Easton Studio Press LLC

In How to Invest in Commercial Real Estate, authors Dowell and Stachenfeld have created the ultimate guide for anyone interested in getting smarter quickly on the complicated world of commercial real estate.

In an easy-to-read format, the authors dissect nearly every aspect of commercial real estate investment, from the basic to the more complex, including asset segmentation, market analysis, deal structuring, promote mechanics, capital stack construction, commercial underwriting best-practices, risk assessment and mitigation, joint venture dynamics, and best-in-class investment processes just to name a few.

But this book isn’t just for beginning investors. Even seasoned professionals will benefit from reading it, especially from the authors’ insights into the more intricate elements of the market.

The authors, a commercial real estate investor and a commercial real estate attorney, have over seventy years combined of invaluable industry experience. Their love for their subject is palpable, and they pass along their passion and enthusiasm to the reader.

So, whether you are taking those first steps into commercial real estate investment or want to upgrade your existing expertise, How to Invest in Commercial Real Estate will prove to be a much needed and frequently referenced resource.

It was through control of the shattering of wild seeds that humans first domesticated plants. Now control over those very plants threatens to shatter the world's food supply, as loss of genetic diversity sets the stage for widespread hunger.

Large-scale agriculture has come to favor uniformity in food crops. More than 7,000 U.S. apple varieties once grew in American orchards; 6,000 of them are no longer available. Every broccoli variety offered through seed catalogs in 1900 has now disappeared. As the international genetics supply industry absorbs seed companies—with nearly one thousand takeovers since 1970—this trend toward uniformity seems likely to continue; and as third world agriculture is brought in line with international business interests, the gene pools of humanity's most basic foods are threatened.

The consequences are more than culinary. Without the genetic diversity from which farmers traditionally breed for resistance to diseases, crops are more susceptible to the spread of pestilence. Tragedies like the Irish Potato Famine may be thought of today as ancient history; yet the U.S. corn blight of 1970 shows that technologically based agribusiness is a breeding ground for disaster.

Shattering reviews the development of genetic diversity over 10,000 years of human agriculture, then exposes its loss in our lifetime at the hands of political and economic forces. The possibility of crisis is real; this book shows that it may not be too late to avert it.

This book was originally published in 1990 and remains as relevant today as it was then.

The United States is barreling toward a second Civil War. Washington, DC is under an orchestrated attack by militias intent on changing everything. The president is assassinated, cities are on fire, and the country is descending into chaos.

In Seattle, Daniel Goldman packs up his brother’s old Karmann Ghia with camping gear, books, and supplies, and retreats from the city. Reeling from a shattered legal career, a bad marriage, and occasional PTSD, he drives to a cabin near a quirky community called Duck Springs. His plan is to escape into the wilderness, where he can read, hike, contemplate his future, and ruminate on the absurdity of it all. Unexpectedly, he also finds love.

But the country’s troubles are not restricted to cities, and soon tiny Duck Springs is surrounded by rogue troops who have a specific reason for attacking this small town . . .

The Duck Springs Defiance is a tale of community, resistance, and redemption. 

John Edward Rossi isn’t the man you’d expect from his name. Adopted at age four, he is Hawaiian in looks, but New Jersey-raised, where he has spent thirty-one years struggling to blend in. He runs the family business, and is engaged to Angela Mancini. Marriage is his chance to finally assimilate into local society. 

His best friend has taken a job with a gambling company in Hawaii. When Jimmie is found murdered on Maui, John is compelled to return to his birthplace to bring his friend’s body home and to reassure Jimmie’s mother that justice will be served. The moment he steps off the plane, Maui feels alive to him—refreshing, intoxicating, and strangely familiar. He soon realizes that Jimmie’s murderer is not the man they have in jail. Plus he is spellbound by Lani, the accused suspect’s beautiful and mesmerizing Hawaiian attorney. 

Determined to find Jimmie’s killer, he is led into a perilous confrontation with Charles N. Brewster, a wealthy and powerful casino owner. Meanwhile, Angela’s father dispatches goons to Maui to drag John back for marriage to his daughter. And a mysterious gang of Tongans is pursuing him around the island. 

