"This is a simple story that means the world to me," June Sprigg writes by way of preface to Simple Gifts, her memoir of a summer spent with the last seven residents of a New Hampshire Shaker community. It's a fitting motto for the serene, unadorned lives of these women--"members of an endangered species," as one of the elderly sisters wryly says--and of the joy they brought a girl who at 19... (read more)