1 comments about WalkBoston: Walking Tours of Boston's Unique Neighborhoods.

1. The arrival to the USA seems to introduce Europeans into a new dimension. You can't do anything without a car! Distances are enormous and walks aren't pleasant because of the empty sidewalks and high traffic streets. At my arrival at the airport after many years of absence I spotted this pocket guide and bought it right away. What a revelation! It is possible and enjoyable to take a walk in Boston outside the downtown area and actually see many hidden aspects of this beautiful even if sprawled out city. The book is written by a humoristic person that has a first hand experience of what he is talking about and is culturally prepared on history and culture of this town.
   I enjoyed using this booklet and strongly reccomend it to tourists use to "walking down cities" in their desire to know them better.

No comments about All Sorts of Good Sufficient Cloth: Linen Making in New England, 1640-1860.

2 comments about New England Summertime Cooking.

1. In "New England Summertime Cooking", Sherri Eldridge (a veteran author of more than forty regional and topical cookbooks) showcases New England recipes and culinary traditions with its emphasis on seafood, new-world produce, and Yankee practicality. The focus is on classic menus featuring hearty-healthy recipes prepared in fresh and flavorful styles. More than 150 recipes are enhanced with nutritional analyses and adhere to American heart Association guidelines. Wonderfully illustrated throughout with color photography and featuring delicious low-fat recipes that range from Whole Grain Hotcakes; Lobster Quiche Tarts; Rainbow Pepper Pasta Salad; and Hearty Vegetable Minestrone; to Oyster Stew; Herbed Cauliflower; Blackberry Calfouti; and Lemon Cheesecake with Blueberry Topping, "New England Summertime Cooking" is a welcome and prized addition to any personal or community cookbook collection.



2. Reviewed by Olivera Baumgartner-Jackson for Reader Views (11/07)
   
   Imagine my delight when I opened the envelope the "New England Summertime Cooking" came in and encountered the wonderfully colorful front cover, depicting quite a few of my all-time favorites There were scallops and lobster and blueberries, as well as tomato with mozzarella and fresh basil, a slice of peach pie, blueberry muffins loaded with those wonderful fruity gems, a lemon cheesecake with blueberry topping, ears of fresh corn, lupins, a lighthouse and a loon. This visual delight would have been plenty enough to make me smile, and then I noticed the subtitle, stating "Following the guidelines of The American Heart Association." Yummy and healthy - that is an unbeatable combo in my opinion.
   
   Sherri Eldridge compiled an amazing cookbook celebrating the bounty of summer harvest, with a number of inventive recipes featuring the seasonal fruits, vegetables and seafood of New England. All of the recipes follow the guidelines for a heart-healthy diet, although I am pretty certain that after seeing the `yummy factor' of the dishes you will have to agree it is not as much a diet as it is a treat.
   
   The book is divided into twelve sections (Breakfast and Fruit; Baked Goods; Appetizers and Finger Food; Fresh Greens and Salads; Soups, Stews and Chowders; Main Meal Dishes; Pasta, Beans and Grains; Vegetables and Sauces; Desserts; Seasonal Preserves and Jams; Resources and References and Index). I would be very hard pressed to pick one as my favorite - absolutely every section has some unbelievably tempting offerings.
   I also loved the layout of the recipes: a list of ingredients on one side, directions on the other, nutritional analyses underneath (serving size, calories, protein, fat calories, total fat, dietary fiber, saturated fat, carbs, sodium, fat component, cholesterol and calcium) and in most cases, a wonderful color photograph of the finished dish. The nutritional analyses were considerably more detailed than in most other cookbooks I've seen recently and they should be an excellent tool in deciding which dishes to serve at a meal to make it well-balanced.
   
   In addition to the culinary delights, this wonderful book also showcased the flora and fauna as well as provided tantalizing tidbits of information that should make everybody want to visit New England as soon as possible. And if you've never eaten a lobster, fear not - there is a whole page dedicated to the art of eating lobster, accompanied with absolutely great photos to illustrate the oftentimes feared process. The author's great sense of humor should be able to help everybody overcome any obstacles on the path to utter bliss of eating a freshly boiled whole lobster.
   
   I found "New England Summertime Cooking" a delightful book, filled with delectable recipes and absolutely stunning photographs. I challenge even the biggest grouch to spend more than five minutes leafing through it before cracking a smile or even chuckling aloud. This is a book that will bring sunshine into your kitchen and into your soul, and as such it should find a permanent home on everybody's bookshelf.

No comments about Southern England: The Geology and Scenery of Lowland England (Collins New Naturalist).

2 comments about The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes With English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty O.

