Selection of a book review often involves diversion down unexpected pathways. With the annual commemoration of the Battle of Plattsburgh scheduled each September, I’ve been thinking about Zebulon Pike, who commanded troops in this area during the winter of 1812. Pike may be more often ...

Contrary to widespread rumor, I am not a 46er. I have been stuck at 37 High Peaks for years and now, in my eighth decade, am resigned to remaining at that rung. Why struggle up a mountain with no formal trail and no view, merely to check a box? Meantime, I have come to appreciate the Low ...

Tommy Rockhurst, a first-time author from Queensbury, has something to say about summers spent on Lake George. Rockhurst’s characters in “Back to the Lake” do all the things kids love to do and adults love to remember doing in the summer when they were kids. They swim, fish, hike, and ...

A Clinton County Museum Day visit in June to Heart’s Delight Farm in Chazy (https://youtu.be/2cGTsU4O79Y) provided some wonderful information and prompted more questions about North Country industrialist and philanthropist, William H. Miner. Former SUNY Plattsburgh President Joseph C. ...

The title of Sally Svenson’s third book on history in the region, “Adirondack Photographers 1850-1950,” tells it all. She has somehow managed to compile a list of everyone who toiled behind a camera during transition from the earliest days of photography through the ubiquity of the ...

It’s well known that books and periodicals (words, in other words) helped promote the Adirondacks as a vacation destination after the Civil War. But so did pictures. One pioneer, in particular of photography’s uses in persuasion, was Seneca Ray Stoddard of Glens Falls. His principal ...