A Working Class Alternative to Labour

Gregory Motton

Levellers Press

In this first history of slavery in western Massachusetts in colonial times, Robert H. Romer demonstrates that slavery was pervasive in the Pioneer Valley in the 1700s, where many of the ministers and other "important people" owned black slaves. To show the role of slavery in the valley, Professor Romer presents a "snapshot" of slavery, choosing a moment (1752) and a place (the main street of Deerfield) to present detailed information about the slaves who lived in that place at that time -- and their owners. Working largely from original sources -- wills, probate inventories, church records, and merchants' account books -- he shows that slavery was much more significant than had previously been thought. Some twenty-five slaves belonging to fifteen different owners lived on that mile-long street in 1752. He emphasizes that these were individuals, some born in Africa, some born as slaves in New England, forced to live their lives as property, always subject to being sold away at the whim of an owner. 
 Deerfield is used simply as an example -- slavery was pervasive throughout the valley. In other chapters he treats -- in less detail -- other towns in the valley. He also gives a brief history of slavery in Massachusetts, from its beginnings in the 1630s until its gradual end in the final decades of the 1700s and then discusses how in the following centuries New Englanders for the most part managed to forget that slavery had ever existed here. 
 His work brings out of obscurity the many black slaves who lived in the valley, the invisible men and women of our colonial past.

Slavery in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts

History

Robert H. Romer

Americas

Vital Aging is sensitive, intelligent portrayal of the challenges of aging in modern society. The women portrayed in this book are pioneers with few role models. They are discovering themselves in the past and the present, leading the way into the future with humor, grace, and a sense of adventure. Sara Wolff has created a compelling story of the challenges of growing old in today's society. Cynthia S. Jacelon, PhD CRRN FAAN, Associate Professor, School of Nursing, UMass, Amherst

Vital Aging: Seven Years of Building Community and Enhancing Health

Sara S. Wolff

<div>She was hired to nurse them back to health...instead, she took their lives. For months, the DaVita Dialysis Center in Lufkin, Texas had been baffled by the rising number of deaths and injuries occurring in their clinic. In April alone, they&rsquo;d rushed thirty-four patients to the hospital. But no one expected such a horrific cause to be behind it all. Kimberly Clark Saenz was a well-liked licensed vocational nurse at the center. The East Texas nurse was a mother of two, and known for her smiles and the stories she told to help patients pass the time. But on April 28, 2008, witnesses came forward to say that instead of lifesaving medication, they&rsquo;d seen Saenz adding toxic bleach to IV ports. Turns out, it wasn&rsquo;t the first time. Once caught, the shocking story of Saenz&rsquo;s murderous practices began to unravel INCLUDES PHOTOS</div>

Bird of a Thousand Eyes

Janet E. Aalfs

Called to Serve: Stories of Men and Women Confronted by the Vietnam War Draft features 30 testimonies representing the entire range of responses to being drafted during the Vietnam War. There are men who served, men who resisted and went to jail, men who chose conscientious objection, men who left the country for Canada and men who found a variety of ways to beat the draft from having a high lottery number to feigning mental or physical illness. Each story is unique, but all share the stress, the turmoil and the uncertainty at a critical stage of life and during very turbulent times - the late 60's and early 70's. There is also a chapter entitled, THOSE WHO LOVED, SUPPORTED AND COUNSELED, which features the stories of 4 women. The author has chosen to include this wide range of responses to the draft and war in order to facilitate long overdue healing as each person presents his or her experience with rich detail and considerable back story so as to encourage empathy with each person's plight. This is from the Preface by Charlie Clements who both served in and later protested against the war:Over the decades, I have waited for someone to recognize and write about the profound fork in the road facing those of us affected by military conscription in the 1960s and '70s. Assuredly, there have been a lot of books that looked at the lives of men (and women) who followed the path of serving in Vietnam. Now, finally, there is a book exploring both that decision as well as the lives of some who chose the other fork in the road. Could the latter be said to be the "road less traveled?" I think not: it's only the road less written about.

