This world doesn’t exist anymore. It was a time when jobs were plentiful and workers were scarce. The Vietnam War divided the country. The sexual revolution was embraced with open arms. The selective service collected reluctant soldiers. Women sought equality. Music was changing into protest songs to help stop a war. It was a time when, with only a high school diploma, you could follow your father into a high-paying but very dangerous industry. This is a story of a young man’s quest, raised on traditional morals and values, finding his way through this tumultuous era. It is also a story of survival in the very dangerous occupation of “hanging iron”. Mr. Neff, the son of a steelworker, joined the ranks of Bethlehem Steel employees in 1972, and became a rigger in 1975. The rigger crews in the Steel Company did the jobs that were deemed too high, too hard, or too dangerous for other departments to handle. They also had an earned reputation for being the bad boys of Bethlehem Steel. Rigger is both riotously funny and chilling. It is a look into a world that few have known and that will never exist again. “This is literally heavy metal literature—a pounding story of the suspense, the danger, and the sublime sense of accomplishment that was the everyday fare of the adventurous, rule-breaking riggers. With this vivid account, Larry Neff and Blue Heron Book Works have made a more important memorial of American industrial history than any museum could hope to achieve.” Mary Lawlor, author of Fighter Pilot’s Daughter: Growing Up in the Sixties and the Cold War. “Neff’s book is a gift to his union "brothers and sisters," and to all of us who've stared at those long-quiet stacks and wondered what it must have been like to work, day to day, in the midst of them.” Joyce Hinnefeld, author of Stranger Here Below “…people wouldn't believe some of the stories we could tell." Charlie "Snapper" Walp, Rigger/Welder

Rigger: A Memoir from High School to High Steel

Biographies & Memoirs

Neff, Mr. Larry James

Memoirs

Blue Heron Book Works

Memoir of a Vietnam Vet who returns home and tries to find his bearing, but butts heads with his father and friends and falls into a career of horse training.

Off Track: or How I Dropped Out of College and Came to be a Horse Trainer in the 1970s While All My Friends Were Still Doing Drugs

McGarrah, Jim

Professionals & Academics

Vincent Francone’s “Like a Dog,” as in “Work like a dog,” is a great read. A working class guy who comes up on the South Side of Chicago and moves north in a quest a better life, Francone takes us on a dazzling tour of minimum wage America over the last couple of decades. He’s has done it all; “I’ve tried telemarketing, copy writing, editing; I managed a courier center, I conducted background checks on potential healthcare employees, and worked in a stock room. . . .” And that’s before he goes to university and winds up, like so many other academics today, as a part-time instructor in a string of economically stressed public colleges. Francone’s descriptions of boring and soul-destroying work, the places where it’s done, and the people who do it are beautifully written, wildl entertaining, deeply poignant, and mysteriously inspiring. This is what it’s like to be alive in these times, “Like a Dog” insists, this is the battlefield of everyday life. These are your adversaries: mindless repetitive work, bored and boring co-workers, feckless bosses, plus your own inclination to work as little as possible, spend every penny you earn right away, and escape from bad job to bad job, without ever climbing any ladder that might lead to better paid if equally meaningless work. Best of all, this post-industrial odyssey down mean streets and corridors to mean offices and classrooms, dingy apartments, and dead end bars is full of gritty life. Francone is a gifted story- teller with a great, street smart voice. His protagonists and characters are brilliantly drawn.. And in their bafflement and self-destructive resistance to the work regieme that claims them they press back in an utterly realistic way against our recession-bred equation of employment, almost any employment, with salvation. Studs Terkel would have loved this book--John McClure, Phd

Like a Dog: A Memoir

Francone, Vincent

Nicholas DiGiovanni’s contemplation of the un-ignorable reality of death is really a celebration of the relationships we form over time with the people around us, with our own histories, and with living itself. I can think of few authors able to write about death this honestly while maintaining the warmth, thoughtfulness and humor that make life worth living. “Man Has Premonition of His Own Death” is a welcome reminder for readers of all ages that we discover the meaning of life through living it deeply and fully. Michael N. McGregor, author of "Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax”

Man Has Premonition of Own Death: An Ancestor's Strange Demise and Other Mortal Matters

DiGiovanni, Nicholas

Boston society divorce lawyer Swanson Herbinko knows better than to mix business with pleasure, but what if this particular pleasure is Hidalgo, a man who knows his way about her BMW as well as he knows his way around her body? And what if the business is finding out who murdered Carlton Stubbs, a Trump-like developer whose wife, Matilda, Swanson is representing in their pending divorce? Dozens of people would love to see Carlton dead including his nurse—Hidalgo’s sister Ines—and especially his nearest and dearest relatives all of whom are tapped out financially: art forger son Tucker and his dominatrix girlfriend Ulrike; daughter Sarah and her 6 foot tall army drill sergeant girlfriend LePage; not to mention his twin brother Stone who controlled Carlton’s inheritance for years and now is forced to give it up…until it mysteriously vanishes. Swanson dives into the stormy waters of Beacon Hill society—becoming a target herself as her sources turn up dead—to solve the murder with the help of her fierce dachshund Devil Dog. The only question that remains is whether Swanson will wind up just like her sources… DEAD.

