represents the whole state, top to bottom, side to side.  He includes images of a dark Victorian parlor in Alton, 1890, and its sunny 2005 counterpart.  Raking hay by hand in Barnstead in the ‘40s looks some different from haying with a Case International tractor at one of the last dairy farms in East Colebrook.  Teddy Roosevelt campaigns in Concord in 1912.  John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, Wesley Clark and John Edwards campaign in Portsmouth in 2004.  In Cornish, the same people seem to have attended both the 1947 and 2004 town meetings – different styles of clothing, same hard chairs and serious faces.

Randall takes readers from the lakes to the sea and from the Isles of Shoals to Franconia Notch for the saddest pairing of all:  Cannon Mountain with the Old Man; Cannon Mountain without.

Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2006. $40.00. (review posted 7/23/06)

It was Keats who wrote, “Poetry should be…a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject,” and this is precisely what Pat Fargnoli’s poems achieve in her luminous third collection. These poems pay attention – to a sense of belonging and alienation in the human and natural world, and to the complex web of existence – in a voice that is subtle, deeply attenuated to its content, and transparent enough to let its subjects shine through. 

In her opening poem, “The Invitation,” Fargnoli signals the reader to enter a realm of wonderment – the garden where “the impossible / is shaking / its bright turquoise feathers” – but ends with the admonition: “What you have left behind / will forget you / soon enough.”  In this bittersweet vein, Fargnoli’s poems mine the duties of the spirit – to bear the fleeting impermanence of “joy,” the balm of “serenity,” and the inescapable weight of “grief.” Aging and the inevitability of death are recurring subjects, and Fargnoli faces them with honesty as well as bewilderment, as in On Reaching Sixty-Five: “Life, like a smoke ring, lifts / into the old air / where I can’t put my finger on it.” In  the powerful “Arguing Life for Life,” the speaker, a therapist, counsels a patient against committing suicide while wondering to herself: “…what is left to tether me to the earth.” But there’s hope in Fargnoli’s vision as well – in “The Point of Deepest Loveliness,”the speaker ecstatically recalls a life lived vibrantly: “I grasp the fullness in the fullness of days, / in the surplus of filling, my body blooms, / the moments explode…” Yet in Desire #1,  Fargnoli acknowledges the state of longing as constant: “Desire is one condition of the soul. / Our bones move us forward, / we grab whatever we can.”

Duties of the Spirit offers stark glimpses into the essential transience of existence while paying homage to the consolations of beauty, love, and nature along the way.  These poems aim for the heart, and like sure arrows, reach their target again and again.

Tupelo Press, 2005.  $16.95. (review posted 7/23/06)

Early Settlement and Other Poems
by Charles Churchill
reviewed by Gordon Lang

Patience, urgency, and mortality: three distinct currents merge into one stream in Charles Churchill’s new collection, Early Settlement and Other Poems. I imagine him waiting eagerly as he tugs our shirtsleeves, saying, “This is really important. Take your time.”

Churchill knows the value of rest. He complains of “a life that always moves too fast” and bids us “pause to rest between the workings of [the] tides.” Even so, his lines read fast; his easy iambs trip right along and the ghosts of the long poem “Early Settlement” are so familiar that our tendency is to race through the second half of the book. Resist this temptation. We’ll only reach our own end that much sooner, rushing towards a “Reclamation” by a hungry and indifferent nature, a time when “all the earth below/ Is wild again within this utter night.” No, these are poems to savor.

Churchill has taken characters we are familiar with and breathed new life into them. They may remind us of the Hester Prynnes and Ethan Fromes we’ve read about in all their various Peyton Places, but they are made more real because their reality reflects the hardscrabble lives of the real folks who worked this land. And that is Churchill’s strength and genius:  he has rebuilt homes in abandoned cellar holes, puffed new life into expired lungs, and reminded us of a life we never lived, but always felt we knew. His reconstructed Porter, Maine, like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, is so specific and quirky in its detail that it wipes clean a window peeking into the universal truths of human nature. In “Clara,” for example, when Seth describes courting his second wife, he speaks not of love or of her beauty, but of the “red tongue between/ Her strong white teeth”; he notes not that he swept her off her feet or that either swooned with desire but rather that “Clara stayed and Clara stayed and stayed.” Less subtle is Angie Blake, who declares in her eponymous piece, “A secret comes out bare in lonely times.”

Charlie Churchill knows his literary roots; he taught a lifetime of high school English to more than one generation of area youths. But his heart was also absorbed in the other activities which give life meaning. For Churchill, this could mean ice-fishing, hunting, or pitting his pluck, his patience, and his dinghy against a riptide, but it also means basking in the warmth of home and family. His has been a life, one senses, in search of perspective. I don’t mean to suggest that he was ever at risk of losing his soul to the capitalist rat-race, chasing the American Dream, but rather that he has pondered his place in the universe, where he fits in with what has come before and what is yet to follow.

Churchill comes closest to pronouncing his theology or cosmology in “Song,” when he speaks of a “great universal choir,” but his worship feels truer, more heartfelt, when he’s waxing on about bobsleds or ice-out or the inscrutable religion that is smelting. Nature, I read, has been his passion and his solace, perhaps a home-wrecking mistress at times and certainly his nurse. It is to nature that the narrator of “Tides” returns, “In hopes a day beyond the world of man/ Might, somehow, in its ocean hours, contrive/ To mend the ragged canvas of my life.” And nature is the irresistible force which ultimately reclaims all we build in life and our lives themselves. In “Forever” Churchill shares the heart-rending sadness that spills out of a failed marriage. In “Reclamation” he reminds us that we all have another spouse, more faithful, even mercilessly so in our later years: “With spring and summer, early fall all fled,/ The north wind rustles first then hammers hard/ On things gone by that lived on borrowed ground.” This ground and our lives are the “something borrowed” that we bring to this wedding. What is old is the heritage of our forebears. What’s new, perpetually new, is the optimistic yearning of Churchill’s voice. And yet occasionally, he strikes a blue, blue note, as in this lyrical departure (“Forever”) from his customary blank verse: “And I thought again about forever/ and all it could not mean.”

Early Settlement and Other Poems is handsomely illustrated by Dawn Marion and handsomely presented by Beech River Books. A slim volume, its heft is in its value: this is the work of a lifetime. Churchill notes in his foreword that he is not one of those writers who writes every day, but like some stereotypically laconic New England farmer, his few pronouncements pack that much more punch for their distillation. I liken him to Arnold, of “Moving Day,” who “dealt with things and seldom lent his thoughts,/ But now it came to him that what he had/ Was never his to hold for long and so/ Must be for all the world that needs to move.” Thank goodness he has seen us stirring and has offered up what he has for us to take and use.

“Some words,” Churchill writes in “Old Cellar,” “like distant granite walls, are poised/ Too far away from life to be a part.” Not true of these words. They are the foundation of life. The weeds and undergrowth of these cellar holes have been scythed away. Step up and read this book; study the traditions which have long supported who we are.

Beech River Books, 2006. $24.00. (review posted 7/23/06)

North to Katahdin
By Eric Pinder
reviewed by Marion E. Cason

Living at Walden Pond about a hundred fifty years ago, David Thoreau wrote in his diaries questions about travelers and how they traveled, who they were and what they saw. Thoreau often hiked Mount Katahdin, the end of the Appalachian Trail and the beginning of the North Woods, the untouched land in northern-most Maine. Pinder wonders just how much have the trails changed. He follows Thoreau's route and senses the invasion of human life, forest cutting, logging roads, and towns springing up within sight of Katahdin. Pinder has hiked the trails many times as a young boy staying at his grandmothers in Millinocket, Maine.  Now Baxter State Park surrounds Katahdin to keep progress at bay.

