This is our fourth "handy book" by Dan Beard, the founder of the American Scouting movement, who believed that having boys build things with their hands was not only a detriment to making mischief, but also the basis for building great lives. In this belief, Beard was indefatigable, and every Scout worth his merit badge was expected to read his classic tract on camp-lore and woodcraft, which included instructions on how to build a good fire, cook venison, prepare for a camping trip, and use an axe and a saw.

When we published the first book in this series (The American Boy's Handy Book), we thought it might appeal to a few hundred aging Scouts who fondly remembered "the old days." How wrong we were! With over 600,000 copies in print, the book is still selling strong. As Beard directed in 1930, "So, Boys
of the Open, throw aside your new rackets, your croquet mallets, and your boiled shirts. Pull on your buckskin leggings, give a war whoop and be what God intended you should be; healthy wholesome boys. This great Republic belongs to you and so does this book." To which we can only say, "Amen!"

Grete Weil's novels The Bride Price and Last Trolley from Beethovenstraat have proved her experience in the Holocaust to be unique and highly personal. She was one of the very few German writers who lost family and friends to the camps and decided to return to Germany after the war to rebuild their lives. In this collection of her best short fiction, the author looks beyond the loss of her loved ones and the effect of the era on her fellow Germans to its effects on those who had fled to apparent safety in California, New York, Paris, or even the forests of the Yucatan. Weil compares them to survivors of an atom-bomb blast, who live beyond the initial explosion and consider the worst to be over, only to later sicken and die. The fugitives' lives are damaged, even physically destroyed, by the aftershock – by their inability to shed the culture of the country from which they have fled, their intense memories of happier times, and by the constant intrusion of the ghosts of both victims and persecutors. The author's acerbic but rigorously honest gaze spares no one, not even herself, as she once again challenges readers to take stock, to ask how to avoid any future infusion of victim's blood into what eventually will be called history.

In her desire to bear witness to the Holocaust...Weil wisely doesn't attempt to show us what it is like to be a victim or a murderer; [she] shows us what it is to be a bystander. And, as she delicately suggests, we are all bystanders to something.
– Adam Kirsch, The Boston Phoenix

Through spare, poignant vignettes, Weil appeals to our historical conscience and our shared sense of the pain of the Holocaust. [She] enables us to inhabit her characters' world...with the emotional force of a visit to a concentration camp.
– The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Read Benjamin Lytal's review in The New York Sun.

The prose of Joan Aiken, her uncanny ability to tell a great story in language that is classically beautiful, her fascinating characters, riveting dialogue, and compelling action, should be better appreciated. Like her father, Conrad Aiken, she is adept at a number of forms but is a master of the short story. In this fetching collection of what she considers thirteen of her best tales, she can be scary (everyone knows her fascination with wolves and witches) and poetic (as in "Moonshine in the Mustard Pot" or "The Lilac in the Lake"). But whatever she sets her hand to, it reads like the work of a master. Set against the lovely and luminous pencil drawings of Pamela Johnson, we have a a baker's dozen of magical tales that will stay with readers long after the last page is turned and the lights turned out.


"What I relish in particular is the swiftness of the telling, the vigor with which brilliant moments of perception … seem to be improvised in the sheer delight of the onward rush of the story. Joan Aiken is a marvel."
—The Guardian

"It is a rare enough achievement to create even one children's novel that is read with equal pleasure by youngsters and adults alike.… [Aiken's] readers can inhabit a world where … wit and poetry, drama and compassion, exist in equal measure."
—Smithsonian

Former Poet Laureate Donald Hall grew up spending his summers on his grandfather Keniston's farm in what was then rural New Hampshire. It was there that his mother, Lucy, and her sister Caroline, had grown up, milking cows, raising sheep and telling stories about their childhood – a time when the July Fourth parade in Danbury was the biggest celebration of the year (complete with flags, speeches and ice cream) and when a trip to Boston, where toys could be bought for a penny apiece, was counted as a major event. Published in the same format and with the same delightful handcolored scratchboard illustrations by Michael McCurdy as Lucy's Christmas, this is a piece of Americana that will bring readers back to a simpler and gentler America in which pleasure was derived from making as much as buying, where politics were truly local and not a national circus, and when worth was determined by character, not price.

