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The House on First Street
The House on First Street
Reed, Julia
¥88.56
After fifteen years of living like a vagabond on her reporter's schedule, Julia Reed got married and bought a house in the historic Garden District. Four weeks after she moved in, Hurricane Katrina struck. The House on First Street is the chronicle of Reed's remarkable and often hilarious homecoming, as well as a thoroughly original tribute to our country's most original city.
The Fence
The Fence
Lehr, Dick
¥88.56
A riveting, true-life account of violence, racial injustice, and betrayal within the ranks of the Boston Police Department The Boston police officers who brutally beat Michael Cox at a deserted fence one icy night in 1995 knew right away that they had made a terrible mistake. The badge and handgun under Cox's bloodied parka proved it: He was not a black gang member but a plainclothes officer who had been chasing the same murder suspect they were. While Cox was being beaten, Officer Kenny Conley chased down and captured the suspect. Afterward, as Cox waited for an apology from his department, federal prosecutors accused Conley of lying when he denied witnessing Cox's beating. Both Cox and Conley grew up in Boston and had dedicated their lives to serving the Boston Police Department, but when they needed its support, they were abandoned.A remarkable work of investigative journalism, The Fence details the shocking story of the attack, the attempted cover-up by police officers beholden to a "blue wall of silence," and the bitter repercussions on the lives of those involved. It follows Cox's 1998 federal civil rights trial against the Boston Police Department and features a diverse cast of characters, including the victims, their families, the officers accused in the beating, city officials, and the actual murder suspect all set against the rich backdrop of Boston. Like J. Anthony Lukas's 1985 Pulitzer Prize-winning classic Common Ground, The Fence examines Boston's race relations and the unwritten police code of covering up through the intimate lens of those who experienced the crime directly. By coming to know the officers and criminals brought together that night at the fence and the families whose lives were changed forever as a result we sense how deeply the strains of prejudice run in this city still haunted by tribalism and racial tension.Boston journalist Dick Lehr has written a gritty, captivating true-crime story with unusual depth a chilling exploration of what happens when fear of admitting mistakes combines with a police culture of lying to undermine justice.
Breakfast at the Victory
Breakfast at the Victory
Carse, James P.
¥88.56
"This was true mystical vision. This I could never have anticipated. But I knew that we were both on the same galactic journey into the great void that contains us all. I was standing before a boundlessness that could swallow the stars in a heartbeat."--from Breakfast at the Victory
Going into the City
Going into the City
Christgau, Robert
¥88.56
One of our great essayists and music journalists, the Dean of American Rock Critics, leads a heady tour through his life and times in this atmospheric, visceral memoir both a love letter to a New York long past and a tribute to the transformative power of artLifelong New Yorker Robert Christgau has been writing about pop culture since he was twelve and getting paid for it since he was twenty-two, covering rock for Esquire in its heyday and personifying the music beat at The Village Voice for over three decades. Christgau listened to Alan Freed howl about rock and roll before Elvis, settled east of Manhattan's Avenue B forty years before it was cool, wit-nessed Monterey and Woodstock and Chicago 1968 and the first abortion speakout. He caught Coltrane in the East Village, Muddy Waters in Chicago, Otis Redding at the Apollo, the Dead in the Haight, Janis Joplin at the Fillmore, the Clash in Leeds, Grandmaster Flash in Times Square, and every punk band you can think of at CBGB.Christgau chronicled many of the key cultural shifts of the last half century and revolutionized the cultural status of the music critic in the process. Going into the City is a look back at the upbringing that grounded him, the history that transformed him, and the music, books, and films that showed him the way. Like Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City, E. B. White's Here Is New York, Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, and Patti Smith's Just Kids, it is a loving portrait of a lost New York. It's an homage to the city of Christgau's youth from Queens to the Lower East Side a city that exists mostly in memory today. And it's a love story about the Greenwich Village girl who roamed this realm of possibility with him.
Monkey Girl
Monkey Girl
Humes, Edward
¥88.56
What should we teach our children about where we come fromIs evolution a lie or good scienceIs it incompatible with faithHave scientists really detected evidence of a creator in natureFrom bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward Humes comes a dramatic story of faith, science, and courage unlike any since the famous Scopes Monkey Trial. Monkey Girl takes you behind the scenes of the recent war on evolution in Dover, Pennsylvania, when the town's school board decision to confront the controversy head-on thrust its students, then the entire community, onto the front lines of America's culture wars. Told from the perspectives of all sides of the battle, it is a riveting true story about an epic court case on the teaching of "intelligent design," and what happens when science and religion collide.
