George Farris Baker Jr. rode a horse to school in rural Oklahoma. Vera Joy Baker was up at 4:30 to work the fields. They fell in love in a 1950 Willys Jeep, with the family Steinway standing nearby, and stayed married more than sixty years. George became an Air Force fighter pilot and flew the F-100 into combat over North Vietnam. After his second tour, still raw from the loss of a young bunkmate, he wrote an essay called “Remember Them,” a plea to remember the kind of men they were. Nearly sixty years later that essay became this book’s title and its purpose. It is the ranch, the airplanes, the music, the fishing trips, four sons, and two people defined less by what they achieved than by how they served everyone around them. The Jeep and the Steinway run through the generations almost as characters, and both are still in the family. Drawn from nearly ten years of Vera’s own writing before her death in January 2026, from family memory, and from the record.
Lev Alexander Trofimov was born in 1892 in Russian Turkestan, trained from boyhood for the Imperial Navy, and in 1917 commanded the Baltic submarine Leopard. When the Revolution turned his rank into a danger, he crossed Siberia in winter, sailed from Yokohama, and began again in Ohio as an engineer and inventor. He built Speed Control Corporation and later sold it to Fairchild. What he could not carry with him was his mother, Maria Vasilievna. For more than a decade her letters — she still called him her golden goose — crossed the ocean with news of family, faith, shortages, and a reunion that never came. The book is built from those letters, the naval papers he kept, and the American life he made after the country that formed him disappeared.
Luca, a Maremma sheepdog, guards a few acres in Bucks County as if they were a small medieval realm. Grocery bags become Wind-Borne Spirits, butterflies are Sky-Flowers, squirrels are Tree-Rats, deer are Horned Dragons, and the swimming pool is the Blue Lake. The humor gives way to something quieter: instinct, guardianship, and the difficulty of seeing an animal on his own terms.
Three volumes, one man. The first follows Michel de Montaigne from the Bordeaux merchant family that bought its name with salt fish and woad, through thirteen years as a magistrate, into the tower where he retired at thirty-eight to write the Essays, and back out as go-between, negotiator, and mayor of a plague city. The second goes with him day by day on the journey of 1580–81 to Italy and back, drawn from the travel diary he kept for seventeen months and never published. The third seats him with the company he asked for: twenty philosophical conversations with the minds he read and those who read him — Seneca and Descartes, Plato and Pascal, Aristotle and Nietzsche among them — each argued with real objections and no verdicts, closing with Montaigne alone.
A note when a book is ready
If you would like a note when one of these is finished, leave your name and email. A note of your own is welcome too. There is nothing to buy and nothing owed. I will write when a book is actually ready.