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 world singing songs of emancipation and women’s rights and of temperance.” The Hutchinson Family singers sang often for Abraham Lincoln and hosted Frederick Douglass at their Milford home. “Milford in the 1850s was a hotbed of abolitionist activity and the Hutchinson homestead was a major stop on the underground railroad that helped slaves escape to Canada.”

Irony on top of irony, when you consider the Harriet Wilson connection. Which Fritz doesn’t. He can’t write about everything, though he tries. Fritz Wetherbee’s New Hampshire covers pretty much the whole state. It spans considerable time, too. “Man Kills Bear with Bare Hands” takes place in Rindge in 1799. “Ironic Fritz” took place within the last couple years. When exactly did Ames go out of business in Concord?

I’m at the check-out counter at Ames in Concord buying a t-shirt and a lady in front of me turns and says, “Oh,” she says, “You’re Fritz Wetherbee. I watch you all the time.”

“Thanks,” I say.

She leaves and the kid behind the counter is looking at me. “You on TV?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say.

He’s looking at me. He hasn’t a clue.

“Is it a comedy?” he asks.

Same old Fritz. We love him so. And his stories, too.

You may remember that Fritz once hosted NHPTV’s New Hampshire Crossroads, now hosted by John Clayton, who--coincidentally--also recently published a book all about New Hampshire. Crossroads, indeed!

Wetherbee’s essays are short (TV demands short), and Clayton’s even shorter in his clever guide to “101 quintessential places, people, events, customs, lingo, and eats of the granite state” called You Know You’re in New Hampshire When . . . . Arranged alphabetically, the guide begins with Aerosmith (yup, Steven Tyler summered here) and ends with The World Championship Sled Dog Derby. In-between: more than a hundred tids and bits on topics such as The Black Fly, Passaconaway, J.D. Salinger, and Live Free or Die.

Wetherbee and Clayton have our state pretty well covered in the quick-read category. On the other hand, for a real-life literary mystery starring scholars as intellectually adventuresome as say, Indiana Jones, read Our Nig and the story of its rediscovery. For more information on The Harriet Wilson Project, working to build a monument, get the book into high schools, and create a documentary on Wilson’s life and times, among other things, visit www.harrietwilsonproject.org.

Fritz Wetherbee’s New Hampshire
Plaidswede, 2005. $19.95.

You Know You’re in New Hampshire When . . . by John Clayton
Insiders’ Guide, 2005. $9.95.

(review posted 12/27/05)

Glass House
by Dianalee Velie
reviewed by J. Kates

The introductory quotations to the four parts of Dianalee Velie’s Glass House are drawn from Dante’s Purgatorio. Purgatory is that mountain where sinners are cleansed for redemption; it is a place of active repentance, but it is also a place in between, a nowhere land.

All the real action in these poems is internal, self-reflective. The glass house of Velie’s title poem signifies an airport lounge, and within that a self-constructed edifice, “an impenetrable sepulcher of silence,” from inside of which she observes others on their journeys and ponders responsibility. But, like Dante, the voice that speaks most of these poems has embarked on her own journey among the other travelers.

Velie’s underlying theme, like Dante’s, is what moves the sun and the other stars. “May I never live without love,” she prays in “A Lover’s Litany,” “Or learn to survive alone. / May someone always dominate my desire, / lay claim to my throne.”

The speakers of these poems include Lilith, and (in a sestina) an unnamed woman burned as a witch; both are figures of feisty womanhood. But the principal speaker is a woman who has loved and loves in the present tense, not without humor and loss--men, mother, cats--and whose love poems often end on the very invocation of writing verse: “impenetrable truths / or the presence / of poetic apparitions,” (“Your Brother’s House”); “Go! Go and write that poem!” (“Hearsay”); “containing / the first elemental whisper of this poem” (“Stanley’s Sneakers”); and finally, “the blankness / following the final word / at the end of a poem” (“Glass House”).

Rock Village Publishing 2004. $14.00. (review posted 12/27/05)

Gringo: The Making of a Rebel
by Emil Willimetz
reviewed by Lynne Lorrey

In this autobiography, Emil Willimetz recounts a life filled with fascinating events that occurred during the first half of the 20th century. From his parents' arrival at Ellis Island to his boyhood in the Bronx, he provides a personal glimpse of everyday experiences that helped shape an extraordinary life.

While hitchhiking cross country, he encounters both ne'er-do-wells and rescuers who populate his life with memorable incidents. His exploits while riding the rails and living with hobos give us a captivating look at life during the Great Depression.

A detailed description of his service as a combat soldier in Normandy during World War II affords us a personal and authentic view of the day-to-day struggles of an infantry member.

Readers will appreciate this candid, sad, and funny glance into the life of an ordinary man and his determination to live life to its fullest.

