Books published by New Academia Publishing/Vellum

In A Life in Nature the author describes the role nature has played in his life, explores the kinds of relationships people have with nature, assesses the importance of these relationships in caring for our Earth home, and stresses the need to help children form a bond with nature, for their own health and for growth into adult responsibility for restoring environmental health. Beginning with his third year, he traces his own relationships with nature, as they expand geographically from his own backyard to other parts of Washington, D.C., then to other parts of America and finally the world. Emotionally and intellectually, the relationship grows from an attachment to pets, then a feeling for wild animals, plants, and landscapes that merges over time with scientific interest in these things and ecological systems, and finally ethical concerns about all life. Along the way there is a great love of birds, involvement with conservationists, writing for the National Park Service and free lance, and exploring nature and environmental issues in Malaysia, Nigeria, Turkey, and Azerbaijan, as he shares parts of his diplomat wife's time in those countries. He concludes his book first with a look at the range of relationships people have with nature, from purely practical to respect, love, and a reverence that sees nature as sacred. Then there is a return to children-introducing them to nature in a time of electronic distractions. The Appendix describes how this experience occurred in the lives of John Burroughs, John Muir, W.H. Hudson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Rachel Carson, and Roger Peterson.

This well-researched work is built around the first diary written by Pvt. William J. McLean, 34th New York Infantry, beginning with his enlistment. William records his wanderings, adventures, and thoughts from the time he leaves Fairfield, NY, through his traveling to Washington, DC, his adventures there, and while picketing along the C&O canal in the Great Falls and Seneca areas. He writes of the first death of a soldier in his regiment, the excitement over Bull Run, and an incursion into rebel-infested Virginia. Much more than a simple diary transcription, the work describes the early family history of a young man, a brother, and a father; all who answered Lincoln's call for volunteers. Researched over many years, this work adds significant new information to the history of the storied 34th New York Infantry.The opening chapter is the intriguing search to identify the diarist. Another early chapter describes antebellum Herkimer County, NY, the town of Fairfield, and the academy in which William was a student and teacher. The diary chapters are the entries between May and early October 1861. William mentions many of his regimental friends and back home acquaintances. Chapter notes provide specifics of each individual which lend context to the reader. His detailed descriptions of camp life, adventures in camp and on picket duty, paint a clear picture of everyday life for a young volunteer soldier in Montgomery County, MD. Additional annotated information includes never before published first person accounts of several startling incidents of war. The concluding chapters review the actions of the 34th at Edward's Ferry (part of the Balls Bluff debacle), McLean's effort to correct his military and pension records, and finally the post-war years of William, his brother, and his father. A must read for Civil War enthusiasts.

A captivating lifetime of personal and professional experiences by an American historian, film specialist and documentary filmmaker in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia. The author's experiences as a radical in the turbulent 1960s, and his eventual disenchantment offer some precedents and perspectives to all those on the Left, Center or Right interested in the fluctuations of American politics. The vivid log of hopes and disillusions is related in a candid, non-academic style, and set against a panorama of history and politics in the late 20th century.

A Broken Propeller is the story of America's first transcontinental air race. Pilots in this dangerous adventure flew WWI planes with open cockpits and no parachutes.In October 1919 fifty-nine pilots competed in a round trip race that began simultaneously on Long Island and in San Francisco with predetermined stops 150 miles apart at airfields across the United States. Newspapers gave it front-page press: who was ahead, who was missing, who made an unexpected emergency landing, who crashed, and who was felled by blinding snowstorms.The race was conceived by Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell to promote the future of flight in the United States, but all did not go as planned. There were 54 crashes and seven deaths. Pilots landed on rooftops, in Lake Eire, and the front-runner had his dog with him. The predominant plane in the race, the DH-4, had life-threatening flaws. Pilots faced heavy rain, gale winds, snow, ice, and treacherous landing fields. As a result they lost their way, and made courageous and foolhardy decisions. There were comic moments, and poignant ones. The future head of the Air Force, Gen. Carl A. Spaatz was a feisty participant. The heroes were the ranchers and farmers who helped downed airmen with food, lodging and fuel.There has never been a book about this extraordinary moment in American history. The author is fortunate to have what earlier reports lacked: memoirs of pilots, plus the charming and humorous letters and log of a participant in the race, her father, one of only eight who completed the race. 1st Lt. Ralph (Baz) Bagby was a former professional baseball player and an MIT graduate.