But John Rossi is undeterred—Hawaii has become home.

Paul Konwiser’s intimate knowledge of Hawaiian culture and lore imbues his novel with credibility and compassion. Island of Shadow and Light sweeps readers into a vivid story of identity, danger, and discovery, where the brilliance of Hawaii’s beauty collides with shadows of greed and violence.

“How can you describe a force?” Margaret Fuller’s friend Sam Ward asked after the pioneering feminist died in 1850 at age forty. Called by Henry James a “ghost” haunting American transcendentalism, Fuller comes to life in this historical novel—not as a pale specter but a passionate firebrand. 

Sparks Fly Up: The Lost Story of Margaret Fuller is a character- and plot-driven story of a brilliant woman who manages to infuriate and inspire peers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville.

Fuller wrote the first American book on women’s rights and was the first female newspaper columnist and war correspondent. She shocked New England conservatives with her revolutionary zeal, affair with a young Italian soldier, and “illegitimate” child. On the cusp of returning to the States from Italy, she died in a shipwreck. Lost with Fuller was her manuscript on the Italian struggle for freedom (the Risorgimento).

Uniting in Concord, Massachusetts, her friends squabble over how to memorialize her life. In this transformative, meticulously researched—and sure to be much discussed—view, some are proud of her ambition and others scandalized.

Strong female allies fight to preserve Fuller’s legacy. A charming cad is not a fan. Thoreau must choose sides. Whitman is an aspiring poet disguised as a hack reporter, and Melville finds Fuller’s story rousing. All are galvanized in a tour-de-force, cinematically thrilling, final scene. “If you have knowledge,” Fuller wrote, “let others light their candles in it.” Sparks Fly Up: The Lost Story of Margaret Fuller shows how her light emboldens and radiates—then and now. As the characters wrestle with the question of “me” versus “we,” their ethical dilemmas are evergreen.

Daughters of Fire is a gripping adventure of romance, intrigue, myth, and murder set amid the cultural tensions of today’s Hawaiʻi.

Winner of the Independent Book Publishers Association Benjamin Franklin Silver Finalist Award for Popular Fiction

A visiting astronomer falls in love with a Hawaiian anthropologist who guides him into a Polynesian world of volcanoes, gods, and revered ancestors. The lovers get caught up in murder and intrigue as developers and politicians try to conceal that a long-dormant volcano is rumbling back to life above the hotel-laden Kona coast. The anthropologist joins forces with an aging seer and a young activist, and these three Hawaiian women summon their deepest traditions to confront the latest, most extravagant resort as the eruption and the murder expose deep rifts in paradise.

Tom Peek’s mystical and provocative novel picks up Hawaiʻi’s story where James Michener left off. Daughters of Fire illuminates how the islands’ post-statehood transformation into a tourist mecca and developers gold mine sparked a Native Hawaiian movement to reclaim their culture, protect sacred land, and step into the future with wisdom and aloha.

Includes an illustrated map and 9 original pen-and-ink drawings created for the novel by John D. Dawson. Also includes a Reading Group Guide. 

Originally published in 2012, Daughters of Fire has become a classic of modern Hawaiian fiction. This edition includes a new introduction by the author.

Since we imagine something intentional about a community both in its formation and its function as a new entity, there is something both baffling and attractive about the idea of a “plant community.” Do plants know what they’re doing? Some claim our attention: good to eat, good to smell, get stuck to your clothes. For a majority, plants or plant communities arouse a restricted admiration: lawn. A lawn can be a plant community, an atrocious one to be sure. But I’m thinking of plant communities in the eyes of God, where the plants foregather in ancient times and set out toward infinity. These deserve the word community, and the individuals who make them up are original in the extreme, as they must be: they live in a tough town.

It is our luck that the eternal aspects of these daredevils have fallen to the eye of artist Lindy Smith who has used the sun in ways known best to her to reveal the souls of plants as lives, as archetypes, as semaphore. Their shapes seem to belong to dreams while for all their unexpectedness they are no more accidental than dreams. What we see emerges from the lives they’ve lived in deep time; their importance hangs over them as an aura. 

