Taken together, the diary, newspaper letters, and other documents tell a coherent story from the viewpoint of an educated private soldier in the Army of the Potomac. Not only did Perkins provide detailed , accurate reports of the battles and camp life of his service, but he also criticized top Army leadership and offered commentaries on major personal and national issues, including his notions of the nature of courage, political issues such as the treatment of draft dodgers, and the effects of slavery."--Book jacket.
A convenient, one-volume edition of the seminal conservation writings of George Perkins Marsh, annotated in the context of modern conservation thinking.
Stones Stand, Waters Flow is a story of change and endurance. The Perkins farm, where the author spent his boyhood, stood as a silent monument to history. Hancock and Adams had fled there from Lexington, assisted in their escape by a widow, a minister, and a slave. The barn where they stabled their horses contained the horse and cow and farm implements of the author’s childhood. Their flight path through the family’s woods remained a logging trail and a favorite childhood playground. Perkins family lives were colored by history and enriched by legends of English, Scottish, Welsh, French, and Indian ancestors. The period from 1930 to1950 included also the stresses of economic depression, wartime, and a mother’s breakdown, as the slow seasons of the past hastened toward the swift transformations of the future.
He applied science to life, not with the disinterested precision of a scientist, but with the aims and methods of a humanist. After 1861 he represented the United States at the Court of Savoy, in the critical years in which Italy was built, and the United States reshaped along modern lines. From his perspective, he described prominent Italian contemporaries and their relations with the United States and his opinion could not be ignored by the Department of State. The hero of the Marsh reports was Giuseppe Garibaldi; the "devil", Napoleon III. His luminous exposition, with a clear and fresh language, revealed many aspects of his historical times and of the images of Italy, which were frequently corroborated by the diaries of American tourists and writers doing their "Grand Tour": far from being a modern country, Italy appeared a wonderful destination for traveling, the land of Dante, Machiavelli, Petrarca.
In a beautiful weekend in June, a group of academics meet at Bellwether University in Lost Valley for an International Conference on Multicultural Initiatives. When an underemployed scholar of English literature and a computer programmer scheme to solidify their relations with the women they love, they enmesh themselves in a tangle of plots that involve the personification of a famous scholar, the theft of a cigar store Indian, and an attempt to enter the school's mascot, a pit bull, in the local dogfights. The characters include a Dean who began his career escorting young ladies at their comings out, the Dean's unacknowledged English daughter, an inarticulate Head of Communications who loves dogs and goldfish, a President with high ambitions but confused intelligence, a visiting Australian with a problematic accent, a misty poet, an uncertain feminist, a gushing multiculturalist, the Chinese innkeeper who reluctantly hosts the conference, and a sinister professor of English whose multiple schemes are fittingly rewarded at the end.
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