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Books

When ordering books please consider the Toadstool Bookshop. The Toadstool is our local independent bookstore. It’s a great place — you’d love to have a Toadstool Bookshop in your town. Order my book here and I’ll gladly sign it.

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Reviews

“I absolutely love this book, a thoughtful, sometimes heart-breaking examination of the American idea of property. Although a stinging indictment of such concepts as private property and eminent domain, more than anything it troubles the definition of property versus land. This powerful book will slice you to the bone with its sweeping intelligence, austere poetics, and utter kindness. Mansfield is a modern explorer, sure-footed and consumed, uneclipsed, his a great mind, his a rousing voice. The essay “Three Days on a Warming Planet” brought me to my knees. Let me say again: I love this book.”
— Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

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In a high pasture in northernmost New Hampshire I stood next to a farmer looking out on mountains for as far as we could see, mountains that were blue shadows in the distance, and beyond that, grey shadows. This was an exalted view. Seeing it in this moment made me happy; but seeing this every day from the time you could first see would shape you in ways you might not be able to express. This farmer loved this land…

*********************************************** dwelling

Reviews

Mansfield invites us to travel across time, geography and culture before delivering us—wiser and more thoughtful—to the full-of-meaning place we call home.
—Kate Whouley, author of Cottage for Sale, Must Be Moved

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More to come…

Reviews

Read an Excerpt

Read the first chapter.

*********************************************** hogwood

Reviews

“Mansfield has written a wonderful first book for children, showing Hogwood’s wry sense of humor. This book will make a great read-aloud as students become absorbed in Moser’s full page illustrations, which almost steal the show with their beautiful compliments to Mansfield’s text. They are vibrantly colored with great detail and some humorous touches… The story eloquently concludes with Hogwood in his pen dreaming of future adventures in a watermelon and pumpkin patch. Just like Hogwood, readers will be saying yes to this wonderfully crafted story. Highly Recommended.” — Library Media Connection, (Starred Review)

*********************************************** memory house

Reviews

"Mr. Mansfield gets beneath the patina of the tangible and intangible relics of our history to locate the emotional core of our past. Through the intensity of his language, his pace and wit, the predisposed reader can take the leap into collective memory and even catch, with Mr. Mansfield, that damp, sweet scent of the past.[a] wise and beautiful book."
—The New York Times Book Review.

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"There was a man I loved to visit. He lived in the house he grew up in-a wonderful, warm, cluttered house that seemed larger inside than out. There were long hallways and rooms, and a barn lined with the things he had collected-antlers and bones, small animal skulls, wood of all sorts. He would carve animals on these or paint scenes of how it used to be. He carved my wife’s wedding ring.

I could have listened to him tell me stories for hours."

*********************************************** ruin books *********************************************** sheds

Reviews

"Superbly illustrated throughout, Sheds is an extraordinary and unique study that is as impressively well written as it is exceptionally well organized and presented."
—The Midwest Book Review

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Reviews

"“Mansfield provides an engaging account of early aviation history, and his book evokes the early part of the century when Americans embraced the promise of technology, when progress-even in the form of an airmobile-seemed possible and limitless."
—Publisher’s Weekly.

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"What was it like to fly in 1911? We want to be told it was like the birds—the man-birds as they said—like the eagle and the skylark. We want to hear talk of air ruffling feathers, of floating along dreamily among the clouds. We want poetry. But flying was something altogether different. It was struts and wires, engines and oil, wind in the face, and crowds that rushed an aeroplane eager to sign their names on it or tear it apart."

*********************************************** summer

Reviews

"A wonderful book. An insightful but droll glimpse inside the life of one New England town. Bringing us the small events and encounters with neighbors and townspeople, Howard goes straight to the heart of the inscrutable nature of small town life, of New England life. We are left with no choice but to love this book."

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"The first frost is a hog's holiday. It's as if the whole world tilts and vegetables roll toward the commodious jaws of our pig, Christopher Hogwood; zucchinis the size of baseball bats, tomatoes that were caught on the vine, broccoli that has bolted, squash going soft in one spot.

Our friends, gardeners, come and render unto Hogwood that which is his. The dreams of the winter seed catalog, the toil of the blackfly season, the loyal watering of July, he takes it all in, joyfully grinds it down—grabs a pumpkin and shakes it from side to side, crushes a beet, snout upward, with red beet juice dripping from his jowls."

— A Hog's Life

*********************************************** bones

Reviews

"A profound curiosity and a rare humanity underlie the elegant work of Howard Mansfield. He is a master sleuth, an invested listener, a credible and compassionate guide to our future and our past. He is a writer I read because there is real wisdom in his words, because there's nobody else in this generation who writes so meaningfully about what really matters in the American landscape."
—Beth Kephart, author of A Slant of Sun"

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This 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 by night. This was the world's order by day and by night in dreams. The Lord spoke through burning bushes and rocks, though lightning and oaks. Trees and rocks and water were holy. They are commodities today and that is part of our disquiet.

*********************************************** same ax

Reviews

"The Same Ax, Twice is filled with insight and eloquence… a memorable, readable, brilliant book on an important subject. It is a book filled with quotable wisdom."
—The New York Times Book Review

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"Back when I went to school, there was an administrator, a vice-president of something or other, who was given to rough-hewn statements, the kind of homilies that were meant to show his populist stuff. He was particularly set on tearing down the wooden houses on campus. They just weren't practical.

We said: They can be repaired. There are wooden houses that have stood for hundreds of years. And all buildings, no matter the material, need repair and renewal.

He said: I know a farmer who says he has had the same ax his whole life—he only changed the handle three times and the head two times. Does he have the same ax?"

*********************************************** turn

Reviews

"Benjamin Franklin said time is money. For Howard Mansfield, time is people… He does his turn on Ebeneezer Edwards, then jumps time and space to Denman Thompson or Marge Bruchac. The connections are what gives the book its power."
—Tim Clark, Yankee magazine.

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"On an October morning, when the air and light was like a tonic, I sat in a museum of stilled machines and old filed papers, the only visitor. I sat at a desk between two clocks. A grandfather clock was behind me and an office regulator clock, with a large pendulum, was in front. The clocks ticked loudly; they ticked in unison. Clock-clock-clock. I could feel the pendulums swing in my gut. Everything else in the museum was mute — the Model A, the steam-engine pumper, the children’s toy metal cars. The clocks were insistent. Time was ticking through me."

Honors

• Turn and Jump has won an "IPPY:" Independent Publisher Book Awards, 2011. Silver medal, in the science category.

*********************************************** mountain

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"In 1935 a small, awkward magazine introducing its first issue, made a stand against a New England “about to be sold, to be ’swallered inter’ a sea of chain stores, national releases, and nationwide hookups.” The editors of the new magazine, Yankee, had set up in Dublin, a New Hampshire town with a year-round population of 506."

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