Chesapeake Boyhood


Book Description

Chesapeake Boyhood is an account of growing up on the lower Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake during the years following the Great Depression. Turner's stories include rousing tales of 'coon hunting, crabbing, boat building, duck hunting, oyster tonging, and Saturday jaunts to town. Turner brings the characters, experiences, waterscape, and landscape of rural Virginia to life as no one has done before or is likely ever to do again. His own drawings illustrate the stories, and they, too, win us over with their honesty and charm. "Its chief virtue (besides its highly literate style), it seems to me, is its intimate, sensory knowledge of a vanishing Chesapeake landscape: its sounds and smells, the way things feel to the touch, the lore lodged in the names of the commonest creatures and activities... At one point Turner likens the local farmers and fishermen sitting around the table in the country store to fixed positions on a compass, with `all the cardinal points taken,' and I think of this [book] as a kind of compass too, that describes one man's orientation to the Eastern Shore."--Andrea Hammer, St. Mary's College "Modern outdoor writing has enough anemic adventures by faint-hearted writers reared in the suburbs. What it needs more of is the droll wit of an Ed Zern, the robust foolishness of a Patrick McManus, and the lean prose of an Ernest Hemingway. It gets all three in the tales of Bill Turner."--George Regier, author of Heron Hill Chronicle and Wanderer on My Native Shore "Storms, boat wrecks, childhood pranks and even old dogs are remembered with a sense of humor in Turner's book. He has captured the rhythms of country life in a time before fast cars, credit cards, and air pollution." -- Waterman's Gazette




An Hour Before Daylight


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Jimmy Carter re-creates his boyhood on a Georgia farm.




Boyhood Days - Book 2


Book Description

Boyhood Days - Book two, is part of a five piece collection of Caribbean Narratives which is revered to some extent, on the actual experiences of the author and a host of other people in his time, and collectively combined to form a single story. In reality, all of the events mentioned in the book and played by its main characters are actually a combination of experiences of the author and other persons, which had sometimes occurred in different places, to different persons (other than the author) and at different time periods, but arrayed together to form one consistent line of occurrences. While the entire activities of the book itself are grounded entirely in Guyana (then British Guiana), the book's main imaginary character, Joshua Williams (called Josh) depicts a life that resonates broadly across our Caribbean culture in the 1960's, and more or less, depicts the generally live-loose nature of our Caribbean people in those times. Those were the times when there were no television sets, no Ipods, no computers, no microwaves, no mobile phones, and no major technological innovations. Those were the times when in despite of the absence of these novelties, people lived more happily, showed more tolerance for each other, demonstrated respect for the elderly, and were never knowingly short of food, as every neighbours pot was always open to the other. Those were the times when a man's word was as good as his handshake, and his promise was as genuine as 24 karat gold. Indeed those were the times when children were playful, yet committed to the tasks bestowed upon them. Those were the days when boys played cricket in the streets and endured the black sage whip fuh cussin, and breaking their neighbours' glass windows. Those were the days when you ketch patwa and houri, strayed whole day, and mercilessly steal from the neighbours fruit trees. Yes, my Caribbean friends, those were the wonderful days that you embrace with nostalgia and craze. Yes, you and I would always remember, our "Boyhood Days".




The Castle Builders


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Bulletin


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Where the Cherry Tree Grew


Book Description

Noted historian pens biography of Ferry Farm—George Washington's boyhood home—and its three centuries of American history In 2002, Philip Levy arrived on the banks of Rappahannock River in Virginia to begin an archeological excavation of Ferry Farm, the eight hundred acre plot of land that George Washington called home from age six until early adulthood. Six years later, Levy and his team announced their remarkable findings to the world: They had found more than Washington family objects like wig curlers, wine bottles and a tea set. They found objects that told deeper stories about family life: a pipe with Masonic markings, a carefully placed set of oyster shells suggesting that someone in the household was practicing folk magic. More importantly, they had identified Washington's home itself—a modest structure in line with lower gentry taste that was neither as grand as some had believed nor as rustic as nineteenth century art depicted it. Levy now tells the farm's story in Where the Cherry Tree Grew. The land, a farmstead before Washington lived there, gave him an education in the fragility of life as death came to Ferry Farm repeatedly. Levy then chronicles the farm's role as a Civil War battleground, the heated later battles over its preservation and, finally, an unsuccessful attempt by Wal-Mart to transform the last vestiges Ferry Farm into a vast shopping plaza.