Although numerous books have been written about the Adirondacks and Adirondackers, not very many have become regional classics. Early authors such as John Todd, Charles Fenno Hoffman, Jeptha R. Simms, S. H. Hammond, J. T. Headly, Alfred B. Street, William H.H. Murray and Verplanck Colvin earned well-deserved popularity in their day and their literary output still exerts a potent appeal more than a century later. One more volume is eminently entitled to consideration as top-bracket upstate literature...and that is Adirondack French Louie by the late Harvey L. Dunham of Utica.

After his friends Harvey Dunham and Mortimer Norton passed away, Lloyd Blankman dreamed of organizing his newspaper and magazine articles, along with articles by his friends, into a book. Sadly, Lloyd died before getting very far into the project.Author William J. O?Hern has resurrected Blankman?s vision, by joining his original writing with the enduring works of Blankman and his contemporaries in Adirondack Characters and Campfire Yarns, a mosaic history of the lives and traditions of the settlers of the Southern Adirondacks. Venture into the wilderness with French Louie and Alvah Dunning and learn about lesser known characters such as Old Lobb of Piseco Lake and Moose River Plains guide Slim Murdock. Travel the trapline with Richard Woods, E. J. Dailey and Burt Conklin, "the greatest trapper." Explore the turbulent waters of the West Canada Creek in search of trout, learn about the tools of the spruce gum trade, and find out why "the liars club" of Forestport called their get-togethers "parting with the dog." Adirondack Characters and Campfire Yarns not only fulfills Blankman?s dream, it fills a void in the recorded history of a seldom written-about region and the people who settled it.Over 80 vintage photographs!

At 33, Noah John Rondeau took to the Adirondack high peaks and lived there nearly the rest of his life. DeSormo and Rondeau himself put down on paper the experiences of an especially rugged and unusual life lived. Firsthand accounts of hermits are few in number, making this book quite an individual entry in the biography field.

Henry M. Beach was a prolific and accomplished upstate New York photographer who documented the North Country during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Although much less known and celebrated, Beach's work is as important to the twentieth-century Adirondacks as Seneca Ray Stoddard's is to the nineteenth century. Illustrated with over 250 examples of his work including ten panoramic foldouts, this book covers the range of Beach's subject matter. Robert Bogdan's lively and accessible approach to the photographer's work encourages the reader to explore the North Country's people and places through Beach's photography and life. Although Beach's postcard pictures and other photographs were taken to sell in bulk to hotel managers, tourist shop owners, and other retail merchants, they are not just mass-produced, stylized, pretty pictures. Beside the bubbling brooks and shady woodland paths are factory boomtowns and paper mills belching pollution. As the rails brought increasing numbers of middle-class tourists to the Adirondacks, the wealthy created their own exclusive wilderness playground. Beach photographed dandy visitors at play as well as manual laborers sweating in the forest, logging camps, factories, mines, and construction sites. Images of "great camps" sit next to modest abodes, small stores, and family-owned resorts. Pictures of trains in scenic surroundings give way to mangled wrecks after tragic railroad accidents. In addition to standard view cards, he produced montages and advertisement postcards serious visual commentary as well as lighthearted picture play. Beach's best works stir the heart and provoke the imagination, and his whimsical, down-to-earth approach to photography produced images that are a treat to the eye.

Algonquian and Iroquois natives of the American Northeast were described in great detail by colonial explorers who ventured into the region in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Beginning with the writings of John Smith and Samuel de Champlain, Gordon Sayre analyzes French and English accounts of Native Americans to reveal the rhetorical codes by which their cultures were represented and the influence that these images of Indians had on colonial and modern American society. By emphasizing the work of Pierre Franaois-Xavier Charlevoix, Joseph-Franaois Lafitau, and Baron de Lahontan, among others, Sayre highlights the important contribution that French explorers and ethnographers made to colonial literature. Sayre's interdisciplinary approach draws on anthropology, cultural studies, and literary methodologies. He cautions against dismissing these colonial texts as purveyors of ethnocentric stereotypes, asserting that they offer insights into Native American cultures. Furthermore, early accounts of American Indians reveal Europeans' serious examination of their own customs and values: Sayre demonstrates how encounters with natives' wampum belts, tattoos, and pelt garments, for example, forced colonists to question the nature of money, writing, and clothing; and how the Indians' techniques of warfare and practice of adopting prisoners led to new concepts of cultural identity and inspired key themes in the European enlightenment and American individualism.