Peter E. Randall, 2003. $26.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Home to Me, Home to You
by Jennifer A. Ericsson, illustrated by Ashley Wolff
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

School Lunch
by True Kelley
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Jennifer Ericsson of Concord writes books for kids (No Milk, She Did It, The Most Beautiful Kid in the World, and many more); True Kelley of Warner writes books for kids and illustrates them, too ( I’ve Got Chicken Pox; Hammers and Mops, Pencils and Pots; It Happened at Pickle Lake, and many more). Each has published a new book for kids. Each of their books involves somebody who’s away, but will return.

Books, like all art, reflect the interests and personality of their creators. We hear the voice of the writer in the words. And if, like Kelley, the writer is also an illustrator, we see it in the pictures. Jennifer Ericsson’s new picture book Home to Me, Home to You shows, as have all her other books, her sensitivity to the small problems that loom large in a child’s life, especially an only child, especially a daughter. In this story, Ericsson slides under the skin of a little girl whose mommy is away on a business trip. The story begins at a point of anticipation:

“Good Morning, Monkey,” says Daddy.
“Do you remember what today is?”

I yawn and think. Then I’m wide awake.

“Today is the day Mommy comes home!” I shout.

Home to me.

Meanwhile, Mommy, far away, is packing her things.

The hotel alarm goes off very early.
I pack my luggage and leave for the airport.
I haven’t seen you or daddy all week,
but now I’m heading home.

Home to you.

The story moves back and forth between the little girl’s long day of waiting (breakfast, play group, lunch, drawing, nap, making a fort with Daddy, snack, etc.) and Mommy’s long day of making her way home (plane ride, paper work, nap, dream of homecoming, delayed connecting flight, etc.) until, in the end: reunion. This sweet, simple, modern story about an idealized little family coping with separation will remind readers of the more dramatic and traumatic plight of the separated families of the Gulf Coast, the hundreds of parents and children desperate for reunion, desperate for home, desperate for the happy ending of Home to Me, Home to You.

On a lighter note--you can depend on True Kelley to provide a lighter note--School Lunch takes an ordinary experience, i.e., the preparation and consumption of school lunches to the whackiest extremes. I don’t think Kelley would mind if I said she’s whacky. Her stories and illustrations are whacky. And that’s why kids love them so much. Because, let’s face it, kids are whacky, too. And by whacky I mean . . . well, when Harriet the cook tires of cooking good, healthy lunches for the kids at Lincoln School, she does what any self-respecting cook would do: flies to a tropical island to put in some hammock time, eat flaming watermelon compote, and cuddle with adorable monkeys.

This story, like Ericsson’s, flips back and forth between locales and experiences. Kelley’s story shows what’s happening to Harriet in the islands and what’s happening in the cafeteria at Lincoln School. Also, Harriet writes postcards to the kids, and they write letters back, describing the contrasting situations.

Harriet’s situation involves beach, palm trees, sun, fruity beverages, and keeping company with a friendly green bird and the aforementioned cuddly monkey. Seems ideal. Heck, it’s paradise. Why would she ever go back to Lincoln School?

The situation for the children at Lincoln School, on the other hand, deteriorates rapidly as the harried principal, Mr. Fitz, tries all kinds of different cooks to replace the apparently irreplaceable Harriet. Al, who used to work at the diner downtown, makes tasty bacon, eggs, hamburgers, fries, and he has lovely tattoos, but after a few days the steady diet of grease, salt, and the occasional dead (from smoke inhalation) bug wears thin. Everybody, including Mr. Fitz, loved what Al’s replacement, Philippe the gourmet cook, prepared. Yummy French cuisine. But they got too fat on all the sauces. Mrs. Dilgood, who cooks for summer camps, made great s’mores, but the slugs and toadstools fell short of delectable.

One after another the substitute cooks go down in flames, and the kids get hungrier and hungrier and more and more testy. Oh, yes, food fights, I mean riots, erupt. A riot moment, caught in a two-page spread, shows kids in frenetic action as the food, most of it oddly purple, flies. Also launched: trays, cups, seaweed (?), snails, toadstools, chameleons, frogs, snakes. It’s a big mess! These kids and their lunches are out of control!

What will it take to get Harriet off that hammock and back in the kitchen? And if she does return, will she bring her monkey?

What a contrast between the new works of these two accomplished New Hampshire children’s book authors. Jennifer Ericsson--realistic, empathetic, gentle, understated. True Kelley--a kernel of realism popped wide open with her absurdist imagination.

There’s room for both, I think, need for both, in any child’s life.

Home to Me, Home to You by Jennifer A. Ericsson
Little Brown, 2005. $15.99.

