Schooner — Pat Lowery Collins

The building of the schooner Thomas E. Lannon as seen through the eyes of a boy, this charming children's book chronicles the extraordinary construction of a great sailing vessel. In the late 1990s, the legendary shipyards of Essex, Massachusetts, buzzed as they had a century before: Under the guiding hand of Harold Burnham, whose family has crafted boats in Essex for generations, the schooner Thomas E. Lannon was built. It was patterned after the nineteenth-century vessel Nokomis, one of the last large engineless schooners to fish off the Grand Banks.