Books published by David R. Godine Publisher Inc

First major collection of poems by Wesley McNair?spanning his career.Will receive major review support (particularly in New England).

Reprint. Originally published Methuen Publications. [1976].

“Beautifully alive.”—Wall Street JournalWinner of the 2022 Distinguished Book Award from The Society of Colonial WarsA tour through the original thirteen colonies in search of historical sites and their stories in America’s founding. Obscure, well-known, off-the-beaten path, and on busy city streets, here are taverns, meeting houses, battlefields, forts, monuments, homes which all combine to define our country—the places where daring people forged a revolution.There is always something new to be found in America’s past that also brings greater clarity to our present and the future we choose to make as a nation. Author-artist Adam Van Doren traveled from Maine to Georgia in that spirit. There are thirty-seven landmarks included, with fifteen additional locations noted in brief. From the Bunker Hill monument in Massachusetts to the Camden Battlefield Site in South Carolina, this is a tour of an American cultural landscape with a curious, perceptive, and insightful guide.The reader steps inside cabins at Valley Forge where nearly two thousand soldiers perished during a cruel winter, meets the chef at Philadelphia’s City Tavern where the menu is based on 18th century fare, seeks out the Swamp Fox in Georgia, visits the homes of Alexander Hamilton, John and Abigail Adams, the Joseph Webb House on the Connecticut River where French general Rochambeau made plans with Washington, and much more. An unvarnished view, we also see Philipsburg Manor, in Sleepy Hollow, New York, where Blacks were once held as slaves to work in the Hudson River Valley. For armchair travelers and anyone fascinated by Americana, Van Doren (The House Tells the Story: Homes of the American Presidents) has created an unforgettable journey through history. We see the Founders—both their stunning achievements and chilling moral failures—where they lived, fought, and agreed on a common purpose, to create a nation whose future—and legacy—is continually evolving.

A thinking person¿s guide to a better life. Ward Farnsworth explains what the Socratic method is, how it works, and why it matters more than ever in our time. Easy to grasp yet challenging to master, the method will change the way you think about life¿s big questions. ¿A wonderful book.¿¿Rebecca Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex. About 2,500 years ago, Plato wrote a set of dialogues that depict Socrates in conversation. The way Socrates asks questions, and the reasons why, amount to a whole way of thinking. This is the Socratic method¿one of humanity¿s great achievements. More than a technique, the method is an ethic of patience, inquiry, humility, and doubt. It is an aid to better thinking, and a remedy for bad habits of mind, whether in law, politics, the classroom, or tackling life¿s big questions at the kitchen table. Drawing on hundreds of quotations, this book explains what the Socratic method is and how to use it. Chapters include Socratic Ethics, Ignorance, Testing Principles, and Socrates and the Stoics. Socratic philosophy is still startling after all these years because it is an approach to asking hard questions and chasing after them. It is a route to wisdom and a way of thinking about wisdom. With Farnsworth as your guide, the ideas of Socrates are easier to understand than ever and accessible to anyone.As Farnsworth achieved with The Practicing Stoic and the Farnsworth¿s Classical English series, ideas of old are made new and vital again. This book is for those coming to philosophy the way Socrates did¿as the everyday activity of making sense out of life and how to live it¿and for anyone who wants to know what he said about doing that better.

?Beguiling and informative??Wall Street JournalLearn to see art as an artist does. Discover how a painting's composition or a sculpture's spatial structure influence the experience of what you're seeing. With an artist as your guide, viewing art becomes a powerfully enriching experience that will stay in your mind long after you've left a museum.A visit to view art can be overwhelming, exhausting, and unrewarding. Lincoln Perry wants to change that. In fifteen essays?each framed around a specific theme?he provides new ways of seeing and appreciating art. Drawing heavily on examples from the European traditions of art, Perry aims to overturn assumptions and asks readers to re-think artistic prejudices while rebuilding new preferences. Included are essays on how artists ?read? paintings, how scale and format influence viewers, how to engage with sculptures and murals, as well as guides to some of the great museums and churches of Europe.Seeing Like an Artist is for any artist, art-lover, or museumgoer who wants to grow their appreciation for the art of others.

“Old Poets is an indispensable jewel.”—Washington Post“An astonishing array of encounters...Hall’s observations are shrewd and generous.”—Boston GlobeIntimate portraits of great poets in old age, giving new insight into their work and their lives, and context to the often flawless art created by flawed human beings. The best of themselves endure, and the old poets’ existence and endurance gives readers courage to pursue their own vision. Donald Hall (Essays After Eighty and A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety) knew a great deal about work, about poetry, and about age. Each of those things come together in this unique collection. We hear about Robert Frost as Hall knew him: vain and cruel, a man possessed by guilt. But, as Hall writes, “The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate; the human being who confronts darkness and defeats it is the one to admire. For all his vanity, Robert Frost is admirable: He looked into his desert places, confronted his desire to enter the oblivion of the snowy woods, and drove on.”Hall’s essays are once both intimate portraits and learned treatises. He takes us on a pub crawl through the Welsh countryside with the word-mad Dylan Thomas; to the Faber & Faber office of T. S. Eliot, who had discovered more happiness in age than in youth; to a reading where Robert Frost’s public persona hid the truth; to Brooklyn for lunch with the enigmatic Marianne Moore; and to Italy and for a visit with the notorious Ezra Pound. By the time Hall met them, each poet was, he observed, “old enough to have detached from ongoing poetry, to feel alien to the ambitions of the grandchildren.”Also included are portraits of the poets who taught Hall as a writer: the unfailingly kind Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters, from whom he learned the most about poetry. Along the way are observations about many other poets and the literary cultures that sustained them.Contents include: “Vanity, Fame, Love, and Robert Frost,” “Dylan Thomas and Public Suicide,” “Notes on T. S. Eliot,” “Rocks and Whirlpools: Archibald MacLeish and Yvor Winters,” “Marianne Moore: Valiant and Alien,” and “Fragments of Ezra Pound.”For lovers of literature, this is a gorgeous remembrance and likely to compel an immediate visit to the poetry section of the nearest bookstore—as Hall writes, “Their presences have been emblems in my life, and I remember these poets as if I kept them carved in stone.”

This is a book about human nature and its management. The wisest students of that subject in ancient times, and perhaps of all time, were known as the Stoics. Their recommendations about how to think and live do not resemble the grim lack of feeling we associate with the word "Stoic" in English today. The original Stoics were philosophers and psychologists of the most ingenious kind, and also highly practical; they offered solutions to the problems of everyday life, and advice about how to overcome our irrationalities, that are still relevant and helpful now.

The definitive life of Charles Bukowski: literary legend and outlaw.

How baseball evolved with shocking speed from a casual folk game into a serious adult activity, an instrument of national unification and then a national entertainment industry.

West of Rome's two novellas, "My Dog Stupid" and "The Orgy," fulfill the promise of their rousing titles. The latter novella opens with virtuoso description: "His name was Frank Gagliano, and he did not believe in God. He was that most singular and startling craftsman of the building trade-a left-handed bricklayer. Like my father, Frank came from Torcella Peligna, a cliff-hugging town in the Abruzzi. Lean as a spider, he wore a leather cap and puttees the year around, and he was so bowlegged a dog could lope between his knees without touching them."

Presents the text of the poem, "The Song of Hiawatha", and provides an index of the Indian names and their meanings.

The way we use our language to convince and cajole is based on timeless principles - on repetition and variety, suspense and relief, expectation and satisfaction - that have been employed by writers and speakers since the Golden Age of Greece. This title presents an overview and analysis of the uses of rhetoric in the English language.