From the acclaimed poet—a refreshing, singular collection of poems about boys and boyhood, historical cycles and personal history, memory and meaning. Bicentennial summons the world of Chiasson’s seventies childhood in Vermont: early VCRs, snow, erections, pizza, snowmobiles, high-school cliques, and the Bicentennial celebration, but his book is also an elegy for his father, whom he never knew and who died in 2009. In these poems, Chiasson movingly revisits the kind of autobiographical poems he wrote as a young man, but with a new existential awareness that individuals are always vanishing in time, and throughout the collection he ponders time’s conundrums. “All of history, even the Romans, / they happen later, tonight sleep tight,” he tells his sons at bedtime. “You’ll learn this later. Tonight, goodnight.” In the topsy-turvy world of Bicentennial, history has both happened and is waiting to happen; boys grow up to be men; men never forget what it is to be boys; and fatherhood is the best answer to fatherlessness.

Examines the impact of the 1976 bicentennial on the way Americans celebrate the nation's past

This classic collection includes the title story, acclaimed as Asimov's single finest Robot tale, and now made into a Hollywood movie starring Robin Williams. Each of the eleven stories here sparkle with characteristic Asimov inventiveness and imagination.

There always seemed to be an adventure to be had and a story to be told, written or remembered! Pursuing a dream to travel, see amazing places, meet wonderful people from all walks of life, and sharing thoughts and experiences in my journals was the best way to memorialize it! Starting in my early youth, fantasizing about travel and adventure from books, movies to re-enacting them with make shift forts, rafts, and friends, a little "Walter Mitty-esque"! It was amazing to read our old encyclopedias, looking at world history and maps, learning about legendary figures! I wanted to be a writer, an artist, a singer, an athlete...lead a cavalry charge, swing from tree to tree, climb the highest peaks, cross the great divide, etc...endless dreams. At the age of 17, I was fully grown and asserting my young adulthood, with a say in my life decisions about my future education, activities, and travel! One of my best friends and I took off for NYC, Boston, and Walden Pond the summer before our senior year in high school for a TRULY awakening experience!!! A year later in college at Alfred State together with some other friends, 2 years later off to Arizona State with another friend, back east to SUNY Oswego, Outward Bound program in North Carolina and ultimately off to Bruges, Belgium to end my senior year of college and beyond... Did I say MIND-BLOWING, 5 years later and 22... on roads less traveled! Come join the ride and or continue on your own journey!!!

The seventies witnessed economic decline in America, coupled with a series of foreign policy failures, events that created an air of unease and uncertainty. This volume examines the ways in which Americans responded to a changing world and sought to redefine themselves.