John Hanson Mitchell
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John Hanson Mitchell is one of those writers who challenges book store
owners; they're never sure in which sections to place his works. His
subjects range from natural and human history, to travel, memoir,
biography, and gardening. No matter what the subject, he has become
best known for his incisive characterizations, his evocations of time
and place, and his lyrical style.

The Scratch Flat Sagas

“Scratch Flat is and was the world”
-New York Times Book Review

Mitchell is the "discoverer", as he says, of a country within a country, a single square mile of land in eastern Massachusetts that was known as Scratch Flat in the nineteenth century. Starting with the now classic cult account, Ceremonial Time  (1984), Mitchell has written five books which use the tract of land in one way or another to address the larger issue of what it means to be living on earth in our time.  This singular tract of land, with its deep historical shadows, its farms and its resident wildlife has been used for twenty years as the metaphorical hunting grounds for Mitchell's explorations. Onto the anomalous, changing landscape of Scratch Flat,  Mitchell has thrown virtually all his creative efforts in an attempt to explore the themes which appear to have obsessed him all his life --- time, place, and the endurance of the natural world.  He is, in the style of his hero and mentor, Henry Thoreau, a traveler in his own land; he never gets far beyond his square mile, and yet, according to the New York Time's Book Review, his work has provided  a "comprehensive view of America, past, present and ---future"   

Click here to see the five books in the Scratch Flat sagas.
Coming in September 2008

"A wonderful piece of work: lively, thought-provoking and totally absorbing. The city of Boston has been chopped to pieces, riddled with tunnels, and surrounded by fill, but as Mitchell reveals in The Paradise of All These Parts, it is still a place of wonder."
-Nathaniel Philbrick, author of Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War

"There is plenty of history, natural and otherwise, in The Paradise of All These Parts, but there is also wit, narrative, and vision. Like Thoreau, Mitchell has a genius for sauntering, and I can't imagine a better rambling companion. John Hanson Mitchell proves once again that he is one of our very finest writers about place."
-David Gessner, author of Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond

"Hands-on and eloquent - a lover's rhapsody."
-Edward Hoagland

The Paradise of All These Parts
A Natural History of Boston

In 1614, the explorer John Smith sailed into what was to become Boston Harbor and referred to the wild lands and waters around him as "the Paradise of all these parts." Fifteen years later a company of Puritans arrived and settled on the tadpole-shaped Shawmut Peninsula at the western end of the harbor and began to remake the topography. Within a few decades, a new city, known as Boston, was rising among the erstwhile hills of the peninsula.

Now, almost four hundred years later, one might wonder what remains of John Smith's "Paradise".

Mitchell's newest work, The Paradise of all these Parts: A Natural History of Boston answers this question. In a series of looping walks around what is left of the old Shawmut Peninsula, Mitchell offers a surprising view of what could have been a very sad story. Twice in its four hundred year history the nature of the place was all but obliterated. But, remarkably, twice, it rose again and restored a semblance of the original nature, a process that is still going on in our time with the creation of new parks, gardens and wild corridors.