Vineyard roots

By Jan Gardner  |  June 21, 2009

Morning Glory Farm is among the biggest and best-loved businesses on Martha’s Vineyard. On summer mornings, customers line up before the farmstand opens. Corn is a big seller, as is the signature zucchini bread.

Owners Jim and Debbie Athearn, who grew up on the island, started the farm 30 years ago with 17.5 acres Debbie’s father bought for $7 in 1943. They now cultivate about 50 acres.

To produce the new book, “Morning Glory Farm and the Family that Feeds an Island’’ (Vineyard Stories), photographer Alison Shaw and writer Tom Dunlop worked the long hours of farmhands. The book also features 70 recipes from some well-known island chefs and the farm’s kitchen. Shaw, Dunlop, and the Athearns will converge at the ART Meeting Room, 2 Arrow St., in Harvard Square at 6 p.m. Wednesday. A signing and reception will follow at the Globe Corner Book Store. Reservations are recommended: 800-358-6013, ext. 21 or events@gcb.com.

Another Martha’s Vineyard institution, Bunch of Grapes Bookstore, will celebrate its reopening on July 4, a year to the day that a fire gutted the shop on Main Street in Vineyard Haven. Books by and about island residents are prominently displayed, and customers are invited to settle into new reading chairs.

With publishers generally loathe to publicize book advances, it’s hard to know what a hero’s story is worth. Hyperion would not comment on the $500,000 advance it reportedly paid to Captain Richard Phillips, who saved his ship’s crew from Somali pirates in April. The as-yet-untitled memoir by the resident of Underhill, Vt., will be published in the first half of next year.

A representative of publisher William Morrow would not comment on the $2 million to $3 million advance reportedly paid to another hero, except to say the estimate for the two-book deal is high. Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger’s memoir will recount not only how he landed his jetliner in January on the Hudson River, but his upbringing and training. “Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters,’’ being written with Jeffrey Zaslow, will be published on Dec. 1.

Helen Keller’s life story is extraordinary, but so is the rise of her teacher, Anne Sullivan Macy, as chronicled in Kim E. Nielsen’s new biography, “Beyond the Miracle Worker’’ (Beacon). Macy, who was nearly blind, lived in a Tewksbury poorhouse after her parents died. She prevailed upon a visiting state official to help her get out, and he facilitated her transfer to the Perkins School for the Blind, which is in Watertown. Some years she was hired to teach Keller. Throughout her life, Macy struggled with chronic illness and depression, according to Nielsen, and depended on Keller at least as much as Keller depended on her.

Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon,’’ by Buzz Aldrin and Ken Abraham (Harmony)

The Fence: A Police Cover-up along Boston’s Racial Divide,’’ by Dick Lehr (Harper)

Holy Hullabaloos: A Road Trip to the Battlegrounds of the Church/State Wars,’’ by Jay Wexler (Beacon)

Pick of the week

Marilyn Racette of Book Ends in Winchester recommends “Mercury in Retrograde’’ by Paula Froelich (Atria): “This is a perfect summer read. Fans of ‘Sex and the City’ will enjoy this snappy story of three very different but equally ambitious young women whose lives intersect when they move into the same Soho apartment building. As they become friends, they find their careful plans shaken up, with disaster the catalyst for a new life.’’

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.