We long to say their names: milkweed, mullein, bulrush, fescue, rush, yarrow. Or, on the other hand, sumpweed, pigweed, spurge. They belong to the things we see for the first time while recognizing we’ve known them always, hence the longing to absorb their eternal forms. Creation—we have it by our fingertips, just. Smith’s images Smith has discovered the souls of so many plants I thought I knew and left their essential signatures on my mind that I will never see them in the same way again, or more to the point, forget them again. I wish I knew enough about the process to understand what help the sun has been in finding these plants out. But here they are, seen by an artist, and what help it is.—from the Preface by Tom McGuane

Sixty percent of Americans live with at least one chronic health condition and over a lifetime, many people will face multiple surgeries or life-changing diagnoses. A scary diagnosis can be overwhelming, launching patients and their loved ones into a world of fear, uncertainty, and complexity. Scary Diagnosis is a uniquely compassionate and empowering book that helps patients, families, and caregivers navigate the emotional and practical challenges that follow a serious medical diagnosis.

Author Edward Rogoff draws on his own experience with chronic illness and shares compelling stories from others who have faced similar journeys. Through these narratives, he reveals how individuals can move from fear to strength, advocate for themselves, and navigate the healthcare system, while maintaining their sense of control and dignity.

Scary Diagnosis is filled with real-life examples and valuable perspectives to help readers approach the challenges ahead with resilience and determination.

October 7. 

The date evokes a harrowing fear. The news broke worldwide that on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, Hamas terrorists had descended on the Supernova Music Festival, several nearby communities near the Gaza Strip, and IDF bases, brutally slaughtering anyone in their path; wiping out families and tearing apart entire families; and kidnapping over two hundred innocent civilians. As footage made its way across the internet and eventually into the hands of news stations and publications, mainstream media outlets quickly deemed most of it too graphic to reveal to audiences. Still images surfaced of a brutality beyond comprehension. 

This collection of writings by survivors of the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is groundbreaking in scope and detail. These raw, first-hand accounts memorialize the murdered and keep that day alive in our collective conscience. The events of October 7 will never be forgotten by those who were witnesses, and the impact must be shared with the rest of the world.

As one survivor writes, “The whole world needs to know what we’ve been through.”

In these writings, we learn of the many acts of heroism that such events so often inspire. And we read of the agonizing pain a parent of a child taken hostage endures; tributes to a fallen father who died protecting his disabled daughter; poems honoring lost sons, daughters, husbands, and wives; recalls of the Torah; and pleas for peace.

Each portrayal opens wide the door to grief, giving the reader an unfiltered account of that terrible day. Some of these writings may be difficult to read, but it is vital that we do read them and understand the impact that day has had on so many lives.

Proceeds from the publication of this book will be provided to organizations that support the survivors and their families.

The secrets behind creating compelling and successful business plans that are sure to attract financial backers and help business owners stay on track are revealed step-by-step in this invaluable guide. Containing clear, detailed explanations of the guidelines that banks, venture capital firms, and the Small Business Administration (SBA) use to grant loans and other financial support to businesses, this crucial resource equips potential business owners with a wealth of knowledge on lending procedures.&

This guide includes hundreds of useful ideas for developing, operating, marketing, and building a profitable business. Also included are copious examples and resources for further study. By demonstrating how to make each business plan uniquely suited to a particular endeavor—such as home-based businesses, sole proprietorships, and franchise operations—this comprehensive handbook ensures that anyone can embark on a new business venture with confidence and clarity.

The newly updated Third Edition includes:

Increased focus on Social Entrepreneurship or Social Ventures.Updated examples, including ventures that apply the latest technology. 

An expanded section that presents eight fundamental thinking tools that underlie entrepreneurial success and creativity. These include how to nurture your creativity and develop and test ideas without spending a penny.

A new and expanded section on establishing feasibility before creating a full business plan.

Expanded tools for researching business ideas, interviewing potential customers, and developing a competitive analysis to judge your ideas against potential competitors.

