“The loblollies off Hail Point, the spars and poles of the oyster dredgers “ are what Edward Mason and his elderly cousin Miss Mary Bayly can see from the porch of the Mansion House. She is dying and is in the process of deciding to bequeath him Mason’s Retreat, her land beside the Chester River, in Queen Anne’s County, which her life’s work has been to turn it into a model dairy farm.

Edward is shown around the farm by its manager, Mr. French, a wise man loyal to the land, and to those who worked, black and white. During the course of the tour he learns more than he really wants to know about his ancestors and the land where they have lived since l657.

Edward learns of Miss Mary’s grandfather, who in 1857 sold the slaves too old or too young to be of use, to a dealer in Virginia for “30 cents on the dollar”. His 15 year old daughter Ophelia watched their sad procession to the boat which carried them down the river. She tried blotting out this shameful memory by turning her back on the Retreat. As soon as she was old enough she left the farm for social life in Baltimore and later Paris.

In one of the most engaging section of this book Tilghman writes of two young boys, Thomas Bayley,(Miss Mary’s brother) and Randall Terrell, (son of the Retreat’s black orchardist), and the adventures they had as they played pirates in the orchard, collected pebbles in the river, flung jellyfish at each other and hid from Beal, Randall’s kid sister. For them that time The Retreat was Eden.

Ophelia’s scientist husband Wyatt Bayley, challenged by the Retreat’s acres of fallow, riverside fields, decides to plant them with peach trees. Then a blight begins to kill thousands of peach trees on farms all over the Shore, breaking the heart of Wyatt who was unable to discover a cure and has to burn the orchard that was his pride and his life’s work .

It is Mary who remains loyal to the land. She spends her life restoring it to productivity through her dairy operation.

This novel has the sweep and depth of one of the great engrossing 19th century novels – Dickens, Eliot, even Tolstoy. A large cast of vital characters play their parts in a beautifully observed Shore, while the shadows of disease, racial prejudice, greed and war flicker over them like heat lightning.

How fortunate we readers are who live here, and can learn of the history,and the heartbreak as well as the beauties of our world in The Right-Hand Shore.

If your “Willing Suspension of Disbelief” needs a workout, try this thriller, The Ripple Effect. It is a sea story with an extremely colorful cast of characters, all of whom sail about on boats – the goodies as well as the baddies. If it’s not giving the complicated plot away, the baddies’ boats are bigger, newer, and more expensive.

You’ll read of business deals so complicated that even those involved in them don’t understand what’s going on. You’ll suffer through storms and hurricanes.

You’ll meet an extraordinary 15 year old girl and her cat who tries to save the day.

Does she ? That, gentle reader, is for you to find out.

Penelope Lively has assembled a cast of characters whose lives are changed as a result of the mugging of Charlotte Rainsford, whose hip is broken as she falls.

Thus a distinguished Historian, (who is someday going to write his memoirs, peppered with the names of all the people he’s known), has to ask his niece to accompany him to a college where he is to speak; as Rose, his PA, must take care of Charlotte, her mother.

The niece, a decorator, meets a man who offers her an interesting job.

The marriage of a couple who have never heard of Charlotte begins to come apart.

And Charlotte volunteers, while she recuperates, to teach English to a middle-aged Central European immigrant .

Lively has created characters who engage us, amuse and charm us, and writes with clarity and deep understanding of what it is like to be old.

“The long and the short of it is,” fumes the Historian, “you can’t bloody well remember what you were going to say next when you know perfectly well what it was.”

This the diary John Moynihan kept and turned into his senior thesis when he finally returned to Wesleyan college.It is an account of life on a supertanker en route from Camden, New Jersey to the Mediterranean when a change of orders sends it to Japan via the Cape of Good Hope and the Indian Ocean.

Frustrated with college, John Moynihan, with help from his influential father, Senator Patrick Moynihan, goes to sea. Sworn into the Coast Guard as a Merchant Marine, he’s handed a job ticket.

“Ordinary Seaman on the Rose City . . . early tomorrow for forty-five days in the Mediterranean . . . and so far as anybody’s concerned your father is a bartender on the West Side.”

But somehow the truth leaks out and John is hazed mercilessly by the crew. He survives. How did anyone survive the constant drinking and hangovers ? He flounders through his watches, finally learning to steer well enough to be at the helm of the 894 foot long ship as they made their way up Puget Sound with a radar that didn’t work. Home at last.

This book takes you on a lighthearted romp through cuisine, cooking, restaurants and wine cellars. It may even tell you more than you really want to know about the great years of Chateau d’Yquem wine, “… the ’45, the ’49 and the youngest, the ‘75′s,” at $75 a sip.

Hollywood entertainment lawyer Danny Roth and his “young, blond and fashionably gaunt wife” fly in his private jet to his ski lodge in Aspen. While are  gone his wine collection is stolen.

Roth’s insurance company calls in Sam Levitt; lawyer, crime expert and wine connoisseur, and the reader is off with him to Paris, Bordeaux and Marseilles. We sample rare wines and enjoy fabulous meals with the company of the delightful and erudite Madame Costes.

I am neither a “foodie” nor an oenophile, the house red is good enough for me, but what interested me most in the Vintage Caper was the section about Marseilles, a city so often in books depicted as a place of squalor and violence.

This is a very pleasant page turner.

Sunday nights recently have been spent amidst the splendors of one of the stateliest of England’s stately homes, Downton Abbey, the stage name of Highclere Castle.

I have been watching chambermaids in caps and aprons turn down the covers on four poster beds, and a pretty little lady’s maid arrange Lady Mary’s hair. I have eavesdropped on the Dowager Countess, and admired the butler’s determination to see that both family and staff do not let down the side. Whispers of scandal overheard on the back stairs, and in the drawing room make it certain I will tune in the following Sunday.

