Earlier this year, DownEast magazine chose 100 books that “every lover of Maine should read.” This idea of “Maine books” has long fascinated me. It is really a question of what Henry Louis Gates calls authenticity, and I wrote about it years ago in an essay called Two Pigs from Maine. When DownEast announced their […]
Most Mainers know something about seaweed, some of what they know might even be true. My mother sang the praises of dulse in her diet, though I recall that she rarely ate it. My father used what we called rockweed from the shores of Penobscot Bay to enrich his vegetable garden. R.P.T. Coffin describes the […]
For the New Year I have been reading again many of my old favorite works of fiction. Re-reading good books is a pleasure. Included in my list are things like Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief (the great Canadian novel?) and John LeCarre’s The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (every time I read the […]
Economists become famous by winning the Nobel Prize (technically the Swedish National Bank’s Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel) or becoming public intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith or Paul Krugman. But economists do not have to be famous to be important. Significant contributions come in many guises. The most important economist you […]
Robert Gordon’s 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth is a comprehensive history of “the U.S. standard of living since the civil war.” Gordon, a Northwestern University economist, details changes in consumption of food, clothing, shelter, and transport during a period when Americans experienced unprecedented improvement in quality of life. From brutally difficult, […]
Mainers are proud of our forest heritage and we often claim to be the “most forested” state in the Union. Those forest lands are best thought of as a mosaic of uses and ownership types. We have industrial forest lands owned by corporations, families, and various investment schemes like Real Estate Investment Trusts. Some lands […]
I recently suggested that one solution to the crisis of our age is a shift in economic paradigms to one called Sustainable De-growth. To understand fully the implications of de-growth, we need to see where the phenomenon of growth comes from. A new book by Swiss economic historian Matthias Schmelzer provides deep insights into the […]
I have been reading about coffee in our culture.* I was intrigued by the idea of Third Wave Coffee business discussed by philosopher John Hartman. The Third Wave in coffee refers to the growth of small, independent coffee roasters who developed as alternatives to Starbucks when that company grew and disaffected coffee drinkers looked for […]
Robin Wall Kimmerer is a plant ecologist at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. She also is an eloquent writer who makes the natural world shimmer with her descriptions. Her book Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses will make you see moss in a new light. And once you see […]
I don’t know if the leading candidates for the American Presidency are big on reading history, but I would like to recommend to them five books to read before taking the office. These provide wisdom and insight that would help our new President do their job well. My first suggestion is William Cronon’s Changes in […]
