The Galaxy Bookshop

I started reading this book after a bike ride around Berlin, N.H. I saw 'boom piers' and wondered what they were. In this book, Robert Pike, who as a youth worked in the woods and on the rivers, writes vividly, knowedgeably, and often humorously of every detail of lumbering. He describes the daily life of the loggers, showing how the various specialists worked and what life in the camps was like. He brings the reader right into the woods, smelling the tangy, newly cut timber, hearing the boom of the falling trees.

An Our Town for our times, The Mammoth Cheese is beautifully crafted and driven by warm, vibrant characters as it follows the residents of rural Three Chimneys, Virginia, on their journey to re-create the original Thomas Jefferson-era, 1,235-pound "Mammoth Cheese." As the book opens, the town is joyously celebrating the birth of the Frank Eleven (eleven babies simultaneously born to Manda and James Frank after fertility treatments) and enjoying the thrill of notoriety as reform-minded presidential hopeful Adams Brooke visits the newborns. But as autumn progresses and the babies weaken, the community seeks to redeem itself through the making and transporting of a symbolic Mammoth Cheese to Washington, as a gift for the newly elected President Brooke.

A San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller A Book Sense Selection "Extraordinary . . . One quickly runs out of superlatives when praising this book." -- Gerard DeGroot, Christian Science Monitor From the author of the widely acclaimed King Leopold's Ghost comes the taut, gripping account of one of the most brilliantly organized social justice campaigns in history -- the fight to free the slaves of the British Empire. In early 1787, twelve men -- a printer, a lawyer, a clergyman, and others united by their hatred of slavery -- came together in a London printing shop and began the world's first grass-roots movement, battling for the rights of people on another continent. Masterfully stoking public opinion, the movement's leaders pioneered a variety of techniques that have been adopted by citizens' movements ever since, from consumer boycotts to wall posters and lapel buttons to celebrity endorsements. A deft chronicle of this groundbreaking antislavery crusade and its powerful enemies, Bury the Chains gives a little-celebrated human rights watershed its due at last.