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In this quiet and personal historical coming of age tale, Sally Gunning shows us New England on the brink of revolution through the eyes of a young and slightly rebellious woman. Protagonist Jane Clarke’s domestic issues of justice and truth mirror those making a loud entrance onto the international stage.

This Early Reviewer selection from LibraryThing was provided by William Morrow Publishing.

File this under family/nostalgia. Here’s a really gritty scan of a slide from the late 1970s, showing my Dad’s Swallow Doretti and my mom in front of what appears to be, maybe, the Coast Range west of Portland. According to Wikipedia, only 276 Swallow Dorettis were ever produced, in 1954-55. The car is built on the Triumph TR2 platform. I don’t know what ever became of it.

Editor’s note: This was originally intended as a response to a question on UK’s version of Yahoo! Answers. You can see the original post here. In it, a user asks about getting over a paralyzing fear of flying. I saw a mention of it on my aviation list on Twitter, though I cannot find the original Tweet now. I started answering, and, well, it got incredibly long. I’m posting it here, as poorly-written as it is, in case it can be of some use to someone, ever.

In this post I share some of the tools I used, the things I focused on and the plans I made to help me get through my fear of flying. The message? It’s not easy, there is no magic answer, but it can be done!

The third in a series of novels following the adventures and misadventures of Morrie Morris, Ivan Doig’s newest yarn maintains his hallmark breezy, historically-rich Western style, even if the payoff isn’t terribly memorable.

In The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, author David Mitchell seems like he’s telling us a secret. A long secret. A long, human secret about a secret land in a time shrouded by history and distance. His latest novel leaves behind the clever tricks of structure of his earlier works in favor of a purer, undistracted treatise on the human condition, nestled into a very unique historical setting.

At the dawn of the 19th century, a group of ragtag, conniving Dutchmen working for the East India Company make up the only westerners that can even steal glimpses of the forbidden Japanese Empire. From a tiny, walled island called Dejima outside of Nagasaki, the handful of Europeans trade and cheat, maximizing profits from copper, camphor and other Japanese goods while occasionally inadvertently enriching the East India Company as well.