Called to Serve: Stories of Men and Women Confronted by the Vietnam War Draft

Tom Weiner

This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon is a life in stories, the life of Margaret Mackenzie, a woman whom the reader comes to love. Weaving back and forth across the years, these stories invite us in, they tell us secrets, whisper mysteries, allowing us to know and feel deep joy, distinct sorrow, the silliness and rich meaning, in the living of one precious lifetime. Its readers say: "These stories won me over at once, heart and mind together." Alice Munro "That terrific and rare writer who can pair side-splitting humor with heartbreaking truth. She never ceases to make me laugh. She never ceases to make me cry." Sy Safransky, Sun Magazine "I loved these stories. Profoundly serious, absorbing, deft, and rare." Edith Pearlman "Like Raymond Carver, these linked stories attend unerringly to ordinary moments in ordinary lives. A life revealed in episodes, with breathless flights of imagination.....quiet, insistent, closely focused fiction." Brad Davis

This Road Will Take Us Closer to the Moon

Literature & Fiction

Linda McCullough Moore

Short Stories & Anthologies

At once a writer's autobiography and a road book, with vivid portraits of an unusual group of people-ranging from an early mentor and one-time neighbor, the late poet Archibald MacLeish, to world renowned jazz great Wynton Marsalis (with whose bands Carl Vigeland traveled for many years) and the author's charismatic, tormented father, also a musician-THE BREATHLESS PRESENT tells several intersecting stories in a variety of voices that mirror music's power to transmute memory and affirm life. The son of musicians, Carl Vigeland grew up in Buffalo, New York; after graduating from Harvard, he lived in Conway, where he taught school, worked on a farm, and reported for small newspapers while freelancing for several magazines. The author of six other books, he lives now in Amherst, where he teaches writing at the University of Massachusetts. Married, he is the father of three children.

The Breathless Present: A Memoir in Four Movements

Carl Vigeland

Ralph Waldo Emerson never tried to reinvent the institution of marriage, but his close friend, the writer Margaret Fuller, was freer to follow the dictates of self-reliance, and choose how she would make her commitments Born in 1810, Fuller received a boy's first-class education, and by the time she was in her twenties, she was so well-read that she had given up any hope of a normal woman's role, in marriage or in society.  Still unmarried at thirty, Fuller pressed Emerson for an intimacy deeper than their friendship. Emerson would not betray his marriage, but in their journals, both writers questioned the value of monogamous marriage for men and women of genius.  When she realized that Emerson was not as radical as his writing suggested, Fuller went to Europe, where she married an Italian Count.  Giovanni Ossoli was barely literate, but Fuller thought that she could still fulfill other sides of herself in other relationships. Fuller never got to live out her experiment in marriage: she and her husband died in a shipwreck on returning to America in 1850.  But the questions Fuller's life had raised-about how to reconcile marriage and self-reliance-are still echoing now, in our discomfort with marriage-and with any of the alternatives.An enlightening and emotionally charged narrative, The Dangers of Passion recounts the passionate friendship in which Emerson and Fuller: First learned to trust themselves and their hearts before any other authority; Discovered the delightful freedom of shared intellectual passion; Worked together to advance a philosophy of Transcendental self-reliance; Quarreled over Emerson's inability to give Fuller deeper fulfillment; Questioned the value of marriage for men and women of genius; Consoled themselves in marriages that lacked the intellectual and philosophical passion of their friendship.

The Dangers of Passion: The Transcendental Friendship of Ralph Waldo Emerson & Margaret Fuller

Daniel Bullen

Combat Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Holistic Approach is a book for:...therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, counselors and others interested in a more effective, more holistic approach to PTSD....Aikido senseis, practitioners and dojos wanting to offer a valuable contribution to veterans with combat-related PTSD. ...veterans support programs open to expanding their options to include the kinesthetic therapeutic learning inherent in the practice of Aikido. ...veterans looking for a martial art that will enable them to redirect the energy of their anger and fear to constructive use. The book presents an analysis of the disorder, an indication of what the statistics imply, a description of the power of Aikido as a kinesthetic therapy, and a one-year case history.

Combat Related Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Holistic Approach

Tom Osborn

SUSAN NAIMARK is a consultant and trainer who works with public school parents, grassroots groups, and nonprofit and public agencies to create responsive community institutions. She was a founder of the Boston Parent Organizing Network, a member of the school board for the city of Boston, and has served in leadership roles with several national nonprofit community development organizations. Susan's home since 1977 has been the Boston neighborhood of Jamaica Plain, where she and her husband raised two now-adult sons.

Education of a White Parent Wrestling with Race and Opportunity in the Boston Public Schools

Biographies & Memoirs

Susan Naimark

Professionals & Academics

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