William Morrow
William Morrow
Retzlaff, Mandy
¥88.56
There is little in this world that a family cannot endure, if endure they must. For we all have it within us to lose everything, absolutely everything, and still find strength in the most simple, beautiful things.Pat and Mandy Retzlaff lived a hard but satisfying farming life in Zimbabwe. Working all hours of the day on their sprawling ranch and raising three boisterous children, they savored the beauty of the veld and the diverse wildlife that grazed the meadows outside their dining room window. After their children, the couple's true pride and joy were their horses. But in early 2001, the Retzlaffs' lives were thrown into turmoil when armed members of President Robert Mugabe's War Veterans' Association began invading the farmlands owned by white Zimbabweans and violently reclaiming the land. Under the threat of death, the family was forced to flee, leaving behind a lifetime's possessions and becoming exiles in the only country they had ever called home. As other families across the country fled, they left behind not only their homes but dozens of horses. Devoted animal lovers, Pat and Mandy now essentially homeless themselves vowed to save these horses: Shere Khan, the queen of the herd; Tequila, the escape artist forever breaking free and trying to walk back to his original home; Grey, the silver gelding and leader; Princess, the temperamental mare; and the numerous others they rescued along the way. One Hundred and Four Horses is a love story and an epic tale of survival and unbreakable bonds those that hold us to land and family, but also those between man and the most majestic of animals, the horse.
The Chain
The Chain
Genoways, Ted
¥88.56
A harrowing investigation of the tortuous path our food products take—from slaughter to Spam On the production line in American packing-houses, there is one cardinal rule: the chain never slows. Under pressure to increase supply, the supervisors of meat-processing plants have routinely accelerated the pace of conveyors, leading to inhumane conditions, increased accidents, and food of questionable, often dangerous quality. In The Chain, acclaimed journalist Ted Genoways uses the story of Hormel Foods and its most famous product, Spam—a recession-era staple—to probe the state of the meatpacking industry, including the expansion of agribusiness and the effects of immigrant labor on Middle America. Interviewing scores of line workers, union leaders, hog farmers, and local politicians and activists, Genoways reveals an industry pushed to its breaking point. Along the way, he exposes alarming new trends: sick or permanently disabled workers, abused animals, water and soil pollution, and mounting conflict between small towns and immigrant labor. The narrative moves across the heartland—from Minnesota, to witness the cut-and-kill operation; to Iowa, to observe breeding and farrowing in massive hog barns; to Nebraska, to see the tense town hall meetings and broken windows in reaction to the arrival of Hispanic workers; and back to Minnesota, where political refugees from Burma give the workforce the power it needs to fight back. A searching exposé in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, Rachel Carson, and Eric Schlosser, The Chain is a mesmerizing story and an urgent warning about the hidden costs of the food we eat.
Epitaph for a Peach
Epitaph for a Peach
Masumoto, David M.
¥88.56
A lyrical, sensuous and thoroughly engrossing memoir of one critical year in the life of an organic peach farmer, Epitaph for a Peach is "a delightful narrative . . . with poetic flair and a sense of humor" (Library Journal). Line drawings.
Ghosts of 42nd Street
Ghosts of 42nd Street
Bianco, Anthony
¥88.56
Imagine shuffling down Broadway through the hustle and bustle right into the nonstop, neon heart of New York City: 42nd Street.Once a quiet neighborhood of brownstones and churches, the area wastransformed in the early 1900s into an entertainment hub unlike any in theworld. No place has ever evoked the glamour and romantic possibility of bigcity nightlife as vividly as did 42nd Street. It was the dazzle of "naughty, bawdy, gaudy" 42nd Street that put Times Square on the map and turned the Broadway theater district into the Great White Way. Ghosts of 42nd Street stirs your imagination as it takes you on a historical journey of this glamorized strip still known today as the Crossroads of the World. From the bold innovations of Oscar Hammerstein and Florenz Ziegfeld through the porn-laden 1960s and 1970s to the present-day "Disneyfication" of New York's bright lights district, Ghosts of 42nd Street is as fascinating as a tabloid frozen in time.
