The Book List

V-Mail: Letters to Luette

Written by Joe Close

Edited by Hal Close

In 1945, Joe Close, a 37-year-old father of two and PR man, found himself on his way to Europe on a commission by the US Embassy to write radio reports for the Office of War Information. But they weren’t the only things he was writing from the war-front. When Close wasn’t celebrating his country, he was writing letters to his wife back home. This book is comprised of much of that correspondence. In part, these are love letters—Joe aches to see his wife and clearly misses his young kids—but against a backdrop of a ragged new post-war Europe we see a London awakening after its bombing siege and the opening up of Germany’s concentration camps. History is rapidly unfolding and Close is there to witness it all, offering up an intimate account of the very events that historians would pore over in the years to come.

ISBN: 978-0-87233-139-6

Price: $20.00

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By Michael James

This is the secret diary of a young sailor written aboard the light aircraft carrier USS Monterey during World War II. The Adventures of M. James is a rare and direct account of the Pacific War told through the eyes of a sensitive enlisted man-a pacifist who discovers an eagerness for battle; a compassion for the enemy and in the end, a confidence in his own ability. From 1943 to 1946, Michael James recorded his thoughts and unique observations as they occurred, with passion, innocence and wry humor. He chronicles both the excitement and boredom of war including eleven major battles and a massive typhoon that nearly destroyed his ship and almost swept Assistant Navigator Lt. Gerald R. Ford overboard. Through his story, the reader gains a genuine sense of James’ character, and an understanding of why it was that a fellow shipmate told him, “there’s not a man aboard this ship that wouldn’t give you the shirt off his back.”

Michael James is the grandson of American philosopher and psychologist William James, and the grandnephew of novelist Henry James. After World War II, James pursued a career as an artist and in 1946 his sculpture was featured in Life magazine. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.

ISBN: 978-0-97620-462-6

Price: $26.00

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Crocodile Shoes

By James Wilde

“Jim Wilde is a legendary figure at Time. ‘Wilde lives up to his name,’ said Time senior editor Howard Chua-Eoan in a 1996 publetter, “ ‘he’s the quintessential gonzo reporter.’ ”

From Publishers Weekly:

After spending thirty-two years tracking stories across the world as a journalist for Time magazine, Wilde turns his eye for engaging detail to poetry in this eighty-two poem debut. At Time he reported on conflicts from Vietnam to Iraq, and also wrote in-depth stories about crime and the death penalty in the U.S. Now, in his poems, Wilde demonstrates his familiarity with the life’s horror and whimsy, fusing a world-weary tone with a childlike fascination with word play and animal imagery. “Cat and Mouse,” for instance, marries dark, violent language to cartoon-like visions of armies of cats and mice doing battle. Wilde’s work is most successful, however, when it takes on a quieter, elegiac quality, as in “The Funeral” in which the poet reflects on how his recently deceased friend would be most at home “haunting his old country kitchen/ Dispensing wry Socratic wisdom/ With chain smoking hyena coughing.” Moments like this provide a moving and intimate glimpse into a thoroughly lived life.

In James Wildes words:

“Canadian, I was Time’s bad boy for nearly 41 years, starting as a stringer in Vietnam in 1958. I retired in Istanbul in 2000 after many wars, from bun fights in 1950’s Indochina to the 1991 Gulf War and the Kurdish insurgency.

I posed as a mad monk, while covering the fall of Ceausescu in 1989, sprinkling holy water at trigger happy Securitat roadblocks.

I covered the pandemic famines of Africa, walking through a silent Ethiopian valley where over 10,000 lay dying. Wars, genocides, AIDS and magic were my daily bread.

I poured dust on my head for five days to gain audience with the Nail of the Universe, Moro Nabe, the Supreme Emperor of the Mossi. I turned 60 during a three-month walkabout in the Congo rain forest seeking pygmies without pants – I found them. They had never seen a white man, and I was so beat up they thought I was a sick gorilla.

