Journey Around Nantucket from A to Z (Journey Around A to Z)

Martha Day Zschock is a former third-grade teacher on Cape Cod who, for the past eight years, has been taking readers of all ages on "Journeys" to some of America's great places. In all, nearly 250,000 copies of her series have sold nationwide.

She began this odyssey with her Journey Around Cape Cod and the Islands from A to Z and has taken regional readers on flights of fact and fancy to Boston and Maine as well. Now the Orleans resident turns her attention to another New England treasure, Nantucket.

From the culture of the Wampanoag Indians who gave Nantucket its name (it means "faraway land") to the early abolition of slavery (in 1773), through the heyday of whaling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the summer delights of the vacation mecca of today, Zschock traces the history of this special place with graceful turns of phrase and an unmatched artistry.

Like previous volumes in the series, this is much more than an alphabet book. Each page is headed by an alliterative sentence that evokes an important theme of life on the island. A richly informative paragraph is finished off with a playful factoid.