In his Superior Person's Book of Words and its two sequels, the incorrigible Peter Bowler did his best to spread confusion throughout the English-speaking world by encouraging his trusting readers to use obscure, sometimes preposterous words for no other purpose than to impress (or conveniently befuddle) their peers. But he recently experienced a "Road to Damascus" conversion. Confronted by the damage being inflicted on his beloved Mother Tongue by the pretentious, euphemistic, obfuscatory, and self-aggrandizing cant now running amok in our military, corporate, and academic arenas, he is mounting a one-man campaign to return us to sanity.

The Superior Person's Field Guide is a call for the return to simple, straightforward words that say what they mean and mean what they say. Most of us know that "downsizing" means that you're about to be fired, but have you ever heard its business-speak cousins "offshoreable" or "cash-flow episode"?

With his customary wit and clear-sightedness, Bowler cuts a swath through the thickets of popular jargon, casting daylight on such linguistic deformities as "interrogate with prejudice" (that is, torture) and "unforeseen geological event" (a mining disaster). Impatient with euphemism, he examines ugly specimens forced into bloom in the interests of political correctness – "waitperson," "developmentally challenged" – designed to help the squeamish avoid direct confrontation with the simple facts of sex and disability. Here are circumlocutions that make the disagreeable seem agreeable, the unacceptable acceptable, and here is Peter Bowler, as always, trying to set the record, and the English language, straight.


"A lexicon devoid of practical value but replete with entertaining possibilities...Not for the faint of wit."
-Publishers Weekly

Durrell's hilarious and warm My Family and Other Animals (1957) began a trio of reminiscences of his life growing up with a slightly dotty family – the overbearing and omniscient Larry; the affectionate and loving siblings, Margot and Leslie; and, of course, the overburdened and patient Mother – on the island of Corfu in the 1930s, when a pound could buy a villa and life was conducted as a series of riotously high (and sometimes low) adventures. But what shines through these five vignettes is the author's engagement with and immense affection for animals in all their forms. From fish to fowl, from lizards to little water fleas (daphnia), Durrell's eye is acute and his prose is tart. You can read this book for the humor alone (for he did perceive his family as some rare and rarefied species), but between the lines you can discern the makings of a world-class naturalist and a cultivated and engaging writer.

One of eight children, Laurie Lee was born in 1914, in Slad, Gloucestershire, then a remote corner of England. As his father was absent, the large family – five children from his father's first marriage and three from his second one – was brought up by his capable mother. "We lived where he had left us; a relic of his provincial youth; a sprawling cumbersome, countrified brood too incongruous to carry with him; and I, for one, scarcely missed him. I was perfectly content in this world of women . . . bullied and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days, patched or dressed-up, scolded, admired, swept off my feet in sudden passions of kisses, or dumped forgotten among the unwashed pots."

Lee's memoir opens when he was just a baby – younger than three years old – and ends as he becomes a young man experiencing his first kiss. "I turned to look at Rosie. She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom; her hair was rich as a wild bee's nest and her eyes were full of stings. I did not know what to do about her, nor did I know what not to do. She looked smooth and precious, a thing of unplumbable mysteries, and perilous as quicksand."

This beloved classic describes a lost world, a world reflecting the innocence and wonder of childhood, and illuminating an era without electricity or telephones. This is England on the cusp of the modern era, but it could have been anywhere. This may explain why Cider with Rosie became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1959, selling over six million copies in the UK alone, and continues to be read by children and adults all over the world.

"Motion, Britain's poet laureate, was 16 in 1968 when his beloved mother fell into a coma after a hunting accident and his childhood "ended suddenly." After this shock opening, Motion recounts the scenes and events of that childhood, which range from warm early memories of growing up "country gentry" in Hertfordshire to being sent off to a Dickensian boarding school—with disgusting food, terrible sanitation and a headmaster who enjoyed beating little boys—at age seven. The book soars into the extraordinary when Motion recounts his early teens. A new boarding school brought a sympathetic headmaster who recognized the potential in the unread country boy's love for Dylan and Hendrix and encouraged him toward poetry. (A heartwrenchingly beautiful scene describes his slow, awed discovery of Thomas Hardy.) By age 15, Motion had made his first real friend and entered a new relationship with his mother, who read eagerly in partnership with him. Motion perfectly conveys the "new faster time" of adolescent thinking and subtly conveys us back to his mother's tragedy with a new understanding of its importance to his entire life."
                - Publishers Weekly, August 13, 2007

