Join author Anne Whitney Pierce for a virtual reading in celebration of her new book, Down to the River on Zoom. 

About the book:

A family with a history as deep and murky as the Charles River that cuts through Cambridge and Boston is tested by the upheaval of the 1960s in Anne Whitney Pierce’s intergenerational saga, DOWN TO THE RIVER (Regal House Publishing, May 3, 2022). 

Remi and Nash Potts are identical twin heirs of the Boston Brahmin elite who were promised the good life: Harvard, wealth, and guaranteed privilege. But as their family fortune dwindles, they are failing as husbands, fathers, and men in a changing world. Now middle aged, the former golden boys are partners in a sporting goods store and are taking their dissatisfaction out on those closest to them. Heavy drinking, affairs, and abusive behavior are shattering their marriages and shaking loose the family ties that connect them to their children. 

Two of the offspring, known as Chickie and Hen, burst free into the kaleidoscopic melee that is Harvard Square at the height of the Vietnam era. As they cling together for comfort and support, they are pulled by the Cambridge undertow as politics, sex, drugs and rock and roll sound their siren call. Their struggles are deeply relevant today—abortion, substance abuse, family dysfunction, racial tension, bomb threats and public protest. 

As family love and loyalty is sorely tested, Nash and Remi must come to grips with their behavior, while their wives confront their own trauma that they have passed on to the younger generation. DOWN TO THE RIVER shows the dissolution of a way of life that is fading into extinction, and yet has had a powerful influence on the shaping of our culture and country. Featuring a city so storied and distinct it becomes a living, breathing character, the perfect setting for what happens when families must find the strength to stand together or forever be swept apart.

ANNE WHITNEY PIERCE is a life-long Cantabrigian and author of two books, Galaxy Girls: Wonder Women, and Rain Line. While raising her three daughters, she taught writing at the WLP graduate Writing Program at Emerson College in Boston and to younger students in the Cambridge public schools.