Dick Martin is perfectly at home recounting his childhood and family escapades, many of which would curl the hair of a daredevil. Yet, he is equally adept reporting the hope for the future he finds in the students he has mentored over a long career as a teacher. He is a wide-ranging and trenchant columnist whose observations run the gamut of life's experiences, and he is as skilled at writing with humor as he is with pathos. His subject is the world around him and his place in it, and he treats it with versatility and ample measures of irony and wonder. - Laurence J. Sasso, Jr., publisherDick Martin's Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sanity offers the architecture of the columnist's craft from his over 30 years of writing in this form of journalism. Whether offering Yankee wisdom, Irish-American wit, portraits of community characters, or musings on his travels or life in New England, Martin's stories are as carefully sculpted as if they were intended to support and convey the weight of meaningful experience that arches over the passage between the 20th and 21st centuries. Read together or standing alone, Dick Martin collects his stories in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Sanity as a pillar to post excursion, embarking from rural Rhode Island to regional and international destinations with a determination to open our eyes and show us the sights. -Mary Lee Partington, Artistic Director, PAF~Pawtucket Arts Festival