Books, Biographies & Memoirs, Regional U.S., New England

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Michael Patrick MacDonald
All Souls: A Family Story from Southie
by Beacon Press (Hardcover)

This searing coming-of-age memoir is set in "Southie" where gangster Whitey Bulger runs the drug business, and class and racial violence erupt in response to forced busing in the 1970s. MacDonald loses four siblings to drugs, poverty, and violence, and eventually attempts to transcend his grief as he becomes an activist in the Southie he can't help but love. "If you were charmed by Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes . . . try All Souls, Michael Patrick Mac-Donald's guileless and powerful memoir of precarious life and early death in Boston's Irish ghetto. . . . With its probes of crooked politicians, bad cops, and layers of racism, All Souls easily breaks its regional and ethnic boundaries."-R. Z. Sheppard, Time

Nick Flynn
Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir
by W. W. Norton (Paperback)

"A stunningly beautiful new memoir…a near-perfect work of literature."—Stephen Elliot, San Francisco Chronicle"Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up."Nick Flynn met his father for the third time when he was twenty-seven years old, working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Nick, his own life precariously unsettled, was living alternately in a ramshackle boat and in a warehouse that was once a strip joint. In bold, dazzling prose, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (a phrase Flynn senior uses to describe his life on the streets) tells the story of two lives and the trajectory that led Nick and his father into that homeless ...

Catherine Goldhammer
Still Life with Chickens: Starting Over in a House by the Sea
by Hudson Street Press (Hardcover)

For the millions who loved A Year by the Sea comes a memoir of a woman who awakens at midlife to find wisdom in a most unlikely place In this lovely, unconventional, often funny memoir, we meet Catherine Goldhammer, newly separated and several tax brackets poorer, forced by circumstance to move from the affluent New England suburb of her daughter's childhood into a new, more rustic life by the sea. Against all logic, partly to please her daughter and partly for reasons not clear to her at the time, she begins this year of transition by purchasing six baby chickens-whose job, she comes to suspect, is to pull her and her daughter forward, out of one life and into another. As she gradually transforms her new house, nine hundred feet from the sea-with its tawdry exterior but radiant soul-tile by tile, flower bed by flower bed, as she watches her precocious twelve-year-old daughter blossom into a stylish and sophisticated teenager, and as she tends to the needs of six ...

Joan Anderson
A Year by the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman
by Broadway (Paperback) (Release Date: 2000-08-15)

Now available in paperback, the entrancing story of how one woman's journey of self-discovery gave her the courage to persevere in re-creating her life.Life is a work in progress, as ever-changing as a sandy shoreline along the beach. During the years Joan Anderson was a loving wife and supportive mother, she had slowly and unconsciously replaced her own dreams with the needs of her family. With her sons grown, however, she realized that the family no longer centered on the home she provided, and her relationship with her husband had become stagnant. Like many women in her situation, Joan realized that she had neglected to nurture herself and, worse, to envision fulfilling goals for her future. As her husband received a wonderful job opportunity out-of-state, it seemed that the best part of her own life was finished. Shocking both of them, she refused to follow him to his new job and decided to retreat to a family cottage on Cape Cod.At first casting about for direction, Joan ...

Dan W. DeLuca
The Old Leather Man: Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend (Garnet Books)
by Wesleyan (Hardcover)

In 1883, wearing a sixty-pound suit sewn from leather boot-tops, a wanderer known only as the Leather Man began to walk a 365 mile loop between the Connecticut and Hudson Rivers that he would complete every 34 days, for almost six years. His circuit took him through at least 41 towns in southwestern Connecticut and southeastern New York, sleeping in caves, accepting food from townspeople, and speaking only in grunts and gestures along the way. What remains of the mysterious Leather Man today are the news clippings and photographs taken by the first-hand witnesses of this captivating individual. The Old Leather Man gathers the best of the early newspaper accounts of the Leather Man, and includes maps of his route, historic photographs of his shelters, the houses he was known to stop at along his way, and of the Leather Man himself. This history tracks the footsteps of the Leather Man and unravels the myths surrounding the man who made Connecticut's caves his home.