Pinder does a beautiful job of describing Mount Katahdin and the changes taken place from the forming of the mountain to the time of Thoreau's trips and today. Pinder refers to the early Abanaki Indians and tells how that area of Maine was sacred for them. Katahdin was their hunting grounds and they used it for council meetings. The Abanakis tolerated the early settlers who also hunted for food in the mountains. When it became too crowded for their comfort, all the Indians left except for Pamola. an Abanaki Indian god, now ghost, who wreaks havoc with the weather causing snow, ice, and wind, and changes the slopes of the mountain itself. Pamola haunts the mountain by putting the peak of Katahdin in dense fog and confusing many hikers who quickly abandon the trails.

North to Katahdin is both informative and relaxing. You can feel the quiet and see the beauty of the woods. There is a sense of civilization creeping in with new highways and villages. With the advancing civilization, Pinder senses future generations will not have this natural world to view.  This is a well-written travel log through history and the invasion of humans disturbing Mother Nature's havens for wild life.

Milkweed Editions, 2005. $15.95. (review posted 7/23/06)

Breakfast in the Bathtub
A Book of Smiles
by Fred Samuels and Joann Snow Duncanson
reviewed by Martha Johnson

Fred Samuels and Joann Snow Duncanson have collaborated on Breakfast in the Bathtub, a series of essays and poems subtitled “A Book of Smiles.”

In a written conversation at the beginning of the book, they ask each other for their own definition of humor.  Joan says that “humor is one of the best gifts in life I have ever received.” Fred claims that “humor is in my blood.” Using different forms of literary style, Fred and Joann take the ordinary happenings of everyday life and make them funny:  a trip to the doctor for a shot, the embarrassment of a young man at his first life drawing class, or even a discussion of the bladder are all topics in this book.

In her poem, “The Ladies Look Lovely on Fridays,” Joann takes us through the week after a regular Friday visit to the hairdresser. As one might imagine, Thursdays are not the best days to go out. Fred describes his infatuation, as a young man, with his teacher. When he presents her with a beautiful goldenrod bouquet, to his bewilderment, she runs sneezing from the room. Joann’s schadenfreude as she discovers that the beautiful young thing ahead of her in the coffee shop line doesn’t have such perfect skin after all, makes us nod with nasty agreement.

The short essay form provides the perfect written style for small tales of family get togethers, naughty wise men, card tricks, and even demonizing raccoons: Should New Hampshire’s first gambling casino be called Raccoonwood?

Joann has fun reorganizing nursery rhymes and takes Emily Dickinson to the mall, while Fred pulls out a variety of poem forms – a sprung-rhythm sonnet and a clerihew to name a few. In case you didn’t know, a clerihew is sort of like a limerick without the last line.

Here’s an example of an observation by Joann:

It’s curious, when you think of it
why men still on the sidewalk spit,
when their hair’s been permed, eyes with contacts lensed,
and their bodies with musk soap so thoroughly cleansed.
Let’s hope that we females in our liberation
never take up the habit of expectoration

Fred, a former professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire finds Garrison Kieller, Jonathan Winters, and the Marx Brothers among those who he thinks are funny.  Joann, originally a humorous verse editor for a greeting card company and a newspaper columnist, relies on her friends and Fred as her sources for humor.  Breakfast in the Bathtub really is a book of smiles.

Peter E. Randall, Publisher, 2005.  $15.00. (review posted 7/23/06)

The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood
by Sy Montgomery
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

 “They called him the spotted thing” at the farm where he was born.  A runt’s runt, no bigger than a cat.  Who knew when Sy Montgomery bought Christopher Hogwood home in a shoebox he would become one of the great loves of her life? Montgomery, of Hancock, loves fiercely:  her husband, historian and writer Howard Mansfield, for example; her parents, though she’d been semi-estranged from them since marrying right out of college until their deaths decades later; her work, traveling, researching, and writing about exotic species (man-eating tigers of the Sundarbans, pink dolphins of the Amazon, great apes in Zaire, the golden moon bear of Southeast Asia). Who knew the little pig would grow so big in her heart. 

Christopher Hogwood lived to be fourteen, about thirteen years longer than his litter mates.  He grew to 750 pounds, and he enchanted Montgomery, Mansfield, their friends and neighbors.  Montgomery’s new book, The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood, chronicles not only his life but his extraordinary power to teach human beings the joy of living simply, honestly, and in the moment. The Good Good Pig will remind readers of that other porcine literary great, Wilbur of Charlotte’s Web.  Except Christopher is real, as his photos prove: Chris decorated for Chris-mas, lounging in the pig spa, slurping a Schlitz, or stretched contentedly in the sun with a small boy, equally content, sprawled across his broad back. 

Montgomery is one of those rare writers with perfect pitch and astounding range -- she could write about anything and we’d be enthralled.   She has learned (through many books, radio essays, newspaper columns) how to write about a near death experience like being stalked by a man-eating tiger with a steady detachment that chills readers’ bones, or describe a happy pig with such affection and poetry that not only do we understand why she loves him, but we fall in love with him, too. To see Chris was to understand “what bliss looked like.”  Entertainment, on the other hand, is a hog at the trough.  When it came to eating, “Christopher was a performance artist.”

Watching a pig eat is the ultimate vicarious thrill.  Seldom can you take such pleasure in another’s joy.  Here is someone following his bliss. . . . Grunting, slurping, and snorting with delight, Christopher ate with the enthusiasm of a gourmand and the natural grace of an athlete.  Food wasn’t just the number one thing on his list; we figured food occupied numbers one through perhaps fifty on his hierarchy of desires.

Chris could pluck a strawberry from a child’s hand.  Or catch a tossed cupcake in his mouth.  His pleasure in eating was such fun to watch, Montgomery could have sold tickets.  But, in the spirit of pig generosity, she let folks enjoy the spectacle for free.

The uninitiated might think that pigs just Hoover everything up.  That was not the case with Hogwood.  Unless the foods had commingled in the slops bucket to the point that they were indistinguishable, he carefully chose the items he liked best first, lifting them rather delicately, albeit noisily, with his flexible lips: pasta, pastry, cheese, and fruit. (From an early age, he had a sweet tusk.)  Next best were carrots and starches, including rice and potatoes -- especially if they had acquired, either in their original preparation or during their stay in the slops bucket, some kind of creamy sauce.  Lastly, though still with flourish, he would eat the leftover kale, broccoli, spinach, and the like.  If there was any trace of onion or a scrap of lemon or orange peel, he would leave this untouched.  If the meal contained any unpeeled eggs, he would crunch them up and then slowly and delicately spit out the shells.

Like Montgomery, Chris was a life-long vegetarian.  And the Montgomery-Mansfield household didn’t generate enough leftovers to feed a growing pig.  So the nourishment of Christopher became a community project.  Seems the people of Hancock and surrounds were more than happy to donate, and Christopher welcomed all delectables.

