Confessions of a Boatbuilder


Book Description

Confessions of a Boat Builder recaptures the maritime lore and romance of the last days of the wooden boat and the craftsmen who built them.







Messing about in Boats


Book Description

Will Millar always dreamed of running away to sea. Now he's an expert sailor, ready to take readers on a lighthearted romp around the world.




Elements of Yacht Design


Book Description

Skene's is one of the most famous books on yacht design ever written. First published in 1904, Skene did several revisions, the last of which was published in 1938 and reprinted here in its original form. In 1962, the book was completely revised by Francis S. Kinney and re-published as Skene's Elements of Yacht Design. Kinney's last version was in 1973 and it is long out of print. While the experts are divided on the relative merits of the different editions, it appears that there is strong demand for Skene's original work. At last the book is again available to the many boatbuilders. aspiring naval architects and sailors who need it for frequent reference. The index has been completely revised and expanded to make it more useful for today's readers. "This book is intended to be a practical and concise presentation of some of the operations involved in designing yachts of all types. Cumbersome and impractical methods which are so often found in more pretentious works on naval architecture have been avoided. Those presented have been in everyday use by the author." Thus wrote Norman L. Skene int he preface to the fifth edition of Elements of Yacht Design.




How to Build a Tin Canoe


Book Description

While still a young boy, Robb White built his first boat, hewn from the tin roof of an abandoned chicken coop in the backyard-stamping and primping it into shape, then testing it out in the back creek. Today, without any formal training, White constructs some of the most sought after small wooden boats around. This colorful portrait of the author's life invites readers into his special world-a world uncluttered by computers, telephones, and rush orders. With chapters such as 'Seagull: In which I learn not to be so gullible' and 'The canned ham incident: In which I did not participate, so hurrah for the other side,' White shares some of his wisdom gained from boat-building. Here as well are tall tales of a childhood spent exploring the Gulf of Mexico, and lessons learned from having his own family. Both wise and entertaining, How to Build a Tin Canoe will find a place on the shelves of readers who love Bailey White (the author's sister), Roy Blount, and Garrison Keillor.




Men without Maps


Book Description

In Men without Maps, John Ibson uncovers the experiences of men after World War II who had same-sex desires but few affirmative models of how to build identities and relationships. Though heterosexual men had plenty of cultural maps—provided by nearly every engine of social and popular culture—gay men mostly lacked such guides in the years before parades, organizations, and publications for queer persons. Surveying the years from shortly before the war up to the gay rights movement of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Ibson considers male couples, who balanced domestic contentment with exterior repression, as well as single men, whose solitary lives illuminate unexplored aspects of the queer experience. Men without Maps shows how, in spite of the obstacles they faced, midcentury gay men found ways to assemble their lives and senses of self at a time of limited acceptance.




The Mourning After


Book Description

On the battlefields of World War II, with their fellow soldiers as the only shield between life and death, a generation of American men found themselves connecting with each other in new and profound ways. Back home after the war, however, these intimacies faced both scorn and vicious homophobia. The Mourning After makes sense of this cruel irony, telling the story of the unmeasured toll exacted upon generations of male friendships. John Ibson draws evidence from the contrasting views of male closeness depicted in WWII-era fiction by Gore Vidal and John Horne Burns, as well as from such wide-ranging sources as psychiatry texts, child development books, the memoirs of veterans’ children, and a slew of vernacular snapshots of happy male couples. In this sweeping reinterpretation of the postwar years, Ibson argues that a prolonged mourning for tenderness lost lay at the core of midcentury American masculinity, leaving far too many men with an unspoken ache that continued long after the fighting stopped, forever damaging their relationships with their wives, their children, and each other.




Tales and Confessions


Book Description




Book Review Index


Book Description

Every 3rd issue is a quarterly cumulation.