This book recounts in detail the negotiations, internal and external struggles, and the outcome of an attempt by HUD, the City of Washington, and several developers to acquire a Washington, D.C. apartment complex known as Sursum Corda. The book begins with an account of a particularly horrific murder that took place in Sursum Corda in 2004, and shows how it was used, in the press and elsewhere, to attack the Community as a whole, and to use it as a reason that the Community should be disbanded, and the land on which it stood be dedicated to other purposes.It proceeds as a journal, kept intermittently between 2005 and 2017, by Professor John C. Hirsh of Georgetown University, who during that period directed an undergraduate tutorial program there in which Georgetown undergraduates travelled twice a week to instruct the K-6 children who live at Sursum Corda in the Language Arts, primarily in reading and writing. Because of his long association with the community he was appointed a non-voting (because non-resident) member of the Board that directs the Community affairs, as was his former student and friend Shiv Newaldass, a Georgetown graduate, whose family has long lived there.Such take-overs as the one described here have become common across the country in recent years, and part of the interest of the book lies not only the story of what happened to Sursum Corda, but also in the implications it exposes as to how such negotiations are actually carried on, and the relative power of those who are involved.

Shakespeare wrote more plays about Italy than any other place in his own world. In this memoir, author John Glavin returns to Italy after decades away to teach Shakespeare's Italian plays to contemporary American students. As Glavin notes, "There's Italy, and there's Shakespeare, and there's the Villa. The Villa gets you to a place where you can see yourself in a way that you couldn't if you didn't have Shakespeare as the optic." In the process they all come to understand themselves and their own lives in deep and revealing ways.Glavin is trying to come to terms with his wife's recent battle with cancer, only to discover that one of his Italian relations has been kidnapped and murdered by the mafia. Suddenly the betrayals of Merchant of Venice and the murders of Othello are no longer matters of the past. At the same time his students, who only want a Shakespeare relevant to themselves, learn that they may gain more by making themselves relevant to Shakespeare.Written primarily as a first-person travel diary, The New Good is divided into three roughly equal parts from September to November. The entries vary, but Mondays and Wednesdays always focus on the two class meetings. Mondays generally discuss the Shakespeare play under scrutiny. Wednesdays cover the students' usually comic but sometimes quite moving attempts to perform short scenes or speeches from that play. By no means limited to its academic background, The New Good often travels beyond Fiesole, including the author's reluctant investigation-at his cousin's request-into her young son's suspicious "suicide."This is a book for anyone who loves literature, or who loves Italy. But it is also a book for any reader who is alert to, and alarmed by, one of the pressing issues of our time. As a writer for The New York Times put it recently "What's the point of college?" Everywhere you turn, you see books that ask this question in academic and theoretical ways. They have titles like Is College Worth It or College Unbound, or College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be. There are even articles like Verlyn Klinkenborg's elegiac "The Decline and Fall of the English Major." This book responds to that crisis and these questions, not with theory or data, but with experience. Through their Tuscan autumn the Villa students discover, and their often bewildered instructor re-discovers, the purpose of literature for English majors and everyone else who reads: to help us as individuals to recognize, tolerate and, where possible, relieve our species' troubling --and winning-- imperfections. No one who reads The New Good will finish it with any lingering doubt whether College is indeed worth it.

This is a book on NATO and the Arabs. The author has been Deputy Secretary General of NATO from 2001 to the end of 2007, and at present is the founder and President of the NATO Defense College Foundation in Rome. In those years he was tasked by the North Atlantic Council to launch possible partnerships with the Arabs of the Mediterranean, of the Gulf, and Israel. NATO wished to compensate for the disaster in Iraq, but we never had before any kind of relationship with the Arab world, traditionally very suspicious of NATO. The narrative of the book is about that policy and the objective to reach out to the Arabs. In the end it was considered to be a success story. Putting the basis for two existing partnerships and a long term relationship. The book came out in Italy in 2013. As the relationship with the Arabs has recently become so dramatically relevant and the transatlantic bond so strained, the book has been updated and translated into English.