Despair over the temporariness of the human condition and the desire to preserve what has been known and felt, even grief, is at the heart of British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion's memoir of his childhood and adolescence in rural postwar England. A paean to his family and to the birds, brambles, and secret hollows of Hertfordshire and Essex, this memoir evokes with clarity, detail, and care a whole world that has past. The book begins in the present tense in December 1968, hours before the event that precipitated Motion's desire to capture and keep unchanged the life he had known heretofore: his mother's foxhunting accident and subsequent coma from which she never recovers. "My childhood has ended suddenly. In a day," writes Motion at the close of the first chapter. "I want to lock into my head everything that's happened in my life up to now, and make sure it never changes. If I can keep it safe, I'll be able to look back and feel safe myself . . . I just want everything as it was, when I saw the world for the first time."

Eschewing the confessional or critical tone of some memoirs, and the investigatory or elucidatory approaches of others, Motion strives to recreate the voice and vision of the boy he once was, taking care not to sully or distort with hindsight what is felt to be still very much alive in memory. Whether recounting his first time salmon fishing in Scotland with his father, the horrors of prep school at the young age of seven, or his discovery of Thomas Hardy and Bob Dylan, Motion imbues his recollections with the quicksilver emotions of the boy he was and the perceptions of the poet he will be; readers of Motion's poetry will recognize many of these experiences as the antecedents of the poems. Yet this memoir is far more than a guide to the life behind the poems; it is a stand against the ineluctability of time's passing, an insistence that what has been "felt in the blood, and felt along the heart," as in the book's title and epigraph from Wordsworth, can be neither taken from us nor lost.

"There seems to be no limit to the number of ways in which there might occur what Wordsworth called the growth of a poet's mind . . . He might well have acknowledged a family resemblance in his latest successor."
-Frank Kermode, London Review of Books

"A sad, gripping and powerful story."
-Margaret Drabble, New Statesman

"Brilliantly achieved and novel-like."
-John Mullan, Guardian

"The most moving and exquisitely written account of childhood loss I have ever read . . . In the Blood will always be Andrew Motion's elegy to his mother. For those of us fortunate enough to read this superlative memoir, it's a celebration of mothers everywhere." 
-Charlie Lee-Potter, Independent on Sunday

Graphic artists recognize genius when they see it, and most acknowledge that de Vicq's website and book, "Bembo's Zoo," was a milestone in creative design. In his new effort, de Vicq takes the designs of type and ornaments (known affectionately in the trade as "dingbats") and common linecuts to form the faces of his literary heroes. In the second part he combines type ornaments and icons to suggest a face with singular attributes: pride, fear, fanaticism, and surprise. But these are not drawings; they are images arranged from the combination of specific and discrete graphic forms. They are created on a computer and not in a composing stick. They are the face, and faces, of the future.

Printed throughout in two colors, often displaying the various letters, sorts and ornaments that make up the whole, this is our typographic offering of the year – wholly original, totally inventive. In these typographic assemblies transformed into ingenious portraits, de Vicq has managed, in the prose of Prose, "to make the alphabet sing."

Metropolitan Tang is Cambridge poet Linda Bamber's first book of poetry, a debut that is erudite and sassy, urban and urbane. Whether she is examining the breakup of her marriage or watching bulls in a field, considering Derrida's concepts of "presence" or her hairdresser's less theoretical philosophy, Bamber receives stimuli as indiscriminately as an antenna, all eyes and ears; then her sharp and curious mind gets to work, turning over images and ideas until she finds their proper relations, making meaning out of random juxtapositions, sense out of chaos, or, if nothing else, a good joke out of a bad situation. Most first books of poetry are tentative experiments in voice; Bamber's voice, sensitive and, at the same time, wry, is clear throughout, uniquely hers and eminently likeable.
As a reader I have often wished, over the years, for a female poet in the style of [Frank] O'Hara: bopping but sincere, humanistic and grounded but exuberant and irreverent. Linda Bamber may be that person. 
– Tony Hoagland