The Honey Boat,> by Polly Burroughs. Illustrated by Garrett Price. Published 1968 and 2008. Schiffer Publishing Ltd., Atglen, PA, 44 pages. $14.99.
For those who remember traveling the streets of Edgartown years ago, the term honey wagon was a euphemism for the septic system pump-out trucks that traveled the streets during the height of summer. It was pretty easy to understand why they got such a witty name. The vehicles attracted so many flies that from a distance they could look like beehives.
Like Ireland in the past two hundred years, and Concord in the mid-19th century, the Vineyard is known for incubating writers. Some of them set their stories right here on the Island. The most illuminating to come down the pike in a long time — perhaps the most illuminating ever — is The Mud of the Place, by Susanna J. Sturgis, published by Speed-of-C Productions, $19.99.
Explore Your Dreams by Acting them Out. By John Lipsky. Larson Publications, 208 pages. Softcover, $16.95.
DREAMING TOGETHER: Explore Your Dreams by Acting them Out. By John Lipsky. Larson Publications, 208 pages. Softcover, $16.95.
Prize-winning playwright, director, and professor of drama at Boston University, Jon Lipsky has been pioneering for decades in the field of dream theater. Now he has written an important and delicious new book, Dreaming Together, which sheds abundant light on what happens inside us at night when our eyes are shut.
The most stressed-out fish of the sea, the false albacore, made an appearance a week ago. They scared the bonito away and now it seems as though both are absentee.
False albacore and bonito are among the fastest swimming fish of these waters from late August to October. They are a finicky warmer weather fish. It is hard to write a sentence about one without mentioning the other in the same paragraph.
But the prevailing northeast winds of the last few days have cut down on a lot of the boat fishing.
KILLER HEAT. By Linda Fairstein. Doubleday, 2008. 384 pages. $26 hardcover.
Killer Heat, like any good title, is a play on words. It refers to death by New York oven — the baking August temperatures that send the rich to the Hamptons or the Vineyard, and the poor to their fire escapes for a breath of nighttime air. Killer Heat is also a reference to an actual killer or killers and to the heat, slang for law, that hunts ’em down and brings ’em to justice.
Many of today’s top writers of thrillers have spent untold hours in the actual forensics and crime fields, and Australian doctor and bestselling author Kathryn Fox is one of them. Dr. Fox will be signing her new book, Skin and Bone, in tandem with the Vineyard’s own celebrated maestro of the legal and police procedural, Linda Fairstein for her latest, Killer Heat (see right), at Edgartown Books today, July 4, at 3 p.m.
CROSSED, a Tale of the Fourth Crusade. By Nicole Galland. Harper Paperbacks, New York, N.Y. 2008. 641 pages. $15.95 softcover.
Blending history with humor is a great way to communicate and Vineyard native Nicole Galland achieves this tender mix in her latest novel, Crossed, A Tale of the Fourth Crusade, in which she brings to life a disastrous medieval holy war.
ISLAND LIFE: A CATALOG OF THE BIODIVERSITY ON AND AROUND MARTHA’S VINEYARD. By Allan R. Keith and Stephen A. Spongberg. Published in cooperation with the Marine Biological Laboratories, Woods Hole, Mass. 2008.
Remarkable Americans: > The Washburn Family. By Kerck Kelsey. Illustrated. Tilbury House Publishers. 402 pages. $25.95.
Since the 1950s, the Washburn name has been a familiar one in Edgartown, with the late Stanley Washburn living on South Water street in summer and C. Langhorne Washburn summering on Pease’s Point Way. This fact-filled volume tells the story of their 19th-century forebears from northern Maine.
