"Bearpond Books

TUESDAY, AUGUST  10 AT 7PM

JAMES TABOR / BLIND DESCENT

Tabor’s last book was the international award-winning Forever on the Mountain: The Truth Behind One of Mountaineering’s Most Controversial and Mysterious Disasters.

Blind Descent is the story of the men and women who risked everything to find the deepest cave on earth, earning their place in history beside the likes of Peary, Amundsen, Hillary, and Armstrong.  This new book received a starred review in Publishers Weekly: “Holds the reader to his seat, containing dangers aplenty with deadly falls, killer microbes, sudden burial, asphyxiation, claustrophobia, anxiety, and hallucinations far underneath the ground in a lightless world. Using a pulse-pounding narrative, this is tense real-life adventure pitting two master cavers mirroring the cold war with very uncommonly high stakes.”

James Tabor, the writer and on-camera host of the acclaimed national PBS series The Great Outdoors, is also co-creator and executive producer for the 2007 History Channel’s special, Journey to the Center of the World.

SEE A REVIEW IN THE WASHINGTON POST

SATURDAY, JULY 3    11 AM-1 PM

THIS IS A SIGNING ONLY EVENT

AUTHENTIC PATRIOTISM

In conjunction with Montpelier’s 4th of July Celebration we will  be having a signing with Stephen Kiernan  for his new book, Authentic Patriotism.

Patriotism has become a loaded word: one that is wielded against people with whom we might disagree, or whose cultural origins don’t match our own.  But our founding fathers–Washington, Jefferson, Adams, and others–saw patriotism as a dynamic force: an act of service, in an evolving nation that defined its purpose by offering all people a better way of life.

Award-winning journalist Kiernan delivers a provocative, inspiring account of our neglected American ideals and the people who are living them today–and restoring our nation’s dream.

TUESDAY, JULY 6 AT 7PM

WHAT IS LEFT THE DAUGHTER

Norman, widely regarded as one of this country’s finest novelists, returns to the mesmerizing fictional terrain of his major books–The Bird Artist, The Museum Guard, and The Haunting of L--in this erotically charged and morally complex story. Set on the Atlantic coast of Canada during WWII, Norman’s latest book is an expertly crafted tale of love during wartime.

This new book received a starred review in Publishers Weekly– “an expertly crafted tale of love during wartime..Norman’s writing is effortless, and his plot is grand in scope but studded with moments of tenderness and intimacy that help crystallize the anxiety and weariness of life on the home front. That Norman is able to achieve so much in 250 pages is a testament to his mastery of the craft.”

Howard Norman(and family)  are  frequent customers at Bear Pond Books when they are in Montpelier and his events here are always well attended.   He lives with his wife poet Jane Shore in Washington, DC and Calais, Vermont.

TUESDAY, JUNE 22 AT 7PM

WILLIAM  POWERS / TWELVE BY TWELVE: A ONE ROOM CABIN OFF THE GRID & BEYOND THE AMERICAN DREAM

Part Annie Dillard, part Bill McKibben, this book offers riveting armchair travel through a landscape rich with clues to personal and global healing.

Why would a successful American physician choose to live in a 12′ x 12′ cabin without running water or electricity?  To find out, Powers visits Dr. Ashley Benton in rural North Carolina. No Name Creek gurgles through Benton’s permaculture farm and she strokes honey bees’ wings as she shares her “wildcrafter” philosophy of living on a planet in crisis. Powers house sits here for a season, befriends the eclectic neighbors, and discovers a way of life under threat in opposition to the globalized American dream. William Powers hails from Long Island, NY and has worked for over a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, Washington, D.C., and Native North America. He is a 2004-2005 recipient of the Open Door Foundation for non-fiction and the author of the Liberia memoir Blue Clay People and the Bolivian memoir, Whispering in the Giant’s Ear.

TUESDAY, JUNE 15 AT 7PM

Noise is usually defined as unwanted sound, but as Keizer illustrates in his new book, noise is as much about what we want as what we don’t want.  As Kiezer hears it, noises give us a key for understanding some of our most vital issues including social inequality, climate change and the way we treat ourselves and our children.  In a review of the book in the New York Times,  Dwight Garner says “As the effortlessly intelligent Mr. Keizer points out, noise is among the thorniest class issues of our time, and we tend to utterly ignore its meanings.”

Garret Keizer is a free lance writer and the author of six books including the critically acclaimed Help, The Enigma of Anger and A Dresser of Sycamore Trees.  He lives in the North East Kingdom of Vermont.

TUESDAY, MAY 4 at 7PM

In his new book, the best-selling author of Deep Economy shows that we’re living in a fundamentally altered planet—thus the spelling of earth.  Our old, familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding and burning in ways we have never seen before.  McKibben doesn’t stop with the bad news, he offers ways to help preserve nature’s greatest treasures.

TUESDAY, MAY 11 at 7PM

Often hilarious, ultimately profound, Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment begins when Tim Brookes receives a phone call from his editor at National Geographic asking if he’d like to write an article on weather forecasting—an assignment that doesn’t go as forecast.  He embarks on an adventure that starts in a hurricane on an icy mountaintop in New Hampshire and takes him to India to watch the monsoon come ashore and write about the elaborate, almost mystical art of monsoon forecasting. When the rain begins, however, a series of misunderstandings finds him banned from every single office of the India Meteorological Department.

TUESDAY, MAY 25 at 7pm

Ron  Koss and his brother Arnie founded Earth’s Best Baby Food in 1985. This book tells the story of how they succeeded in creating the first nationally distributed organics food company to sit next to its mainstream competition on a supermarket shelf.  Theirs is a tale of idealism, naivete and possibility– a tale that reflects their quest to find a place in this world by somehow changing it for the better.  Ron Koss lives in Montpelier. We are fortunate to have both Arnie and Ron at this event.

TUESDAY, APRIL 20 AT 7 PM

Pamela Harrison is a graduate of Smith College and the Vermont College MFA and adjunct professor of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Named the PEN Northern New England Discovery Poet for 2002, her first full-length collection, Strepticon, was published in 2004 by David Robert Books. A new poetry collection, entitled Out of Silence, telling her parents’ moving story of love and loss and recently quoted by Poets House in NYC on their Twitter, has just been published.

Gary Margolis Ph.D, is Executive Director of College Mental Health Services and Associate Professor of English and American Literatures (part-time at Middlebury College). He was a Robert Frost and Arthur Vining Davis Fellow and has taught at the University of Tennessee, Vermont and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences. His third book, Fire in the Orchard was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Margolis will be reading from his new book of poems, Below the Falls–a book that responds to the loss of Middlebury student Nicholas Garza, our country’s wars, and the search for things that sustain us.

April 13  7PM  Three Vermont Poets

April Ossmann, Peggy Sapphire, Baron Wormser

April Ossmann is the author of Anxious Music (Four Way Books) and has published her poetry widely in journals including Colorado Review and Harvard Review, and in anthologies. Her poetry awards include the 2000 Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award.

Peggy Sapphire has been writing since she discovered the salvation of writing, beginning with good-bye letters. Her poetry has since appeared in numerous journals including Connecticut River Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Flipside, The Country & Abroad, The Blue Collar Review. She will be reading from her new book In The End A Circle.

Baron Wormser was Poet Laureate of Maine from 2000 to 2005. He is the author of seven books of poetry, most recent, Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems(2008), and the co-author of two books about teaching poetry.