For almost thirty years, Merrill Gilfillan has written outdoor columns devoted primarily to describing and creating moods about the world of nature. These columns are informed by a rural background and field notes from more than sixty years of outdoor experience. In Gilfillan's words, "Observation is more of the mind than of vision; our attitude is the secret of original observation. I choose the subjective approach to outdoor enjoyment. I did this after training in zoology and twenty years of field work as a wildlife biologist....We should learn to seek our own original 'view' of what we observe....The scientific method is necessary to gain facts, but the manner in which one experiences the facts is what will determine their final value to the individual and, perhaps, to society." Moods of the Ohio Moons is the product of this subjective method of observation, balanced with scientific knowledge and intended to encourage readers to explore their own individual appreciation and understanding of nature. Twelve essays, one for each month, relate incidents and events--weather, diagnostic events, vegetation and wildlife, agriculture, trends of land use, and the wild harvest--that contribute to the mood of the time. As Gilfillan demonstrates, each month has its mood established primarily by nature and only secondarily by humans.

As the state of Ohio prepares to celebrate its bicentennial in 2003, Andrew R. L. Cayton offers an account of ways in which diverse citizens have woven its history. Ohio: The History of a People, centers around the many stories Ohioans have told about life in their state. The founders of Ohio in 1803 believed that its success would depend on the development of a public culture that emphasized what its citizens had in common with each other. But for two centuries the remarkably diverse inhabitants of Ohio have repeatedly asserted their own ideas about how they and their children should lead their lives. The state's public culture has consisted of many voices, sometimes in conflict with each other. Using memoirs, diaries, letters, novels, and paintings, Cayton writes Ohio's history as a collective biography of its citizens. Ohio, he argues, lies at the intersection of the stories of James Rhodes and Toni Morrison, Charles Ruthenberg and Lucy Webb Hayes, Carl Stokes and Alice Cary, Sherwood Anderson and Pete Rose. It lies in the tales of German Jews in Cincinnati, Italian and Polish immigrants in Cleveland, Southern blacks and white Appalachians in Youngstown. Ohio is the mingled voices of farm families, steelworkers, ministers, writers, schoolteachers, reformers, and football coaches. Ohio, in short, is whatever its citizens have imagined it to be.

A compilation of current biographical information of general interest.

New Moon: A Coming-of-Age Tale traces the author's path through grade school at P. S. 6, "group" in Central Park, high school at Horace Mann, and college at Amherst, while recalling Freudian psychoanalysis, Grossinger's Hotel in the Catskills, Color War at Camp Chipinaw, '50s rock 'n' roll, teen romance, the mysterious world of tarot cards, discovery of Carl Jung, and spiritual and political initiation. This is not the paperback of the 1996 hardcover but its metamorphosis and realization.