Christopher’s happiness showed not only in his eating but all aspects of his life.  He loved to root, to stretch out on pig plateau and take the sun.  He loved being bathed at the pig spa.  He loved nothing more than a long, vigorous belly rub.  He loved company and communicated clearly in grunts and sighs and snuffles.  He loved life.  Every minute of it. Once, stuck on a slope on his side with his legs pointed uphill and no hope of rising, he just waited.  For hours. Confident that help would come. Not that he needed it.  He could, it seemed, lie on that side hill forever, perfectly content.   That was the thing with Christopher Hogwood: he was happy whatever the circumstances.  His cup was not only half full but slopping over.

The big pig enriched and anchored the life of Montgomery, the adventurer. For her, Chris meant home. Throughout The Good Good Pig we get the inside scoop on Montgomery’s dangerous escapades in faraway places, swimming with dolphins in a piranha-infested river, for example, or being bitten by a vampire bat.  “How can you go to all these difficult, dangerous jungles?” people would ask her.  Having a pig to come home to was, in part, the answer.

           

 Ballantine Books, 2005. $21.95. (review posted 5/27/06)

Sail Away, Little Boat
by Janet Buell, illustrated by Jui Ishida
reviewed by Rebecca Rule
 
Sail into spring with Janet Buell’s delightful picture book, Sail Away, Little Boat.  Buell, of Goffstown, has published several books on dead people, a fascinating series for young readers each featuring a different kind of mummy, from Ancient Horseman of Siberia to Ice Maidens of the Andes.  In her new book she makes the leap from nonfiction to fiction, and from middle-grade readers to the littlest readers and listeners. And this time she’s writing about life.

Inspired by a walk along a brook, this simple, beautiful story is as New Hampshire as can be -- and as universal as well.  Having tried to write picture books, I know that simple and beautiful are remarkable achievements.  Think of the limitations:  32 pages, fewer than 500 words that evoke distinct images, keep the story moving, can be understood by a four-year-old, and, in this case, offer profound messages about ecology, adventure, and connection.

Buell gets help from Jui Ishida, the illustrator.  Ishida was born in Taiwan and grew up in Japan. Her paintings evoke the orient in the flow of line, the surprising balance of muted natural colors and the bright red and blue boat with its yellow and white sail. The story begins with two stylized children, boxy and pink-cheeked, beside a swift brook.  You can see the fish, again stylized, but clearly fish, moving in the translucent current flowing over and around smooth rocks.  A small dog with bead eyes and a pink tongue watches.

Let’s launch our boat
in the wild roving brook
and watch as it slides and swirls
through the nooks

Turn page.

of a root-tangled bank
where deer come to eat
the tasty green moss
growing thick at their feet.

The rhyme works, the story glides.  Kids will enjoy the repeated stanza:

Sail Away, Little Boat
to search for new friends.
Just follow the brook
till it reaches its end.

They will love discovering the new friends, beginning with the deer, then whirligig beetles, silver-swift minnows, a blue dragonfly, a nimble-quick newt, a prowling red fox, a mink:

. . . scrambling by
where the giant oak fell,
as the brook tumbles on
with a white-water yell.

The boat tumbles with the brook in open-eyed wonder to the river and then the sea.  Eventually, it washes up on a beach to the wonder of other children, ones who “love little boats that go traveling by.”

Carolrhoda Books, 2006. $15.95. (review posted 5/27/06)

Inside Writing: How to Teach the Details of Craft
by Donald H. Graves and Penny Kittle
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

“What is there not enough of in your life right now, this very minute? Write about it.”  Donald Graves and Penny Kittle prompt a quick write, one of seventy or so in My Quick Writes, a companion volume for Inside Writing: How to Teach the Details of Craft. 

In my life, truth be told, there’s not enough writing.

Sure I write three or four Bookmarks columns each month, but other than that it’s set lists for storytelling gigs, lesson outlines for school visits, and e-mails organizing those storytelling gigs and school visits.  Oh, and grocery lists.  Without my brilliant grocery lists, we’d be out of olive oil, tin foil, and toilet paper just when we needed them most.  It’s true: I spend two to six hours a day in my office typing into and reading from the computer--and yet, what I need more of in my life is writing.  The kind of writing in which you reflect, recollect, reframe, relive and, generally, make sense out of experience.  The calming kind.  The healing kind.  The kind that helps you grow and learn. The kind that helps you survive.  The kind Don Graves and Penny Kittle model in Inside Writing.  Though full of practical advice for teachers, this book’s philosophy reaches beyond the classroom.  Something like:  Slow down if you seek true accomplishment.   Improvement comes from building on strengths, not getting beaten over the head with weaknesses.  Connect with respect.  And listening is a powerful tool in teaching, learning, and life.

Basically, Don and Penny teach teachers to write with their students.  Don says:

When I began my teaching career in 1956 the school day was the same length as it is now.  But the curriculum has expanded fivefold, interruptions have tripled, and assessment requires more attention than ever before.  To say that today’s teachers are pressed for time is a gross understatement.  Nevertheless, when teachers compose texts of their own -- texts they care about -- during writing workshop, precious time is saved.  Teachers reveal to their students the decisions all writers must make about every aspect of writing and demonstrate the skills that make writing clear and meaningful.

Practice what you preach; do what you teach; show by example.  Don and Penny teach teachers to write and use their writing in their teaching by, get this, writing and using their own writing in this book and on the accompanying DVD.  They model the modeling process.  Don’s wife Betty, a retired nurse and environmental docent, plunges in with her own essays and poetry shown in drafts throughout the book, providing another model.  Settings for the DVD include Don Graves’ study on a hillside in Jackson as he works on his laptop, line by line, word by word, speaking his thoughts as he moves through a draft.   Writing sessions, workshops, and conferences feature Dexter Harding and his students at Jackson Grammar School, Sue Ann Martin’s class at Broken Ground Elementary School in Concord, and the classrooms of Lucie Swain and Vicki Hill at Josiah Bartlett elementary in Bartlett.  The combination of the text, DVD, and My Quick Writes notebook allows participants to read the ideas, see them applied in real classrooms, and practice their own writing in the notebook. “This book is built on your own writing,” the authors say. “You can’t skip the writing part and just read the text.”

They also recommend reading the book and viewing the DVD with colleagues, then reflecting together (writing, too) on how this applies to them and their work--collaborating on how to use the information presented.  Speaking of collaboration, Penny describes her writing workshop of teachers at Kennett High School and how, over five years, the group has energized and informed her teaching and her writing. 

One of my favorite readers asks questions when he’s confused by my writing.  He doesn’t point out weak leads, broken paragraphs, rabbit trails.  He asks.  I never feel inadequate with him.  That’s the teacher I want to be for my students.

We need to nurture the fire that made us English teachers.  We should contribute pieces to the school literary magazine or perform at the next poetry slam.  We must process writing with our students, not stand apart from them as the authority when we are afraid to try the craft ourselves.  We should give our students the gift of having a writer for a teacher.  We have to find the time.

Heinemann, 2005. $45. (review posted 5/11/06)

Beast at the Hearth by Martha Carlson-Bradley
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

What poetry can do! Among other things, it can peel away the skin of those old horror stories for children we call fairy tales to reveal adult truths that resonate deeply with how we live now. Among other things, it can document a physical and emotional landscape day-by-day -- three lines at a time, five syllables/seven syllables/five syllables -- to create, all told, a very big picture.

