Down East Books Win IPPY Awards!

[Camden, Maine] Two Down East Books have won Independent Publisher Book Awards this year!  Becoming Teddy Roosevelt: How a Maine Guide Inspired America’s 26th President by Andrew Vietze, won a Silver Award in the “Best Regional Non-Fiction” category, and Chosen Faith, Chosen Land: The Untold Story of America’s 21st-Century Shakers, by Jeannine Lauber, has won a Bronze Award in the “Religion” category.

Chosen Faith, Chosen Land explores the world’s only remaining Shaker community. Weaving together proprietary Shaker quotations, interviews, and photographs, the book exposes a multitude of popular misconceptions and myths, most notably that the Shakers and their faith are dead. The contemporary Shaker community has become surprisingly outward-reaching and in this book the author strives to place the topics of faith, community, work, and worship in the context of Shaker history and contemporary developments on the American landscape.

Author Jeannine Lauber is a nationally recognized, multiple Emmy-Award winning broadcast journalist who has spent more than two decades covering the news. She lives in Casco, Maine.

Becoming Teddy Roosevelt tells the story of how Theodore Roosevelt went into the Maine woods with legendary Maine Guide Bill Sewall, as a sickly, asthmatic city boy, and emerged several trips later as a robust, confident outdoorsman—the kind of man who could be president. This book describes the lifelong friendship between the twenty-sixth president and the lumberman from Island Falls, and explores how that bond changed Roosevelt (and the nation)… and why it matters today.

Andrew Vietze is a freelance writer based in Appleton, Maine. The former managing editor of Down East magazine, he’s written for a wide array of publications. He’s currently finishing a thriller set in the North Woods during the lumbering era.

Both books are published by Down East, which in addition to producing Down East: The Magazine of Maine for fifty-six years, has more than eight hundred books in print and, most recently, produces four branded Web sites—DownEast.com, MaineHomes.com, MaineBoatyard.com, and MaineVows.com.