A simple and direct Venture Assessment Tool to specify the issues that are essential for success and enables you to evaluate the potential of your venture.

In Carol Hoenig’s previous novel, Without Grace, it is believed that Grace Finley walked out on her husband and two young children to fulfill a selfish dream of becoming a famous singer, leaving behind rumors and questions among her family and townsfolk in the mountains of Upstate New York.

Now in Before She Was a Finley, it is years later when Adele, a reluctant young journalism student is assigned to “get” a story from a local nursing home where she comes across elderly Grace Finley. Over time, Grace slowly takes Adele back to the 1930s and subsequent years that follow as she provides bits and pieces that eventually reveal the dark truth as to why she walked out on her family carrying only a guitar and suitcase. Adele knows that the class assignment was simply to write about a local person, and even though journalists aren’t supposed to be a part of the story, she cannot shake what she discovered and wants to do more to set the record straight. But is there anyone still alive who would care?

In reviewing Without Grace, North Country Public Radio said, “We need more North Country novels like Without Grace, novels with a keen sense of place. Before She was a Finley answers that call. 

Dramatic changes in the business world are creating new opportunities for personalized experiences. With no fixed pathways towards success, maneuvering the complexity of this new environment calls for further immersion into that which energizes and empowers you. This book is a journey through inner experiences, emotional development, and the dynamics that shape one’s worldview, values, and guided actions, creating a foundation for a purposeful and satisfying career.

Wagner Denuzzo, a Latino immigrant from Brazil, became a licensed psychotherapist and later held global executive roles in Fortune 500 companies. His experiences allow him to establish connections between psychology and workplace social dynamics, as well as the unique experiences of individuals navigating rigidly hierarchical businesses. At its heart, the book shows that leadership skills are vital for all members of the organization—from individual contributors to executives—to prepare them well for the new era of work.

Denuzzo helps the reader understand the “Essential Leadership Expressions” required for a balanced life, integrating character, community, and career. It is particularly relevant for the early-in-career individual entering a transformed world of work, experiencing historic technological advancements and a global economy that must address ESG and global social concerns, while satisfying shareholders and customers.

LEADING TO SUCCEED is a must read for members of the new workforce. It defines the key leadership skills imperative for success in tomorrow’s workplace, independently from positions, roles, and titles within an organization.

Organizational leaders will benefit from learning to understand the human dynamics in workplace performance, and HR practitioners will enhance their understanding of the employee experience, allowing them to address situations with greater empathy and compassion.

From the United Nations Security Council, through community organizing that changed the paradigm of municipal redevelopment, to the revolutionary post–Watergate Congress and his role spearheading new environmental, anti-cancer, and global vaccine health initiatives, Andy Maguire was on the front lines in seminal moments of recent American history.

Ahead of the Curve is the riveting story of how Andy learned to accumulate power and leverage it for the public good. Andy’s terms in Congress coincided with the tumultuous times of the Israeli Six-Day War and the reform era of New York Mayor John Lindsay. After a successful unorthodox campaign in a staunch Republican district, he helped revive a hidebound House of Representatives and led an important new environmental movement there. Pacesetting international development work came next.

Andy learned early on that no single person can create real change, discovering how to take risks, use power, build teams, spot compromises, and mobilize diverse interests to get constructive change done. His story is more than an inspiring memoir, and more than a portrait of a committed changemaker pursuing the common good. It also is a coming-of-age tale and an implementation handbook that shows others how to continue Andy’s work.

This vivid insider’s view of fifty years of world history by Michael Takiff, bestselling author of A Complicated Man: The Life of Bill Clinton as Told by Those Who Knew Him, is both a compelling read and a beacon of hope for the current era.

Ahead of the Curve is an exceptionally valuable and important book for those who seek to confront today’s challenges to American democracy and a stable world order.