First, the fairy tales. Martha Carlson-Bradley of Hillsborough turns fairy tales inside out in Beast at the Hearth. This is her second chapbook from Adastra Press. The first, Nest Full of Cries, reinterpreted “Hansel and Gretel” in poems. This one takes inspiration from stories of the Beast: “Snow White and Rose Red,” “Hans My Hedgehog,” and “The Winter Rose.” Published in a limited edition, the book’s Colophon itself is a kind of poem:

Type is hand set Garamond Old Style, a metal type that traces its roots to 17th century France. Paper is Neenah’s Environment Felt natural White text and Sadona Red endwrapped with Wausau’s Royal Fiber Rose; all in 80 lb. weight, all recycled. Work occurred as winter reluctantly gave up its snow and the fisherman tied trout flies.

If every book received such loving attention, I contend, the world would be better for it. Carlson-Bradley’s poems earn the paper they’re printed on. She peels these Grimm fairy tales to their sensual essentials in three spare, excruciatingly beautiful poems. In “Snow White and Rose Red,” the beast is a bear and an object of fascination for two sisters. When the bear comes to them, the sisters embrace him. Somehow in fairy tales, characters can see beyond the hairy surface to the goodness within.  “Why is the bear awake out of season,” they wonder, “its coat crystalized with snow?”

Cold, it weeps
down in its throat

as she slides her fingers
deep into fur:

the touch sets her skin
tingling with friction.

The bear closes his eyes.
He lays his head, sighing,
in her sister’s lap.

The bear unites and, ultimately, separates these sisters who sleep “arm in arm . . . like halves of a locket.”

The title character of“Hans My Hedgehog” seems even harder to love. On the bottom he’s a man, but on top, nothing but quills. Still “the princess who keeps her promises” meets him in the bridal chamber where his candlelit quills seem to tremble in the flickering shadows.” Her courage and honor reap the reward of bearing witness as:

he strips off his pelt as easily as clothing
and flings it -- empty mask --in the fire:

the skin to his waist in human form,
burned black -- ready to heal.

Carlson-Bradley begins with fairy tales and writes her way into fertile territory like the power of the open heart to transform. No wonder she won a 2005 NH State Council for the Arts fellowship for poems based on a 1650 map of the moon, a project she’s been working on for ten years. “After toiling for so long,” she says, “it was wonderful to feel recognized . . . . I’d just turned to freelance editing, so that first year out on my own was a little scary. I was taken completely by surprise, having applied for a fellowship, on and off, over the course of about fifteen years.”  

Adastra Press, 2005. $12.00. (review posted 4/9/06)

Winter to Winter: A Year of Seasonal Change in the Monadnock Foothills by Jack Kraichnan
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Jack Kraichnan of Dublin goes outsidefor the source of his limited-edition book-as-art -- Winter to Winter: A Year of Seasonal Change in the Monadnock Foothills. This book, he explains, “records the drama of seasonal change in New England through regular observations written as brief poems. . . . I wrote most of the poems during a daily five-mile loop walk in the eastern foothills of New Hampshire’s Mount Monadnock, in a landscape of field, woods and wetlands. I took this walk in all weather from mid-December 2002 to mid-December 2003. In our increasingly developed and engineered world, weather is one of the last forces of Nature left wild. Being out in it for a year was a gift.”
 
Kraichnan’s gift to readers is this thick-paged volume with a soft brown cover, plain except for a line-drawn silhouette of Monadnock. He offers two haikus to a page, sequenced by season, for 191 pages. That’s a lot of haikus. Here are four March meditations:

Mourning doves exchange
Soft, hollow calls like breaths blown
Across bottles’ mouths

Swollen with snowmelt
Brook stands over stone in wave
Thick as molten glass

Cerulean sky
Puffs of snow from hemlock boughs
Greet the morning wind

I grasp dry oak leaf
And find it soaked with warmth from
Bright pool of March sun

If each of us walked every day in the woods and wrote haikus, I contend, we would all be better for it.

Snow Brook Press, 2005. $19.95. (review posted 4/9/06)

The Other Side of Sorrow, edited by Patricia Frisella and Cicely Buckley
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

If you’re bone weary of listening to talking heads spin this war and wars in the making, turn your ear to the poets. Maybe the poets know how to save us. Maybe they will, if we let them.

Editors Patricia Frisella of Farmington and Cicely Buckley of Durham spent more than a year gathering poems for The Other Side of Sorrow: Poets Speak Out about Conflict, War, and Peace.  The project began, Frisella told me, with Sam Hamill, a West Coast author of more than thirty books of poetry, essays and translations. Hamill called on poets across the country to host community readings to address the then-impending war in Iraq. Hamill, founder of Poets Against the War, is a man with passion fueled convictions -- and he’s not afraid to express them, as he does in this column from the Poets Against the War newsletter Winter, 2006:

In what country am I living? Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Our guy's lighting matches. Does anyone give a damn about gulags or torture or massive eavesdropping on such "threats" as the Quakers or students for nonviolence? Does anyone object to the shredding of our Constitution? Does anyone find "the war on terror" to be a declaration of perpetual war and a march into fascism, and does anyone find that idea appalling? Does anyone object to energy policies written by energy companies that turn record-breaking profits while the citizenry shells out hundreds of billions of dollars for an immoral war and billions more in the wake of Katrina? War profiteers make war. But the blood stains each of us on every side.

Here in New England, many responded to Hamill’s passion, answered his call and the readings began. “Both readers and audience,” the editors say, “many of them veterans, were surprised by the deep grief, anger and hope expressed. The idea of a book came naturally, and a year was spent tracking down poems heard at these readings and beyond.” Some of the poems come from writers whose work we know well: Maxine Kumin, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Cynthia Huntington, former NH Poet Laureate; Robert Dunn, John Perrault, and Maren Tirabassi, former Portsmouth Poet Laureates; Mimi White, current Portsmouth Poet Laureate. Others, say the editors, “do not consider themselves poets, (but) know this is the medium through which they can best convey thoughts on such a prodigious topic. Many are simply poets toiling in the fields of words and finding land mines where there should be rutabagas.”

The editors’ search yielded many more poems than the book could hold, even when it grew from the 160 pages planned to nearly 250 pages. Frisella says they were able to print about half of the poems received. Along the way they worked with some poets to revise “poems that had promise but lacked polish.” And, “as we went along if we heard or read a poem we wanted, we tracked it down.”

In this way, the poems of Bat-Chen Sharak found their way into the anthology. This was a girl who died in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv in 1996. In this way, poems by Sorley MacLean found their way in. MacLean -- a Scot, born 1911, died 1996 -- spent a lifetime addressing injustice, in particular, the Clearances foisted on the Gaels. The anthology’s title is drawn from his poem, “The Cuillin.”

Beyond the lochs of the blood of the children of men,
beyond the frailty of the plain and the labor of the mountain,
beyond poverty, consumption, fever, agony,
beyond hardship, wrong, tyranny, distress,
beyond misery, despair, hatred, treachery,
beyond guilt and defilement; watchful,
heroic, the Cuillin is seen
rising on the other side of sorrow.

The poets of The Other Side of Sorrow write about many wars. Frisella says, “We were very partial to veterans, and you will see that there are veterans from WWII through the current war in Iraq.” And yet, the editors add, “This book is not intended to be a polemic against war, but a view of the world in conflict through the eyes of poets. Perhaps, to paraphrase Whitman, it will bring hope to the downtrodden and strike terror in the hearts of despots. Perhaps it will help turn the barge of conflict toward more peaceful shores.”

