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Ducktails, Drive-ins, and Broken Hearts
An Unsweetened Look at '50s Music
by Hank Davis
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
They all tried, but few singers and musicians from the 1950s became stars. Yet many of them had stories to tell that were far more interesting than the ones you already know. Author Hank Davis was bitten by the music bug as a teenager. By the time he entered college in 1959, he was no stranger to New York's recording studios and had a few 45s of his own on the market.
Spanning a 45 year career in music journalism, Davis has spent time backstage, in motel rooms, and on tour buses to uncover stories that rarely made the official annals of pop music history. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews and new research, Ducktails, Drive-Ins, and Broken Hearts offers a fascinating, behind-the-scenes look at the winners and losers during rock 'n' roll's formative era.
How did a decade as uptight and puritanical as the '50s produce so much cringe-worthy, politically incorrect music? What was it like to see a pale cover version of your latest record climb the charts while yours sat unplayed by mainstream radio stations? How did precious Elvis tapes end up in a Memphis landfill? And who was that thirteen-year-old girl who made a five-dollar vanity record at Sun just two years after Elvis had-and ended up singing backup on "Suspicious Minds" and "In the Ghetto?" This book is a must-read for all fans of '50s music.
In the words of Jerry Phillips, son of Sun Records founder, Sam Phillips, "Hank Davis is one of the few guys who really gets it."
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New York
A Sketch of the City's Social, Political, and Commercial Progress from the First Dutch Settlement to
by Theodore Roosevelt
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Theodore Roosevelt's New York, published in 1891, was one of forty titles he authored during his lifetime. Roosevelt sets out, as he declares in his preface, "to trace the causes which gradually changed a little Dutch trading-hamlet into a huge American city." New York admirably accomplishes this objective. Proceeding chronologically, Roosevelt maintains control of his concise narrative throughout, recounting events clearly while continually providing well-considered and enlightening analysis. In suitable places-without disrupting the narrative-Roosevelt offers the reader his perspectives on a variety of broader topics, including his admiration for leaders who combine boldness with wisdom and moderation and his perceptive outlook on the frequent lack of connection between wealth accumulation and good character and meaningful living. While Roosevelt's own time as an exemplary top-level "man in the arena" was still years away, in this revealing and engaging book about his native city by a historian then in his early thirties, there are glimpses of the mindset and temperament of the world-historical leader who was to preside over the government of the United States from 1901 to 1909-yet another reason why Roosevelt's classic book New York remains well worth reading.
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Made in New York
25 Innovators Who Shaped Our World
by Frank Vizard
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
When singer Frank Sinatra famously crooned about New York, "If I can make it there, I'll make it anywhere," he could have been talking about New York's great inventors whose works have travelled across the globe. New York has been a hotbed of innovation since its founding. Made in New York tells the stories behind the innovators and their inventions. Like many New Yorkers, some came from elsewhere to find success in their new home. Some became famous; others struggled for recognition. All were visionaries and risk-takers who were willing to put their lives on the line if necessary. From the first brassiere to the life-saving pacemaker, and from a solar lantern to the first mass-produced cameras, New York has been the seedbed of life-changing technologies that have altered how we live. Made in New York celebrates these compelling stories.
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The Motorcycle Industry in New York State
A Concise Encyclopedia of Inventors, Builders, and Manufacturers
by Geoffrey N. Stein
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The Motorcycle Industry in New York State is the first book to focus on the over 120-year history of motorcycle construction in the Empire State. Beginning with experimental motorized bicycles in the 1890s, New York's motorcycle industry experienced its golden years for innovation and production in the 1900s and 1910s. From that promising start, the state's motorcycle industry declined, when the public adopted automobiles for everyday transportation. However, since the late twentieth century, the rise of custom, one-of-a-kind motorcycles has brought a new focus toward the industry. Also, a new effort to reach mass production comes in the form of e-motorcycles and e-bicycles that are being designed in New York.
The first edition, published in 2001, was the product of nine years of research by New York State Museum (NYSM) curator Geoffrey N. Stein. This second edition has been revised and updated by NYSM Senior Historian and Curator Brad L. Utter. For anyone who loves motorcycles or for those enthusiasts/collectors that wish to know more about these unique makers and the bikes that they created, The Motorcycle Industry in New York State is the ideal companion.