School Lunch by True Kelley
Holiday House, 2005. $16.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Jack and Other New Poems
by Maxine Kumin
reviewed by Kathi Hennessy

Maxine Kumin’s fourteenth collection of poetry demonstrates the mature and piercing vision, the deft use of language and form, and the arresting clarity of a gifted poet. Her frequent employment of poetic form is subtle and never forced or obtrusive. “Where Any of Us” begins, “Where any of us is / going in tomorrow’s reckless Lexus is / the elemental mystery: despite // instructions he left behind, Houdin- / i, who could outwit / ropes and chains, padlocks and steam- // er trunks, could extricate / himself from underwater metal crates, / could send forth, he was certain, // a message from the other side, / never cracked the curtain.”

In Jack and Other New Poems, Kumin writes about love and loss, grief and redemption, engaging in the contemplation of death and all its mysteries in several evocative and haunting pieces. In “Crossing Over,” she writes, “If only I too could undertake / this perilous journey with the Sybil / to see my warring brothers again, / who slipped through my hands / when alive, grasping and roaring / as if on opposing teams in the Superbowl.” The poem ends, “Let them slip through my hands / weightless as wind and fugitive as dream / bucking the line in Limbo / forever short of first down.”

In “Summer Meditation,” after referring to casual pesticide as “Killing before / breakfast // and killing after,” the poem ends: “If only death could be / like going to the movies. / You get up afterward / saying, how was it? / Tell me, tell me how was it.” Kumin’s wry humor and gentle irony is evident in the same poem, wherein the speaker notes that “Always the annual / hay supply comes / at suppertime / on the hottest day / in August,” hay that “clings to everything / like rumor.”

Admirers of Kumin’s work will find many of her common themes and subjects here--the atrocity of war and injustice, religion and atheism, the natural world, family, country life, and those loved and lost--rendered in a voice both wise and passionate.

W.W. Norton, 2005. $23.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Lizard Walinsky
written by Roberta Baker
illustrated by Debbie Tilley
reviewed by Lisa Jackson

For the adult reader, Roberta Baker’s Lizard Walinsky is an enjoyable foray back into childhood. For young children it is quite entertaining. What little girl can resist playing with frogs, spiders, and lizards and getting dirty? Most of them, you say? Well, Elizabeth Ann Walinsky prefers dinosaurs and creepy crawlies to dolls and mermaids. She insists that people call her Lizard, instead of Elizabeth, and you certainly can’t expect her to wear a dress!

Lizard is an enchanting character. She has her own interests, and even at such a young age she lives a unique life. She had a lot of friends with similar interests, but they all discovered new interests as they approached first grade. Lizard certainly wasn’t happy being alone, but playing dress-up with her dinosaurs and talking with her dog, Fossil, eased the loneliness. At T-ball practice one day, she meets a boy who calls himself Spider. For the rest of the summer they are inseparable.

Lizard Walinsky is a tale of best friends, the pain that comes from being separated from that friend, and the joys of finding new friends without having to change who you are. The colorful illustrations capture the characters in a fun way that can lead to engaging conversations between adult and child.

If you are an Olive fan, keep your eyes poised for a cameo of her within the pages of Lizard Walinsky. If you aren’t an Olive fan, you may become one after meeting her friend, Lizard Walinsky!

Little, Brown and Company, 2004. $15.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

The Stone Man: Shaker Brother Peter Ayers 1760-1857
written by Dudley Laufman
illustrated by Jacqueline Laufman
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Jacqueline’s folksy watercolors and Dudley’s historical stanzas revive the true story of Peter Ayers. Shaker Village is known for its impressive buildings as well as artifacts and handcrafts from the nearly extinct religious sect. From height of land, a maze of amazing stone walls defines the landscape. In the beginning, i.e., round about 1792 when Peter Ayers came to Canterbury, “the land itself seemed to be but a mass of rocks.” Brother Peter changed all that. In The Stone Man, the Laufman’s show and tell how.

It seems the soldier from New York--though a protégé of founder Mother Ann--didn’t quite fit in with the Canterbury folks. Along with the usual horse and wagon, corn cob pipes (one in pocket), hounds, flintlock, axe, and cider, he brought “a pair of boxing gloves, and an old red violin.” Maybe his penchant for pugilism, but more likely his fiddle tipped the scale:

The elders wondered about that old red fiddle.
The one he played at kitchen sweats for rowdies
In Gilmanton and Loudon. Out all night
At fiddling, hunting, trapping, lord knows what.
Cobs and drams of cider.

The elders gave him land, house and barn outside the village. “Thee is always welcome at Meeting,” they told him. “Thee may sing our sacred songs or take part in our dances, kindly welcome.” Peter agreed to the arrangement and set about his life work of transforming the landscape from rocky rubble to elegant order. A man of imagination as well as strength, wile, and determination, he built miles of walls as well as:

Irish beehive huts for monks, faery
Mounds luring him to come away,
Rampways up to otherworldly homes.
Castle turrets from which he could see
To the hills of Loudon . . . .

