VIRGINIA

With "green" the watchword today and with a new administration taking climate change off the back burner, it's hard to remember a time when environmentalism was a fledgling movement.

But Margaret T. Peters does so in Conserving the Commonwealth: The Early Years of the Environmental Movement in Virginia (144 pages, University of Virginia Press, $27.95.

Peters, who was a historian and publication manager at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources from 1968 to 2002, recounts efforts beginning in the 1960s to protect the state's resources and to create new parks within reach of every Virginian.

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The oldest baby boomers are eligible for Social Security retirement benefits, and the youngest have hit their middle 40s. Within the middle stage of life often comes an inclination to reflect, and that's what Kevin Gray does in Waking Up in the Studebaker (316 pages, World Audience, $23).

Gray, a Richmond native, is now news editor for the Osawatomie Graphic in Osawatomie,Kan. He grew up in Richmond's western suburbs, and "Waking Up in the Studebaker" tells a story of racial tension, girls, Vietnam, pop music and the counterculture that only someone who came of age in the'50s and'60s could tell.

The cover photo shows a 15-year-old Gray, in his Sgt. Pepper phase, hanging out on Broad Street in 1968.

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The massacre at Virginia Tech in 2007 grasped the nation's attention as few such horrific events had done, as hearts broke for the victims and their families. And in Virginia, of course, the tragedy's ripples continue to affect the state's government.

A year earlier, Joseph A. Lieberman, a writer and educator who lives in Oregon, had written "The Shooting Game -- The Making of School Shooters." The horror in Blacksburg, as well as other similar shootings, prompted him to revise and update his work.

The result is School Shootings: What Every Parent and Educator Needs to Know to Protect Our Children (366 pages, Citadel Press, $14.95). In addition to the history, he provides practical strategies for how we can respond to and even prevent such killings. -- Jay Strafford