The most pressing question in these uncertain times may well be, How can we bring healing and protection to the Earth? It was this very question that Cynthia Jurs carried with her in 1990 as she climbed a path high in the Himalayas, to meet an “old wise man in a cave”—a venerated lama from Nepal. In response to her question, the old lama gave her a formidable assignment based on an ancient practice from Tibet: she must procure earth treasure vases made of clay and potent medicines, fill them with prayers and symbolic offerings, and bury them around the world where healing is called for.  

Thus begins the journey of a lifetime—sometimes harrowing, but always shining with beauty at the threshold between urgency and the timelessness of the sacred. In Summoned by the Earth we accompany this passionate and creative Buddhist teacher, as she attempts to fulfill the daunting task. Ultimately, the path from the wise man’s mountain cave winds around the world, bringing Cynthia into relationship with elders, activists, diverse ecosystems and communities. One by one, as the humble clay pots are planted in the Earth, the power of an ancient technology of the sacred comes alive and a global community grows to protect the Earth and learn how to become vessels of healing.  

Along the way, we come face to face with the troubles burdening our communities everywhere while encountering some of the people leading the way to unexpected solutions and surprising new visions. We meet survivors of the Liberian civil war, and an ex-combatant who puts down his AK47 to take up mindfulness practice in order to create lasting peace. There’s the Hero Women in Congo, who are resisting femicide and defending the sanctity of their bodies and the world’s second largest rainforest. And there’s the indigenous elders everywhere, from the outback of Aboriginal Australia to the Native pueblos of northern New Mexico, who, in keeping their lifeways alive, are stewarding their sacred lands and regenerating ecosystems vital to our collective survival.    

Through all these cultures and communities, the path leads us to a cave above the Los Alamos National Laboratory, back to the cave in Nepal where it all began, and finally, to another cave high on Mount Parnassus in Delphi where the Oracle, in service to the Goddess Gaia, once divined how we may best live in balance. Over and over, we touch the heart of the world, only to discover by journey’s end that the heart of the world is everywhere and that our assignment now is to recognize we are a global family and wake up together. 

As many of us wonder what we can do in this eleventh hour, Summoned by the Earth offers a riveting account of one woman’s response to the challenges we face, and is an irresistible invitation to become “sacred activists” heeding the call of the Earth.

In Legal Briefs: The Ups and Downs of Life in the Law, editor Roger Witten takes us behind the scenes of some of the most fascinating court cases of the last few decades, while introducing us to the sometimes strange, and sometimes comical situations these lawyers have experienced during their long careers.

This collection features twenty lawyers of varying backgrounds and expertise writing with pizzazz, humor, and passion about such significant events as the Watergate break-in; the 9/11 Commission; the Iranian hostage crisis, and more. They write of tackling issues concerning money in politics and Citizens United; same-sex parental custody rights; and the contempt charge against Martin Luther King Jr. And we are also treated to intimate portraits of some unique clients and towering figures in the legal world.

This book will delight all readers, not just those with a specific interest in the law. As Roger Witten writes in the introduction, these stories “reveal the ups and downs of a life in the law by telling stories that are dramatic, moving, and/or amusing Some are tongue-in-cheek. Others are serious but never dull.”

In these 25 true stories, a widely published philosopher recounts 60 years of interaction with people in all walks of life – some extremely famous, others complete strangers – from hospitals to restaurants, concert halls to airplanes, in private conversations and nationally broadcast interviews. Stories can be heartbreaking, distracting, funny, shocking, inspiring, revealing, and sometimes unforgettable – and all those attributes appear here. There’s no substitute for learning what it’s like to be someone else, to see the world as that other person does and reconsider our own views in light of that learning. These compelling and accessible stories motivate and enable us to do that, illuminating the unexpected relationships among all domains of human concern, the wellsprings of creativity, the elusive character of good judgment, and the pathways to social justice. They help us see more clearly what we care most about: deep features of human character and difficult choices, of social structures, of the power of imagination, of how to take account of the importance of what cannot be counted, and of bogus boundaries and assumptions that can repress clear thinking in any domain. These stories will make the reader more powerful in service of those values.