Not a children’s book--though history-minded children will enjoy it--The Stone Man is a creative guide to the strange and wonderful stone structures of Shaker Village as well as a tribute to a long and productive life. We should all be so wise and lucky to find our passion, our calling, and follow it. A trip to the gift shop at Shaker Village might, also, be the answer to many of your gift-giving questions this Christmas season.

Canterbury Shaker Village, Inc., 2005. $15. (review posted 12/27/05)

Marvin Monster’s Big Date
written by Tabatha Jean D’Agata
illustrated by Bonnie Everett-Hawkes
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Poor Marvin. He’s been sitting on my book shelf for months, cute as a monster-button, growling “write about meee, wouldja?”And I’ve been ignoring him. Well, I’ve been saving him (hear that Marvin?) for a special week. It’s here! And here is, taa-daa, Marvin, star of Marvin Monster’s Big Date by Tabatha Jean D’Agata of Hooksett, with monsterlicious illustrations by Bonnie Everett-Hawkes, whose drawings reveal Marvin’s imperfect but sensitive and generally monstermagnificent self, a cross between Bela Lugosi with a tan and a jack-o-lantern.

So adorable.

Not only that, he’s funny. Which is why early readers (6 - 9) will eat him up; I mean, eat up his story. Which is kind of true and kind of made up, the story, I mean. The made up part is (I think) that that Marvin lives in Marshville, Transylvania, “where the neighbors are more than a bit strange.” That is, they’re all monsters: werewolfs, banshees, zombies, you name it.

Marvin and his friends go to school at Grim Castle Elementary. The trouble starts on the way to school. Marvin has blown off his friends, Gretchen Goblin and the Werewolf Twins, and decides to walk to school instead with Reba Banshee, “a new, raging cool monster!”

Only the worm turns on Marvin when somebody cooler than him, i.e., Bobby Zombie, gets to Reba first with a cool bunch of weeds and Reba blows Marvin off. But first she and Bobby make fun of his new hair style, slicked down with goop from his dad’s jar of slug slime:

Reba stared at Marvin’s head. “What did you do to your hair?” she asked.

“Cool, huh? I used some of my dad’s hair stuff,” Marvin replied.

“I thought you washed your hair with raw egg,” she said, and laughed.

“Suddenly, Marvin’s handsome beast confidence failed. Now a tornado of bats circled inside his tummy.”

This is the true part (I think): sometimes people aren’t very nice to each other. Marvin hurt Gretchen’s feelings by standing her up. Reba hurt Marvin’s feelings, too. So nobody’s feeling too hot. Pretty soon Marvin’s feeling positively curly-clawed and the whole class makes fun of his wimpy solo in howling class. The kids are cackling “like a coven of hags.”

Worst of all, Marvin has a toad-wart on his palm, because when you break a promise you get a toad-wart, according to the old witch’s tale, and the toad-wart can only be cured with a ball of spider’s web. Gross! Embarrassed and ashamed, and kind of mad too, Marvin’s in a pickle. What happens next?

You’ll have to read the book. You’ll like reading the book. And looking at the pictures. They’re horrible! And funny! Marvin Monster’s Big Date is a gruesome good book.

Moo Press, 2005. $5.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Ordinary Lies
by Robert Duffy
reviewed by Kathi Hennessy

If the “business of the poet” is, as Thomas Hardy put it, “to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things, and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things,” in Ordinary Lies, Robert Duffy strikingly achieves that aim. Duffy’s metaphors are fresh and often startling, even when his subject is one as familiar as a “Fall of Snow,” which begins, “Excommunicant angels, they circle and sink, / pausing here and there as though to think / where and if they might consent to fall.” In the last stanza, the falling flakes are “So few and slight at first they’re hardly there, / but congregate into an overwhelming thing, / as chill and lucid as a memory laid bare / to unforgiving eyes that follow and stare.” And in “The Haunting,” a house is described as having “broken / window teeth and sunburned paper / curling down from walls, the shabby / smell of old quarrels and injuries.”

In most of the poems, Duffy employs some formal elements, which he handles skillfully, giving the pieces a musical quality and quiet grace. “Adam’s Prayer” opens, “He wonders if this child’s sudden / density of sleep recalls that paradise / no longer to be found on any earth / or under any sky, where every morning / sun creates the garden new and every / deathless winter’s followed by / a spring beyond all season green.”

In “The House Not Lived In,” Duffy writes, “This is after all, / a country best made for leaving, / I don’t suppose it matters where you go.” In a voice both thoughtful and restrained, Duffy has created luminous poetry that is elegant yet candid, evocative and poignant without being sentimental. The poems collected in Robert Duffy’s Ordinary Lies are beautifully crafted, intelligent, and often haunting.

