Before passing up a career in law for the writing life, Richard Matthews Hallett lived an exciting life of adventure, that included a stint as a police officer, and as a seaman aboard a schooner bound for Australia. He then trekked across that country and lived by his wits in England for a time before returning to the States. Later, he was a deck officer on warships convoying soldiers and horses across the Atlantic in WW I, and facing U-boat attacks. Over is life, Hallett wrote several novels and more than 200 short stories that were published in the most widely read magazines of the day, including the Saturday Evening Post, Harper's, Atlantic, Collier's, Everybody's, and American Legion Monthly. The stories gathered here, published in the first half of the twentieth century, include vivid tales of the sea, both in the days of sail and in the midst of war, often built around ship-board tensions and tumult; and stories of Maine and New England and their small town values and rivalries.

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.

This colorful history of the shipbuilding company of William Donnell Crooker and Charles Crooker, 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.