Life at Highclere Castle as portrayed in this book is even more fascinating. Almina Wombwell, was rumoured to be the illegitimate daughter of the fabulously wealthy Alfred de Rothschild. He settled an enormous dowry on her upon her marriage to the 5th Earl of Carnavon.

There were house parties, shooting weekends, (even the Prince of Wales was once guest of honor), balls and banquets as well as celebrations to which the whole village was invited. Electricity, central heating and indoor plumbing was installed.

There are photographs of Almina with feathered hats perched on her upswept coiffeur, photographs of the eighteen house servants; the men in brass – buttoned livery, the women in black with caps on their heads.

During World War I, Almina opened a private hospital in London and turned Highclere into a place where officers could recover in luxury and comfort. (One wonders what became of wounded enlisted men ?) She threw herself and her fortune into this work, and her influence helped turn nursing into a respectable career for women.

Her husband, the 5th Earl Carnovan, avoided the cold, damp English winters, instead spending time in Egypt. While there he became interested in archeology, and teamed up with Howard Carter. Their partnership eventually uncovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, one of the greatest discoveries of that ancient era.

Although this book has been written by the current Countess, the world she writes about, the world we see on television as Downton Abbey, seems as remote as the world of the Pharaoh’s.

In 1940, magazine editor Howard Bloomfield, his wife Connie, their baby son, and the family dog set sail on Kittywake, a thirty foot gaff rig sloop – destination Florida.

This is the story of their voyage; the harbors, the towns along the way, the people they met at the docks where they tied up.

My husband and I and our seven year old son had made the same trip in 1968, and this book brought back memories of rivers we’d crossed and anchorages we’d found. Though I imagine the 21st century has brought many changes, or “improvements”, for the comfort and convenience of the boats heading South, the magical names on the charts are still the same: The Alligator, the Ashepoo, Beaufort,Callibogue Sound, Dafuskie, the Dismal Swamp Canal, Hobucken Bridge , Mantanzas inlet, Thunderbolt, Oriental, and back to Oxford, where Bloomfield’s trip ends. Ours had begun from there.

The book describes the challenges as well as the pleasures of compressed living: a stroller crowding the cockpit, the delight of having porpoises swimming beside you, the satisfaction when the wind is on the quarter and the sails are set just right, the joy of feeling solid ground under your feet when you make port.

The Bloomfields pulled it off, decided to put off another such trip until the baby, who had been content to lie snug in his hammock, but was now crawling all over the place, would be able to, “swim, steer, reef, splice … and explain the engine to his father.”

Tall ships have been sailing up the river to Chestertown for several years now to take part in our Downrigging weekend, and there must be many of us watching from land who envy the picturesque way of life by those who sail in them.

Harvey Oxenhorn, student and teacher, no athlete, had volunteered to become part of the crew of Regina Maris. The ship was a barkentine, “with more than three miles of lines and sixteen canvas sails.” She was bound from Boston for the Arctic to study humpbacked whales.

Oxenhorn is assigned the fore watch, bossed by twenty-three year old Joan, who is teaching them knots. He fails the bowline, but finally after many tries and help from David, who’d crewed on skipjacks, learned the slippery clove hitch. “Great,” said Joan, ”of course, when its rough aloft, you’ll want to do that with one hand.”

Oxenhorn gives us a vivid picture of the crowded, uncomfortable conditions, of people learning to live and work together. Although terrified of heights, he learns to climb, and in seven foot seas and soaking rain is paralyzed trying to furl the sails – out on the yard arm and afraid to move.  Once again it  is Dave who comes to his aid.  “On deck I was grateful to Dave but angry with myself . . .Now I dread it worse than before. I’m not sure I can go up again.”

There are descriptions of wind , weather, ice bergs and whales —“Every time I have seen a whale its beauty, power and intelligence have been self evident.”

While reading Tuning the Rig, you are not only a member of the crew, but you are shown skies and seas and shores of intense beauty. This is not a peaceful read; you find yourself holding the book, white knuckled, almost afraid to turn the page, though you know the author survived to write it. It was sad to read that Harvey Oxenhorn was killed in an automobile accident shortly after it came out.

A woman sits beside the bed of her husband who has just died, and struggles to absorb the loss. She thinks of their daughter in far off California, who still believes her father is alive. She remembers her first meeting with him in Paris; an artist and a mathematician.

The novel is written in short, seemingly unrelated paragraphs; snapshots of a marriage that lasted for years. The images come and go as she sits in the dark bedroom. You learn about Nina, you learn about Philip. It’s a love story – not sentimental, with a strangely happy ending.

How was this daffodil fresh young woman with her beautiful, crystal voice able to emerge from the turbulent home life and upbringing she writes of in this memoir ? She began singing professionally when she was 12ish. Her mother broke up the family by joining ranks with a man Julie was told to call Pop. Julie was forced to leave her home, father and brother and join her mother and stepfather as they toured in second rate vaudeville theatres as a musical trio. Alcoholism dulled her mother’s piano playing and her stepfather’s voice, just as Julie’s career surged forward. By her teens she was supporting the whole family; mother, step brothers, and even the step father she disliked.

Her big break came when she was chosen for the Boy Friend, a hit musical in England and America. This led to the role of Eliza in My Fair Lady .The backstage glimpses into behind the scenes of My Fair Lady and her subsequent TV shows are intriguing, as well as Julie’s comments on the theatrical world in which she became a star. She also reveals the strain on her voice from the singing, which sounded so carefree and effortless. The book ends as she flies off to American with husband Tony Walton and baby Emma to become Mary Poppins.