Ed Morley has a problem. He has five days to pass Amherst’s comprehensive exam in Fine Arts or he won’t graduate. Ed spent the past four years majoring in frat parties and rugby scrums, and after failing the comprehensive once, the odds are against him. However, taking on an obscure office known as the Class Choregus may propel him to a successful graduation. All he needs to do is lead the senior class in song during Commencement week—simple enough if he could read a note of music or carry a tune! As Ed navigates his personal comedy of errors, the specter of the Vietnam War looms over campus and a feeble anti-war protest is catalyzed into a fullscale rebellion. This is a tale of Eastern Seaboard colleges in the Sixties: fraternities, drinking, football, and scoring with “Beta honeys”—a world which is interrupted by the seriousness of the war in Vietnam. Even an apathetic jock like Morley is forced to consider his dilemma ina larger societal context.If the boys of A Separate Peace and A Catcher in the Rye continued to college, this is the world they would have entered. The Class Choregus belongs among the fine comic college novels which reveal to us the flip side of our fantasies and dreams.

A journey of whim, humor, and self-discovery along the Connecticut River When retired CEO Ramsay Peard, 61, called his old friend David Morine, 59, and asked the longtime conservationist if he wanted to canoe the Connecticut River,  Morine said he’d do it under one condition: no camping. “We’ll rely on the kindness of strangers.” And that’s what they did. Mooching their way down the river and staying with strangers every night, Morine and Peard got an inside look at such issues as the demise of farming, the loss of manufacturing, gay rights, and Wal-Mart versus Main Street, and they were able to delve deep into the lives of complete strangers. But Morine soon realized the one life he never dug into was Peard’s. After spending a month with him in a canoe, he had no idea that his friend’s innermost thoughts had taken a fateful course. Written in the tradition of Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods, this book will be treasured by conservationists, canoeists,  and old friends still seeking a thrill. Everyone else will be delightfully entertained.

Product Description: Watching the great Bill Russell be told that he couldn't play at a famous New England golf club; leaving Kermit the Frog in a house of ill repute in Mississippi; and poaching The Nature Conservancy's biggest donor's birds hunting in Georgia are just a few of the embarrassing, hilarious, and unpredictable moments that David Morine recounts in Small Claims, his latest book...read more

The author describes some of his more monumental foul-ups in his ceaseless effort to find people to donate land to The Nature Conservancy