Dale

The Darkness Manifesto (Staff Pick)

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The Darkness Manifesto: On Light Pollution, Night Ecology, and the Ancient Rhythms that Sustain Life By Johan Eklöf, Elizabeth DeNoma (Translated by) Cover Image
By Johan Eklöf, Elizabeth DeNoma (Translated by)
$20.80
ISBN: 9781668000892
Availability: In Stock: Click Title to See if it's in CAMBRIDGE or BOSTON
Published: Scribner - February 14th, 2023

We’ve all understood light pollution - light from homes, businesses, street lamps, etc. particularly in urban areas - prevents us from seeing what our ancestors routinely saw of the night sky. Eklof shows us the effects of light pollution are infinitely more significant as light is so highly disruptive to the life cycles of countless species critical to the health of planetary ecosystems.

- Dale


Born in Blackness

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Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War By Howard W. French Cover Image
$19.95
ISBN: 9781324092407
Availability: In Stock: Click Title to See if it's in CAMBRIDGE or BOSTON
Published: Liveright - October 25th, 2022

French restores the centrality of Africa to what is often seen as the modern economic and political ascendancy of Europe. Incredibly rich in detail provided by recent scholarship and informed by French’s own contemporary reporting from the region, Born in Blackness helps to forever change how we view the last 700 years of the Trans-Atlantic world.

Dale


Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside

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Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside By Gordon Wilkins, Mark Dion, Christoph Irmscher, Errol Morris, Belinda Rathbone Cover Image
$65.00
ISBN: 9780847872282
Availability: In Stock: Click Title to See if it's in CAMBRIDGE or BOSTON
Published: Rizzoli Electa - September 13th, 2022

This monograph by notable local artist Rosamond Purcell serves as the catalogue of a spectacular career retrospective exhibition currently taking up the entire 2nd floor of the Addison Gallery in Andover until Dec. 31st. With several insightful essays as well as an interview with the artist, this book stunningly displays the evolution of this remarkable American artist.

Dale


One Hundred Saturdays

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One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World By Michael Frank, Maira Kalman (Illustrator) Cover Image
By Michael Frank, Maira Kalman (Illustrator)
$28.00
ISBN: 9781982167226
Availability: In Stock: Click Title to See if it's in CAMBRIDGE or BOSTON
Published: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster - September 6th, 2022

Over the course of six years Frank, with much kindness and patience, elicits from Stella Levi her profoundly moving story of the Juderia of Rhodes, a community of Jews who lived on the island for hundreds of years and were brutally deported by the Nazis to Auschwitz in 1943. Frank’s loving portrait of Levi is luminescent.

Dale


Fears of a Setting Sun

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Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders By Dennis C. Rasmussen Cover Image
$18.95
ISBN: 9780691241418
Availability: In Stock: Click Title to See if it's in CAMBRIDGE or BOSTON
Published: Princeton University Press - November 8th, 2022

It will come as a surprise to many, as it did to me, almost all the Founding Fathers, save Madison, were so disillusioned by what had become of the experiment of the republic they helped create they did not expect it to survive much longer past their lifetimes. Rasmussen explains why.

Dale


Orwell's Roses

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Orwell's Roses By Rebecca Solnit Cover Image
$28.00
ISBN: 9780593083369
Availability: Available to Order from Supplier: Arrives at Store in a Week(ish)
Published: Viking - October 19th, 2021

That Orwell was a gardener may come as a surprise to many. Even more so the idea, as Solnit so clearly and elegantly shows, his close observation of the natural world and the beauty he found there was central to his humanistic vision and was reflected in all he wrote.

Dale


Godine at Fifty

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Godine at Fifty: A Retrospective of Five Decades in the Life of an Independent Publisher By David R. Godine Cover Image
Not Available to Order
ISBN: 9781567926767
Published: David R. Godine Publisher - December 14th, 2021

One of the distinct pleasures of working in the book business over the many years of my career has been those times I spent perusing the catalogs of David R. Godine and sometimes meeting in a sales call with the man himself. A pleasure because Godine’s offerings were always out of the ordinary and the catalogs themselves were as carefully produced as you knew the books would be. I own many and have sold most of the books described in this celebration. It is a delight to read the backstory of the publishing of not only my favorites but also those I have yet to read and no doubt now will want to.

Dale


The Cause

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The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783 By Joseph J. Ellis, Ph.D. Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9781631498985
Availability: Available to Order from Supplier: Arrives at Store in a Week(ish)
Published: Liveright - September 21st, 2021

Ellis, in his new one-volume history skillfully manages the large cast of characters and the diplomatic, political and military aspects to tell a compelling story of the American revolution. Informed by a consensus of current scholarship it is both elegantly written and entertaining.

Dale


The Afghanistan Papers

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The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War By Craig Whitlock, The Washington Post Cover Image
$30.00
ISBN: 9781982159009
Availability: Available to Order from Supplier: Arrives at Store in a Week(ish)
Published: Simon & Schuster - August 31st, 2021

The Pentagon Papers is the obvious inspiration for Whitlock’s title. At first, I was suspect as the length of the book seemed to indicate it was not as encompassing an examination of U.S. involvement in its longest war as it’s model. The Afghanistan Papers, however, brings to light decades of interviews with the actual boots on the ground through the military’s own “Lessons Learned” project. What is compelling clear is that the U.S. took almost nothing from the lessons of our involvement in Vietnam. Once again, year after year, the top brass and our politicians lied about the progress being made in yet another unwinnable war without a clear strategy in a country we never made the effort to understand. Read this book to find out why what is happening in Afghanistan today is not in the least surprising and long ago foreseen.

Dale


Unsolaced

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Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is By Gretel Ehrlich Cover Image
$26.95
It's Complicated--Contact Us for More Information
ISBN: 9780307911797
Published: Pantheon - January 5th, 2021

 

Very much a bookend to her first book, the 1985 memoir Solace of Open Spaces set in Wyoming where she came to make her home, Ehrlich’s new work is much darker for she’s witness to the calamitous effects of climate change on the distant places and people she’s come to love over the past decades, from Greenland to Japan to Africa. In the end it’s a book not without hope as it is also a story of resilience , renewal, and once again, love.

Dale


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