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Store Hours
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Greetings!
As always, our newsletter contains information about upcoming events. The next two authors to visit are award-winning journalist Brian McGrory with his memoir of life with a rooster, a story of "love, acceptance, and change" and George Howe Colt - the author of The Big House returns with Brothers, a look at his own family relationships and brothers throughout history - including the John and Henry Thoreau.
Further in this newsletter you'll find more information about these upcoming events, and view our complete schedule in the left sidebar of this newsletter. If you're unable to attend an event, but would like a signed book, just call us to have it a copy personalized and we'll hold it for your pick-up or arrange to have it shipped.
This week's newsletter picks include biography, inspiration, a novel, and a short fiction collection. Scroll down to find out about the latest from David Nasaw, Anne Lamott, Ian McEwan, and Alice Munro!
New to our Signed Books Gallery - a delightful picture book for the younger set, and the final installment in a Young Adult trilogy.
The community window highlights the Nature Connection, a local group which offers therapeutic and educational nature programs.
We look forward to chatting with you in the Bookshop! When you come in to take a closer look at an item mentioned here, please tell us "I saw it in the newsletter" and let us know what you're reading now.
Comments are always welcome via email to
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Our next event: Award-winning Boston Globe journalist with Buddy
Buddy: How a Rooster Made Me a Family Man by Brian McGrory
Event Date: Sunday, November 18 at 3pm
Award-winning journalist Brian McGrory goes head to beak in a battle royale with another male for a top-spot in his home, vying for dominance with the family's pet rooster.
Brian McGrory's life changed drastically after the death of his beloved dog, Harry: he fell in love with Pam, Harry's veterinarian. Though Brian's only responsibility used to be his adored Harry, Pam came with accessories that could not have been more exotic to the city-loving bachelor: a home in suburbia, two young daughters, two dogs, two cats, two rabbits, and a portly, snow white, red-crowned-and-wattled step-rooster named Buddy.
While Buddy loves the women of the house, he takes Brian's presence as an affront, doing everything he can to drive out his rival. Initially resistant to elements of his new life and to the loud, aggressive rooster, Brian eventually sees that Buddy shares the kind of extraordinary relationship with Pam and her two girls that he wants for himself. This is an inherently human story of love, acceptance, and change.
In the tradition of bestsellers like Marley and Me, Dewey, and The Tender Bar comes a heartwarming and wise tale of finding love in life's second chapter - and how it means all the more when you have to fight for it. Brian McGrory is a longtime newspaper reporter, editor, and columnist, and has written for and edited the Boston Globe since 1989. He has a twice weekly column that appears on the front of the metro section, for which he has won the Scripps Howard journalism award, and is the author of four novels. He lives in Massachusetts with his entire family.
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Upcoming event: National Book Award finalist discusses Brothers
Brothers: On His Brothers and Brothers in History
by George Howe Colt
Event Date: Thursday, November 29 at 7pm
Please join us on Thursday, November 29 at 7pm, as George Howe Colt presents his new nonfiction, Brothers, which looks at his own siblings and brothers throughout history - including John and Henry David Thoreau.
The Big House, George Howe Colt's memoir of life at the Colt family vacation compound, was a runaway bestseller and 2003 National Book Award finalist. Now, Colt has returned to his beloved family, this time focusing on brothers.
Part memoir, part history, Brothers traces the relationships among the four Colt brothers (George is the second oldest after Harry; Ned and Mark come next) while providing alternating chapters on famous brothers in history to illuminate concepts of brotherhood more broadly. Readers will learn about the Booth brothers, one the greatest stage actor of the 19th century, the other the assassin of a president; and about how Henry David Thoreau's masterpieces were written under the shadow of his adored older brother John, who died of lockjaw at 27. The Marx Brothers, famous for their onscreen collaboration and camaraderie, competed bitterly behind the scenes.
In alternating chapters, readers hear about the Colt brothers, and the fraternal relationships that frame each of their lives. As in The Big House, the Colts steal the show: responsible but distant oldest brother Harry; cautious, artistic George; rebellious matinee idol Ned; and baby Mark have adventures that anyone who's ever had a sibling will find resonant.
Illuminating, affecting, and full of surprises, Brothers will be revelatory for any mother or father of sons, any brother or sister, anyone curious about how thoroughly a man's life can be molded by his brothers.
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Upcoming event: new research explores Louisa May Alcott and "Marmee"
Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother by Eve LaPlante
Event Date: Sunday, December 2 at 3pm
Based on newly uncovered family papers, this groundbreaking and intensely moving portrait of Louisa May Alcott's relationship with her mother will completely transform our understanding of one of America's most beloved authors.
Since its release nearly 150 years ago, Louisa May Alcott's classic Little Women has been a mainstay in American literature, while passionate Jo March and her calm, beloved "Marmee" have shaped generations of young women. Biographers have consistently credited her father, Bronson Alcott, for Louisa's professional success, assuming that this outspoken idealist was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence.
But in this riveting dual biography, Eve LaPlante explodes those myths, drawing on unknown and unexplored letters and journals to show that Louisa's "Marmee," Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter's world. It was Abigail who urged Louisa to write, who inspired many of her stories, and who gave her the support and courage she needed to pursue her unconventional path. Abigail, long dismissed as a quiet, self-effacing companion to her famous husband and daughter, is revealed here as a politically active feminist firebrand, a fascinating thinker in her own right. Examining family papers, archival documents, and diaries thought to have been destroyed, LaPlante paints an exquisitely moving and utterly convincing portrait of a woman decades ahead of her time - and the fiercely independent daughter who was both inspired and restricted by her mother's dreams of freedom.