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Growing Up Roosevelt
A Granddaughter's Memoir of Eleanor Roosevelt
by Nina Roosevelt Gibson
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
When Nina Roosevelt was just seven years old, her family moved from California to live with her grandmother at the small cottage, Val-Kill, in Hyde Park, New York. It was at Val-Kill Farm that Nina shared her childhood years with her remarkable grandmother, the woman who would change her life. To Nina, she was Grandmère, but, to most everyone else, she was Eleanor Roosevelt. Few people realize how important Val-Kill was for Eleanor Roosevelt. Returning "home again" nourished her, allowed her time for reflection, planning, and rejuvenation so that she could continue pouring her heart and soul into the needs of so many people the world over.
Growing Up Roosevelt gives an intimate picture of life at Val-Kill as well as Nina's wide-ranging experiences traveling as a teenager with her grandmother. Included are portraits of the family, staff, famous friends, people in need, and world leaders as disparate as Nikita Khrushchev, Haile Selassie, and John F. Kennedy. This book will appeal to anyone interested in the life and times of Eleanor Roosevelt, her work as a trailblazing political and feminist leader, and the intimate behind-the-scenes details that only her granddaughter can tell.
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Pepper Adams
Saxophone Trailblazer
by Gary Carner
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Pepper Adams is more than a definitive biography of Park "Pepper" Adams (1930—1986). The culmination of thirty-seven years of research, it's a fascinating account of Adams's life and times, thanks to colorful vignettes drawn from the author's 250 unpublished conversations with Adams and other esteemed musicians. These candid observations about Adams and his colleagues reveal previously confidential aspects of Adams's complex personality, his many outstanding achievements, and little-known facts about musicians with whom he worked, such as Thad Jones, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Elvin Jones, Charles Mingus, Stan Kenton, Duke Ellington, Bobby Timmons, Wardell Gray, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, and others. Musicians, jazz fans and collectors, and readers who enjoy a hero's journey will be intrigued by Adams's extraordinary intelligence, the extent of his influence, the reverence he commanded, and his struggle to be rewarded as the unique stylist that he was throughout his career. Moreover, readers will be enlivened by the author's unique approach to biography, in which storytelling moves thematically, sometimes in reverse chronological order.
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Calling Wild Places Home
A Memoir in Essays
by Laura Waterman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Poignant and vulnerable essays that weave together seemingly disparate themes of wild places and mountain stewardship, books and reading, and building a new life after loss.
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Sun, Sea, Soil, Wine
Winemaking on the North Fork of Long Island
by Richard Olsen-Harbich
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Growing up a stone's throw away from New York City in a small house on suburban Long Island, Richard Olsen-Harbich always dreamed of being a farmer. After graduating from Cornell with a degree in viticulture, he found himself back on the Island at the heart of an emerging wine region that was struggling to find itself. Starting from the ground up with little information or experience, Olsen-Harbich began a lifelong quest to master the art and science of growing wine grapes less than 90 miles from Manhattan.
In the last half-century, the North Fork's bucolic seaside towns and humble potato farms were transformed into one of this country's most compelling agricultural success stories, garnering praise from wine critics around the world. Olsen-Harbich charts the meteoric rise of North Fork winemaking from the historic failures of colonial times to the modern triumph of becoming one of the most important wine-producing districts on the East Coast. Through a poetic interweaving of personal anecdotes with scientific reporting about climate, soils, geology, and botany, Olsen-Harbich drills deep into the topic, giving the world a new language for talking about wine. In doing so, he redefines what it means to make wine in the New World.
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The Camp Abilities Story
The Global Evolution of Sports Camps for Children Who Are Visually Impaired
by Lauren J. Lieberman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
In 1995, Lauren Lieberman was an assistant professor with a dream: to form an educational sports camp for children who are visually impaired. Beginning with a small grant, Lieberman built a local program that grew into a worldwide movement. The Camp Abilities model has now been replicated all over the United States and in ten other countries. The Camp Abilities Story relates Lieberman's journey-from her earliest experiences in sports, to her "aha moment" during college, to her Fulbright scholarship and starting Camp Abilities programs worldwide. With an inspirational yet honest view of how a dream to make a difference in the world was tempered by the reality of the hard work necessary to change lives, the lessons herein are applicable to anyone with a dream to make the world a better place.
