Poetry. In Samuel Amadon's intense, second collection, a sequence of meditative and darkly comic postmodern narratives about what it is like to be from Hartford, Connecticut, we stagger with the speaker down the streets of his still-present past, together with a motley cast of crackheads, liars, scoundrels, and unlikely heroes. "The speaker is on the rack and only timidly aware of the torture he cannot help wreaking. Our poetry will never be the same now Amadon has spoken, our language can be entirely different. Happily for us." Richard Howard "These poems are street-smart, buoyantly lyrical, and they possess something beautiful and permanent at their core. Samuel Amadon does for Hartford what Koch, Schuyler, and O'Hara have done for New York City." Tracy K. Smith"
Through firsthand accounts, interviews with survivors and a gripping collection of vintage photographs, author Michael Skidgell attempts to make sense of one of Hartford's worst tragedies. Almost 7,000 fans eagerly packed into the Ringling Brothers big top on July 6, 1944. With a single careless act, an afternoon at the "Greatest Show on Earth" quickly became one of terror and tragedy as the paraffin-coated circus tent caught fire. Panicked crowds rushed for the few exits, but in minutes, the tent collapsed on those still struggling to escape below. A total of 168 lives were lost, many of them children, with many more injured and forever scarred by the events. Hartford and the surrounding communities reeled in the aftermath as investigators searched for the source of the fire and the responsible parties.
The acclaimed author of Emily, Alone and Henry, Himself brings all his narrative gifts to bear on this gripping account of tragedy and heroism—the great Hartford circus fire of 1944. It was a midsummer afternoon, halfway through a Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus performance, when the big top caught fire. The tent had been waterproofed with a mixture of paraffin and gasoline; in seconds it was burning out of control. More than 8,000 people were trapped inside, and the ensuing disaster would eventually take 167 lives. Steward O'Nan brings all his narrative gifts to bear on this gripping account of the great Hartford circus fire of 1944. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of survivors, O'Nan skillfully re-creates the horrific events and illuminates the psychological oddities of human behavior under stress: the mad scramble for the exits; the perilous effort to maneuver animals out of danger; the hero who tossed dozens of children to safety before being trampled to death. Brilliantly constructed and exceptionally moving, The Circus Fire is history at its most compelling.
A MATTER OF DEGREE, bound in a high-quality hardcover first edition, is a haunting tale of personal loss and public controversy, a superior work of narrative nonfiction filled with passion, purpose and poetic imagery. Don Massey humanizes history by placing a dedicated fireman's spiritual quest for an unknown and unclaimed child against the backdrop of a public tragedy.
Before the Salem Witch Trials...in 1662, a witch panic struck Hartford, Connecticut. Seventeen year old Hester Hosmer is a neighbor and friend to Ann Cole, despite Ann's reputation for being "strange" and a mooncalf. One night when Hester tries to drag Ann home from one of her moonlight walks, the girls stumble upon a strange fire-lit gathering on the South Green. But in 1662, such gatherings are strictly forbidden. When a child dies mysteriously, Ann's hysteria begins and she accuses certain townspeople of witchcraft. A witch panic envelopes Hartford and paranoia runs rampant. Hester tries to discourage Ann's hysterics and the more she discovers, the more conflicted she becomes about her own loyalties. Hester's budding romance with Tom, the peddler's son only makes Ann jealous and increases the tension. With the ruthless Marshal Gilbert, the Puritan Elders and the Acting Governor himself at her beck and call, Ann can prove to be a dangerous enemy. After all, anyone in Hartford might be a witch. After years of research, Ms. Spada Basto has brought to life a turbulent and disturbing period of Colonial Connecticut History. It is a time when wolves prowled near the town and superstitions about witches often brought people to an untimely death-hanging by a noose on Gallows' Hill.
Combining legal and social history, Bruce Mann explores the relationship between law and society from the mid-seventeenth century to the eve of the Revolution. Analyzing a sample of more than five thousand civil cases from the records of local courts in Connecticut, he shows how once-neighborly modes of disputing yielded to a legal system that treated neighbors and strangers alike. During the colonial period population growth, immigration, economic development, war, and religious revival transformed the nature and context of official and economic relations in Connecticut. Towns lost the insularity and homogeneity that made them the embodiment of community. Debt litigation was transformed from a communal model of disputing in which procedures were based on the individual disagreements to a system of mechanical rules that homogenized law. Pleading grew more technical, and the civil jury faded from predominance to comparative insignificance. Arbitration and church disciplinary proceedings, the usual alternatives to legal process, became more formal and legalistic and, ultimately, less communal. Using a computer-assisted analysis of court records and insights drawn from anthropology and sociology, Mann concludes that changes in the law and its applications were tied to the growing commercialization of the economy. They also can be attributed to the fledgling legal profession's approach to law as an autonomous system rather than as a communal process. These changes marked the advent of a legal system that valued predictability and uniformity of legal relations more than responsiveness to individual communities. Mann shows that by the eve of the Revolution colonial law had become less identified with community and more closely associated with society.
