FACT & FICTION

CAMPUS HISTORY SERIES

FOLLOW DOC ON HIS ADVENTURE ACROSS CAMPUS.

Suzanne Loudermilk; Brief Description: Haussner's artwork. Coffey salad at the Pimlico Hotel. Finger bowls at Hutzler's Colonial Tea Room. The bell outside the door at Martick's Restaurant Francais. Details like these made Baltimore's dining scene so unforgettable. Explore the stories behind thirty-five shuttered restaurants that Baltimoreans once loved and remember the meals, the crowds, the owners and the spaces that made these places hot spots. Suzanne Loudermilk and Kit Waskom Pollard share behind-the-scenes tales of what made them tick, why they closed their doors and how they helped make Baltimore a culinary destination.

Matthew Crenson; Brief Description: Charm City or Mobtown? People from Baltimore glory in its eccentric charm, small-town character, and North-cum-South culture. But for much of the nineteenth century, violence and disorder plagued the city. More recently, the 2015 death of Freddie Gray in police custody has prompted Baltimoreans--and the entire nation--to focus critically on the rich and tangled narrative of black-white relations in Baltimore, where slavery once existed alongside the largest community of free blacks in the United States. Matthew A. Crenson, a distinguished political scientist and Baltimore native, examines the role of politics and race throughout Baltimore's history. From its founding in 1729 up through the recent past, Crenson follows Baltimore's political evolution from an empty expanse of marsh and hills to a complicated city with distinct ways of doing business. Revealing how residents at large engage (and disengage) with one another across an expansive agenda of issues and conflicts, Crenson shows how politics helped form this complex city's personality.

Jamie Goodall; Brief Description: The story of Chesapeake pirates and patriots begins with a land dispute and ends with the untimely death of an oyster dredger at the hands of the Maryland Oyster Navy. From the golden age of piracy to Confederate privateers and oyster pirates, the maritime communities of the Chesapeake Bay are intimately tied to a fascinating history of intrigue, plunder and illicit commerce raiding. Author Jamie L.H. Goodall introduces infamous men like Edward "Blackbeard" Teach and "Black Sam" Bellamy, as well as lesser-known local figures like Gus Price and Berkeley Muse, whose tales of piracy are legendary from the harbor of Baltimore to the shores of Cape Charles.

Leslie Harrison; Brief Description: The poems in The Book of Endings try to make sense of, or at least come to some kind of reckoning with absence - the death of the author's mother, the absence of the beloved, the absence of an accountable god, cicadas, the dead stars arriving, the dead moon aglow in the night sky.

Leslie Harrison; Brief Description: Leslie Harrison's collection marks the arrival of an assured new poetic voice. Chosen as the winner of the 2008 Bakeless Prize in poetry by guest judge Eavan Boland, Displacement addresses questions of place and, of course, displacement--from marriage and home--and explores the aftershocks of being uprooted physically and emotionally. Paired with Harrison's natural, keen sense of rhythm, the central themes of impermanence and loss are heightened by the poems' impeccable structure.

Michael Downs; Brief Description: Inspired by the true story of the 1944 Hartford Circus Fire, the interconnected stories in Michael Downs's The Greatest Show explore the aftermath of disaster in a world of clowns, elephants, and childhood fantasies. In the opening story, Ania Lizsak, a young Polish housemaid, steals circus tickets from her employer to take her three-year-old son, Teddy, to the matinee. The fire nearly kills both and leaves them scarred in different ways: Teddy's mother enjoys the beautiful strangeness of the scar on her face, but the patches across Teddy's body inspire cruel schoolmates to call him "Lizard Liszak." Over time, his mother revels in her dramatic history while Teddy, having no memory of that day, seeks ways to return to it. These and other captivating characters appear throughout the book, creating a portrait of an American city and its people over five decades, raising questions about wounds and healing, memory and forgetting, and about the human capacity for kindness -- with all its futility and power -- in the midst of great loss.

Michael Downs; Brief Description: In 1844, Horace Wells, a Connecticut dentist, encountered nitrous oxide, or laughing gas--then an entertainment for performers in carnival-like theatrical acts--and began administering the gas as the first true anesthetic. His discovery would change the world, reshaping medicine and humanity's relationship with pain. But that discovery would also thrust Wells into scandals that threatened his reputation, his family, and his sanity--hardships and triumphs that resonate in today's struggles with what hurts us and what we take to stop the hurt. In this novel, Michael Downs mines the gaps in the historical record and imagines the motivations and mysteries behind Wells's morbid fascination with pain, as well as the price he and his wife, Elizabeth, paid--first through his obsession, then his addiction. The book is a love story, but also a story of what love can't redeem; of narcotic dreams and waking insanity; of humbug and miracle; of pain's destruction and what pains can never be eased. Following Wells throughout New England and across the ocean to Paris, the novel immerses the reader in the nineteenth century, conveying through rich physical description and telling dialogue the tragic life of a dentist who gave everything to rid the world of suffering.

Geoffrey Becker; Brief Description: A collection of stories about music, identity, liars, and love brings the reader into the lives of people who have come to a turning point.

Geoffrey Becker; Brief Description: Hot Springs is the road-trip love story about a young woman who gave up her child for adoption and her quest, five years later, to steal the child back.

Jeannie Vanasco; Brief Description: In this genre-bending investigation into the trauma of sexual violence, Vanasco interviews her high school rapist, exploring how the assault has impacted his life as well as her own.

Jeannie Vanasco; Brief Description: "The night before her father dies, eighteen-year-old Jeannie Vanasco promises she will write a book for him. But this isn't the book she imagined. The Glass Eye is Jeannie's struggle to honor her father, her larger-than-life hero but also the man who named her after his daughter from a previous marriage, a daughter who died. After his funeral, Jeannie spends the next decade in escalating mania, in and out of hospitals--increasingly obsessed with the other Jeanne. Obsession turns to investigation as Jeannie"

Joseph Capista; Brief Description: In this powerful debut, Capista traverses earth and ether to yield poems that elucidate the space between one's life and one's livelihood. While its landscapes range from back-alley Baltimore to the Bitterroot Valley, this book remains close to unbidden beauty and its capacity to sway one's vision of the world. Whether a young father who won't lower the volume on the radio or a Victorian farm boy tasked with scaring birds from seed-sown furrows, the inhabitants of Intrusive Beauty are witness to the startling ease with which one's assorted lives come in time to comprise a singular life. Mortality, love, duty, desire, an acute longing for transcendence: here, old themes resound anew as they're uttered in a multiplicity of forms and means, holding fast always to the heart.

Jack Carneal; Brief Description: "In 1994, Jack Carneal had a loose collection of friends--including Ned Oldham--who liked to get together and play some tunes now and then. It didn't seem like much of anything, until Ned's younger brother, Will Oldham, invited the guys to be his backing band on that summer's Lollapalooza tour. From working two jobs just to pay the bills to hitting the road with one of America's most iconic touring music festivals to European tours--follow Jack Carneal as he navigates the chaos of the road, the trials and tribulations of being in a band, and the personal sacrifices and demands necessary to make is as a successful artist. Told with unparalleled wit and candor, Destroy your safe and happy lives is an unflinching look at the intersection of art, commerce, and domestic stability from someone who's mapped each of those roads time and again"