I‘ve visited the USS Constitution during school vacations, crowded with chattering kids. I once sat in an open gunport, close to the water, during one of her annual turnaround cruises. I’ve seen the venerable frigate from below, when she was in dry dock, and I’ve touched her massive keel. But my most memorable visit of […]
Tim Clark
This year millions of words will be printed and spoken about the 50th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. None will be as moving as When We Were the Kennedys, a memoir by Monica Wood. Seven months before the gunshots in Dallas, the author’s father, Albert Wood, a 57-year-old woodyard foreman at […]
As soon as I’d read it, I was lost. I’d intended to review In the Words of E. B. White | Quotations from America’s Most Companionable of Writers, focusing mostly on its introduction, a lovely essay by Martha White, the writer’s granddaughter, with whom I’d worked here at Yankee some years ago. I thought it […]
Magazine
Sand Castles | Beach Memories
The drive to build such fleeting structures as sand castles must satisfy some ancient urge. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, which is a fancy way of saying that children are barbarians. I see this every summer at the beach when my kids build sand castles. The younger the child, the more primitive the architecture. Joel, who is […]
Read an excerpt: The Price of Malice When Archer Mayor published his first murder mystery about Joe Gunther of the Brattleboro, Vermont, police force, I wondered how long he could keep it up. There aren’t many murders in Vermont. I figured he’d have to start killing people in other states to keep Joe busy, and […]
Yankee
Book Review | Seen the Glory
Men going off to fight the Civil War sometimes declared they were going to “see the elephant.” It was a metaphor: The elephant stood for the whole wide world outside their little towns, and for the mystery and glory of war. Those who survived often came home shot to pieces in wagons bearing the ironic […]
Tolstoy once said that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own unique way. This month, I’ve found a novel featuring a happy family that is happy in a way entirely its own, which includes house calls for farm animals, a near-fatal shooting, and a flying saucer. The Call, […]
The Abenakis called him “cousin,” the Penobscots “grandfather.” The Kets of Siberia preferred “fur father.” In the Carpathian Mountains, he was “little uncle”; Laplanders addressed him as “the old man with the fur garment.” We call him Smokey, Yogi, or Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s clear that human beings have always felt a kinship with bears, as Bernd […]
According to the Veterans Administration, 680 U.S. veterans of World War II die every day. Too often, their stories die with them. The men and women who served from 1941 to 1945 were not encouraged to talk about their experiences. Perhaps that’s why, when Edie Clark asked her father about his service, he would reply, […]
I’ve never read Little Women; boys didn’t when I was growing up, and most still don’t. Thus, much of what fascinated me about Eve LaPlante’s Marmee & Louisa, a dual biography of Louisa May Alcott and her mother, Abigail, came as a shock. I had always assumed that Louisa’s books were thinly disguised versions of […]
A traveling father, a runaway father, a silent father, and a father who never shows up: These are the strands that truss three fine novels and a story collection together like a stuffed Thanksgiving turkey. The hero of A Simple Murder, by Eleanor Kuhns, is Will Rees, a traveling weaver whose son runs away and […]
An earlier title for Up: A Mother and Daughter’s Peakbagging Adventure was Alex and the 4,000-Foot Classroom, a reasonable choice because it’s about a little girl named Alex who climbs all 48 of New Hampshire’s 4,000-foot mountains before losing her first baby tooth. But that sounds like a children’s book, and this is a book […]