Oyster River Press, 2005 $12.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Solace of Solitude
By Janice Gray Kolb
Reviewed by Lynne Lorrey

In her latest book, Janice Gray Kolb shares her intensely personal experience with grief caused by the death of her beloved pet. She also recommends ways to deal with, and eventually overcome, grief.

We cannot control our reactions to death, Jan says, and everyone grieves in a different way. However, whether we lose a parent or a beloved pet, the overwhelming feeling of loss can be the same. Jan advocates performing a series of exercises that can help us to transform depression and grief into more positive energy. We can then channel that energy into something that eases our pain.

For example, she suggests a walk in the woods to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of God’s creatures. Being alone in a quiet place such as a wooded area can provide the solitude needed for prayer and meditation so necessary to heal the soul. She recommends spending time alone, thinking about your deceased loved one, and keeping a journal to help you remember everyday details of his or her life. Writing down your thoughts during a difficult time can be a wonderful way to connect to the loved one for whom you grieve so deeply.

Some of her suggestions allow us to bring comfort to others. She recommends giving someone close to you a gift--a simple gift of love for no particular occasion. Giving a friend a gift, she says, may console you and help your grief to dissipate or diminish. Your friend’s happiness at receiving an unexpected gift may lift your spirits and make you feel more peaceful.

Each of her recommendations, on its own, could provide solace. Taken together, they make a formidable tool for overcoming grief and developing the inner strength to deal with grief. Grief does not get better, Jan says, but it does get different. We should strive for acceptance, but not necessarily closure. Grief therapists and anyone suffering the loss of a loved one will appreciate this book.

Blue Dolphin Publishing, 2005. $17.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Star Light
Photographs by Bruce J. Parsons
reviewed by Lisa Jackson

Bruce Parsons spent over thirty years photographing Star Island, one of the Isles of Shoals, located in Rye, New Hampshire. He has now compiled selected Star Island photographs in Star Light.

Parsons’s dedication to his subject is visible from the first photograph--“All American Pot of Gold,” an image of the deep blue ocean and dark blue sky after a summer storm, a rainbow beam curving beside an American flag at full mast--to the last photograph, “Day is Done,” which captures the essence of a warm summer night’s last rays of sunset.

Viewing the images transports you to Star Island. You feel the mist on your face as you look at “Rolling In,” where an ocean wave is crashing over the boulder in front of you. You feel the fog pressing against your skin in “Another Day,” where you are at the shore with boats that can’t be launched in the fog.

The photographs in Star Light bring you to Star Island and will have you coming back for more visits. Each image tells a story; each evokes memories and sensations.

This is a great book to share with friends, relatives, and guests. It’s a great conversation starter. It’s also gives you a great way to sit back and enjoy the beauty that is the New Hampshire seacoast.

Peter E. Randall Publisher, 2004. $34.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Swinging for the Majors: Inside the Fisher Cats Championship Season
by Michael Cousineau
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

This week’s featured book is Swinging for the Majors: Inside the New Hampshire Fisher Cats Championship Season by Michael Cousineau of Litchfield. Published in April, Swinging might well have languished on my “maybe” shelf. (Let’s just say, I’m more into fly-fishing than baseball, and I’m not that interested in fly-fishing.) All I knew about the Fisher Cats was that they were briefly called the NH Primaries, but fans hated the name so it went away.

I can’t say I was riveted by the game-by-game recounting of the Fisher Cats’ inaugural season or the insights into the personal lives, ambitions, superstitions, and accomplishments of players I’d never heard of like Cameron Reimers and Dominic Rich. But I recognized the name Bob Tewksbury, one of New Hampshire’s few claims to major league fame, who wrote the foreword.

More than 200,000 people attended Fisher Cats home games last year, and a good number of them might very well be riveted by the saga of how the Fisher Cats--part of the Toronto Blue Jays franchise--set up shop in the heart of the Red Sox Nation, after substantial negotiation sweetened by a healthy dose of compromise and a pail of money. Fisher Cats fans might also be riveted by the back story of a championship first season, as well as the inside scoop on how prospects hone their skills in the minor leagues, embrace the opportunities open to them, and keep their sharp eyes on the ever-present carrot of moving into the majors. If major league play is all (or a lot) about money, minor league play is all (or a lot) about hope and pure passion for the game.

Cousineau’s passion--he’s a fan and a half as well as a reporter for the Manchester Union Leader--drives this story. He loves the game. He loves it so much, he became Fungo. Yes, one hot, muggy evening--feeling “a little like Clark Kent turning into Superman”--Cousineau donned “the green-eyed, brown fuzzy costume of Fungo, the Fisher Cats mascot.”

