Anyone who’s visited Annapolis is familiar with the site of the white-uniformed Midshipmen from the U.S. Naval Academy. But unless you’re one of the 1,000 or so to graduate from the service academy each year, life behind its stone walls and iron fences is full of mystery like some secret society.
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A good book can take us farther than an airplane, keep us otherwise occupied longer than a week away from home and cost far less than any vacation. True, I’d rather be reading my book on a sandy beach with an ocean breeze. But even on my own back deck, lolling my cushy birthday chaise, a good book, a summer’s day and a cool drink make a vacation.
    In that spirit, the Bay Weekly family of readers offers its annual summer reading special.

We English speakers lack words for what the French call plein air painting, the Italians al fresco and Spanish speakers al aire libre.
    But fresh air painters we’ve got aplenty, as Gary Pendleton’s new book 100 Plein Air Painters of the Mid-Atlantic lavishly illustrates.
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Bob Timberg has a face you don’t forget.
    How the U.S. Naval Academy graduate and Marine first lieutenant — handsome son of a mother who was a McCall’s cover girl at 13 — got that face is a question you don’t ask.
    Yet now, “as I edge into my seventies,” Timberg says, he has written a book revealing the whole story.
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