Piasecki’s upbringing was laced with poverty and trauma. He began reading at an early age, seeking out the wisdom and relevance from the “magical clan of writers” who helped him strengthen his writing muscle and feed into his creative hunger. Bruce’s journey to becoming a writer is spiritual and practical, as he discovers and uncovers what is truly valuable in a life. As well as being a writer, Piasecki is also an environmentalist, a speaker on climate and society, and AHC Group founder. He has also founded the family-endowed Creative Force Foundation. 

Doing More with One Life can be read as biography, or inventive memoir, or even as magical realism. Piasecki leaves that choice up to his reader. Readers and followers of Piasecki’s expansive career in environmental and community issues will be deeply moved by his tales of loss and his determination to make himself—and his world—into something profoundly better.

Becoming Forest opens with Aishling—the young Irish woman at the heart of this story—as she visits her grandmother in California following her grandfather’s death. Aishling finds her grandfather’s journal and reads about a trip he made to India years ago to visit the original Bodhi Tree, the place where the Buddha found enlightenment.

At the end of the journal, she finds a letter addressed to her from her grandfather asking for her help passing along his message of “deep security” to her generation as they deal with the climate crisis and the uncertain future ahead. Aishling goes to India to follow in her grandfather’s path to find a way of responding to his request. There she meets and falls in love with a young Buddhist monk, who is also on a quest. As they walk together along the roads of India, they gather unexpected and invaluable insights from each other and come closer to the answers they both seek.

A boundary-bridging novel that will surprise, captivate, and move readers who thought they knew Hawaiʻi; an age-old story of healing a seared heart and finding home. 

Mauna Kea: A Novel of Hawai'i is a gripping tale of clashing passions—science and spirituality, vengeance and compassion, fear and courage—set atop Hawaiʻi’s 14,000-foot Mauna Kea, realm of revered goddesses and star-wise explorers. A young vagabond running from America’s turmoil is forced to confront his own grief and rage on an embattled holy mountain in the Pacific. There he encounters a mysterious domain of ancient mountain deities and the Native Hawaiians who revere them, including two wise elders who take him under their wings and a young woman with a world-weary heart akin to his own. 

Through his startling experiences with them—and a motley cadre of other islanders—he learns the power of aloha and discovers an untapped reservoir of faith and courage that rekindles his hope in himself and in the world we share.

Includes an illustrated map and 12 original pen-and-ink drawings made especially for the novel by John D. Dawson

In a Whole New Way is a photographic self-portrait by New Yorkers who are serving a term of probation. The book also lifts the veil on this “second-chance” justice intervention that has spread from its origins in 1841 Boston to most of the world today.

If all Americans serving a term of probation were gathered in one locale, they would constitute the third-largest city in the country. Yet few of us understand what the sanction involves. Nor do many Americans realize that the originally rehabilitative practice became punitive following the 1972–92 crime wave. In many jurisdictions, it still is. Probation unfortunately has become a staging area for incarceration rather than its alternative.

In a Whole New Way shows how hundreds of determined city residents on probation, along with neighborhood allies, undertook to change this. Equipped with cameras and new artistic sensibilities provided by the editors’ nonprofit Seeing for Ourselves, they set off in a whole new way to reform the sanction of probation, returning it to the rehabilitative and positive program it was originally intended to be. In the process, they found themselves transformed.

The result of their journey is this unique collection of stunning photographs, accentuated by deeply personal captions and lengthier testimonies, that reveal the reality of life in probation. The stories of these participants powerfully undercut their own—and probation’s—derogatory popular image. The true goal of this book is to reform the entire justice system toward decarceration.

In a Whole New Way is both the sequel to the editors’ Project Lives (2015), the globally acclaimed volume resulting from a similar effort with New Yorkers living in public housing—a work catapulting Seeing for Ourselves to the front tier of “participatory photography” practitioners worldwide—and the source of today’s award-winning eponymous documentary film, airing on select public television stations in 2023.

When they first began working on this book, the authors thought they would simply write the story of Linda Killinger’s grandparents who, with seven of their thirteen kids, took a fifteen-month trip across the country visiting relatives and the national parks, in their brand new 1930 Model A Ford.

