EMILY POST: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners. By Laura Claridge. Random House, New York, N.Y. October 2008. 544 pages. $30 hardcover.
The Honey Boat,> by Polly Burroughs. Illustrated by Garrett Price. Published 1968 and 2008. Schiffer Publishing Ltd., Atglen, PA, 44 pages. $14.99.
For those who remember traveling the streets of Edgartown years ago, the term honey wagon was a euphemism for the septic system pump-out trucks that traveled the streets during the height of summer. It was pretty easy to understand why they got such a witty name. The vehicles attracted so many flies that from a distance they could look like beehives.
Like Ireland in the past two hundred years, and Concord in the mid-19th century, the Vineyard is known for incubating writers. Some of them set their stories right here on the Island. The most illuminating to come down the pike in a long time — perhaps the most illuminating ever — is The Mud of the Place, by Susanna J. Sturgis, published by Speed-of-C Productions, $19.99.
Explore Your Dreams by Acting them Out. By John Lipsky. Larson Publications, 208 pages. Softcover, $16.95.
DREAMING TOGETHER: Explore Your Dreams by Acting them Out. By John Lipsky. Larson Publications, 208 pages. Softcover, $16.95.
Prize-winning playwright, director, and professor of drama at Boston University, Jon Lipsky has been pioneering for decades in the field of dream theater. Now he has written an important and delicious new book, Dreaming Together, which sheds abundant light on what happens inside us at night when our eyes are shut.
David Lebedoff is a Minneapolis attorney, political figure and writer known for provocative thinking. In the interest of full disclosure, he is also an old friend.
VINEYARD BIRDS II: Where and What to See on Martha’s Vineyard. By Susan B. Whiting and Barbara B. Pesch. Vineyard Stories, Edgartown, Mass. 2007. 152 pages, photographs and illustration. $19.95, softcover.
Is there any relationship more complicated and, when it works, more rewarding, than the mother-daughter bond? Two authors with strong Vineyard ties have approached this essential kinship from both sides, from the formative years, and during the final years.
The litany of complaints of the squeezed middle class is familiar.
Three million jobs gone overseas this decade. People working all their lives on the promise of pensions they don’t get. Declining availability of health care. Parents believing, for the first time in U.S. history, that their children will not do as well as they did.
“Everyone knows that recitation,” said Philip Dine.