The Reckoning
The Reckoning
Bishop, Patrick
¥88.56
Renowned military historian Patrick Bishop revisits the death of notorious Zionist leader Avraham Stern head of the infamous Stern Gang challenging the prevailing account of his demise.The charismatic mastermind of a series of high-profile terrorist attacks with the goal of attaining Jewish independence and statehood, Avraham Stern was driven by his belief that he was the Jewish liberator of British Palestine. By early 1942 he was the most wanted man in Palestine, forced to take refuge in an attic in Tel Aviv to evade Assistant Superintendent Geoffrey Morton, who was assigned to track him down.Stern's capture and death have been debated and endlessly contested over the years. The official British report stated that Stern was attempting to escape, and Morton had reason to believe that he had explosives. However, witnesses claimed that it was a cold-blooded murder that precipitated a cult of martyrdom, precluding any possibility of a detente among the British, the Arabs, and the Jews, and inspiring his followers for many years.The Reckoning chronicles Patrick Bishop's fascinating quest to uncover the truth about Stern's ignominious death. Bishop gained access to Morton's private archive and interviews with witnesses, and relates a dramatic story that resonates to this very day in one of the world's most conflicted regions.Bishop's gripping narrative describes without bias what actually transpired in the safe house where Stern was discovered. He relates Stern's capture in the context of the complex battle to expel the British from Palestine and secure Jewish independence. These men appear to have nothing in common, yet Bishop succeeds in depicting critical traits that they did share dedication to their causes and an unflinching determination to achieve their goals at all costs. Bishop makes a strong case for the impact of Stern's shooting in the remaining years of British rule through meticulous research and a profound understanding of the forces at play during this historic conflagration.
Not Quite What I Was Planning
Not Quite What I Was Planning
Smith, Larry
¥88.56
Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity six words at a time.One Life. Six Words. What's Yours?When Hemingway famously wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," he proved that an entire story can be told using a half dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving.From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-sized pieces. From authors Jonathan Lethem and Richard Ford to comedians Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris, to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.
The Heart Revolution
The Heart Revolution
McCully, Kilmer
¥88.56
A safe, effective, and revolutionary program for lowering homocysteine levels and cutting your risk of heart disease In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Kilmer S. McCully explains what is really behind the epidemic of heart disease. For many years, clogged arteries have been inaccurately viewed as the cause, rather than a symptom, of heart disease. Now, McCully shows you how to cut your risk of heart disease by controlling the real culprit, homocysteine. Considered one of the most significant medical breakthroughs in recent years, McCully's findings have been validated by numerous large-scale studies. The Heart Revolution: Challenges the long-held assumption that lowering cholesterol is the key to preventing heart disease Explains how eating vitamin B-rich food can control homocysteine levels Lays out a plan with menus for putting more B vitamins in our diet Discusses how food processing and additives compromise our health Explains how costly cholesterol-lowering medicines can actually harm our health Eat Your Way to a Healthy Heart Pork Chops with Potatoes and Onions, Veal with Wine and Mushrooms, Guacamole, Omelettes. This is not your typical diet program. Dr. McCully offers real food choices with fresh ingredients available just about everywhere. The focus is on delicious foods that will leave you satisfied. The purpose is to make sure you're getting enough of the vitamins needed to prevent heart disease B6, B12, and folic acid, as well as essential, phytochemicals, fat-soluble vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and essential oils. It's easy to follow this plan as it relies on foods you want to eat with little preparation time and tons of variety.
Rebirth of a Nation
Rebirth of a Nation
Lears, Jackson
¥88.56
In the half-century between the Civil War and World War I, widespread yearning for a new beginning permeated American public life. Dreams of spiritual, moral, and physical rebirth formed the foundation for the modern United States, inspiring its leaders with imperial ambition. Theodore Roosevelt's desire to recapture frontier vigor led him to promote U.S. interests throughout Latin America. Woodrow Wilson's vision of a reborn international order drew him into a war to end war. Andrew Carnegie's embrace of philanthropy coincided with his creation of the world's first billion-dollar corporation, United States Steel. Presidents and entrepreneurs helped usher the nation into the modern era, but sometimes the consequences of their actions failed to match the grandeur of their hopes. Award-winning historian Jackson Lears richly chronicles this momentous period when America reunited and began to form the world power of the twentieth century. Lears vividly captures imperialists, Gilded Age mavericks, and vaudeville entertainers, and illuminates the roles played by a variety of seekers, male and female, from populist farmers to avant-garde artists and writers to progressive reformers. Some were motivated by their own visions of Christianity; all were swept up in longings for revitalization. In these years marked by wrenching social conflict and vigorous political debate, a modern America emerged and came to dominance on a world stage. Illuminating and authoritative, Rebirth of a Nation brilliantly weaves the remarkable story of this crucial epoch into a masterful work of history.