John "Red" Shea
Rat Bastards: The Life and Times of South Boston's Most Honorable Irish Mobster
by William Morrow (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2006-03-14)

You've met the Italian mob in The Godfather, now welcome to the real-life world of Irish America's own murderous clan of organized crime The man who has remained silent for more than a decade finally speaks, revealing the gritty true story of his life inside the infamous South Boston Irish mob led by the elusive, Machiavellian kingpin Whitey Bulger, who to this day remains on the lam as one of the world's Ten Most Wanted criminals, second only to Osama bin Laden. John "Red" Shea was a top lieutenant in the South Boston Irish mob, rising to this position at the age of twenty-one. Thus began his tutelage under the notorious Irish godfather James "Whitey" Bulger. An ice-cold enforcer with a legendary red-hot temper, Shea was a legend among his Southie peers in the 1980s. From the first delivery truck he robbed at thirteen to the start of his twelve-year federal sentence for drug trafficking at twenty-seven, Shea was a portrait in American crime -- a terror, brutal and ...

Lobster Chronicles, The: Life on a Very Small Island
by Brilliance Audio Unabridged (Audio Cassette) (Release Date: 2002-07-10)

After seventeen years at sea, Linda Greenlaw figured it was time to take a break from her career as a swordboat captain. She felt she needed to return to Isle au Haut - a tiny island seven miles from the Maine coast with a population of 70 year-round residents, 30 of whom were her relatives. She would pursue a simpler life; move back in with her parents and get to know them again; become a professional lobsterman; and find a guy, build a house, have kids, and settle down.But all doesn't go as planned. The lobsters resolutely refuse to crawl out from under their rocks and into the traps she and her stern man (AKA, her father) have painstakingly set. Her fellow Islanders, an extraordinary collection of characters, draw her into their bizarre Island intrigues. Guys prove even more elusive than lobsters. And as mainlanders increasingly fish waters that are supposed to be reserved for Islanders, she realizes the that the Island might be heading for a "gear war," a series of attacks ...

Wendell Seavey
Working the Sea: Misadventures, Ghost Stories, and Life Lessons from a Maine Lobster Fisherman
by North Atlantic Books (Paperback) (Release Date: 2005-04-27)

In Working the Sea, Wendell Seavey paints a lively portrait of life both off and on the shores of Maine. Journeying from a two-room schoolhouse to the College of the Atlantic, from boatyards to back alleys, and from labor strikes to soul-searching road trips, he is accompanied by not just fisherman, but by professors, psychiatrists, and environmentalists. A man of humor and humility, open to both nature and the supernatural, Wendell Seavey is living proof that fishermen are indeed the best storytellers.

John "red" Shea
Rat Bastards: The South Boston Irish Mobster Who Took the Rap When Everyone Else Ran
by Harper Paperbacks (Paperback) (Release Date: 2007-01-09)

John "Red" Shea, 40, was a top lieutenant in the South Boston Irish mob run, led by James "Whitey" Bulger. An ice–cold enforcer with a red–hot temper, Shea was a legend among his peers in the 1990s South Boston, as much as John Gotti, Bugsy Siegel, and Al Capone were in their time and place. When the actor and producer Mark Wahlberg, raised in nearby Dorchester, learned of a script based on Shea's life circulating in Hollywood, he immediately committed to playing the gangster on screen. A major feature film project is now in development. From the age of thirteen, when he started robbing delivery trucks, to the age of twenty–seven, when he began serving a twelve–year federal sentence for drug trafficking, Shea was a portrait in American crime – a bantam–weight, red–headed terror, brutal with his fists and deadly with a lead pipe, a baseball bat, or a knife. At fifteen he was selling marijuana . At seventeen he was handling Bulger's cocaine. At eighteen he was loan ...

Kate Maloy
A Stone Bridge North: Reflections in a New Life
by Counterpoint Press (Hardcover) (Release Date: 2002-01-08)

A middle-aged woman with a teenage son rediscovers her Quaker faith, and quits her urban life for a homestead in the woods of Vermont. "I lived a straight-edged life, a cubist arrangement of familiar rectangles: office, computer screen, paycheck, city blocks, mortgage, calendar pages, television screen. These were more confining than I knew. Most confining of all, for most of those years, was the four-square house I occupied like a resentful ghost through half my marriage...I am no longer a ghost in my life." --from the Prologue A Stone Bridge North is the author's own story of "miracles found and fears allayed" in the journey out of a confining urban existence and into a simpler, more joyous life. To tell this story fully, she must look through changed eyes at her past-at childhood anxieties, family disaffections, failed marriages, late motherhood, restless boredom, and, paradoxically, a native talent for joy. She learns that she has been guided by faith even when she ...

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