Very quickly, they realized this was not just a simple story. Instead, they began to see it as a reveal of how this moment of history affected not only their grandparents’ family, but the generations to come, in the same way these historic events have affected so many other families. Levi’s Dream presents a living history of twentieth-century America. 

All proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to charity via The Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation. Visit our website, thekillingerfoundation.org.

Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald honeymooned for five months in the summer of 1920 in a modest gray house in Westport, Connecticut. It was an experience that had a more profound impact on both of their collective works than any other place they lived.

It was, for Scott and Zelda, their honeymoon. Having just gotten married and after being kicked out of some of New York city's finest hotels, they were, for the first time, in their very own place, albeit for only five months. It was a time that Scott Fitzgerald called "the happiest year since I was eighteen."He had, after all, just achieved success with his first novel, This Side of Paradise, and was suddenly awash with money.

The Fitzgeralds lived a wild life of drinking, driving and endless partying while living in suburban Connecticut. As it happens, living near the beach, they were neighbors to a larger-than-life reclusive multi-millionaire, F.E. Lewis.

Historian Richard Webb grew up in Westport a few doors down the street from where the Fitzgeralds had lived some forty years earlier. Fascinated with the Fitzgeralds, when Webb learned that author Barbara Probst Solomon, who grew up across the river from the F.E. Lewis estate, proposed in the New Yorker that Westport was the real setting for Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, he was stirred to actively researching her claim.

Boats Against the Current tells the real story behind the famous novel and its tragic hero, debunking the long-held belief that the book was solely inspired by the Fitzgerald’s time in Great Neck, across the Sound in Long Island, and lays out enough information about the fascinating Mr. Lewis that it is difficult not to believe that author Webb has located the true inspiration for one of the most captivating and iconic characters in American literature, the great Gatsby himself.

Illustrated with a fantastic array of never-before-seen photos from the Lewis family, as well as the scrapbooks of the Fitzgeralds, period newspaper clippings, and a myriad of compelling stories about Scott, Zelda and their fantastically wealthy neighbor.

A companion book to the documentary Gatsby in Connecticut: The Untold Story, Boats Against the Current also recounts Webb’s own journey of making the film with fellow Westporter and filmmaker, Robert Steven Williams.

The Great Gatsby may be one of America's essential novels. Boats Against the Current is an essential document for anyone who has read the book and wondered at the fantastical world whose story it tells.

Edith Wharton in France chronicles Edith Wharton’s dogged efforts to penetrate the Byzantine levels of French high society, her love for the French and Italian countryside, and her consuming passion for the Mediterranean garden. While Lesage is initially skeptical of Wharton’s ability to “become French,” this work ultimately portrays a woman of indomitable spirit who ultimately succeeds in fashioning a French home of her own making in her beloved adopted country.

Lesage’s work illuminates the intertwined characters and important relationships of Wharton’s life in France, many of them overlooked or minimized in earlier biographies. Prominently featured in the account are the French novelist Paul Bourget and his wife Minnie, whose meticulous diary entries over a 35-year period provide a fresh look at Wharton’s active social life both in Paris and on the French Riviera.

A still more intimate look into Wharton’s French circle is provided by her extensive correspondence with the Frenchman Léon Bélugou, a widely travelled mining engineer, writer and well-known figure in Parisian high society. Spanning more than 25 years, the letters portray a mutual intellectual kinship and devoted friendship. Other newly discovered highlights include letters presented as evidence in Wharton’s French divorce proceedings, a mysterious autobiographical essay written by Wharton’s lover, American journalist Morton Fullerton, and numerous photographs never before published.

The author of multiple works of translation, as well original French texts on Wharton and Conrad, Lesage had access to unexamined and untranslated French sources. She presents Wharton’s life from the perspective of a native French woman, capturing a unique view of Wharton trying to navigate through the ancient layers of French society and master its often maddeningly obscure rules, all the while commenting on the horrors of World War I and the cataclysmic changes in the arts and culture of Paris.