I lumbered out with my huge feet, cutting through the dugout and walking onto the turf. I gave high-fives to all the kids lined up along the first-base line waiting to join the players on the field for the national anthem. First baseman Mike Snyder delivered a playful shot to the back of my head. . . .

“You rock!” a pint-sized blonde girl in blue yelled as she pointed my way.

Inside Fungo’s fur coat, a stream of sweat flowed down my face. I couldn’t merely wipe away the moisture with my hands . . . I mean paws. That would have required me to lose my head, something not done in mascot land.

For baseball aficionados, especially Fisher Cats fans, Swinging for the Majors will be as satisfying as a loaded hot dog (or two), relishing a surprisingly successful first season, and anticipating many more. It’s a well-researched and heartfelt tribute to America’s game.

Play ball!

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

The Art of Uncontrolled Flight
by Kim Ponders
reviewed by Lisa Jackson

Annie Shaw wanted to fly for as long as she could remember. Her father was a pilot in the Korean War, and when he was home she would eavesdrop on his late night conversations with his buddies while they traded combat stories. After a family tragedy that occurs when she is young, Annie assumes a focused, self-analytical perspective on her life that borders on unnatural. She is driven to fly. She wouldn’t know what to do if she were unable to have the freedom of flight.

As an adult, Air Force Captain Annie Shaw is married to a civilian. When Annie is deployed to the Gulf War, she must leave behind the man who knows her best. As an aviator, and as the only female in her unit, she must be focused on her job at all times. Annie must compartmentalize her feelings in order to manage the struggle between her two lives.

Ponders gives us a frank, poignant glimpse into the bared soul of a woman dealing with the reality that she must give up part of herself in order to pursue her passion. The first-person point of view is enthralling and easily leads us between the past and the present, as though we are in conversation with the main character. This novel is also gripping because of the Gulf War setting.

Even though this is a work of fiction, you can feel the pull of authentic details the author used from her own experience as one of the first US female pilots to fly in combat. The Art of Uncontrolled Flight, Ponders’s debut novel, is simply powerful.

Harper Collins Publishers, 2005. $19.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

Twenty-Nine Hills
by Marty Basch
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

Watch out for griz (that’s grizzly bear). Beware the snafu gods. And try do try to avoid killer goat heads. Never heard of a killer goat head? Well, “Think back to jacks of childhood. Now make the ends of the jacks sharp. You’ve got a goat head. They have an appetite for rubber.” As in the tires on the bikes North Conway residents Marty Basch and Jan Duprey rode from Canada to Mexico along the Great Divide through Montana, Wyoming, a corner of Idaho, Colorado, and New Mexico.

Basch’s Twenty-Nine Hills chronicles the trip, which begins with a rough takeoff, I mean pedal-off, in Whitefield, Montana. Half the gear was delayed in the mail. So Basch and Duprey, psyched to get going, “aching to bust out on the trail,” had to wait. And wait. Finally:

With a kiss and a couple of I love you’s, Jan and I took off on what she called “the trip of a lifetime.”

Optimism reigned. The drizzle abated. There were smiles. The adventure had begun. We were pedaling the first of thousands of miles. Nothing could stop us now.

After a quarter of a mile, Jan reached over on her handlebar to shift her chain into a higher gear.

“Damn,” she yelled under the big sky.

Her chain fell off.

This adventure/love story or is it a love story/adventure ends eleven weeks later in Antelope Wells, New Mexico, after a deflating bout with the aforementioned killer goat heads and an encounter with “hordes of grasshoppers” blanketing the roadway. Basch’s description of the grasshoppers: “Crunchy.”

Funny guy, Marty Basch. And a lively writer who equates biking with freedom. “Over 20 and have a birthday ending in zero?” he says. “Hop on a bike.” His joyous, evangelistic spirit adds as much flavor to this book as Jan Duprey’s one-pan recipes. She’s a trained chef who does wonders with Spam. Also dehydrated garlic flakes, pasta, stewed tomatoes, dry basil, and grated cheese--the ingredients in Star-Spangled Spam. Other recipes: Bannack Burritos, Rocky Mountain Raman, Rawlins Rice and Rooster, Summit Sausage Casserole, and Flat Tire Frijoles.

But, cuisine aside, why ride the length (and height) of the Continental Divide? Why subject yourself to wind, rain, heat, exhaustion, mechanical failures, and body scraping, bone bending headers onto unforgiving ground? Personal challenge? Masochism? Transformation?

Two months on the road and thoughts of home start trickling into the mind’s theater. There are dreams of showers and refrigeration, microwaves and motor vehicles, drawers and closets filled with clothes. On the road, socks are worn three days in a row. A clean shirt means one that has been doused in deodorant . . . . Pop into a restaurant bathroom and look deep into that face in the mirror. . . . There are changes. The skin is darker. Lines are etched deeper into it. That face that looks back is thinner.

