The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened FamiliesBy James Q. WilsonHarperCollins, New York, 274 pages You have to admire James Q. Wilson’s nerve. In his latest effort, The Marriage Problem: How Our Culture Has Weakened Families, the noted conservative social scientist bushwhacks through a set of thorny problems. He’s well prepared for the brambles. […]
Katharine Whittemore
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Ode to New Englands mills reborn
Reused factories provide haunts for the ghosts of our industrial past In western Massachusetts, where I live, many rivers bear resonant names. A few conjure up attributes (the Swift, the Cold); some echo the oh-to-be-in-England titles of neighboring towns (the Deerfield, the Westfield); others recall fine, kinetic tribal names (the Housatonic, the Konkapot). But the […]
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Seeing the Forests and the Trees
Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New EnglandBy Tom Wessels The Countryman Press, Woodstock, Vermont, 1999 (paperback), 199 pages. Stepping Back to Look Forward: A History of the Massachusetts ForestEdited By Charles H.W. FosterHarvard University, Cambridge, 1998, 339 pages. When I was a kid, out in the patchy, suburb-fringed but, to me, luminously […]
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Suburban Sprawl
Changing Places: Rebuilding Community in the Age of SprawlBy Richard Moe and Carter WilkieHenry Holt, New York, 1998, 276 pages. Home From Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World for the 21st CenturyBy James Howard KunstlerSimon & Schuster, New York, 1998, 318 pages. As I lay on the couch in my sunlit apartment, reading Home from Nowhere, […]
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George Apley Lives
No equivocation, then. “The land where the gold grasshopper swings above Faneuil Hall to the bidding of a damp east wind,” in other words Boston, has never been decanted more expertly, into any other novel, than the vintage, silky pages of The Late George Apley. It won the 1938 Pulitzer for fiction. It became a […]