EVENT: Hidden History of Maine author!

WHAT: Author appearance
WHEN: Saturday, June 19, 2010 at 12:00 noon
WHERE: The Green Hand Bookshop, 661 Congress Street, Portland, ME
FMI: call (207)450-6695 or email michelle.souliere[at]gmail.com

Come to the Green Hand Bookshop for a reading and signing of the Hidden History of Maine by Harry Gratwick!

The history of the Pine Tree State would be bare but for the contributions of hardy and impassioned individuals—generals, governors, settlers and activists whose lives of leadership make up the story of Maine’s “hidden history.”

Author Harry Gratwick creates intimate and detailed portraits of these Mainers, from the controversial missionary of Sebastien Rale to Woolwich native William Phips, whose seafaring attacks against French Canada earned him the first governorship of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Gratwick also profiles inventors who “challenged the assumptions of [their] time and place,” such as Robert Benjamin Lewis, an African American from Gardiner who patented a hair growth product in the 1830’s, and Margaret Knight, a York native who defied nineteenth-century sexism to earn the nickname “the female Edison.”

Discover over four hundred years of Maine’s history through the tales of its unique residents, from soprano Lillian Nordica, who left Farmington to become the most glamorous American opera singer of her day, to slugger George “Piano Legs” Gore, the only Mainer to have ever won a Major League batting championship.

Harry Gratwick is a lifelong summer resident of Vinalhaven Island in Penobscot Bay. He is an active member of the Vinalhaven Historical Society and has written extensively on maritime history for two Island Institute publications, the Working Waterfront and the Island Journal. Harry and his wife, Tita, spend the winter months in Philadelphia. Hidden History of Maine is his second book.