The importance of grandparents

In 2011, “60 Minutes’’ correspondent Lesley Stahl was so overjoyed to become a grandmother that she couldn’t stop talking about it. A book editor invited her to write about the experience. “Becoming Grandma: The Joys and Science of the New Grandparenting’’ (Blue Rider), a blend of memoir and reportage, is the result. She was pleased to learn that there is science behind her intense love for her grandchildren: When a woman holds a baby grandchild, the bonding hormone oxytocin can drench her brain, just like it does for a new mother.

Stahl, a Swampscott native, acknowledges that hopping on a plane to visit her granddaughters, Jordan and Chloe, is a luxury not every grandparent can afford. She mixes in interviews with celebrities and ordinary citizens and discusses loving relationships as well as strained ones. Stahl writes about mothers who want to keep their children away from grandma and those who enlist their mother to help raise a child. That’s what Whoopi Goldberg did when she got a role in “The Color Purple.’’ Goldberg’s mother, Emma, hopped on a plane and moved from Harlem to Berkeley to help raise Alexandra.

Stahl is an evangelist for the importance of grandparents in children’s lives and the power of grandchildren to transform the lives of their elders. She relishes a comment by Steve Leber, who founded Grandparents.com: “God gave us grandchildren to make up for aging.’’

Building America

“Go west young man, and grow up with the country’’ was the advice from New Hampshire native Horace Greeley. And in the 18th and 19th centuries hundreds of thousands of New Englanders did as he said. This wave of internal migration and its unifying force in the building of the United States is chronicled in “Yankee Colonies Across America: Cities Upon the Hills’’ (Lexington) by Chaim M. Rosenberg, a longtime New Englander who now lives in Chicago. The New England Society in New York City has named it the year’s best history book. The society’s annual awards honor books that celebrate New England and its culture.

Among the cast of characters in “Yankee Colonies’’ are Whately native Myron H. Crafts, a force behind the founding of Pomona College in California; Newton native Edgar Ray Butterworth who established what was then the largest funeral home in Seattle; and Connecticut native Moses Cleaveland for whom Cleveland is named. A major shareholder in the Connecticut Land Co., Cleaveland led a team of 50 men who surveyed 3.8 million acres south of Lake Erie, land that was divided into salable lots. Where the Cuyahoga River enters the lake, the men established a town. It was to carry the team leader’s name but was misspelled due to a cartographer’s error.

Additional book award winners are, for fiction: Somerville writer Peter Swanson’s “The Kind Worth Killing’’ (Morrow), a murder mystery set in Boston; for contemporary nonfiction: the late New Hampshire poet Maxine Kumin’s memoir “The Pawnbroker’s Daughter’’ (Norton); and for specialty title: New Hampshire poet and former US poet laureate Donald Hall’s “The Selected Poems of Donald Hall’’ (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Coming out

¦ “The Cavendon Luck’’ by Barbara Taylor Bradford (St. Martin’s)

¦ “Hogs Wild: Selected Reporting Pieces’’ by Ian Frazier (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

¦ “Dishonorable Intentions’’ by Stuart Woods (Putnam)

Pick of the Week

Jean MacKenzie of Brewster Book Store in Brewster recommends “Dinner with Edward: A Story of an Unexpected Friendship’’ by Isabel Vincent (Algonquin): “Such a sweet memoir. Through the stylish dinners he cooks and the wisdom he imparts, 93-year-old Edward is both able to help the much younger Isabel navigate changes in her life as well as keep the memory of his late wife alive.’’

Jan Gardner can be reached at JanLGardner@yahoo.com.