historical

Built by the author's great-grandfather 100 years ago on a peninsula stretching out into Buzzards Bay from Cape Cod, the big house is a landmark. The four-story, 19-room jumble of roof lines, gables, bays and dormers is the emotional home and the center of gravity for the Colt family through the 20th century.
The big house is a wonderful place. Anyone who ever understood the use of the word "summer" as a verb can feel the emotions, smell the smells, hear the creaks in the floors and appreciate the melancholy of the fading glory of this monument to family, local history and old New England aristocracy.
The big house silently presided over five weddings, four divorces and three deaths. There were countless anniversaries, reunions, birthdays, nervous breakdowns, conceptions and love affairs. Author George Colt blends humor and affection as he describes the rise and fall of the significance of his family's social class while saluting his ancestors' deliberate manner and their deep-seated pleasure found in this place at the shore.
For a century everyone returned and worshipped the familiar. It was an unchanging place in a changing world. It was sanctuary for 100 years. But even the best summers come to an end, and people must move on.
The context for this memoir is Colt's pilgrimage to the big house with his own wife and children as his extended family comes to grips with the impossible task of maintaining or renovating the old house in a time when "new money," sterile architecture and thoughtless development are the norm. The big house is being sold.
Colt's book is a gift to anyone with memories centering around a family place and the legends of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents who went there before.
Reviewed by Carroll Colby and the North Star Monthly, Danville VT

This is a marvelous book. It is not just the story of a summer house, and of the family that owned it for it's first hundred years, It is a book about what Aristocracy means, about letting go, about accepting oblivion.
There is only one draw back to the book : No maps, No family tree, No photographs. The maps you can buy, the family tree you can draw yourself as you read the book, but you need the photographs. Especially when there are so many descriptions of photos in the book.
I suggest the publishing of a new " Special Edition" of the book, with reproductions of the original blueprint for The Big House, and photos of it and the successive generations of Forbes-Atkinsons- Colts -Singers who summered in it.

This book is incredible. I feel like I am reliving my childhood which is a bit odd because my childhood would have decidedly been on the other side of the tracks from the author's. My grandmother, in fact, was one of those large, warm, cuddly Irish women who worked for families like the Colts and Atkinsons. Until her death she received loving cards and letters from the children that she cared for (reading some of the names in this book, I believe they might be cousins). To me, this narrative transcends the class structure of the 60's in the US. Times have changed, my best friend is from one of those WASP families and 70 years ago our paths never would have crossed. The author tells his story and his family's story in a way that makes me feel he is telling the story of us all. This book made me sad and elated at the same time. I think deep down, people are more alike than different.