Jilly Gagnon in conversation with Hank Phillippi Ryan
On Thursday, Sept. 7, from 6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m. features Thursday thrillers! Jilly Gagnon brings her new thriller, “Scenes of the Crime,” to Gibson’s Bookstore at 45 South Main Street in Concord, to discuss with Hank Phillippi Ryan (“The House Guest,” newly in paperback), and talk about tension, plot, and why people are the most unsettling thing of all. A missing queen bee. Toxic female friendships. A locked room mystery set at a remote coastal winery. An ambitious screenwriter tries to solve her friend’s disappearance by re-creating their fateful final girls’ trip in this riveting locked-room mystery from the author of “All Dressed Up.”
The Birth of the Old Man
Twenty years ago this spring, the iconic 200 million year old “Old Man of the Mountain” fell from Franconia Notch. The Old Man of the Mountain was made of White Mountain Granite, a representative of one of the three major granite-forming events in the history of New Hampshire that gives the state its well-deserved title as The Granite State. On Thursday, Aug. 31, at 7 p.m. at the Museum of the White Mountains on 34 Highland St. in Plymouth, Dr. VanTongeren presents a lecture describing the unique confluence of tectonic events that set the stage for the birth of the Old Man and the other granites that dot the region. She will track the geological development of New Hampshire from the closure of an ancient ocean basin and the formation of the supercontinent Pangea, through a giant super-eruption of magma and major global mass extinction, and ultimately to the opening of the Atlantic Ocean we see today. This is a hybrid event. Registration for Zoom is required. Please register at nhhumanities.org.
Putting Human Faces on the Textile Industry
Daily life for the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company’s textile worker was not easy. Robert Perreault sheds light on how people from a variety of European countries as well as from French Canada made the transition from an agrarian to an industrial society and how that change affected families, cultures, the nature of work, and relationships among workers themselves. The event will be held Monday, Sept. 4, at 5 p.m. at Castle in the Clouds Carriage House at 586 Ossipee Park Road in Moultonborough. For more information, contact K. Stawasz at 603-476-5410.
12,000 Years Ago in the Granite State
More than 12,000 years ago, small groups of Paleoindians endured frigid winters on the edge of a small river in what would become Keene, New Hampshire. In 2009, an archaeological survey for the new Keene Middle School discovered the remains of their stay and brought to light one of the oldest Native American sites in New England. The remarkably intact site produced evidence of four separate dwellings containing over 200 stone tools and fragments of burned animal bone. These early people, rather than being isolated stone-age nomads, were part of a social network that extended across much of northeastern North America. The discovery and excavation of the site was required by the National Historic Preservation Act, a frequently maligned piece of legislation that in this instance worked to save an irreplaceable piece of the human story. Robert Goodby presents information on this fascinating topic on Tuesday, Sept. 5, at 7:00 p.m. at the Abbott Library on 11 Soonipi Circle in Sunapee. For more information, please contact the Abbott Library at 603-763-5513.
