When Howard Mansfield grew up, World War II was omnipresent and hidden. This was also true of his father's time in the Air Force. Like most of his generation, it was a rule not to talk about what he'd experienced in war. You're not getting any war stories from me, he'd say.

Cleaning up the old family house the year before his father's death, Mansfield was surprised to find a short diary of the bombing missions he had flown. Some of the missions were harrowing. Mansfield began to fill in the details, and to be surprised again, this time by a history he thought he knew.

I Will Tell No War Stories is about undoing the forgetting in a family and in a society that has hidden the horrors and cataclysm of a world at war. Some part of that forgetting was necessary for the veterans, otherwise how could they come home, how could they find peace?

I Will Tell No War Stories is also about learning to live with history, a theme Mansfield explored in earlier books like In the Memory House, which The New York Times called a wise and beautiful book and The Same Ax, Twice, said by the Times to be filled with insight and eloquence ... a brilliant book.

Whenever Howard Mansfield writes about the world around him, whether it be small-town New England, or what compels us to preserve the artifacts of our lives, or the mystery of Time, I pay attention.Mel Allen, editor, Yankee magazine Howard Mansfield's new book, Summer Over Autumn: A Small Book of Small-Town Life is named for what Mansfield calls the moment in late summer when the season is still going strong but you get that first glimpse at autumn. There's a moment every summer when I look up at a nearby mountain and see a weakening of the green, and here and there like a splattering of paint, the first yellow leaves, writes Mansfield. Autumn is beginning to slip out from undercover. I think of this moment as its own distinct time, as Summer Over Autumn. This is the moment that precedes the fall snap, the great colors, and the final bare season in November. Mansfield's new book is about such moments. Summer Over Autumn is a small book of small-town life. He has written twenty-one short essays over the last thirty years, stories about neighbors, animals, tractors, trees, yard sales, funerals, money, and fidelity to time itself. It's a book about the crooked path that is New Hampshire, about the parts that are postcard pretty, and the rougher parts that have a kind of hidden grace you have to live with to really see. He doesn't waste time with the quaint postcard view of a New England town, but shows readers where the real merit of small-town life lies. It can be found in the war waged against invasive, wild rosebushes, the hopeful placing of bets in the elm tree lottery, the artful dance of fundraising, and in bribing the band to play longer at the mechanic's anniversary party. He brings us the hidden stories in one chair, a conversation in passing, or a Fourth of July fireworks display. Like Hancock's crooked Main Street, the town and these stories are not just there for reminiscing; they are a breathing lesson. Howard Mansfield is an everyday tourist and detective of the nearby. His ability to fully immerse himself in the here rather than rushing on towards there, has helped him create the wonderful essays in this small book full of big ideas.

Chasing Eden is about seekers, Americans searching for their Eden, longing for a Promised Land, a utopia somewhere out on the horizon. With his usual deep perception, humor, and grace, Howard Mansfield writes about a small gathering of Americans united by longing and devotion in their search for something perfect here on earth, a goal that is ever receding. Mansfield illuminates how this longing--for God, for freedom, for peace--can be found in every era, and gives form and force to our lives in our pursuit of happiness--the primary occupation of every American.

The mystery that attracts Howard Mansfield's attention is that some houses have lifeare home, are dwellings, and others aren't. Dwelling, he says, is an old-fashioned word that we've misplaced. When we live heart and soul, we dwell. When we belong to a place, we dwell. Possession, they say, is nine-tenths of the law, but it is also what too many houses and towns lack. We are not possessed by our home places. This lost quality of dwellingthe soul of buildingshaunts most of our houses and our landscape. Dwelling in Possibility is a search for the ordinary qualities that make some houses a home, and some public places welcoming.

Before Thomas Edison, light and fire were thought to be one and the same. Turns out, they were separate things altogether. This book takes a similar relationship, that of time and place, and shows how they, too, were once inseparable. Time keeping was once a local affair, when small towns set their own pace according to the rising and setting of the sun. Then, in 1883, the expanding railroads necessitated the creation of Standard Time zones, and communities became linked by a universal time. Here Howard Mansfield explores how our sudden interconnectedness, both physically, as through the railroad, and through inventions like the telegraph, changed our concept of time and place forever.

The Bones of The Earth is a book about landmarks, but of the oldest kind--sticks and stones. For millennia this is all there was: sticks and stones, dirt and trees, animals and people, the sky by day and night. The Lord spoke through burning bushes, through lightning and oaks. Trees and rocks and water were holy. They are commodities today and that is part of our disquiet.