Dead Wrong: A Swanson Herbinko Mystery in Boston (The Dead Series)

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Monk, Bathsheba

Mystery

Boston society divorce lawyer Swanson Herbinko has never been out of Massachusetts, but when she meets Guy de Guy, a Frenchman with sandy blond hair and an adorable soul patch living in Boston’s Back Bay, she runs—not walks!—in her five inch Jimmy Choos to get her passport. Guy woos Swanson with food and she falls hard, but when she goes to France to help Dick untangle the murder of Michel Meriodoc the head of the French Farmer’s Association and chief proponent of gastronomie terroir she finds herself in the middle of an international food fight between Meriodoc’s organization and the sellers of GMO food. Quelle horror! Swanson and her dachshund Devil Dog dive into the thick bouillabaisse of French food, getting arrested in a Parisian demonstration, getting in a brawl in a French women’s prison and almost dying in the chateau’s maze which was built to imprison people. The only question that remains is whether Swanson will wind up just like Meriodoc... DEAD.

Dead Silence: A Swanson Herbinko Mystery in Paris (The Dead Series)

Blue Heron Book Works loves stories and we are dedicated to the idea that everyone’s individual story—not just those who live in the glare of the celebrity spotlight—is essential to the bigger story of who we are. It’s not politically correct to assign characteristics to nationalities, and in fact most Americans wouldn’t consider being American a nationality, claiming that we all come from somewhere else. And yet, after even one generation here—often sooner—the thing that we all have in common, the thing that makes us American, asserts itself and that is this: we look at everything with a child-like sense of the new. Nothing has associations that can’t be reworked or reimagined. That’s what Americans do: we reinvent ourselves constantly, create ourselves from scratch because all of us are starting over in some way. It’s this looking at a situation for what it is without the judgement of generations that makes us the most creative people on the planet. This quintessential American point of view is captured beautifully in journals and blogs, letters, in unedited and unreflective short bursts of observation and it is what we are celebrating in Songs of Ourselves.

Songs of Ourselves: America's Interior Landscape

Literature & Fiction

Blue Heron Book Works, Editors

Matranga, Jonah

Pamela Varkony

United States

Lynnie Godfrey shares lessons she learned while pursuing a career in show business. Lynnie is an award winning actress both in the theater and television, a popular chanteuse and now a sought-after producer and director. Her "lessons learned" will encourage and guide anyone who is "seeking the spotlight."

Lynnie Godfrey: Sharing Lessons Learned While Seeking the Spotlight

Arts & Photography

Godfrey, Lynnie

Performing Arts

This is the story of a woman who falls in love in Tulum, Mexico—before the maddening crowds descended and made it a hip destination. Fanny fell in love with Tulum but mistook it to be part of an interesting, dysfunctional and violent relationship with a beach bum she met the day she arrived in 2004. He introduces her to all the wonderful things about Tulum: the pace, the nature, the lifestyle. And, as she falls in love with Tulum—the new feelings, places and experiences—she thinks she’s falling in love with him as well. He begins to control her and help her move her life from straight-laced Boston to a pre-discovered Tulum: savagely beautiful, raw, amazing and intense. Before electricity, before hip cool restaurants and people, before it was the tourist destination that it is today. But as her relationship gets increasingly abusive and achieving her dream life in Tulum increasingly impossible, the question becomes: how can she leave? In this wonderful story of love and discovery, Fanny Barry conjures the magic of a place that enticed her to abandon the secure life of a professional on the rise to start anew in a jungle hideaway on a beach she thought was worth dying for, or at least worth dying on. She lets go of her traditional life and jumps into the deep end with this man and this place. Her story is riveting and captures the essence of a paradise that is quickly fading. Tulum 12 years ago, before Johnny Depp, before Meg Ryan, before all the hipsters could hack it, Fanny built herself a little bungalow in the jungle with no electricity where she could practice yoga, detach from hostile men, ant, and scorpion invasions while she healed from breast cancer treatments, lost loves and opportunities. She turned her life upside down and inside out and came out on the other side of Tulum: at the beach, alive and willing to share her story.

Map of Life and Beauty

Barry, Fanny

Arts & Literature

She’s lost her work, her home and her freedom. Now, harboring a mysterious newborn, she could lose her life. In 17th Century Germany on the brink of the Thirty Years War, 24-year-old Katarina is traded to the patrician Sebald Tucher by her fiancé Willi Prutt in order to pay his debts. En route to her forced relocation to the Tucher country estate, Katarina is met by a crazed archer, Hans-Wolfgang, carrying a baby under his cloak. He tells her an incredible story of how his beloved was executed by a Jesuit priest for witchcraft right after the birth and makes Katarina—at sword point—swear on her life to protect the child. But protecting the child puts Katarina at risk. She could fall in disfavor with her master. She could be hunted by the zealots who killed his beloved. She could be executed for witchcraft herself. Can Katarina's love for the baby and Sebald Tucher's desire for her keep the wrath of the zealots at bay? Set in Franconia, The Master and the Maid is an accurate, authentic account of a young woman's life in Germany in the 1600's, her struggle for freedom and her fight for those she loves.

The Master and the Maid: #1 in the Heaven's Pond Trilogy

Libricz, Laura

Genre Fiction

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Books by Blue Heron Book Works