Tours of American maximum security prisons culminated in the Gary Gillmore execution circus. My words on being strapped for execution into “Ole Smokey,” the electric chair that fried the Rosenburgs, were featured on the1983 Time cover on capital punishment a first.”

ISBN: 978-0-87233-137-7

Price: $15.00

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AntHymn

A children’s book by Cosy Sheridan

illustrated by Chad Niehaus

National awarding-winning song writer Cosy Sheridan and her wryly insightful songs have been showcased everywhere from Carnegie Hall to The Dr Demento Show; from The Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon to NPR’s Car Talk. Her live performances move seamlessly from satirical cultural observations to emotional explorations of family relationships, all with a mastery of pacing and sophisticated guitar work. Now she has taken her song Anthymn and collaborated with artist Chad Niehaus to create this wonderful tale.

ISBN: 978-0-87233-138-5

Price: $15.00

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The Challenge of Authentic Education

Joyful Learning in a School Community

by Jay and Toni Garland

Education in America is in crisis. Jay and Toni Garland responded to this growing phenomenon decades ago by starting their own school. Feeling dissatisfied after teaching in various private and public schools in Massachusetts and Alaska, and in answer to an appeal by Jay’s brother to educate his large family, they founded a small school in rural New Hampshire. As partners in life and teaching, they ran The Well School for thirty-four years. Their discoveries along the way provide the foundation for their educational philosophy as laid out in The Challenge of Authentic Education series.

In Book One, Joyful Learning in a School Community, we hear first Jay’s and then Toni’s experiences of how their early years shaped their beliefs about education. In sometimes humorous and often poignant anecdotes, they chronicle their individual perspectives of running The Well for the first five years.

At a time when people are searching for answers to the crisis in education, whether in public, private or home-schooling communities, the Garlands provide solutions for everyone involved in educating children.

ISBN: 978-0-87233-135-8

Price: $24.00

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In the Wake of Home

poems by Christian McEwen

Christian McEwen was born in London, England in 1956, and grew up in the Borders of Scotland. She has edited four anthologies, including Naming the Waves: Contemporary Lesbian Poetry, and Jo’s Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure, True Grit & Real Life. Her poems and essays have been published in The Granta Book of the Family, Virago New Poets, and My Lover is a Woman: Contemporary Lesbian Love Poems, as well as in numerous other journals and anthologies. McEwen has been a fellow at the Yaddo and Macdowell colonies. She teaches poetry through the Creative Arts in Learning program at Lesley University, and divides her time between Scotland and Vermont.

In poems that search, name, nab, and unsettle, Christian McEwen excavates loss-—and discovers evidence of love. Many of the poems make poignant use of the rich iambic throb and dangerous lilt of nursery rhyme, while others follow instinct and let mystery do the singing. A toddler left to a “hot smear of sunlight,” a woman watching her hands “like other people’s children,” another crying “Give me the bloody lunch that is your heart”—I am grateful for these voices’ testimony, fierce and gentle.
—Ellen Doré Watson

In the Wake of Home is a volume of acute tenderness: for a father’s drinking, a sister’s death by drowning, a brother’s suicide, a lover found and lost, and above all for the vulnerable child self that remains alive in the grown woman who seeks “a way to praise.” With a deft music at times lyric, at times analytic, mordant and comic, Christian McEwen’s poetry touches what’s most inward in us.

—Alicia Ostriker

ISBN:978-0-87233-134-1

Price: $14.95

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Gustave Dore’s London: A Study of the City in the Age of Confidence, 1848-1873

(Monograph / Frederic Lindley Morgan Chair of Architectural Design)

Gustave Dore’s unforgettable images of Victorian London portray in stark contrast the affluent world of monumental buildings, horse racing, and scoiety balls against the teeming populace of city streets and the raw poverty of slums, homelessness, and hopelessness. To reinforce Dore’s powerful engravings, Coolidge draws skillfully upon the written observations of contemporary European visitors such as Taine, Heine, Gautier and Dostoyevsky.