Congratulations to The Poetry Society of New Hampshire, which published this book, and to Patricia Frisella and Cicely Buckley, whose vision guided it into print. On these pages readers will find hundreds of poems on the subject of war. Some are gentle, some violent; some ugly, some beautiful; some abstract, some painfully detailed; some ironic, some raging; some full of despair, some acknowledging hope.

I wish there were space here to quote a hundred of them. I wish I could choose one that would give full flavor of this ambitious and provocative volume. Instead, as a token, I offer this small poem by Gary Widger of Dover -- a poem, he explains, “that concerns itself with the sadness of war; of people hurting and being hurt.”

Winter, 1939

The boot prints around the grave
are small German snow angels.

Today is a good day, because of the snow
falling and filling so we can pretend
the winter is done.

The Other Side of Sorrow is available at independent bookstores or may be ordered by e-mail from frisella@worldpath.net.
Poetry Society of New Hampshire, 2006. $16.00. (review posted 4/8/06)

Refined to Real Food: Moving Your Family Toward Healthier Wholesome Eating by Allison Anneser with Sara Thyr, ND
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Maybe it was the visit to the new food co-op in Concord (South Main Street, across from Gibson’s Bookstore), maybe it’s that New Year’s resolution to live healthier; maybe it’s the craving for garden fresh tomatoes and greens that comes on so strong in the dead of winter; maybe it was a flashback to the early eighties, when I belonged to a grassroots (in somebody’s basement) food co-op and bought carob coated peanuts by the bucket, black strap molasses by the gallon, and brown rice by the sack. Something drew me to this how-to book by Allison Anneser of Hollis with Dr. Sara Thyr of Nashua--how to eat healthier, that is, in this age of highly processed food that’s so tantalizingly convenient. Buy it, rip the packaging off (as directed), nuke it, and in 6.5 minutes you’ve got Savory Salmon Slathers in lime/mango sauce, yukon gold potatoes with garlic and gorgonzola, buttered green beans almondine, and lemon-cake dessert, all on one toss-away plate.

Perfect. Until you read the label. Not the part that says--low carb, low fat, this is the stuff they eat on South Beach where everybody’s skinny and fit--but the fine print about soy lecithin, mono-di-and-triglycerides, malodextrin, hydrogenated oil, fatty acids, ammonium chloride, etc.

This stuff is not good for you.

This is not news to you. Nor was it news to me. I know those t.v. dinners are full of chemicals. But they’re so tasty. As are the canned soups, meals in a box, breaded protein nuggets, heat-and-eat breakfasts. We all know these foods aren’t healthy. In Refined to Real Food: Moving Your Family Toward Healthier, Wholesome Eating, Anneser and Thyr are preaching to the choir--it’s just that the choir doesn’t always have time to practice.

So these authors do a smart thing. Instead of using the Animal Farm model of bleached-white-flour-treated-with-dough-conditioners bad, whole-grains-ground-by-hand-under-a-full-moon good, they suggest ways to move from the absolute-worst (artificial sweeteners) to the not-too-bad (brown sugar) to the pretty good (raw sugar, natural jams) to best (pure maple syrup, honey, stevia). They offer these options for several food categories--grains, sweeteners, nuts and seeds, oils, legumes, poultry and eggs, fish, vegetables and fruits, and dairy.

Not everything has to be “organic” either. Though organic products contain more nutrients and fewer toxins making them worth the higher prices, you can’t beat “locally grown conventional produce picked at its peak.” Also, “Many grass-fed meat products contain more nutrients but do not meet all of the standards required by the National Organic Program. However, farmers and ranchers conscious enough to pasture-raise animals probably follow the organic model closely and produce quality products.”

These are health food evangelists, with healthy doses of common sense. They advocate whole, nutrient-dense foods in their original form, “plant foods in their natural state, and animal products from animals in their natural environments, eating their natural diets. It has always made sense and will always make sense: eat real foods.”

Or at least as real as you can get them, as often as you are able.  “Healthful eating is not about doing everything perfectly. It is a process of changing what you eat to more nutritious foods.” Anneser, the narrator, gives this example:

Decide where you can make the most impact without getting overwhelmed. For example, making soup helped me include many traditionally difficult whole foods: whole grains, vegetables, and legumes. Canned soup is not as nutritious as homemade, so it is worthwhile to make it. However, making my own broth (“stock”), at this point in my life is unrealistic and overwhelming. So I buy it. . . . Decide where to draw the line between everything made from scratch and everything processed, prepared and packaged. Each family has to decide what changes they can handle and what needs to wait.

She advises readers to keep the rituals that make you happy like warm cookies for the kids after school. (My grown daughter, just the other day, reminded me that I, sometimes, had warm cookies waiting when she got off the bus--I’d forgotten.) “There’s no need to deprive yourself or give up traditions,” Anneser writes, “Just as getting 80 percent of the way up the mountain is better than not climbing the mountain at all, improving 80 percent or even 50% percent of what we eat is a giant leap in terms of good health.”

This seems like a healthy, balanced attitude, from someone who writes from experience, which, in fact, Anneser does. Her journey to better eating began when she was having trouble becoming pregnant. She thought she ate pretty well, but tests revealed “I was low on almost every essential nutrient my body needed (and totally devoid of some) and high on a few toxin scales.”

When her nutritionist suggested, “Maybe your body isn’t a healthy place to support new life,” she decided to “take a hard look at my eating habits, educate myself, and make changes.” In Refined to Real Food, she and her consultant Dr. Sara Thyr, pass the knowledge on to readers. Thirty pages of recipes are included as well as an extensive list of resources and recommendations for further reading.

Bon healthy appétit!

J. N. Townsend Publishing, 2005. $15.95. (review posted 4/9/06)

Burn by James Patrick Kelly 
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

James Patrick Kelly’s new novel, Burn, may be—once the embers die and ashes settle on this first fast reading—my favorite Kelly novel so far. The Nottingham resident, author of four previous novels and more than sixty short stories, is a double Hugo winner and Chairman of the NH State Council on the Arts (bless his public-spirited heart). He has long been a favorite of mine, even though his specialties—science fiction and fantasy—are not my favorite genres. Kelly always manages to put enough earthly detail in his imagined worlds to keep even a literalist like me grounded. In Burn he roots his other-worldly tale in the richness and fertility of Transcendentalism, specifically Thoreau, especially Walden.

Some writers stick quotations from other writers here and there, impressing readers, maybe, with their knowledge of the classics. Kelly not only quotes Thoreau often and appropriately, but plays out Thoreau’s themes and tests his philosophy.

The story: The small planet called Morobe’s Pea, owned by entrepreneur/visionary Jack Winter, has problems. Winter—who is not a character, merely a name in this book—has created his own Walden, and watches from afar this social experiment in simplicity. Our hero, Spur—and his family, friends, neighbors—live on the land, hardworking farmers with gardens, orchards, goats, and lots of four-footed, feathered gosdogs running around.

Unfortunately, the original inhabitants of the planet resent this experiment. This is their land and they want it back. They deserve a place to be, too. (Remind you of any situations in this world?) Some pukpuks want to get rid of the Transcendent State—touted as the “last and best home of the true humans.”

Terrorists, including “recruits” from within the Transcendent community, try to destroy Walden with fire. The planet—heavily forested with dense, dry undergrowth—is particularly susceptible. When the story begins, Spur is recovering from terrible burns received fighting a terrorist fire, where he watched his brother-in-law die, turned traitor and human torch.

