History, Natural History & the Arts
Leslie Day’s life changed forever when, in 1975, she moved to a tiny houseboat on the Hudson River at the 79th Street Boat Basin ― a new home umbilically tied to Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
In her heartfelt memoir, River (Cornell University Press, 2025), Day reveals how she fell in love with ― and married ― her neighbor, a biology professor at Brooklyn College, became a naturalist, educator, and author, and raised her son on the boat. [Read more…] about Leslie Day’s River: A Hudson Memoir
The Adirondack Forest Preserve is the largest publicly protected wilderness in the Eastern United States, with a state constitutional provision guaranteeing that it be “forever kept as wild forest lands.”
But just what does “wilderness” mean today? How has our understanding of that concept shifted, from the colonial implications of the term as first applied to the Adirondacks to a more inclusive usage, still contested, today? [Read more…] about Philip Terrie’s ‘Wild Forest Lands’ Revisits Adirondack History & Culture
In a new novel the resorts in the Catskill Mountains are struggling in 1963, but the village of Fleischmanns has a secret that keeps the tourists coming back: A hidden colony of satyrs (a class of lustful, drunken woodland Greek gods).
Strikingly good-looking and differing in appearance from humans only because of their short horns and delicate hooves, it is easy for satyrs to pass. [Read more…] about The Satyr in Bungalow D: A New Catskills Novel
New York native Frank Baum‘s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been inspiring artists – filmmakers, political cartoonists, poets, sculptors, songwriters – for more than 100 years.
OZmosis: The Enduring Popularity & Artistic Influence of The Wizard of Oz (2025) by Noel Holston collects and annotates works from tin-can sculpture to movie musicals. It’s an illuminating and amusing compendium. [Read more…] about OZmosis: A Compendium of The Wizard of Oz’s Artistic Influence
Just in time for the 200th anniversary commemorating the completion of this engineering marvel, Many Voices: Building Erie, the Canal that Changed America (Holiday House, August 2025) investigates the untold stories of men, women, and children from all social classes and national origins who helped create and work on the Erie Canal.
Award-winning author Laurie Lawlor’s full-color narrative nonfiction explores how this monumental, 363-mile canal was built across a daunting upstate New York landscape at a time when America had no trained engineers, no idea how to make water-proof concrete, no modern mechanical tools, and no reliable source of workers. [Read more…] about Many Voices: Building the Erie Canal
Theodore Allen, known as “The.”(ca. 1833–1908) was an New York gambler, political organizer, saloon keeper the head of a family of criminals in the mid-to-late 19th century.
Jerry Kuntz, a librarian and historical researcher whose interests have focused on people involved in American subcultures in the 1850s-1930s has assembled a series of articles purport to present Theodore Allen “in his own words,” as ‘The.’ Allen: The Rough and Tumble Years (Wickham House, 2025). [Read more…] about Theodore Allen: Gambler, Political Organizer, Saloon Keeper and Criminal
With another holiday season nearly here, it is time for my annual reminder that books about the Catskills’s rich and colorful history always make great gifts, but especially this time of year.
And this year there are a few newly released titles that should be on every shopping list, along with a number of older stand-bys that belong on every history buff’s book shelf. [Read more…] about Catskills Local History Books Make Great Gifts
A Jacket Off the Gorge: True Story of the Biggest Liar (Post Hill Press, 2023) by Susan Ashline is part true crime, part memoir, and takes place entirely in New York. Reality becomes more dangerous than fiction when the author is pulled into the secrets and deceptions of an enigmatic con man who faked his own death and stole a treasure of ancient gold and silver coins that are still missing to this day.
A Jacket Off the Gorge is a page-turning real-life psychological thriller that tells the story of a journalist who crosses paths with a master manipulator — exposing the shortcomings of a criminal justice system that failed them both. [Read more…] about A Jacket Off the Gorge: Part True Crime, Part Memoir
In August of 2015, the Liberty Museum and Arts Center’s 14th annual conference on the history of the Catskills was entitled, “Small but Grand Hotels: The Backbone of the Catskills Tourism Economy.” The focus of the conference was the hundreds of smaller hotels — those accommodating 300 or fewer guests — that had a major economic impact on the area’s downtowns, as their guests, absent the 24-hour-a-day entertainment found in their larger competitors, made their way to the main streets of neighboring communities for movies and an occasional meal in a delicatessen or diner. [Read more…] about A Catskill Carnival: A New Book On Borscht Belt Life
To Distress the French and Their Allies: Rogers’ Rangers, 1755-1763 (Black Dome Press, 2023) is the first volume in a new “Rangers of the French and Indian, Cherokee, and Pontiac’s War” series by Black Dome Press, that is expected to document for the first time the histories of all ranger units, from each of the colonies, that served in the French & Indian War and after.