ISBN:978-0-87233-134-1

Price: $12.95

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Ruins as Architecture

Thomas J. McCormick

Thomas J. McCormick, a noted scholar of the century of Enlightenment, examines the phenomenon of the creation of man-made ruins as an architectural form. Picturesque grottos, Gothic Temples and “ruins to be inhabited by a hermit” are the focus of McCormick’s study as he looks at these frequently playful yet melancholy monuments.

McCormick is Professor of Art History, Emeritus at Wheaton College. He was trained first as an art historian at Syracuse and later at Princeton where he earned his PhD. A noted scholar and author, McCormick has become a powerful and important voice in the field of art history and in particular the study of architecture. He was the 15th holder of the Frederick Lindley Morgan Chair of Architectural Design at the University of Louisville.

ISBN:978-0-87233-117-4

Price: $12.50

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Saint Sophia at Constantinople

by W. Eugene Kleinbauer

Saint Sophia is surely one of the most-discussed buildings in the history of architecture. . . The quantity of information about Saint Sophia is vast; how, then, is this little book different from the rest? Kleinbauer examines contemporary, as well as ancient sources of Byzantine architecture, . . . in a book so clearly written that students will find it invaluable and so thoroughly researched that scholars will be unable to ignore it, he achieves that goal.

—from the introduction by Stephanie J. Maloney

Trained at Berkeley and Princeton, and Professor of Fine Arts and Near Eastern Languages at Indiana University, Eugene Kleinbauer is a noted scholar and author of several books on Early Christian and Byzantine art and architecture. He was the 16th holder of the Frederick Lindley Morgan Chair of Architectural Design at the University of Louisville. This study of Saint Sophia grows out of his 1995 Morgan Lecture.

ISBN:978-0-87233-123-5

Price: $12.50

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Opening Book

by Patrick Gillespie

As its title suggests Opening Book is the first published selection of Patrick Gillespie’s work. His poems, written over the last decade—35 of them in all—range from a few spare lines of Haiku to “All Hallows Eve,” a full narrative that as Richard Wilbur notes, harkens back to Coleridge and Keats “with the summoning of a lover upon a traditional eve.”

Gillespie’s work has appeared in such publications as the New England Review, the Formalist, the Threepenny Review, Singular Speech Press and the Red Candle Press.

Born in Germany, Gillespie earned his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and his M.A. in childrens literature from Simmons College. He currently lives in Vermont.

ISBN:978-0-87233-125-3

Price: $12.50

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A Surgeon in Combat

by Dr. William V. McDermott

Set against the Allied liberation of Nazi occupied Europe, Dr. William McDermott’s vivid memoir offers a first hand glimpse of history through the eyes of young doctor, fresh from Harvard Medical School. Based on letters he wrote from the front to his young wife, Blanche, back home in Massachusetts, A Surgeon in Combat offers an original, compelling remembrance of war, one that turns over a number emotional cards, from tragedy and humor, to drama and irony. Complimented by his snapshots from this period-some startling photographs taken at the time by the author— they give an immediacy to the narrative. 332 pp. Maps.

ISBN:978-0-87233-120-4

Price: $30.00

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Nora S. Unwin: Artist and Wood Engraver

by Linda Clark McGoldrick

The definitive work on Nora S. Unwin, artist and wood engraver. Born into the prominent Unwin book publishing family of England, Unwin studied at the Royal College of Art and helped to revive wood engraving in America, to where she moved in 1946. She is represented in major museums, and gave more than forty one-woman shows and won over fifteen major awards. This beautifully printed book contains 160 of Nora Unwin’s engravings, drawings and sketches, as well as an extensive catalogue of her work. A must-have for any student of wood engraving, this book won the 1990 Award For Excellence in Typography. Hailed as a dedicated artist and identified as one of the key figures in the renaissance of wood engraving earlier in this century, Nora S. Unwin won numerous awards including the Hamilton-Merrill prize of the American Society of Etchers and Engravers in 1951. Her engravings display a thorough knowledge of natural forms as well as the human figure. In this look at her life, Unwin brings together a number of examples of her work, treating artists of all types to her talent.

ISBN:9780872330979

Price: $32.00

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