A caring docbot (the mind of a doctor in the shell of a robot) from the Upside tries to help Spur heal emotionally as well as physically, but Spur’s smoldering secret about the treason of his brother-in-law slows progress. Bored with rehab and intrigued by the technology at the hospital, Spur indulges in some random high-tech-interplanetary tell calls:

Most of the bots were polite but firm. No, they couldn’t connect him to their owners; yes, they could pass along his greeting; and no, they couldn’t say when he might expect a greeting in return. Some were annoyed. They invited him to read his own Covenant and then snapped the connection. A couple of virtual bots were actually rude to him. Among other things, they called him a mud hugger, a leech and a pathetic waste of consciousness. One particularly abusive bot started screaming that he was “a stinking useless fossil.”

Spur wasn’t quite sure what a fossil was, so he queried the tell. It returned two definitions: 1. an artifact of an organism, typically extinct, that existed in a previous geologic era; 2. something outdated or superseded. The idea that, as a true human, he might be outdated, superseded or possibly even bound for extinction so disturbed Spur that he got up and paced the room. He told himself that this was the price of curiosity. There were sound reasons why the Covenant of Simplicity placed limits on the use of technology. Complexity bred anxiety. The simple life was the good life.

Spur finally makes contact, entirely by accident, with the powerful, curious, and young (12 standard years) High Gregory, who uses his considerable influence to break many rules and return with Spur to Spur’s home village. High Gregory, a maker of luck, wants to see Walden for himself.

The High Gregory stood up in the back of the truck and turned around once, surveying the farmstead. “This is your home, Spur.” He said it not as a question but as a statement, as if Spur were the one seeing it for the first time. “I understand now why you would want to live so far from everything. It’s like a poem here.”

Between recovering from his injuries, grief over the death of his brother-in-law, High Gregory’s inconvenient and unconventional visit, an impending divorce, and a tense relationship with his dad, Spur has “too much heartbreak” and “not enough pie.”

And then . . . more fire, this time close to home, threatening Spur’s farm, his family, his village, his whole world.

What’s a guy to do? What can a guy do except his best?

Burn offers readers plenty of quirky characters, humor, pathos, and flaming action. It offers a fresh look at an old philosophy, raising questions like:

Does the farmer own the farm or does the farm own the farmer?
Are “isolation and ignorance . . . suitable foundations” for society?
Do those who live in simplicity really believe in it or do they “just not know any better?”
Where do the notions of “simpler” and “better” diverge?
Is simple also good?
What does it mean to be alive?

In what seems like a sci-fi twist to me, but is apparently state-of-the-art literary technology, Burn is not only available in the “dead tree” version at bookstores, but is being podcast, chapter by chapter, over the internet. Hear Kelly read Burn on your own computer. What could be simpler?

To discover the wonderful world of podcasting and find out what else is going on in James Patrick Kelly’s eclectic career, go to jimkelly.net.

Tachyon, 2005. $19.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

A Flamboyant Disarray of Dreams
by Joy Lee Rutter
reviewed by Wendy E. N. Thomas

Joy Lee Rutter’s Flamboyant Disarray of Dreams is a smartly written and intelligent story about a young and feisty “Hawkeye Pierce” sort of woman, Joleen Cumberland, who works in a New Hampshire neuro-rehabilitation facility with brain-injured patients. Joleen is witty, cynical, at times bitter and disillusioned, but certainly knows her stuff and is able to handle her patients with skill and respect. Her struggle to find her sense of where she is in life complements her patients’ struggles to regain their sense of who they once were.

As Joleen is drawn into the lives of a new patient, Mitch Stevens, and a previous patient, Alex Williams, the story moves effortlessly from events within the rehabilitation center to events in her personal life and leads readers to some unexpected and intriguing situations. Through their encounters, the characters learn about their own limitations and finally free themselves to discover what they had initially thought was beyond their reach.

Using her working experience at a neuro-rehabilitation facility, the author draws us into the lives of her characters and accurately conveys what it is like to work with brain-injured individuals and also what it may feel like to be a survivor of a brain injury. Rutter maintains the momentum and suspense throughout the entire story. A Flamboyant Disarray of Dreams an enjoyable, enlightening, and entertaining novel.

Behler Publications, 2004. $15.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

A Rose at Midnight
by Sylvie Kurtz
reviewed by Lisa Jackson

A Rose at Midnight is filled with strong musical descriptions that enhance this romantic and mysterious tale. “A familiar symphony of sensations arose,” Kurtz writes, “cellos of longing, saxophones of sensuality, trumpets of warning.”

The opening words, “feelings were for fools,” set the stage for successful pianist Daniel Moreau and the woman who has been on his mind for nine years, Christiane Lawrence. Daniel has not played the fool for nine years and he is determined not to start now just because Christi has entered his life again. She is unaware of the power she has to easily destroy him, and that makes her the most dangerous person in his life.

The female protagonist is strong in her love for her daughter and her desire to learn about her family history. She has learned through bittersweet experience to follow her head and not her heart, yet is quite aware how quickly her heart can overtake rational thought.

The setting is Quebec City at the approach of Mardi Gras. The city is filled with life and fun and celebration. Christi is joyful at her vacation far from her Texas home, happy to discover her roots through an old family friend. This vacation is meant to help her recover from a recent tragic loss. She is grateful for the attentiveness of her host and oblivious to the darkness that cloaks her. As Daniel re-enters her life, Christi quickly discovers how strong, and deadly, family ties can be.

A Rose at Midnight is refreshing in its ability to pull readers into another time and place. Sylvie Kurtz piques our interest early and raises the intrigue slowly and gently until it peaks at crescendo. Then the story eases down to a soft pianissimo that leaves us feeling satisfied.

Harlequin, 2005. $4.99. (review posted 12/27/05)

Personal Enemy
by Sylvie Kurtz
reviewed by Lisa Jackson

As exciting as an award-winning action film, this novel opens with a child’s life being torn apart before her eyes and ends in an unexpected, satisfying way.

The protagonist, Adria Caskey, is a strong woman whose job it is to protect lives. Partners with her grandfather in the protection business until his recent death, Adria now has one final promise to fulfill to her grandfather before she officially closes the doors to the family business.

Her staff of security specialists is made up of strong, talented women who are like sisters. There is implicit trust among them that supersedes the need for them to speak to each other at times. No one is happy to have the business close. For some, it is the only thing they know and they do not know how to move on.

Adria’s final client, Peter Dragon, unknowingly has ties to Adria that span their lifetime. She and her staff of executive protectors must be at their best in order to see this case to a successful conclusion.

Sylvie Kurtz has an amazing ability to describe a scene so that you feel you are in the action and not simply reading words on a page. You can smell the aroma of fresh pasta sauce so strongly that your taste buds engage. When a character’s teeth chatter due to a recent douse of ice cold water, so do yours. And when Adria is completed exhausted from having been on the run, you feel her disorientation.

Personal Enemy is a gripping thrill ride that any fan of strong action, female leads, and good mysteries will enjoy. You will feel like you’re in the passenger seat during the high-speed chases, and you’ll find yourself ducking when the bullets start flying. This book is a thoroughly engaging read.