Busted
Busted
Ruderman, Wendy
¥88.56
Although Busted reads like a thriller, the breathtaking story it tells of two journalists' quest to unmask corrupt police officers and a warped justice system, the reporting of which culminated in a Pulitzer Prize is absolutely true. One afternoon in late 2008, a man walks into the offices of the local tabloid the Philadelphia Daily News and asks to speak with reporter Wendy Ruderman. An imminent casualty of the foundering print industry, the paper is on the brink of bankruptcy, and its anxious staff members are plagued with dwindling resources. But what Benny Martinez tells Wendy and her colleague Barbara Laker is too shocking to ignore; his career as a confidential informant for a member of the Philadelphia Police Department's narcotics squad has drawn him into a horrifying web of corruption, and now he is afraid for his life. The decision they make that day to believe Benny's saga will lead the two journalists to uncover a truth darker than they could have imagined. Busted is Ruderman and Laker's riveting account of their explosive investigation into the acts committed by rogue members of the narcotics squad. By dint of perseverance, ingenuity, and good old shoe-leather reporting, the women unravel a tapestry of lies almost six years in the making. Starting with a scheme to fabricate search warrants, the scandal soon encompasses the systematic, citywide looting of immigrant-owned businesses and allegations of brutal sexual assault. The remarkable lengths Ruderman and Laker go to for the story chasing down witnesses on the city's grimmest streets, sifting through archive boxes and hours of surveillance tape for crucial clues, and coaxing reluctant victims to come forward put their determination to balance motherhood with the career they love to the ultimate test. But when they produce a devastating series of articles that blows the lid off the scandal prompting civil lawsuits against the city and the reexamination of hundreds of convictions (although none of the officers have been charged or convicted of any crime) they not only win the fight for justice; they also win a Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, an unthinkable achievement for two city reporters at a beleaguered regional paper.
Clever Girl
Clever Girl
Kessler, Lauren
¥88.56
Communists vilified her as a raging neurotic. Leftists dismissed her as a confused idealist. Her family pitied her as an exploited lover. Some said she was a traitor, a stooge, a mercenary and a grandstander. To others she was a true American heroine fearless, principled, bold and resolute. Congressional committees loved her. The FBI hailed her as an avenging angel. The Catholics embraced her. But the fact is, more than half a century after she captured the headlines as the "Red Spy Queen," Elizabeth Bentley remains a mystery.New England-born, conservatively raised, and Vassar-educated, Bentley was groomed for a quiet life, a small life, which she explored briefly in the 1920s as a teacher, instructing well-heeled young women on the beauty of Romance languages at an east coast boarding school. But in her mid-twenties, she rejected both past and future and set herself on an entirely new course. In the 1930s she embraced communism and fell in love with an undercover KGB agent who initiated her into the world of espionage. By the time America plunged into WWII, Elizabeth Bentley was directing the operations of the two largest spy rings in America. Eventually, she had eighty people in her secret apparatus, half of them employees of the federal government. Her sources were everywhere: in the departments of Treasury and Commerce, in New Deal agencies, in the top-secret OSS (the precursor to the CIA), on Congressional committees, even in the Oval Office.When she defected in 1945 and told her story first to the FBI and then at a series of public hearings and trials she was catapulted to tabloid fame as the "Red Spy Queen," ushering in, almost single-handedly, the McCarthy Era. She was the government’s star witness, the FBI’s most important informer, and the darling of the Catholic anti-Communist movement. Her disclosures and accusations put a halt to Russian spying for years and helped to set the tone of American postwar political life.But who was sheA smart, independent woman who made her choices freely, right and wrong, and had the strength of character to see them throughOr was she used and manipulated by othersClever Girl is the definitive biography of a conflicted American woman and her controversial legacy. Set against the backdrop of the political drama that defined mid-twentieth century America, it explores the spy case whose explosive domestic and foreign policy repercussions have been debated for decades but not fully revealed until now.
Dear Senator
Dear Senator
Washington-Williams, Essie Mae
¥88.56
Breaking nearly eight decades of silence, Essie Mae Washington Williams comes forward with a story of unique historical magnitude and incredible human drama. Her father, the late Strom Thurmond, was once the nation's leading voice for racial segregation (one of his signature political achievements was his 24 hour filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1957, done in the name of saving the South from "mongrelization"). Her mother, however, was a black teenager named Carrie Butler who worked as a maid on the Thurmond family's South Carolina plantation. Set against the explosively changing times of the civil rights movement, this poignant memoir recalls how she struggled with the discrepancy between the father she knew one who was financially generous, supportive of her education, even affectionate and the Old Southern politician, railing against greater racial equality, who refused to acknowledge her publicly. From her richly told narrative, as well as the letters she and Thurmond wrote to each other over the years, emerges a nuanced, fascinating portrait of a father who counseled his daughter about her dreams and goals, and supported her in reaching them but who was unwilling to break with the values of his Dixiecrat constituents. With elegance, dignity, and candor, Washington Williams gives us a chapter of American history as it has never been written before told in a voice that will be heard and cherished by future generations.
