Why is it that so many writers of spooky stories–Edgar Allen Poe (Massachusetts), H. P. Lovecraft (Rhode Island), Stephen King (Maine)–have been New Englanders? Now Vermont’s Chris Bohjalian joins the lineup. Or should I say the coven? After reading Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers, I wonder how much it has to do with our architecture. Every […]
Tim Clark
In April 24, 1895, Captain Joshua Slocum set sail from Boston, Massachusetts, in a 37-foot sloop he called Spray. He was alone. Three years, two months, two days, and 46,000 miles later, he dropped anchor in Newport, Rhode Island, having completed the first solo voyage around the globe–unless you accept his claim that the ghost […]
The word eccentric means, literally, “off-center.” These two books examine New Englanders who, like all true eccentrics, never thought of themselves as strange; it’s everyone else who’s off-center. Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia, by Richard Francis, is the story of a motley band of 19th-century idealists–deeply influenced by Transcendentalists such as […]
Yankee
Book Review | Turn & Jump
We all know what time is, but when called on to define it, we can’t. Benjamin Franklin said time is money. For Howard Mansfield, time is people. For example, he begins by introducing us to Ebenezer Edwards, who fought at Concord’s North Bridge in the first full-scale battle of the Revolutionary War. But Mansfield is […]
This past decade was a triumphant era for New England sports fans. Their professional baseball, football, and basketball teams brought six championship trophies home for a celebratory Boston duck boat ride, a now-traditional tour of the city in World War II-vintage amphibious vehicles. Two of those parades took place in a mere eight months between […]
Yankee
Books: Poems, Birds, Gardens
In his typically smart and funny introduction to Bright Wings, former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins cheerfully admits the uselessness of poetry. “Of course, if the meaning of ‘useful’ is extended from how to assemble a piece of outdoor furniture to how to engage our verbal intelligence and uplift the human spirit,” he adds, “then […]
Here are two remarkably similar stories about remarkably dissimilar works of art. Maryalice Huggins calls hers “a love story” as in Aesop’s Mirror: A Love Story; Erica Hirshler prefers “biography of a painting” for Sargent’s Daughters: Biography of a Painting. In fact, both are mysteries. The mystery is why certain works of art seize our […]
About 35 years ago, when my wife and I arrived in Concord, New Hampshire, we went to something called a contra dance. We had some experience with square dancing, and there were some similarities, but in other ways contra dancing was a whole new experience. Our teacher was a cranky, charismatic fiddler and poet from […]
Magazine
Book Review | Peter’s War
When historian and constitutional scholar Joyce Lee Malcolm first discovered a 1765 bill of sale for a 19-month-old slave boy, she put it aside. She was reconstructing the famous running battle between the Minutemen and the Redcoats that passed through Lincoln, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1775. The couple who bought Peter, Josiah and Elizabeth Nelson, […]
When historian and constitutional scholar Joyce Lee Malcolm first discovered a 1765 bill of sale for a 19-month-old slave boy, she put it aside, says Tim Clark, who reviews Malcolm’s book, Peter’s War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution in the July/august 2009 Yankee Magazine. But Malcolm pursued Peter’s story and, though […]
Read an excerpt from Donald Hall’s book. “At fourteen I decided to spend my life writing poetry, which is what I have done.” Those are the first words of Donald Hall‘s charming and harrowing memoir, Unpacking the Boxes (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; $24). It’s two books, really. One is about the shy boy from Hamden, Connecticut, […]
He was lionized as the first man to reach the North Pole on April 6, 1909, then later accused of “the biggest lie of the 20th century.” Still today, Robert E. Peary remains an enigmatic hero. This Yankee Classic was originally published in April, 1989. At high tide Eagle Island is 17 acres of rocks and trees […]