Take the roof of our pleasant homes, says one woman in this history, and we'd see a lot more trouble than we knew about. In the mid 1950s the runaway best selling novel Peyton Place and the sensational movie Blackboard Jungle warned that American values and reality were very different. More than 50 years later LOOK BACK AND CHEER suggests that despite some hidden horrors, small town American values and schools launched young people on successful lives. This book traces the legacy of one community, Sea Cliff, NY, through the lives of some 100 members of the last class to graduate from its...

100 years after nurse Wallace "Buster" Pickering died citizens of the late 21st century in the town of Plainfield, New Hampshire will find their village can now use the fund he left at his death to relieve their misfortunes and send poor children to college. The humble man who ran away from immigrant parents as a teenager became a nurse to the richest people in America. He could choose his future. He chose a young woman from a New Hampshire village, followed her home, and there they stayed the rest of their lives. His love for her became his love for her hometown, and for its future. This is...

The survivor of two suicide attempts begins a quest to understand her family's curse of depression, as well as its many gifts and rumored nobility. The story begins with her girlhood in Roslyn Village on Long Island but as her son takes up her unfinished work, it leads him to the Scottish border and back to the Jewish ghettos and villages of Bohemia, and finally forward to descendants on five continents.