Somehow I missed the book, “Outsider: Stories of Growing Up Black in the Adirondacks,” when it was published in 2023. Author Alice Paden Green passed away earlier this year at age 84. I’m sorry I never had the opportunity to meet her or listen to her speak. Her memoir provides insight ...

Our books column’s subject this time barely qualifies as a book. It’s a 6-inch-by-3-inch, 16-page assemblage of “advice and good cheer” titled “A Trotty Veck Message: Be Friendly,” published by “Trotty Veck Messengers, Saranac Lake, N.Y.” It’s not dated, but extensive material ...

The bed is empty. That’s the first of sentence of Liz Moore’s novel, “The God of the Woods.” Louise Donnadieu, a summer camp counselor, sneaks back into the cabin after a night of partying to find one bed empty. Barbara is gone. From here, the Adirondack-based story takes off like ...

Bloomingdale author George Bryjak explores the connection between the people here before the Europeans and the America signed into being in 1776 Philadelphia. Consider the book’s epigraph from historian Jill Lepore: “The Revolution in America ... began not with the English colonists but ...

In 1874, a cadre of Methodists established a nondenominational education center for Sunday School teachers on Chautauqua Lake in western New York. Originally striving to enhance teaching strategies during summer sessions also offered respite and recreation. Reading circles and educational ...

I’ve always been fascinated by maps, especially old ones. Studied carefully, they can reveal a lot of history. Nineteenth-century maps accompanying the earliest guides to the region, by Seneca Ray Stoddard and E.R. Wallace, for example, show that the way to get from place to place on Long ...