Volume I begins with the most famous ranger unit of all ― Robert Rogers’ Rangers, which served in the major campaigns in New York and Canada, and then in the Caribbean, and continued to fight in the Cherokee and Pontiac’s Wars. [Read more…] about To Distress the French and Their Allies: Rogers’ Rangers, 1755-1763
Gail Merrifield Papp’s new book, Public/Private: My Life with Joe Papp at the Public Theater (Applause Books, 2023), is a memoir about her life with famous producer/director Joe Papp as they founded the Public Theater in New York City.
Over their 26-year relationship, the Papps established a partnership that built a theatrical institution. In her memoir, Gail Merrifield Papp provides an inside look at the early years of the Public when plays such as A Chorus Line were just starting and then little-known actors were making their way in show business. [Read more…] about Before They Were Famous: A NYC Public Theater Memoir
Shortly after emigrating from Russia in 1908, Abraham and Molly Brickman fled the overcrowded tenements of New York City and purchased land in the Catskills just outside South Fallsburg, in Sullivan County, NY. [Read more…] about Catskills’ Brickman Hotel Story Told in New Book
Charles Yaple’s latest book, The ‘Tree’ of Us: Richford Boys Who Changed The World And What They Left Behind (2023) is a deeply personal narrative mixing biography, history, and memoir to encourage the furtherance of a land ethic as envisioned by famed ecologist Aldo Leopold. The story follows the lives of three men, from the steeply forested hills of Richford, in Tioga County, NY, who changed the world. [Read more…] about The ‘Tree’ of Us: Richford Boys Who Changed The World
Erik Schlimmer dedicated three years of research to produce the two-volume With an Ax and a Rifle: Settler and Onomastic History of the Adirondacks (Beechwood Books, 2023). Onomastics is the study of the etymology, history, and use of proper names.
This tome consists of 92 chapters that tell the settlement history of each of the Adirondack Park‘s 92 towns. With an Ax and a Rifle totals 1,200 pages, includes nearly 200 images, and comes with a settlement poster map. [Read more…] about A Settler History the Adirondacks
Of all the British soldiers who served in North America during the American Revolution, none wrote more about his experiences than Roger Lamb. His service in two of the most important campaigns — the 1777 Saratoga campaign and the 1781 campaign through the Carolinas to Virginia — put him in the thick of some of the war’s most famous battles. [Read more…] about Roger Lamb’s American Revolution: A British Soldier’s Story Updated
This week on The Historians Podcast, David Pietrusza discusses his latest book, Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal (Diversion Books, 2022). [Read more…] about FDR’s Landslide Victory in 1936
The new book Adirondack Cabin & Mountain Poems (Subjudica House Press, 2022) by Edward Zahniser features mountain and wilderness poetry, written from the Adirondack cabin Zahniser has visited since the 1940s.
Here is the mountain experience rendered by the poet’s words. A harvest of wilderness after-thoughts by Zahniser who is a regular contributor to New York Almanack of poetry and essays about wilderness, his youth in the Adirondacks, and his father Howard Zahniser, author of the national Wilderness Act and friend of Adirondack conservationist Paul Shaefer. [Read more…] about Adirondack Cabin & Mountain Poems
Set in the 1940s and 1950s in Lackawanna, Erie County, NY, Visitors To My Street (Outskirts Press, 2022) by Bernard T. McCann is a nostalgic look back at the life of a boy growing up in the postwar era. [Read more…] about Lackawanna Memoir ‘Visitors To My Street’ Published
Ilion, My Childhood, My Memories (Self Published, 2022) by Kevin Hall is a book containing the many colorful antics of a young boy. A boy curious with the life around him, enjoying the many moments with his family and friends in his hometown of Ilion, Herkimer County, New York.
This memoir follows a young Kevin Hall from ages of 6 through 13, as he explores his hometown of Ilion, the neighborhoods he lived in, and the many friends he enjoyed spending time with. Hall relates his many adventures and the sometimes-unexpected consequences of those adventures. [Read more…] about New Ilion, Herkimer County Memoir Published
The new book We Who Believe in Freedom: Activism and the Struggle for Social Justice (King Jesus Press LLC, 2021) by Alice Green, with foreward by Paul Grondahl, is an inspirational book that exposes readers to weighty topics such as police abuse and accountability, criminal justice and prison reform, and political abuse of power in Albany, NY.
The book, part memoir and part history, Green deals with these topics through her life experiences as a life-long advocate, highlighting the impact they have had on Albany’s black communities since the early days of enslavement, up to the present. [Read more…] about Alice Green’s New Book Covers Social Justice Activism
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