Silhouette Books, 2005. $4.50. (review posted 12/27/05)

Bitch Creek
by William G. Tapply
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

I thought I knew something about New Hampshire writers, since I’ve been writing this column about them for thirteen years. So how come I missed William Tapply of Hancock? A famous mystery writer, creator of the famous Brady Coyne series, twenty Brady Coyne novels. Twenty-one if you count the one recently released by St. Martin’s Press, Nervous Water. And, while he was at it, he wrote nine books on fishing. And The Elements of Mystery Fiction: Writing the Modern Whodunit.

I’ve got some catching up to do. And if you don’t know Tapply’s work, so have you--especially if you like mysteries, fishing, and most especially if you like both. I do. So as I waded into Bitch Creek (the title refers to a nymph for fly fishing), I got hooked right away.

A few minutes after eight in the morning, Stoney Calhoun heard the bell ding over the door, alerting him that someone had come into the shop. He glanced up from his fly-tying vise. A white-haired man stood inside the doorway studying the rack of Sage and Orvis fly rods against the wall. Calhoun returned his attention to the nearly completed fly in his vise.

A minute later, the man was standing in front of him. “What in the hell is that?”

Calhoun did not raise his eyes. “Bunker fly,” he mumbled, pronouncing it bunk-ah. He always thickened his Maine accent for out-of-state customers, on the theory that they found it quaint and charming.

Actually, it was Kate’s theory, but Calhoun guessed she was right. Out-of-staters, flatlanders, folks “from away”--and this old gentleman, with his pressed chino pants, shiny loafers, green polo shirt buttoned to the throat, and his distinctly dixie drawl, certainly was from away--expected Downeasters like Stoney Calhoun to talk like the caricatures they’d heard in television commercials, and Kate Balaban believed they’d be more inclined to spend money in her shop if the shopkeepers satisfied their expectations.

“Say ‘ayuh’ more, Stoney,” Kate kept telling him. “You’ve got to practice. Go for taciturn. If you have the chance, tell ‘em they can’t get there from here.”

Ha!

Fly tying. Orvis. Flatlanders. Taciturn. Can’t get they-ah from he-ah. This is my kind of novel.

After his twenty Brady Coyne mysteries, Tapply brings a new amateur detective to the page in Bitch Creek. Stoney Calhoun has his limit of attitude and just as much heart. He’s lost his memory in a flash--a lightning flash--a few years before the story begins. His past is a mystery to him, though an occasional flash of memory strikes him: the recurring vision of a naked body floating down a stream, for example. He doesn’t know who he was before his accident, or what he did for a living, but he’s pretty good at nosing out clues and interpreting a crime scene.

After release from the hospital, where--oddly--no one seems to know much about him except his name, but someone, grateful maybe, slips him a pocketful of money for a fresh start, he is drawn to Maine. He finds a suitable piece of land with a brook running through it. Builds a house, gets a job as a fishing guide and retailer, and falls for his boss, the beautiful Kate Balaban, a skilled guide herself.

And that’s all before the precipitating event--a murder in (literally in, the victim was up to his chest in waders) a remote millpond.

Tapply weaves bits of Stoney’s spotty past with the murder narrative. Who is the mysterious stranger calling himself Green, who appears to be involved in the millpond murder? He appeared at Kate’s fishing shop and hired a guide. That guide should have been Stoney, but Stoney didn’t like the guy so he sloughed Green off on young Lyle, a move that may have saved Stoney’s life, but after-the-fact fills him with guilt.

Here’s where I’ll tread carefully, so’s not to spook the brookies or give away the plot. But, between the spot-on Maine Yankee dialogue, the unusual love story (Kate is married; to a dying man), the deep woods settings (somewhere between Portland, Maine, and the NH border), the attractive, likeable characters (especially Stoney’s dog)--this is a topnotch mystery novel. Did I mention that the writing is as smooth and clear as a trout pool, and that Tapply makes it look as easy as flicking a Bitch Creek nymph just where you want it? Only the truly accomplished can make something so hard look so easy.

William Tapply, where have you been all my life?

Writing, apparently. In Hancock.

The upside: I get to read all his other novels now. Other upside: many of them are being released in paperback.

Did I mention the fly-fishing?

Teachers of writing often say (Tapply is one, at Clark University): Write what you know. I’m thinking the parts about murder, he’s probably making up. But the parts about fly-fishing, he’s lived. Note his latest work of nonfiction, Gone Fishin’: Ruminations on Fly Fishing. Note that he has written more than 500 articles and essays for publications like American Angler, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and Field & Stream. Note that his father also wrote for Field & Stream, two pages of “Tap’s Tips,” every month for 35 years.

Here’s a man who knows what he knows. It’s in his genes.

This just in (by e-mail as I compose this column): William Tapply and his wife Vicki Stiefel moved to Hancock in the summer of 2002, from away. So technically, they’ve been NH writers for only three years. Tapply generously suggests that this gets me “sort of off the hook” for overlooking him until now.

Thanks, Bill. Tight lines.

For more information on his work or public appearances, visit his website: williamgtapply.com.

The Lyons Press, 2004. $22.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Disasters &c.
by John R. H. Kimball
reviewed by Lynne Lorrey

Although Marblehead, Massachusetts, is now a famous yachting center, it once held a much different moniker; it was a filthy cod fishing port, and its citizens, sailors, and sea captains were considered lewd and uncultured. However, this fishing port was also more productive than any other, and these immoral citizens were “fishermen and shipmasters with unique character, ability and success.” This well-researched book provides a behind-the-scenes story of the Marblehead seafarers and what their lives were really like during the heyday of the clipper ship era in New England.

Author John R. H. Kimball has done extensive research in writing this book. Using documents he inherited from his Marblehead ancestors, as well as actual ships’ registers, period newspapers, and ships’ logs, he brings Massachusetts’ maritime history to life. Through the words of their own contemporaries, the unique careers and lifestyles of shipmasters, sea captains, and fishermen are revealed.

The book’s title, Disasters &c., refers to a newspaper’s maritime column, which carried information on seafaring vessels and any general news or accidents associated with the vessel. The book itself is filled with pictures and maps of historic New England during the 1800s and contains artists’ portraits of the actual ship masters and family members. The author has uncovered detailed descriptions of the everyday lives of Marblehead sea captains and how they set a high standard of competence throughout the shipping industry.

This book recounts in fascinating detail a preeminent New England fishing port, its shipbuilding, citizens, and sea captains from the time of the War of 1812 through the Civil War.

Peter E. Randall Publisher LLC, 2005. $25.00. (review posted 12/27/05)

Evening Ferry
by Katherine Towler
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Reading Evening Ferry, the new novel by Portsmouth writer Katherine Towler, you might think she grew up on an island off the coast of New England, because she knows Snow Island, her setting, so well. Her knowledge shows in the physical details, like how to catch crabs or what it feels like to be surrounded by water when a hurricane blows through. More importantly, she knows who islanders are and how they are with each other.

An island may not be a closed society, but it’s certainly isolated. Islanders are different--different from mainlanders and from the tourists who balloon the population in warm weather. What’s it like to, literally, know everybody in town? What’s it like to go to a school, K-12, with fewer than twenty students? Which kids can’t wait to get away? What does it take to stick it out?

In fact, Towler has never been an islander. Snow Island (which is also the setting for and title of her first novel) was inspired by Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay, where, years ago, she spent time writing at a house loaned to her by a friend.