On the day before and on May Day of 1970, Yale University and New Haven prepared to host an agitated congregation of young civil rights activists with a diverse list of causes, but focused mainly on freeing Bobby Seale, the Black Panther leader. This book gives a glimpse of that diversity; diverse in cause, attitude, and dress. Marked changes in mood evolved over the approximate 32 hours. Yale and New Haven could be proud of avoiding real violence and blood shed.

Like an archeological record, it exhibits not only the New Haven Green on that one day, but marks a broader shift in direction for a county at large. For those who were there, it seems painfully near. For later generations, it is likely a remote abstraction.

The Paris Herald, narrative historical fiction, tells the story of the world’s most famous newspaper, focusing on the key years of the 1960s, when the fates of the newspaper and of the regime of Charles de Gaulle became curiously intertwined.

The story centers on intrigue and rivalry among the New York Herald Tribune, New York Times and Washington Post. When the Herald Tribune ceased operations in New York in 1966, the Times, which had started its own European Edition in 1960, expected the Paris Herald to close, too, giving the Times victory in Paris as well as New York. But Herald Tribuneowner Jock Whitney wouldn’t sell to the Times, preferring to join with Katharine Graham, who’d taken charge at the Post after her husband’s death.

Within months, the Times came, hat-in-hand, offering to close its European edition and asking to buy into the new Herald/Post partnership. The Times neither forgave nor forgot its humiliation.

The Paris Herald is the story of many people: of Frank Draper, who fought in the Lincoln Brigade; Byron Hallsberg, who joined the Hungarian uprising; Dennis Klein, researching the Nazi occupation of Paris; Suzy de Granville, searching for family roots; Wayne Murray, escaping homophobia; of Steve and Molly Fleming, living the high life; Sonny Stein and Al Lodge and Connie Marshall and Ben Swart and Eddie Jones, paperboy, all finding themselves at the Paris Herald for their own reasons and ending up in the fight to keep the newspaper alive.

The 1960s was a tumultuous decade. The conflict in America over race and the Vietnam War spread to Europe, setting off terrorism, riots and revolt across the continent and threatening already shaky regimes. Nowhere was the risk of collapse greater than in France, where the revolt of 1968 nearly toppled the government and led to the resignation of President Charles de Gaulle the following year. Throughout those difficult times, the Paris Herald was at the center of events

Since being founded in 1887 by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., the Paris Herald has been essential to American expatriate life in Europe. In France, many Americans put down roots, married into French families and became permanent expatriates, in some cases exiles, like Bennett himself. The tense events of the 1960s touched the lives of every American in Paris, including many well-known artistic exiles: James Baldwin, Art Buchwald, William Saroyan, James Jones, Bud Powell, Dexter Gordon, Kenny Clarke, Joe Turner, Memphis Slim.

As the crisis deepened, one shadowy man became the link between de Gaulle and the troika of newspaper owners, Whitney, Graham and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger. This man, Henri de Saint-Gaudens, a high French official in the Elysée Palace, understood the Herald’s historical importance to Paris.
The Paris Herald, a novel, is riveting historical drama, as relevant today as yesterday. It is a story never before told.

Written by an intimate participant in the turbulent civil rights movement in Mississippi, Nobody Said Amen tells the stories of two families’ lives, one white, one black, as they navigate the challenging, tilting landscape created by the coming of “outside agitators” and social change to the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s.

Owner of a great plantation, Luke Claybourne is a product of Southern attitudes, a decent man who feels responsible for the black families who make his plantation run, but who is loathe to accept the changes necessary for its survival. When he loses his plantation, his entire world is shattered. Led by his wife, Willy, and their friendship with a Northern journalist, Luke is forced to come to terms with a new way of life in the post--Civil Rights era South.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Mack, a young black Mississippian leading a group of students who have come to Shiloh to help blacks gain the right to vote, has become a target of the Klan—savagely beaten while in jail and threatened with a burning cross. His love affair with Eula, a Claybourne employee, highlights the tensions and hazards of trying to love in the shadow of a racist world.

Rich with a colorful roster of the people in Shiloh, Nobody Said Amen tells a triumphant American tale.