Howard Mansfield explores the loss of cultural memory, asking: What is the past? How do we construct that past? Is it possible to preserve the past as a vital force for the future? He writes eloquently on the land and time, on how to be a tourist of the near-at-hand, and on the forces that try to topple us. From the author of In the Memory House, which The New York Times Book Review called wise and beautiful, and The Same Ax, Twice comes The Bones of The Earth, a stunning call for reinventing our view of the future.

Before Thomas Edison, light and fire were thought to be one and the same. Turns out, they were separate things altogether. This book takes a similar relationship, that of time and place, and shows how they, too, were once inseparable. Time keeping was once a local affair, when small towns set their own pace according to the rising and setting of the sun. Then, in 1883, the expanding railroads necessitated the creation of Standard Time zones, and communities became linked by a universal time. Here Howard Mansfield explores how our sudden interconnectedness, both physically, as through the railroad, and through inventions like the telegraph, changed our concept of time and place forever.

A shed is the shortest line between need and shelter, writes Howard Mansfield. Drawing on material from his recent book Dwelling in Possibility, Mansfield explores the different types of sheds found around New England and beyond: covered bridges, barns, worksheds, worship sheds (meeting houses), extended farmhouses, bob houses for ice fishing. In lyrical style and supported by photographs by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey, Mansfield shows the connection between the design of these structures and their roles in our lives.

While reporting on citizens fighting natural gas pipelines and transmission lines planned to cut right across their homes, Howard Mansfield saw the emotional toll of these projects. They got under the skin, writes Mansfield. This was about more than kilowatts, powerlines, and pipelines. Something in this upheaval felt familiar. I began to realize that I was witnessing an essential American experience: the world turned upside down. And it all turned on one word: property.

The twentieth century saw a grand procession of promises for the city. The great modern architect Le Corbusier dictated cities of glittering white towers planted in green parks, Frank Lloyd proposed cities with no downtown, cities spread across the countryside with each family on its homestead, and skyscraper utopians of the 1920s promised paradise on the one-hundredth floor with our airplane hangared next door.One thing was sure: the city of tomorrow would put to shame the city of yesterday. Another thing was certain, too: we would be happier, more peaceful (and productive) people. Here is Le Corbusier: Free, man tends to geometry. And if we followed the radiant harmony of his geometry, the world's cities could become irresistible forces stimulating collective enthusiasm, collective action, and general joy and pride, and inconsequence individual happiness everywhere . . . the modern world would emerge . . . and would beam around, powerful, happy, believing.There were others who promised deliverance through their brands of architecture: the right angle, the curvilinear road in the park, the tower of glass. Each fervently preached that his was the magic geometry that, like tumblers on a lock, would open the way to the good life. Cosmopolis is a pattern book of expectations, generously illustrated with a gathering of plans from the City Beautiful to the Italian Futurists, The Cité Industrielle, World's Fair utopias, science fiction visions, and the grand plans of the Moderns. Cosmopolis is the story of the ideal city we never achieved, and the great plans that went into making-over precincts of our urban language.

In the Memory House recalls what American society has forgotten--the land, its people, and its ideals. By examining what we choose to remember, this important book reveals how progress has created absences in our landscapes and in our lives.

The twentieth century saw a grand procession of promises for the city. The great modern architect Le Corbusier dictated cities of glittering white towers planted in green parks, Frank Lloyd proposed cities with no downtown, cities spread across the countryside with each family on its homestead, and skyscraper utopians of the 1920s promised paradise on the one-hundredth floor with our airplane hangared next door.

One thing was sure: the city of tomorrow would put to shame the city of yesterday. Another thing was certain, too: we would be happier, more peaceful (and productive) people. Here is Le Corbusier: Free, man tends to geometry. And if we followed the radiant harmony of his geometry, the world's cities could become irresistible forces stimulating collective enthusiasm, collective action, and general joy and pride, and inconsequence individual happiness everywhere . . . the modern world would emerge . . . and would beam around, powerful, happy, believing.

There were others who promised deliverance through their brands of architecture: the right angle, the curvilinear road in the park, the tower of glass. Each fervently preached that his was the magic geometry that, like tumblers on a lock, would open the way to the good life. Cosmopolis is a pattern book of expectations, generously illustrated with a gathering of plans from the City Beautiful to the Italian Futurists, The Cité Industrielle, World's Fair utopias, science fiction visions, and the grand plans of the Moderns. Cosmopolis is the story of the ideal city we never achieved, and the great plans that went into making-over precincts of our urban language.