The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance
The Feud That Sparked the Renaissance
Walker, Paul Robert
¥88.56
A lively and intriguing tale of the competition between two artists culminating in the construction of the Duomo in Florence this is also the story of a city on the verge of greatness and the dawn of the Renaissance when everything artistic would change. Florence's Duomo the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral is one of the most enduring symbols of the Italian Renaissance an equal in influence and fame to Leonardo and Michaelangelo's works. It was designed by Filippo Brunelleschi the temperamental architect who rediscovered the techniques of mathematical perspective. He was the dome's 'inventor' whose secret methods for building remain a mystery as compelling to architects as Fermat's Last Theorem once was to mathematicians. Yet Brunelleschi didn't direct the construction of the dome alone. He was forced to share the commission with his arch rival the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti whose 'Paradise Doors' are also masterworks. This is the story of these two men a tale of artistic genius and individual triumph.
Gaspipe
Gaspipe
Carlo, Philip
¥88.56
The boss of New York's infamous Lucchese crime family, Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso's life in the Mafia was preordained from birth. His rare talent for "earning" concocting ingenious schemes to hijack trucks, rob banks, and bring vast quantities of drugs into New York fueled his unstoppable rise up the ladder of organized crime. A mafioso responsible for at least fifty murders, Casso lived large, with a beautiful wife and money to burn. When the law finally caught up with him in 1994, Casso became the thing he hated most an informer.From his blood feud with John Gotti to his dealings with the "Mafia cops," decorated NYPD officers Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, to the Windows case, which marked the beginning of the end for the New York Mob, Gaspipe is Anthony Casso's shocking story a roller-coaster ride into an exclusive netherworld that reveals the true inner workings of the Mafia, from its inception to the present time.
Symmetry
Symmetry
du Sautoy, Marcus
¥88.56
Symmetry is all around us. Of fundamental significance to the way we interpret the world, this unique, pervasive phenomenon indicates a dynamic relationship between objects. Combining a rich historical narrative with his own personal journey as a mathematician, Marcus du Sautoy takes a unique look into the mathematical mind as he explores deep conjectures about symmetry and brings us face-to-face with the oddball mathematicians, both past and present, who have battled to understand symmetry's elusive qualities.
A Pearl in the Storm
A Pearl in the Storm
McClure, Tori Murden
¥88.56
"In the end," writes Tori McClure, "I know I rowed across the Atlantic to find my heart, but in the beginning, I wasn't aware that it was missing." During June 1998, Tori McClure set out to row across the Atlantic Ocean by herself in a twenty-three-foot plywood boat with no motor or sail. Within days she lost all communication with shore, but nevertheless she decided to keep going. Not only did she lose the sound of a friendly voice, she lost updates on the location of the Gulf Stream and on the weather. Unfortunately for Tori, 1998 is still on record as the worst hurricane season in the North Atlantic. In deep solitude and perilous conditions, she was nonetheless determined to prove what one person with a mission can do. When she was finally brought to her knees by a series of violent storms that nearly killed her, she had to signal for help and go home in what felt like complete disgrace.Back in Kentucky, however, Tori's life began to change in unexpected ways. She fell in love. At the age of thirty-five, she embarked on a serious relationship for the first time, making her feel even more vulnerable than sitting alone in a tiny boat in the middle of the Atlantic. She went to work for Muhammad Ali, who told her that she did not want to be known as the woman who "almost" rowed across the Atlantic Ocean. And she knew that he was right.In this thrilling story of high adventure and romantic quest, Tori McClure discovers through her favorite way the hard way that the most important thing in life is not to prove you are superhuman but to fully to embrace your own humanity. With a wry sense of humor and a strong voice, she gives us a true memoir of an explorer who maps her world with rare emotional honesty.
Paddy Whacked
Paddy Whacked
English, T. J.
¥88.56
Here is the shocking true saga of the Irish American mob. In Paddy Whacked, bestselling author and organized crime expert T. J. English brings to life nearly two centuries of Irish American gangsterism, which spawned such unforgettable characters as Mike "King Mike" McDonald, Chicago's subterranean godfather; Big Bill Dwyer, New York's most notorious rumrunner during Prohibition; Mickey Featherstone, troubled Vietnam vet turned Westies gang leader; and James "Whitey" Bulger, the ruthless and untouchable Southie legend. Stretching from the earliest New York and New Orleans street wars through decades of bootlegging scams, union strikes, gang wars, and FBI investigations, Paddy Whacked is a riveting tour de force that restores the Irish American gangster to his rightful preeminent place in our criminal history -- and penetrates to the heart of the American experience.