ROCKACHUSETTS: AN EXPLORER’S GUIDE TO
AMAZING BOULDERS OF MASSACHUSETTS
By Christy Butler and Russell Dunn
www.rockachusetts.com
There are any number of hiking, bicycling, cross-country skiing and other outdoor adventure guides to Massachusetts, including tallies of prime rock-climbing areas. So why not a guidebook to the state’s biggest boulders?
The co-authors and photographer of “Rockachusetts” have produced just that. Their guidebook features descriptions and photographs — including historic pictures, in which forests had mostly been cleared — of 155 massive rocks in the state. Balanced rocks, split rocks, rock profiles, even painted rocks, some of them the size of houses: they’re all here, complete with maps and descriptions of hiking trails to these massive remnants of the Ice Age.
The guidebook includes information on some 20 boulders scattered up and down the Pioneer Valley, from Holyoke to Ashfield, including a number in Mount Tom State Park in Holyoke and a well-known leaning rock in Huntington, near the Knightville Dam.
Co-authors Christy Butler and Russell Dunn — Butler took the photos — have mapped all the locations, even providing GPS coordinates, and provided interesting historical information on some areas where boulders are located.
They also say their book is intended as a general guide to these unique geological sites that should appeal to hikers, rock climbers, geologists and naturalists, or families looking for fun things to do with their children.
MY INTERVIEW WITH JAMES BALDWIN
By Russell Steven Powell
Brook Hollow Press
brookhollowpress.net
Back in the 1980s, Hatfield writer and artist Russell Steve Powell was the director of public information at Hampshire College, and in fall 1983 he got a plum assignment: interview James Baldwin, who had come to Hampshire as a visiting Five College Scholar. It was the famous writer’s first visit back to the United States after living in France for 12 years.
In the lengthy interview, published by the college’s magazine, Powell and Baldwin covered many topics: Baldwin’s books, his initial impressions of his Hampshire students, and some of his current projects (at the time a musical adaptation of his first play, “The Amen Corner,” had opened on Broadway, and a video of “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” his semi-autobiographical debut novel, had begun production).
But Baldwin, who died in 1987, also spoke at length about the civil rights movement, his experience as an African-American and what he saw as the problems with the U.S. political system. At one point, he remarked, “There is something very wrong about a political system that depends so heavily on money.”
It was prescient comments like that, as well as the increased focus in the U.S. in the past year on police shootings of blacks and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, that prompted Powell to reissue his interview in a small hardcover book.
“The names and faces have changed,” Powell writes in an introduction, “but as a nation we are still dealing with many of the same issues, and much of what Baldwin had to say remains relevant today — and not just his comments about race. … His personal story, including his uneasy relationship with America, his homeland, provides valuable background for contemporary discussions about race.”