“I think it was the eighties,” Towler told me. “It was an utterly magical place. There aren’t very many places like it. There were no restaurants, no inns or B & Bs. I think the population was 125 in the off season, maybe 2000 at the peak of summer.”

“Part of what intrigued me,” she said, “was the great panic when you got on the ferry of being on a place that you can’t leave.”

The Snow Island trilogy--she’s planning a third book--began as a series of linked short stories. The story that grew into Evening Ferry concerned a mother, Phoebe, and daughter, Rachel, both islanders. In the novel, Rachel, freshly divorced, returns to Snow to care for her father.

“What happened?” Rachel asked.

“We were working on the Farnwells’ roof. Nate was up there by himself. He’d just started hammering on the shingles, and the next thing we knew, he was on the ground.”

“Was he drunk?”

“At seven in the morning? No.” Eddie gave her a withering look.

“Was he hung over?”

“He doesn’t drink anymore, Rachel, not since your mother . . .” He trailed off, without finishing the sentence. “He has one or two beers. That’s it.”

Her father’s alcoholism, her mother’s death, her own divorce complicated by her Catholicism, her sorrow and guilt about her institutionalized younger brother, her complicated relationship with Eddie (which seems to mirror her complicated relationship with Snow), and her history with just about everybody else on the island, all this against the cultural backdrop of the Vietnam War, makes for plenty of conflict and opportunity for character development and exploration of the nitty-gritty of island life.

Towler accomplishes all this--with characteristic grace, gorgeous language, and astounding wisdom about human nature (how’d she get so smart?)--by moving back and forth between two stories and two times. One story chronicles Rachel’s experiences as she helps her father through his convalescence, then stays on, taking a temporary job as teacher at the one-room school house. The other story takes the form of Phoebe’s diaries, left in a pile on the kitchen table, for her husband to find after her death. He passes the diaries on to Rachel, who won’t give him the satisfaction of admitting to reading them, but does read them, in secret. The diaries begin with Phoebe’s marriage and wrenching estrangement from her mainland family, and then move to Snow:

August 5, 1930

You can see the water everywhere on the island. Wherever you are, the water is there, a constant view. I find it quieting, comforting. I am Mrs. Nate Shattuck now. Phoebe Shattuck--I keep saying it over to myself, trying to get used to the sound. Yes, I am a new person with a new name. I feel as if I am watching her, this strange woman moving through a strange life, and yet it is my life. The freedom of the island is wonderful, and the freedom of being with Nate. I can say or do anything. It’s as if someone opened all the windows and let in the light. There is nothing but sun here--sun and wind and water. My eyes hurt from the brightness and beauty of it.

Towler started the novel with about ten pages on Rachel from her short story efforts. But it was Phoebe who led her deeply into the story.

“The idea of having the diary entries came very early in the process,” she said. “I had the idea for the shape of the whole thing, and I wrote the diaries first.”

She wrote them as if she were keeping her own diary, “little meditations,” two or three entries a day. Phoebe’s diaries practically wrote themselves, she said. “They had character, voice and story. I let Phoebe say whatever she wanted to say, then left it alone.”

Which is not to say there was no revision. Towler saves all her cuts in a computer “dump” file. By the time she’d finished the novel, her “dump” amounted to 600 pages. The challenge, she said, was to fit Rachel’s “present time” story with the diary entries.

“For me,” she said, “the heart of the book was the relationship between Rachel and both of her parents. Where the book started, when I had the first germs of the story many years ago, there wasn’t going to be much forgiveness.”

But as she wrote, she realized that forgiveness was essential. Through the writing she was “bringing Rachel to a place of seeing her parents, both of them, as complex people. We all have stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and the people we love.” Not all of them are true. Evening Ferry grips readers, beginning to end, with a gradual revealing of hard and sometimes redeeming truths about characters we truly care about.

MacAdam/Cage, 2005. $25. (review posted 12/27/05)

Fog: The Jeffrey Stories
by Christopher Brookhouse
reviewed by Martha Johnson

If you live in New Hampshire, you’ll recognize the people in these stories. They are your best friend, or your sister-in-law, or the creepy guy who lives down the street. They live in Jeffrey, New Hampshire, population 100, average age, over 60. Jeffrey is a college town situated a bit north, so the winters are long and cold.

There are a few characters who appear more than once. They are the grounding forces who remind readers that everybody really does know everybody in a small town. Rudy rents houses on the lake to the fancy summer people. Jimmy, the bartender at the inn, is witness to much more than he’ll ever say. Arlene sells real estate.

There is intrigue involving a shiny piece of jewelry. A huge secret is carried by a well-known town character, and there’s violence against a brave young girl. But there is also the ebb and flow of the days in Jeffrey where nothing much happens at all, and this is when readers get a glimpse of the lovely characterizations drawn by the author.

Christopher Brookhouse, who lived for ten years in New London (one might recognize New London in the town of Jeffrey), is a prolific, award-winning writer. This book won the 2005 New Hampshire Literary Award for Outstanding Work of Fiction.

The stories in Fog are tightly crafted, and readers might find themselves nodding in recognition at a character they are sure they have met before. Fog is a great read--poignant, funny, scary and fascinating.

Safe Harbor Books, 2004. $24.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Fritz Wetherbee’s New Hampshire
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

You Know You’re in New Hampshire When . . .
by John Clayton
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Recently at the Nashua Public Library, I led a discussion of Our Nig by Harriet E. Wilson, a new-old book. Truth be told, the discussion didn’t require much leading. The readers were primed and raring to talk about what is, probably, the first novel written in this country by an African-American. The fact that the author lived in Milford, was a woman, and likely an indentured servant added local, cultural, and historical interest. Frosting on the cake, JerriAnne Boggis showed up. She’s a Wilson scholar and one of the leaders of The Harriet Wilson Project, so when we had questions, she had answers! The stars aligned: great book, great readers, great resource, and stimulating discussion, courtesy of the NH Humanities Council. (Check NHHC.org or contact your library to find out about discussions in your area.)

I call Our Nig a new-old book, because, though published in 1859, it was long overlooked in the canon of American literature. Only in the last fifteen years, has Our Nig resurfaced when scholars recognized the importance of the story of Frado, abandoned by her white mother after the death of her black father. Taken in by the well-to-do Bellmont family, she becomes servant, clown, object of pity, and victim. Over time her health is destroyed, but her spirit soars. Myths dissolve as Frado reveals brutal truths about how “free” blacks were treated in the not-so-enlightened north. The full title suggests the depth of the irony: Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black in a Two Story, White House, North, Showing that Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There, by “Our Nig.”

New Hampshire’s own Barbara White, who wrote the afterward to the latest edition, concludes the book is more autobiography than novel, and that the “Bellmonts” were a prominent Milford family, cousins to some of the most famous Abolitionists of the time, none other than the Hutchinson Family Singers.

Sure enough, none other than our own Fritz Wetherbee has the lowdown on the Hutchinson Family Singers in Fritz Wetherbee’s New Hampshire. This collection of more than 100 essays, many performed on WMUR’s NH Chronicle, prove Wetherbee knows New Hampshire character, characters, and history. He even includes stories about his own family like “Father Sees His First Naked Lady.”

But back to the Hutchison Family Singers. While young Harriet Wilson was being abused by one branch of the family, the Hutchinson Family Singers toured. “In their time,” writes Wetherbee, “(they) were as well known in this country as, say, Brittany Spears is now. They traveled the w