1. Francis Jennings, long associated with the Newbury Library American Indian collections has brought his vast knowledge to bear on the subject of the Iriquois as the fearsome 5 or 6 nations who independently cowed both their fellow tribes and the English and French colonists. He proves it wasn't so with so many documents of which we have never heard in our schoolbook history texts that I wonder how such material escaped notice previously. In the process he slays some American Sacred Cows such as Francis Parkman. One learns that the Indian frontier was no such thing and didn't exist but was a commonly inhabited piece of terrain, peopled by various tribes and the European invaders who traded with them. Relations were, for the most part, reasonably amicable, which accounts for the fact that during later wars the Eastern Indians frequently exhibited what we call civilized treatment of enemies and prisoners. (Of course there were the exceptions, usually well justified.) But in the beginning, the Dutch, Swedes, English and French, all found it necessary to deal with the various tribes quite diplomatically in order to survive, and use them in their wars of empire with one another. Furs in return for trade goods were king. The undoubted reality is such a vast contrast with the accepted picture of our frontier that this book, as well as Jennings others in this series, should be required reading to repair the damage done in our schools by claptrap such as Parkman and other revered historians who followed his lead, writing off the Indians as barabarians and the frontier as a clearly delineated line across which whites stepped only if they were willing to take their lives into their hands. Instead we find two cultures living amicably in common communities up until the first half of the 1700's when the balance was upset by driving out the Indians such as the Delewares and Shawnees so that they located in the Ohio country and became relatively independent. The Iriquois had a large hand in this and it was their undoing. Read the book. It is a complicated subject but well worth digesting. I recommend reading it in small doses and having an atlas nearby.



2. Our standard secondary school history jumps abruptly from Jamestown and Plymouth Rock to Lexington & Concord. The intervening 150 years are barely mentioned. The Jennings trilogy examines this period. In the instant volume we see the native Americans neither as passive victims nor noble savages but as politicians, diplomats, merchants and power players. Though probably doomed from the start due to the absence of immunity to European diseases, for a period of several decades they interacted with the early colonists on a basis of near parity. The Iroquois actually attempted with some skill the become the central player that would resolve the French-English rivalry and leave them at the center and in command. Jennings shows us that though this didn't happen and though the odds may have been against it such goals were far from fantasy. It's enough to cause one to imagine that "chutzpah" is a Mohawk term. One can only wonder, if the Indians had not been devastated by disease what the political map of North America would look like today.

No comments about Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation (Revisiting New England).

No comments about DK Readers: Robin Hood (Level 4: Proficient Readers).

3 comments about Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949-1989.

1. Mary Fulbrook's review of the former East German state misses the point totally. It is too longwinded, bogged down in detail and fails to underline the major key principle, that the GDR was loved by over half of its population despite what the Western media would have us believe. Having spoken to former East German citizens, the book seems to be too concerned with the origins of the Soviet satellite state and doesn't address the issue that most East Germans were content with their state. In all, I found the book overpriced, badly researched and most disappointing.



2. Mary Fulbrook has done an excellent job in succinctly analysing the political system of the GDR, arguing that the former East Germany state is best classified as a "dictatorship". Her writing is easily understood by non-specialists and her compassion and attention to detail heightens the reader's interest in this fascinating subject. The book is excellently researched, with Professor Fulbrook combing the now open East German State and Party archives to present new material alongside her central thesis. Her insightful chapter on the role of the Church is especially welcome, since this subject has long been recognised by German scholars as of central importance, but is too often neglected or misunderstood by non-Germans academics. "Anatomy" is clearly the best book to recently appear on the "first socialist state on German soil".



3. Mary Fulbrook has done an excellent job in writing a concise analysis of the GDR in plain English. The book is very well researched and Professor Fulbrook has a clear and compassionate understanding of her subject. Her thesis that the GDR can be best classified as a dictatorship is convincing and well argued.

   I am myself researching the role of the Protestant Church in the GDR, and was pleased to find a chapter in Fulbrook's book devoted to this subject. Western scholars have a record of embarassing themselves (out of ignorance) on topics such as this, but Fulbrook does an outstanding job.

No comments about Acadia National Park Pocket Guide (A Falcon Guide; Pocket Guide).

5 comments about The Abbess of Crewe.

1. I was about nine years old when the Watergate scandal broke, and I must confess that I don't know much about it beyond our national mythology of bugging, break-ins, erased tapes and G. Gordon Liddy. Is this satire fair to Nixon and his gang? I don't know, but I suspect that it is. At any rate, it remains a witty parable of hypocrisy in high places and, given the rate at which our technology is improving, its comments on surveillance are bound to keep this book topical for quite some time to come.



2. If this book were written in a serious tone, I fear it could be taken as very offensive slander. Instead, it is a brilliant send-up of Watergate and similar abuses of power. It centers on the election of a new abbess.

   Candidate 1 recites her favorite (Protestant) English poetry rather than the Psalms, supports a strong sense of societial class, and uses electronic eavesdropping as a mere extention of listening to convent gossip as a way to maintain proper order.

   Candidate 2 is compulsive regarding order in her sewing box, maintains an all-too-public liaison with a young Jesuit (outdoors rather than linen closets), and leads the sewing nuns to dreams of freedom.

   Add to this a missionary nun using Machivelli to deal with cannibal and vegetarian tribes, young Jesuits bungling break-ins, a nun cross-dressing to deliver hush money ... and you have an absolutely hilarious study in justification of means to insure one's "destiny".




