Written by a Maine man living in Mexico, this collection of short stories, essays, plays, and poems elicits a kaleidoscope of emotions. These tales are funny, horrible, and uplifting by turns. Author Robert James Shand provides a full disclosure of his personal life, from his experiences as a child growing up in Brewer, Maine, to his thoughts and feelings while living in Mexico. Through his stories, he describes gaining a deeper appreciation for the changing of the seasons in Maine, reflects on celebrating Veterans Day in Mexico, and laughs about the time no one believed that he saw a naked woman running down the street On a more serious note, Shand recalls his experiences serving in Vietnam as well as the traumatic stress he coped with upon returning home. Throughout Musings of a Maine Man Abroad, he maintains and supports his core beliefs about the world, God, and his personal relationship with Jesus.

These reflections in Book Ten of the Earth Manifesto contain a series of introspections into the nature of the financial crisis as it unfolded in 2008, along with Evolutionary Understandings during the early years of the 21st century.

Written by a Maine man living in Mexico, this collection of short stories, essays, plays, and poems elicits a kaleidoscope of emotions. These tales are funny, horrible, and uplifting by turns. Author Robert James Shand provides a full disclosure of his personal life, from his experiences as a child growing up in Brewer, Maine, to his thoughts and feelings while living in Mexico. Through his stories, he describes gaining a deeper appreciation for the changing of the seasons in Maine, reflects on celebrating Veterans Day in Mexico, and laughs about the time no one believed that he saw a naked woman running down the street On a more serious note, Shand recalls his experiences serving in Vietnam as well as the traumatic stress he coped with upon returning home. Throughout Musings of a Maine Man Abroad, he maintains and supports his core beliefs about the world, God, and his personal relationship with Jesus.

A collection of essays about family, community and everyday life through the viewpoint of a father. The basic concept is that despite adversity in life, one can still find ways to celebrate the victories and find good in the world.

"I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." And, as soon as Bill Bryson was old enough, he left. Des Moines couldn't hold him, but it did lure him back. After ten years in England he returned to the land of his youth, and drove almost 14,000 miles in search of a mythical small town called Amalgam, the kind of smiling village where the movies from his youth were set. Instead he drove through a series of horrific burgs, which he renamed Smellville, Fartville, Coleslaw, Coma, and Doldrum. At best his search led him to Anywhere, USA, a lookalike strip of gas stations, motels and hamburger outlets populated by obese and slow-witted hicks with a partiality for synthetic fibres. He discovered a continent that was doubly lost: lost to itself because he found it blighted by greed, pollution, mobile homes and television; lost to him because he had become a foreigner in his own country.

For over two decades visual artist and historian Brenton Hamilton has created a sustained body of work, mostly concentrated within the historic processes employing nineteenth century photography techniques, no longer commercially available. Hamilton has produced a unique body of work using methodologies like gum bichromated forms, platinum, and collodion ambrotypes on black glass, French variants of paper calotypy and of course the embellished cyanotype. Influenced by the Surrealist motifs; coaxing dream like, chance collisions of fragments from art history, Hamilton shapes a new landscape in his photographs. The present symbolism of the dark night sky and the freedom to look outside himself towards unfettered ideas and musings, learning to make a new place with paper and metal salts and light allowing him to rest and wonder. He combines human anatomy, astronomy and botanical imagery to create intriguing and provocative arrangements. His work references to ancient Greece and Rome, as well as 15th and 16th century Dutch and Italian paintings. Hamilton uses symbols and visual elements from the history of art to create a thoroughly contemporary vision.