First Book

While David Danelo was in Iraq two years ago, he was "one of those guys" who wrote home about once a month to let friends and family know how things were going. As a Marine Corps captain in Fallujah -- an insurgent stronghold in the Sunni triangle -- he had plenty to say in his "updates from the front." The e-mails were passed around by friends and family and eventually caught the eye of Steven Pressfield, the author of Gates of Fire. The historical novel chronicles the Battle of Thermopylae, during which about 7,000 Greek allies held off millions of Persians in a mountain pass for three days in 480 B.C. Pressfield, whose work is popular with Marines, told Danelo he was a good writer, which made the young captain feel like "Babe Ruth had just told me I was a good baseball player."

Nan Hayden Agle, an author whose numerous children's books included a series about the adventures of triplet boys and a story about a former slave, died Feb. 14 at Copper Ridge in Sykesville of complications from a fall. She was 100. She was born Anna Bradford Hayden on her family's Catonsville farm, Nancy's Fancy on Nunnery Lane - now part of the Academy Heights neighborhood. She was a 1923 graduate of Catonsville High School. In several autobiographical articles Mrs. Agle wrote for The Sun, she recalled an inspiring high school English teacher who "sits enthroned in the highest seat of memory.

Ella May Stumpe, a former teacher and longtime Frederick resident who was in her 90s when she wrote her first book, died in her sleep Tuesday at the Record Street Home for Ladies in Frederick. She was 110. She was born Ella May Leonard, July 12, 1895, in Dunseith, N.D., during the second term of Grover Cleveland's presidency and the reign of Queen Victoria. When the Wright Brothers took to the air at Kitty Hawk, N.C., she was a precocious 8-year-old. Mrs. Stumpe spent the early years of her life in a sod house that her pioneer parents built.

Harford County Executive David R. Craig has released his first book, "Greetings from Havre de Grace," which he describes as a pictorial "history of the city through postcards." Craig, who co-wrote the book with local antiques dealer Mary L. Martin, wrote captions for the postcards, which feature Concord Point lighthouse, Tide water Marina and other land marks. "You can you see how the city has changed," Craig said. The 128-page book, published by Schiffer Publishing Ltd., was released this month and sells for $24.95.

NOVEL 98 REASONS FOR BEING By Clare Dudman. Viking, 352 pages. The British novelist Clare Dudman knows that every reader is a de facto psychiatrist, piecing together a theory of character and coherent narrative from elusive and contradictory information. In her quietly compelling second book, 98 Reasons for Being, Dudman positions us firmly in the healer's chair by structuring the book as a group of seemingly unrelated fragments set in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1852. There are the unvoiced thoughts of Hannah Meyer, a 19-year-old Jewish girl admitted to the local asylum when she becomes catatonic for no immediately discernible reason.

By Maryland standards, this has been an unusually cold March. But to Havre de Grace resident Lucille Maistros, the brisk, windy days are no big deal. Maistros grew up in northern Vermont, where March is considered the dead of winter. "It's only 500 miles away, but up there it's going to look like January for another six weeks," she said last week. Her hometown, St. Johnsbury, just got 6 inches of snow, she said. Maistros describes her Vermont childhood in her first book, Growing Up Cold: a memoir of growing up cold, but longing to be cool, in 1950s Vermont.

Muff Singer, 62, who wrote or co-wrote more than 35 books for toddlers and preschoolers, died of ovarian cancer Sunday at her Los Angeles home. A former political activist and the wife of former City Comptroller Rick Tuttle, Ms. Singer published her first book in 1981 and turned to children's books in the 1980s after the birth of her daughter, Sarah. Many of her board-page books, including What Does Kitty See and Little Duck's Friends, came with a stuffed or squeaking toy of the story's main character.

HISTORY CAN BE a pain, a thorn in our sides. It can bewilder us, trouble us, befuddle us and mesmerize us. Our challenge is to make sense of history, to decipher meaning from this mish-mash of dates and events and benign encounters and evil conspiracies. And, as we do all this, we can hope -- nay, we can pray -- that it changes us and our world for the better. In recent years, few people made more sense of history better than Iris Chang. She had grit, stamina, passion and commitment. She was willing to look at horrors and atrocities and report back to us about them -- without blinking.

On a golden morning cut just right for a sail, Christopher Tilghman sets out on a tour of his favorite landscape -- the one that has colored both his life and his imagination. There's the cottage where he hammers out his first drafts and the creek, deep with memories. Strolling toward the "Big House," the tall, lean author introduces each outbuilding -- "the meat house," "the granary," "the mule barn" -- as if it were a minor, yet indispensable, character. Before long, the walk feels like a scene from one of his novels.

Nathan Miller, a former reporter for The Sun who was the author of more than a dozen critically acclaimed books of American history and biography, died Friday at a Washington nursing home where he had been since suffering a stroke two years ago. He was 77. "Every newspaper person has a yearning to be an author. Nat didn't talk about it, he went out and did it, and he managed to draw thousands of readers into naval and presidential history," said James H. Bready, a retired editorial writer and author of a monthly column on regional books for The Sun. "His last book, New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America, was a climax to his earlier works.