Frederic B. Hill – författare

Senator Charles "Mac" Mathias was a lifelong Republican who won every election in a 26-year congressional career in heavily Democratic Maryland. A courageous risk-taker, Mathias led efforts to advance civil rights, voting rights, environmental initiatives to clean up the Chesapeake Bay, and establish the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. On foreign policy, he was an early critic of the Vietnam War and a consistent advocate for nuclear arms control, Middle East peace and sanctions against apartheid South Africa.His story, captured here by senior staff members, members of Congress and others, is an inspiring example of what a courageous political leader can do when he follows his conscience and is acts on principle. His remarkable career is a stark reminder of the days when the Republican Party stood for the rule of law, respect for the Constitution and a bipartisan foreign policy.

The true and remarkable life of Richard Willis (Will) Jackson, an intrepid seaman from one of the leading shipbuilding families in 19th century Maine, whose exploits and adventures in the oceans of the world would rival characters straight out of the lives and imaginations of Joseph Conrad and Jack London. Will Jackson survived a harrowing shipwreck in the Marshall Islands, being washed overboard rounding Cape Horn and running down Alaskan glaciers over a tragically shortened life that ended in a most bizarre and pedestrian incident on the eve of realizing his life’s ambition: appointment as master of a ship. After nine months of sometimes perilous life among natives in the South Sea islands in 1884, captured in chapters of a book he helped write, Jackson served on a series of large ships and coastal schooners – all based in the post-Gold Rush boomtown of San Francisco – that took him up and down the west coast from Alaska to Mexico and to the four corners of the earth. His faithful letters to his family in Maine and a diary offer a compelling portrait of an extraordinary young man of character and independent spirit, intellect and curiosity, no small ambition and that most admirable of traits, an abiding sense of humor.

In an age when local daily papers with formerly robust reporting are cutting sections and even closing their doors, the contributors to The Life of Kings celebrate the heyday of one such paper, the Baltimore Sun, when it set the agenda for Baltimore, was a force in Washington, and extended its reach around the globe. Contributors like David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire, and renowned political cartoonist Kevin Kallaugher (better known as KAL), tell what it was like to work in what may have been the last golden age of American newspapers -- when journalism still seemed like “the life of kings” that H.L. Mencken so cheerfully remembered. The writers in this volume recall the standards that made the Sun and other fine independent newspapers a bulwark of civic life for so long. Their contributions affirm that the core principles they followed are no less imperative for the new forms of journalism: a strong sense of the public interest in whose name they were acting, a reverence for accuracy, and an obligation to keep faith with the reader.

Brothers William Donnell Crooker and Charles Crooker were among the most prominent mid-nineteenth-century shipbuilders in Bath, Maine, itself one of the most prominent shipbuilding cities in the world during that time. This colorful history of the Crookers' company by the great-great grandson of William Donnell provides a thorough overview of a family, its contributions to shipbuilding, and the historic sweep of shipbuilding in the area, as well as a fascinating glimpse into everyday life in Maine during this time. Today, a small portion of Maine's twenty-first-century shipbuilder, Bath Iron Works, occupies land that was once the Crooker yard.