Arts and Culture (Books)

Article - Books; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 11/15/12

Saveur’s A Bountiful Shore

Take inspiration from this beautifully photographed Virginia Shore dinner

The best appetizer is a good story. With that philosophy of life, I’m drooling over Bernard L. Herman’s first-person story of his Chesapeake Thanksgiving feast in this month’s Saveur. A titled professor of American studies and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Herman tells his story with the loving detail we tend to reserve for faraway times. Just before dawn on Thanksgiving morning, he begins, I pull on...

Article - Books; by Elisavietta Ritchie - 11/8/12

Chesapeake Country Poets and Novelists

Washington Writers’ Publishing House wants to give you $1,000

Writers and poets of the greater Bay Weekly area, here is your chance to see your best work as a book. Storm Sandy pushed the venerable Washington Writers’ Publishing House annual deadline to December 1. Fiction writers and poets living within a 75-mile radius of the U.S. Capitol — in the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia — thus gain an extra month to prepare manuscripts for entry in two annual book competitions. Some writer-...

Article - Books; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 11/1/12

Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White...

Allan Lichtman has unlocked the secret to counting the vote

Can’t stand to wait another week to know who’s going to be president? Ask Allan Lichtman. “My 13 questions will tell you who will claim the popular vote,” says the American University political professor, a Marylander who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2006. His keys have called it right in every election since the middle of the 19th century, when the popular vote was first counted. Of course...

Article - Books; by Ann H. Wolfe - 10/25/12

The Reader: 2012 General Election Voters’ Guide

by League of Women Voters of Anne Arundel County

The Voter’s Guide is a superb primer to the Maryland and Anne Arundel County ballot questions on which we will vote November 6. The League of Women Voters is a well-known nonpartisan political organization. In its own words, the League “encourages informed and active participation in government, works to increase understanding of major public policy issues and influences public policy through education and advocacy. The League does not support or oppose any...

Article - Books; by - 10/18/12

Books Fit for Halloween

Haunted Annapolis: Ghosts of the Capital City reviewed by Sandra Olivetti Martin We are not alone. Other feet have stood in the spot our lively toes now wiggle. Other lives have occupied the place we now call home. Historians may strain an ear to hear reverberations of their passing; most of us are deaf. Until Halloween, when their calls stir the air around us, raising our hackles. Mike Carter and Julia Dray listen all year long. They are career historians of the ghosts of...

Article - Books; by Dr. Francis Gouin - 9/13/12

The Reader

Plants of the Chesapeake Bay

In Plants of the Chesapeake Bay, John Hopkins University Press has just published what I consider the most comprehensive and well-illustrated field guide. Lytton John Musselman and David A. Knepper’s 217-page book has outstanding color pictures and descriptions of wildflowers, grasses, aquatic vegetation, trees, shrubs and other flora. It also organizes the plants in communities within the Bay region. The communities include hyper-salinity, maritime, brackish and...

Article - Books; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 9/6/12

The Reader

Janet is an utterly personal book describing the human experience with purity, truth and guilelessness. That is how elegies work.

The elegy is a literary form dear to the human heart, for it’s the best reply we can summon to death’s speechlessness. Janet is such a work, created by Bay Weekly contributing writer Al McKegg in honor of his wife, Janet. With soaring highs and crashing lows, theirs was a love story made for literature. It was too cruel for real life. Cupid struck them with wayward arrows. Al was 12 years older than Janet and otherwise...

Article - Books; by Ashley Brotherton - 8/9/12

Putting in His Two Cents

Crownsville author writes to end hatred

Denis Murray wants to put his two cents on the table. After 70 years of reading and thinking and thinking and reading, he believes that death, hate and responsibility are gifts we should appreciate. “If it weren’t for death,” Murray explains, “we wouldn’t appreciate life. If it weren’t for hate, we would be bystanders in life. With hate comes the choice of hope, a choice that can offer meaning in our lives. And responsibility gives us the...

Article - Books; by Bay Weekly staff - 12/15/11

Winter Reads

With cold weather here to stay, warm up with these Chesapeake authors

The sights are great, world travelers report. But, they insist, you only really get to know a place through its people. All around us are people who are the keepers of untold treasure. Untold until you scratch the surface. Then you find yourself in the company of people who’ve recorded history being made, and people who’ve delved into the past to recover history made long ago. People who know more than anybody else in the world about this or...

Article - Books; by Sandra Olivetti Martin - 11/3/11

When the World Was Big

Read all about it in a big new book: Traveling the World for National Geographic

High-school sweethearts Tom and Lynn Abercrombie grew up when the world was big and globe-trotting journalists lived big. A legendary National Geographic photojournalist, Tom had carte blanche to travel to exotic lands and stay until he had the pictures and story he wanted. Lynn, a freelance Geographic photographer, was at his side. Tom, a pilot, recalled in these pages the time he bought a floatplane for an assignment in Alaska, putting it on his expense account. When the...