The Concord Bookshop - Established 1940

Please join us at the Bookshop on Sunday, September 12th at 3 PM when we welcome Ilie Ruby, discussing her debut novel, "The Language of Trees".

Ilie Ruby grew up in Rochester, NY and spent her childhood summers on
Canandaigua Lake, the setting for her debut novel, "The Language of Trees". She is the the Edwin L. Moses Award for Fiction,
chosen by T.C. Boyle; a Kerr Foundation Fiction Scholarship; and
the Phi Kappa Phi Award for Creative Achievement in Fiction. Ruby
is also a recipient of the Wesleyan Writer's Conference Davidoff
Scholarship in Nonfiction and the Kemp Award flie
or Outstanding Teaching
and Scholarship. She has worked on PBS archaeology documentaries
in Central America, taught 5th grade in Los Angeles on the heels
of the Rodney King riots of 1992, and written two children's books,
MAKING GOLD and THE LAST BOAT. In 1995, she graduated from the Masters
of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California,
where she was fiction editor of The Southern California Anthology.
Ruby is a painter, poet and proud adoptive mom to three children
from Ethiopia.

Please join us Sunday, September 19th and meet prize winning author, psychiatrist and Harvard professor Robert Coles, signing his latest books, "Lives We Carry With Us" and "Handing One Another Along".

Robert Coles is a professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at the
Harvard Medical School and a research psychiatrist for the Harvard
University Health Services. His many books include the Pulitzer
Prize-winning five-volume "Children of Crisis" and the bestselling "The Moral Intelligence of Children", "The Spiritual Intelligence of Children", and "Lives We Carry With Us". He is also the James Agee Professor of Social Ethics at Harvard. He lives in Massachusetts. 

Join us Sunday, September 26th at 3 PM for two authors - Sy Montgomery reads from her latest, "Birdology", and her husband, Howard Mansfield, reads from his new book, "Turn & Jump: How Time and Place Fell Apart".

To research books, films and articles, Sy Montgomery has been chased by
an angry silverback gorilla in Zaire and bitten by a vampire bat in
Costa Rica, worked in a pit crawling with 18,000 snakes in Manitoba and
handled a wild tarantula in French Guiana. She has been deftly undressed
by an orangutan in Borneo, hunted by a tiger in India, and swum with
piranhas, electric eels and dolphins in the Amazon. She has searched the
Altai Mountains of Mongolia’s Gobi for snow leopards and hiked into the
trackless cloud forest of Papua New Guinea to radiocollar tree
kangaroos.

For her newest book, BIRDOLOGY, Sy bashed through the Australian
rainforest to meet up with the most dangerous bird in the world, the
150-pound cassowary. She took years of falconry lessons; worked with a
wildlife rehabilitator to raise and release orphaned baby hummingbirds;
and shares 20 years of living with affectionate and individualistic
hens. BIRDOLOGY is an exploration of the essence of birds through
adventures with seven species.

She is a 1979 graduate of Syracuse University, a triple major with dual
degrees in Magazine Journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public
Communications and in French Language and Literature and in Psychology
from the College of Arts and Sciences. She was awarded an honorary
Doctor of Letters by the University System of New Hampshire Board of
Trustees, conferred at the commencement ceremonies at Keene State
College in Keene, N.H. in May, 2004.

Writing about preservation, architecture and American history, Howard
Mansfield has contributed toThe New York Times, American Heritage,
The Washington Post, Historic Preservation, Yankee and other
publications. Mansfield has explored issues of preservation in five
books, including In the Memory House, of which The Hungry Mind
Review said, "Now and then an idea suddenly bursts into flame, as
if by spontaneous combustion. One instance is the recent explosion of
American books about the idea of place.... But the best of them, the
deepest, the widest-ranging, the most provocative and eloquent is Howard
Mansfield's In the Memory House."

Mansfield's work has been honored with the Gold Medal for Commentary for
the City and Regional Magazine competition. He is on the advisory board
of the Monadnock Institute of Nature, Place and Culture at Franklin
Pierce College, chair of the local Library Trustees, and an occasional
guest on radio and TV shows commenting on issues of historic
preservation. He has been a keynote speaker at preservation
conferences, and spoken to many historical societies, art museums, and
colleges.
He was graduated from Syracuse University in 1979 with a dual degree:
Magazine Journalism and Honors in American Studies. He was one of two
undergraduates to be awarded the Chancellor's Citation for Exceptional
Academic Achievement. He and his wife, the writer Sy Montgomery, live
in a 120-year-old house that they have left mostly alone.

Please welcome back to the Bookshop a favorite of ours, Julia Glass, reading from her new novel , "The Widower's Tale".

Julia Glass is the author of "Three Junes", which won the National Book Award for Fiction, "The Whole World Over", and "I See You Everywhere". She
has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the
New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for
Advanced Study. Her short fiction has won several prizes, including the
Tobias Wolff Award and the Pirate's Alley Faulkner Society Medal for
the Best Novella. She lives with her family in Massachusetts.

Please join us Thursday, October 14th at 7 PM when we welcome John Vaillant, discussing and signing his latest book, "The Tiger: A True Story of Vengance and Survival".

It’s December 1997, and a man-eating tiger is on the prowl outside a
remote village in Russia’s Far East. The tiger isn’t just killing
people, it’s annihilating them, and a team of men and their dogs must
hunt it on foot through the forest in the brutal cold. As the trackers
sift through the gruesome remains of the victims, they discover that
these attacks aren’t random: the tiger is apparently engaged in a
vendetta. Injured, starving, and extremely dangerous, the tiger must be
found before it strikes again.

As he re-creates these
extraordinary events, John Vaillant gives us an unforgettable portrait
of this spectacularly beautiful and mysterious region. We meet the
native tribes who for centuries have worshipped and lived alongside
tigers, even sharing their kills with them. We witness the arrival of
Russian settlers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
soldiers and hunters who greatly diminished the tiger populations. And
we come to know their descendants, who, crushed by poverty, have turned
to poaching and further upset the natural balance of the region.

This
ancient, tenuous relationship between man and predator is at the very
heart of this remarkable book. Throughout we encounter surprising
theories of how humans and tigers may have evolved to coexist, how we
may have developed as scavengers rather than hunters, and how early Homo sapiens
may have fit seamlessly into the tiger’s ecosystem. Above all, we come
to understand the endangered Siberian tiger, a highly intelligent
super-predator that can grow to ten feet long, weigh more than six
hundred pounds, and range daily over vast territories of forest and
mountain.

Beautifully written and deeply informative, The Tiger
circles around three main characters: Vladimir Markov, a poacher killed
by the tiger; Yuri Trush, the lead tracker; and the tiger himself. It
is an absolutely gripping tale of man and nature that leads inexorably
to a final showdown in a clearing deep in the taiga.

JOHN VAILLANT's first book was The Golden Spruce. He has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, and Men's Journal, among others. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife and children.