Staff Picks
Past and present Whistlestoppers have a fascinating diversity of taste in books, as you may deduce from a browse in all our recommendations. If you are curious about an individual staffer's picks, click the names below. I emphasize to them that all literature is fair game, not just current or trendy titles. We try to stock everything they would like to sell by hand.
Nine Mile Bridge: Three Years in the Maine Woods
Nine Mile Bridge: Three Years in the Maine Woods
In this critically acclaimed Maine classic set in the 1930s, Helen Hamlin writes of her adventures in the Maine wilderness. Hamlin was warned that remote Churchill Depot, an isolated lumber camp located at the headwaters of the Allagash River, was “no place for a woman.” Despite the warning, Hamlin set off at age twenty to teach school at the tiny camp. After teaching for one year, she married a game warden, and moved deeper into the wilderness, where she spent her next three years. Hamlin effectively captures this time in her life, complete with the trappers, foresters, lumbermen, woods folk, wild animals, and natural splendor that she discovered first at Umsaskis Lake and then at Nine Mile Bridge on the St. John River.
Islandport Press is proud to reissue Nine Mile Bridge. The enhanced classic features: a new foreword by Dean B. Bennett, author and noted authority on the Allagash and North Woods regions of Maine; a new Helen Hamlin biography; and new photographs.