The Pocket Guide to Woodstock: An Insider’s Guide by Michael Perkins and Will Nixon ’75
The Pocket Guide to Woodstock: An Insider’s Guide by Michael Perkins and Will Nixon ’75 Bushwhack Books, 2012 Join Michael Perkins and Will Nixon, authors of the best-selling Walking Woodstock, for a personal tour of places they’ve explored on foot for years. Learn about the early Dutch settlers and witches; the bluestone quarries and tanneries; the bohemian arts colony; the historic hotels on Overlook Mountain; the concert that didn’t happen here; the sixties rock ’n’ rollers, including Bob Dylan and Levon Helm; the promoters and the eccentrics; the legends and the history that...
Read MoreCharles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel by Jonathan H. Grossman ’85
Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel by Jonathan H. Grossman ’85 Oxford University Press, March 2012 The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. Charles Dickens’s Networks explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport network in the 19th century and the indelible impact it made on Dickens’s work. The advent first of stagecoaches, then of railways and transoceanic steamships made round-trip journeys across once seemingly far distances seem...
Read Moreintimate geographies: poems by Bo Thorne Niles ’62
intimate geographies: poems by Bo Thorne Niles ’62 Finishing Line Press, 2012 “Although its title may call to mind Elizabeth Bishop, the poems in intimate geographies conjure the alert, lucid spirit of May Swenson as they shape their way toward emotional heights and depths. In this collection, which is also recollection, the poet’s formal and verbal inventiveness is deftly balanced with a tender attention to sensory details. The resulting poems map, and honor really, lives that are dear, vivid, all-too-swiftly passing, and therefore, in the truest sense, sacred.” —Jeanne Marie...
Read MoreA Weaving of Cultures
For more than 60 years, Jacquetta Nisbet ’46 has been learning, practicing and teaching the ancient textile traditions of Native American and First Nation cultures. One of North America’s premier weaving artists, she has created works represented in collections around the world, from a 15-foot double-woven light form for Pasadena’s California Design X show, to a ten-footwide wall hanging for Nordstrom. Born in Malaysia and raised in Edinburgh, she emigrated to the United States and now lives in British Columbia. Jacquetta embodies cultural exchange. Her interest in weaving began on an...
Read More5 Voices from History
A daily pleasure of mine is listening as students react to the primary texts we read in class. Though the vocabulary of colonial English and the complex sentences of offi cial texts present challenges, students engage. Why did Jefferson blame King George and not Parliament for the abuses listed in the Declaration? Why did the authors of the Constitution set up the electoral college and need urging for the Bill of Rights? Other readers connect with the humanity—sometimes cloaked, sometimes fully expressed—in the words left behind. We use primary documents in all our history classes. What...
Read MoreA 14-Minute Talk For Seniors: A Reflection on Spending Time
By Lisa Baker Some of the very best moments of my year have been running with Malia. She’s my daughter, 10 years old and coltish, limby and awkward, ankles poking out of her pants, her foot already a women’s size nine. But she’s all-girl, too—breathless and silly, amused by her sister’s potty humor and still willing to snuggle. “Wanna go for a run, honey?” I say to her after school, and she says, “Sure,” every time. Running had become a tedious routine, the washed-up athlete in me needing to hold on to the daily run, an efficient way to keep in shape, to claim a little for...
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