Weather good, got out of house, bought books, got autographs

It's been nice--weather-wise and health-wise.  I've actually been able to get out and about a bit. One outing was totally non-book related.  Down to the shore for a seafood lunch.

The book related outings were both lectures.  On the bottom of the stack is the Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader, edited by Joan D. Hedrick. Hedrick won  the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for her biography of Stowe. On Friday I attended a talk by her (Hedrick, not Stowe). She spoke about both Stowe and also about her current work in progress: Nineteenth Century American Women and the Holiness Movement. She is a Connecticut author on the faculty of Trinity College in Hartford. The program was sponsored by Middlesex Institute for Lifelong Education (MILE).  Time to read something by Stowe other than Uncle Tom's Cabin.

On the top of the stack is another book by a local author.  Richard Freund is on the faculty of the University of Hartford.  He spoke at another MILE program on Monday. He spoke about his part in searching in Southern Spain for  the lost city of Atlantis which was covered in the National Geographic documentary “Finding Atlantis.”  I bought his book Digging through History: Religion and Archaeology from Atlantis to the Holocaust to learn more about his work, which is somewhat controversial in archaeological circles.  This is most likely going to lead me to further reading. 

Sandwiched in between the Hedrick and Freund books is another book by several local authors.  The editor, Matthew Warshauer, teaches at Central Connecticut State University. The nine essays in Inside Connecticut and the Civil War: Essays on One State's Struggles focus on various aspects of the state's involvement in the Civil War and its commemoration. I was unable to attend a talk by the editor and two of the essayists yesterday at the Old State House. (I did watch a video of the presentation on CT-N Connecticut Network )However, I know this group and my copy of the book has one author autograph. This is a gift copy. So far I've read one of the essays.