3. -- unquote the most formidable of my university tutors, declining to follow up my recommendation that he should see The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie).

   I had the presence of mind to answer 'Well so have I' but not the gall to say to him 'How about you?' Really she only has a 'bad' mind in the sense we all have bad minds -- there are thoughts we do not lightly own up to. What makes Spark so unique is that the thoughts are so diverse and fanciful. She is all over the place in the best sense, she is as light-footed as a Mendelssohn scherzo, and there is never a demeaning touch in all her writing. I never really know where I am with her. She deals with senility (Memento Mori), satanism (The Ballad of Peckham Rye), fascism (Brodie), epilepsy (The Bachelors) and sexual situations too various to list (passim) like the shallop flitting silken-sailed in The Lady of Shalott. They never become issues, they never become themes and there is often an overlay of the outright fantastic, as when Mrs Georgina Hogg in The Comforters, who has no private life, disappears when she closes her bedroom door behind her.

   The Abbess gets 4 stars from me because it is one of her slighter efforts compared with the novels mentioned above and certain others. Anyone getting to know Spark's work could start as well with this as with those, or indeed as well with those as with this. If you can get her wavelength at all this book will not 'lose' you as The Hothouse by the East River might do. I have seen it described as 'a wicked satire on Watergate', a plonking, insensitive characterisation -- you do not pin Spark down like that. Any fool can see what might have suggested the election campaign for Abbess between the sewing nun and the electronics nun, and the repeated question to the foreign missionary nun when she rings in from various parts of the globe 'Gertrude, do you have a cold?' is an obvious reference to Kissinger but fantasy not satire. Dame Muriel was Jewish by birth and a convert to Catholicism, with which she is obviously fixated in her own strange way. I have never understood what its special attraction was for an author who has an affair going on between one of the nuns and a local Jesuit, but I don't think this author allows us that kind of insight into her thinking. This book is even more of a gossamer effort than usual and you will get to the end before you know it, at which point you will be hit out of the blue by the sudden and startling poetry of the last sentence.




4. Muriel Spark's The Abbess Of Crewe (1973) is a brief comic meditation on the forms and abuses of power in the Anglo Saxon world. Partially inspired by the events and the political repercussions of Watergate, The Abbess of Crewe transposes the narrative to a Catholic convent in England, where a small cabal of elitist nuns, blinded by power and a foolish faith in their own impervious superiority, has seized control of the abbey through a startling and inventive series of Machiavellian maneuvers. The novel is complexly shaded, and thus mischievous Alexandra, the abbess of the title, and her scheming cohorts, Walburga and Mildred, are the novel's protagonists despite their gross cruelty and self-centeredness.
   
   Looking forward to today's world of continuous public video surveillance, Alexandra and her inner circle have, regardless of the fact that the convent observes medieval standards, wired the entire facility so that there is no place in which the other nuns cannot be eavesdropped upon or monitored. Hilariously, the abbess and her inner circle enjoy pate and champagne in their sumptuously decorated observation room, while the rank and file members of the order, whom they privately hold in gleeful contempt, endure meals of hot water, boiled nettles, and cat food without complaint or awareness. Spark is unsparing in her depiction of both Alexandra's sense of superiority, which approaches the predestined, and the mindless idiocy and gullibility of the common nuns in the pew, who clearly represent the average man, ripe for manipulation, exploitation, and programming.
   
   Like Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1962) and The Takeover (1976) among others, The Abbess of Crewe is another extraordinarily deft examination of political and personal power struggles and the methods in which politics really operate within ostensibly gentile, mannered, and "correct" hierarchies. Alexandra and her confidantes are blissfully aware that they are capable of the very vices they publicly decry in the "vulgar" "common" nuns; but serene deportment, assured speech, personal charisma, and effortless presentation are, in their eyes, inherent manifestations of individual and spiritual nobility, and not only take precedence in all situations, but firmly override the possibilities of sin and wrongdoing in the elect. Alexandra's outrageously barbed and salty language behind closed doors--"A Jesuit, or any priest for that matter, would be the last man I would elect to be laid by. A man who undresses, maybe; but one who unfrocks, no"--is one of the highlights of The Abbess of Crewe.
   
   Interestingly, the corrupt and delusional Abbess appears to lose control of both "history and mythology" as the narrative winds to a close, going so far as to throw her co-conspirators to the wolves when the need to do so arises. But Alexandra never loses her regal bearing or quiet sense of self-justifying divine grace and privilege, and, Spark hints, probably never will.



5. Spark said this was a dig at the Bush Administration, but read it now for a new perspective. The line-tapping nuns of Crewe feel just as much like Bush's NSA as Nixon's plumbers.
   
   Who's Alexandra? Personally, I think Bush is the model for Winifrede... Read this for some laughs and some razor-sharp cuts at the "paranoid style" of government that Richard Hofstadter warned us of 40 years ago-- boy oh boy, did he know what he was talking about....