Books published by publisher Doubleday, Doran and Company, inc

Penrod is a collection of comic sketches by Booth Tarkington that was first published in 1914. The book follows the misadventures of Penrod Schofield, an eleven-year-old boy growing up in the pre-World War I Midwestern United States, in a similar vein to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In Penrod, Tarkington established characters who appeared in two further books, Penrod and Sam (1916) and Penrod Jashber (1929). The three books were published together in one volume, Penrod: His Complete Story, in 1931.

This presentation of Eve Currie's journey catches the world mired in war for just over two years. In the course of the book's unfolding, the United States enters the military phase after Pearl Harbor. This comes just as the European powers and China are only just establishing their military infrastructure, through Africa and the Middle East and Russia, and the Far East. German forces are meeting stiff resistance in Russia and North Africa, though the Japanese are pushing through South Asia, threatening India. Through the author's experiences, we read of the patriotism of the Free French, the exiled Poles, the British colonial hierarchy, the Russian Red Army, and the Chinese, both the leadership and the rank and file. We also get a glimpse of the struggles between local concerns and global warfare on all fronts. For example, she expresses the difficulty in understanding the Indian self-absorption in independence and lack of concern in face of the encroaching Japanese-Axis threat. In this unfolding chaos it is little short of amazing that any reporter is capable of traversing the globe and acquiring access to all the leading military and political leaders to learn of their plans and visions for the war itself and their hope for the aftermath, and witness their actual efforts and those of their followers.

Pulitzer Prize winning poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin’s 1941 depiction of the perfect Maine Christmas describes a farmhouse "banked with emerald jewels clustered on bayberry boughs," stuffed with aunts, uncles, and cousins by the cart load, with mince pies by the legion. You will feel like one of the family as he brings you along to play with cousins in the hay chaff, take a bouncy afternoon sled ride, savor the goose during the three-hour meal, string popcorn for the tree, and listen to tales by firelight at the drowsy end of a long and perfect day. Paired with gorgeous and evocative original woodblock prints by Maine artist Blue Butterfield, this edition will be a keepsake book, one to read aloud year after year to remind ourselves of the true meaning of the holidays.