Why ride? Back to cuisine: if you bike all day you can eat anything you want--including Star-Spangled Spam--and still lose weight. “Eat what you want, but pedal your butt off. Ride to eat. Eat to ride. That’s the best way to reduce what you carry. Lose weight.”

Not that these two athletes needed to lose an ounce. Thin and trim seems to come with the territory and a rugged territory it is, though Basch doesn’t wax either lengthy or eloquent with descriptions of the sights. His focus stays on the road, the body, the bike, and the conditions that allow progress or impede it. Occasionally he glances back at little Jan, the less experienced biker, pedaling her heart out, conquering her fears. (She is especially apprehensive of the griz, for example.)

Her smile was wider than Montana’s big sky. What would come to be a tradition at each crossing, we would hug, kiss and butt helmets. Take the obligatory picture. Do the high five thing. Whoop it up for the cattle. Moon the horses. Do any stupid or crazy thing in celebration. The crossings were Divide landmarks. Collect them all and win bragging rights.

We just bagged our first one.

What goes up must come down. . . . Down is a glorious feeling. The miles click by rapidly. The wind cools off the body and whistles through the helmet. It is the big reward . . . .

. . . Jubilation is cycling down by the farms, wildflowers, and fences of March Creek Canyon with the person you love enjoying the same sensation.

Alarm is hearing her scream in pain.

At about 20 miles an hour on a sand road, Jan skidded on a corner and sailed off her bike. Bloodied, bruised, but not broken she picked herself up, cleaned herself off with Marty’s help, and climbed “gingerly” back on the bike. The scar on her left elbow would become a lasting souvenir.

Twenty-nine Hills offers insight into what drives these adventurers. Maybe their story will inspire you to seek an adventure of your own, wheeled or otherwise, so that like Marty Basch and Jan Duprey you can say in the end: “I did it. We did it.”

And they’d do it again.

Marty Basch’s other biking adventure books include Against the Wind, Above the Circle, The White Mountain Ride Guide, Winter Trails Vermont and New Hampshire, and Winter Trails Maine.

Top of the World Communications, 2005. $14.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

White Mountain Wilderness: A Photographic Journey to New Hampshire’s Most Rugged Places
by Jerry Monkman, with images by Jerry and Marcy Monkman
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

The landscape called “Dusk from Mount Monroe” spreads waves of intense color across two glossy pages in Jerry and Marcy Monkman’s new book, White Mountain Wilderness: A Photographic Journey to New Hampshire’s Most Rugged Places. The colors range from navy at the bottom (the peak closest to the photographer) to an undulating lavender sky at the top, with six or seven rich blue ridges in-between. It is a stunning photograph—absolutely gorgeous. One might even say--and mean it--breathtaking. When I turned the page and first saw it, I gasped.

The Monkmans, of Portsmouth, are professional photographers specializing in the outdoors, further specializing in the White Mountains. Their pictures have appeared in many magazines--Backpacker, National Geographic Adventure, Yankee, Down East--and they have previously published three guide books as well as another pictorial, The Colors of Fall. (Note: the subject of one of their guidebooks is Acadia National Park, and their daughter’s name is Acadia--how cute is that?)

White Mountain Wilderness is a kind of guide, too. Not in the traditional sense of how to get there from here and what to expect once you arrive; the first section guides readers through the history of the region from “the crashing of continents and the upwelling of molten rock” to Darby Field’s 1642 trek up Agiocochook, through the tourist decades and rise of the grand hotels. Many other books cover this history in more depth, but what’s special here are juxtaposed photographs of now and then. Many of the historical photographs are the work of Dr. Ralph Larabee. A member of the committee that wrote the first Appalachian Mountain Club guide book in 1907, Dr. Larabee also served as president of the AMC (1912-1913). His photographs date from that era. The Monkmans have taken the trouble to, literally, follow in his footsteps.

They stood where he stood at the base of Arethusa Falls, the highest waterfall in New Hampshire. Good news: Arethusa looks almost exactly the same now as it did in 1917. Larabee’s 1929 photograph taken from the ledges of the Old Bridal Path shows ghastly clear-cuts scarring Mount Lincoln top-to-bottom. The Monkmans’ photograph from the same spot shows scars healed and the forest restored on those steep slopes. The mountains endure; the forests regenerate. A new photograph of the Pemigewasset Wilderness shows no sign of the devastation caused by the Owl’s Head fire of 1912. From Logging Camp 22 in 1915 Mount Hancock appears denuded. Today, the mountain is thick with trees, the camp has disappeared, and the only signs it ever existed are traces of old logging roads. On the other hand, the Old Man of the Mountain is as gone as he can be. The view of Cannon Mountain from Profile Lake would be lovely if we could forget the amazing profile that has fallen away.