A story guaranteed to turn all previous scholarship on its head, Marmee & Louisa is a gorgeously written and deeply felt biography of two extraordinary women and a key to our understanding of Louisa May Alcott's life and work.
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Celebrated historian tells the story of Joseph P. Kennedy
The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy by David Nasaw
In this magisterial new work The Patriarch, celebrated historian David Nasaw tells the full story of Joseph P. Kennedy, the founder of the twentieth century's most famous political dynasty.
Nasaw tracks Kennedy's astonishing passage from East Boston outsider to supreme Washington insider. Kennedy's seemingly limitless ambition drove his career to the pinnacles of success as a banker, World War I shipyard manager, Hollywood studio head, broker, Wall Street operator, New Deal presidential adviser, and founding chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. His astounding fall from grace into ignominy did not come until the years leading up to and following America's entry into the Second World War, when the antiwar position he took as the first Irish American ambassador to London made him the subject of White House ire and popular distaste.
The Patriarch is a story not only of one of the twentieth century's wealthiest and most powerful Americans, but also of the family he raised and the children who completed the journey he had begun. Of the many roles Kennedy held, that of father was most dear to him. The tragedies that befell his family marked his final years with unspeakable suffering.
The Patriarch looks beyond the popularly held portrait of Kennedy to answer the many questions about his life, times, and legacy that have continued to haunt the historical record.
Nasaw tells the life story of a man who participated in the major events of his times: the booms and busts, the Depression and the New Deal, two world wars and a cold war, and the birth of the New Frontier. In studying Kennedy's life, we relive with him the history of the American Century.
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Essential reading; essential living
Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers
by Anne Lamott
New York Times-bestselling author Anne Lamott writes about the three simple prayers essential to coming through tough times, difficult days and the hardships of daily life.
Readers of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott's funny and perceptive writing about her own faith through decades of trial and error. And in her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she knows about prayer to these fundamentals.
It is these three prayers - asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating what we have that is good, and feeling awe at the world around us - that can get us through the day and can show us the way forward. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott recounts how she came to these insights, explains what they mean to her and how they have helped, and explores how others have embraced these same ideas.
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New novel from award-winning author
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan
In this stunning new novel, Ian McEwan's first female protagonist since Atonement is about to learn that espionage is the ultimate seduction.
Cambridge student Serena Frome's beauty and intelligence make her the ideal recruit for MI5. The year is 1972. The Cold War is far from over. England's legendary intelligence agency is determined to manipulate the cultural conversation by funding writers whose politics align with those of the government. The operation is code named "Sweet Tooth."
Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is the perfect candidate to infiltrate the literary circle of a promising young writer named Tom Haley. At first, she loves his stories. Then she begins to love the man. How long can she conceal her undercover life? To answer that question, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage: trust no one.
Once again, Ian McEwan's mastery dazzles us in this superbly deft and witty story of betrayal and intrigue, love and the invented self.
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Brilliant new collection of stories
Dear Life: Stories by Alice Munro
Alice Munro's peerless ability to give us the essence of a life in often brief but always spacious and timeless stories is once again everywhere apparent in this brilliant new collection. In story after story, she illumines the moment a life is forever altered by a chance encounter or an action not taken, or by a simple twist of fate that turns a person out of his or her accustomed path and into a new way of being or thinking.
While most of these stories take place in Munro's home territory - the small Canadian towns around Lake Huron - the characters sometimes venture to the cities, and the book ends with four pieces set in the area where she grew up, and in the time of her own childhood: stories "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact." A girl who can't sleep imagines night after wakeful night that she kills her beloved younger sister. A mother snatches up her child and runs for dear life when a crazy woman comes into her yard.
Suffused with Munro's clarity of vision and her unparalleled gift for storytelling, these tales about departures and beginnings, accidents and dangers, and outgoings and homecomings both imagined and real, paint a radiant, indelible portrait of how strange, perilous, and extraordinary ordinary life can be.
Alice Munro has published twelve collections of stories and two volumes of selected stories, as well as a novel. During her distinguished career she has been the recipient of many awards and prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine, Granta, and other publications, and her collections have been translated into thirteen languages. Alice Munro lives in Clinton, Ontario, near Lake Huron.
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New in our Signed Books Gallery
Bus Driver by Nancy Poydar
Nancy Poydar presented her most recent read-aloud picture book, Bus Driver, about a very special toy which keeps getting lost ... until Max stumbles upon a clever solution.
This is a delightful book that every toddler or preschooler (or the caregivers of these young children) can connect with!
Signed books are on our shelves!
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Reached by Ally Condie
We have signed editions of Reached, the third book (following Matched and Crossed) in the "Matched" Young Adult trilogy.
In a starred review, Kirkus says "With reveals seeming to arrive on almost every page, prepare to stay up all night."
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NYT Best Illustrated Children's Books of 2012
The list was announced in this week's New York Times Book Review. Here they are, in alphbetical order - come on in and check out the images inside the covers!:




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In our window
The Nature Connection: "Bringing nature, animals, and the arts to people."
This week's community window display was created by The Nature Connection.
The Nature Connection (formerly known as Animals As Intermediaries, AAI) brings animal and nature programs to people with limited access to the natural world. Founded over 25 years ago, we connect individuals with nature's capacity to heal and to teach.
The Nature Connection serves at-risk youth, people with disabilities and elders. We use a unique methodology that brings together seasonal natural materials, live animals, storytelling, music and other expressive arts.
Visiting each site once a month, or more, The Nature Connection brings educational and therapeutic nature programs to hospitals, residential programs, special needs schools, and nursing homes. We have served some of our clients for over 15 years.
For more information about The Nature Connection, visit their website, "like" them on Facebook, or phone 978-369-2585.
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