For more than ten years, the Monkmans have worked under the principle of “participating in the landscape.” They “hiked, biked, and paddled hundreds of miles of White Mountain trails and rivers.” During these adventures, Jerry Monkman writes, “when all of our senses are immersed in the beauty of the White Mountains, . . . we are best able to understand the essence of the place.” They translate essence into photographs using “ those elements of a scene that we feel will best tell the story of the landscape or our experiences in it.” Maybe those elements are striking bands of blue that constitute a dusky mountainscape. Or grassy hummocks in the water of Star Lake near the gray, rumble-tumble peak of Mount Madison. Or the surging crowd of water-rounded stones, like hundreds of bald heads, in the shallows of the Saco River at Bartlett.

Each photo tells a story. Each photo beckons: come to this beautiful place; see it for yourself; participate.

University Press of New England, 2005. $35. (review posted 12/27/05)

White Sea
by Cleopatra Mathis
reviewed by Rebecca Rule

I wade into White Sea with trepidation. What the heck is a white sea anyhow? If I guess wrong it won’t be Dartmouth Professor Cleopatra Mathis’s fault. She knows what she’s doing, having published seven collections of poetry and collected a boatload of awards and rave reviews (she “enthralls without throwing the reader off a cliff”) from obscure publications like The New York Times Review of Books. Wisely, she provides an opening poem that blankets the others and guides readers through. It’s called “Salt,” and begins:

All those years I went the way of grief,
turning my stony eye on disorder, something to be cleaned
and fixed. I was lost, scrubbing away at the hidden,

hating the vase where the fruitflies nested,
the artful bowl that held ruined fruit
Throw away the rot, I said, making myself saint

of the immaculate, not knowing a thing about the soul.

Already a fan of Mathis--especially her collection What to Tip the Boatman, which explored a troubled mother/daughter relationship, and won the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize--I nonetheless wade into White Sea burdened with flotsam from a time when I believed, as many do, that because poems can be interpreted, I might get it wrong, then pass my wrongness on to unsuspecting readers, who would be (a) confused, (b) disdainful, (c) irritated, or (d) all of the above.

I know Mathis’s poems are not to be read quickly or taken lightly; there are layers of meaning roiling beneath the iridescent surface. “Salt” served as my buoy, as I began the chill, rejuvenating swim through dark waters. I know, it’s white sea, but white in contrast to the darkness beneath the reflected moon, wind-driven chop, or the froth of death and decay in “The Herring Run”:

The ocean’s riled-up, frothing, she’s wild
up and down the sea-swept beach, collecting
stray crab parts in a broken cardboard box.
April’s sea brings up its bleached, salt-eaten
whites. Some hooked interlocking
legs and claws still movable, correct--
she’ll take them home, she says: somewhere in there
is enough to make a whole crab.

Back to “Salt,” charting our way through this short, deep book: Look, it suggests, for chaos restored to order; look for death as it touches life; look for fruitflies, rot, crab parts, destruction. But look, too, for a softening or, perhaps, an opening of that “stony eye.” More from “Salt.”

Meanwhile, little spirit, essence, psyche, anima,
the forever-alive-but-unpinnable one

turned its gaze away, claimed a crack,
found a rusty needle, curled up in the eye of it.
In the pine floors alone, a million crevices,

a million particles of grit, pitch, and crumb.
What sea in my bucket could wash the world clean?

This is what I used to tell students: “You don’t have to understand everything. You don’t have to read the poet’s mind. Read and reread and accept the gifts of image and insight the poem offers.”

Mathis offers many gifts of image and insight as she contrasts notions of a world washed clean, a beach scrubbed with one wave, remnants of death deposited on the next. Death lives here. Two women in the dedication--Linda, who died young and Elise, who died old--inspire several poems. If white sea is a metaphor--hey, in poetry it’s all metaphor, ain’t it?--these two dear friends of Mathis make the metaphor personal. She writes of Linda in the long poem “The Release”:

. . . And just like that, she’s gone--

Linda, who I can’t keep,
even the rising trill of her laugh

already revised, reordered.

“Death of a Gull,” the killing of the “Moonsnail” for its shell, “Vulture, Circling,” this is solemn territory. “Salt” ends with this line, “me at the sink, scouring the porcelain, not seeing.” But White Sea is all about seeing, and nowhere is this clearer than in the final lines of the final poem, “Soul”:

. . . The snow
is nothing but a great emptiness,
and I’m tired of trying to find a secret there.
But look--one leaf
skittering across the glazed surface
catches its stem to stand upright,
the shape of a hand waving.

Sarabande Books, 2005. $13.95. (review posted 12/27/05)

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