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New York's Great Lost Ballparks
by Bob Carlin
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
New York's Great Lost Ballparks tells the story of New York playing grounds and ballparks of yesteryear. Organized by region and city, the book includes a complete list of New York's historic ballparks in an easy-to-read guidebook format. Each listing includes the name and location of the park, the years in operation, the names of the professional clubs that called it their home, the park's seating capacity, and a "Fun Fact" or two that distinguishes each locale. More famous ballparks include an extended history that examines the importance of the field in the annals of the game. The book is richly illustrated with historic photos of the parks and players and ten maps of key locations (including New York City's boroughs). Special attention is given to locales that hosted the Negro League and all-women teams.
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Dear Uncles
The Civil War Letters of Arthur McKinstry, a Soldier in the Excelsior Brigade
by Various Authors
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Dear Uncles is one young man's story from the beginning of the American Civil War. Taken from letters sent home to family and friends, including correspondence written for his uncles' local newspaper, this book gives an intimate portrait of Arthur McKinstry's journey from a small town in upstate New York to confront Confederate forces in Virginia. Articulate, confident, and observant, McKinstry's letters are written with a journalist's eye and poet's heart, giving us a vivid, humorous, and, ultimately heartbreaking view into his experiences of going to war. Whether slogging through rain and mud, waiting for care packages from home, or watching cannonballs land in camp, these dispatches place readers in a young soldier's boots and help them to imagine how family and friends experienced this crisis in American history. Dear Uncles also offers new insights into regimental organization, training, and the often-overlooked attempt of Confederates to blockade Washington, DC's Potomac River supply route. Dear Uncles will fascinate and entertain readers with an interest in American Civil War history.
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Perfect Pitch
An Autobiography
by Nicolas Slonimsky
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Perfect Pitch tells the compelling story of Nicolas Slonimsky. A boy prodigy as a pianist, Slonimsky fled pre-Communist Russia, reaching Paris at the height of another revolution-one in music and the arts. His early association with conductor Serge Koussevitzky brought him into contact with many of the era's greatest talents, including Igor Stravinsky and Serge Prokofiev. Emigrating to Boston in 1925, he embarked on a writing career, authoring key works still in print decades after their first publication, including Music Since 1900, a chronological history; Lexicon of Musical Invective, which proved definitively that new works are rarely understood in their time; and Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, which inspired generations of composers and performers, including jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Known for his sharp wit, Slonimsky appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and was befriended by Frank Zappa. Perfect Pitch captures a life that was rich with discovery and invention and spanned a century of revolutions and explorations. This new edition is enhanced with several previously unpublished photographs, an extensive oral history, and several original essays, some reprinted for the first time.
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The Spirit of New York
Defining Events in the Empire State's History
by Bruce W. Dearstyne
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
In this lively and engaging book, Bruce W. Dearstyne presents New York state history through an exploration of nineteen dramatic events. From the launch of the state government in April 1777 through the debut of the musical play Hamilton in 2015, Dearstyne puts the fascinating people who made history at the center of the story: John Jay, the lead writer of the first state constitution; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the irrepressible crusader for women's rights; Glenn Curtiss, New York's aviation pioneer; Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play baseball for the Brooklyn Dodgers; and Lois Gibbs, an environmental activist. This new edition is updated with four recent significant events, including the stories of New Yorkers who joined the "Occupy" protests and those who struggled through Superstorm Sandy. The stories in this book illustrate the "spirit" of New York-the elusive traits that make New York State unique-and the complexity of its history.
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Bronx Epitaph
How Lou Gehrig's "Luckiest Man" Speech Defined the Yankee Legend
by Steven K. Wagner
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
When Lou Gehrig stepped to the plate on Independence Day 1939, he was not there to deliver a home run. For the first time in seventeen years, Gehrig was there to deliver his heart. In recent weeks he had lost his job as the Yankees' first baseman as well as the good health that had made him the team's respected Iron Horse and was facing a death sentence. Nervous and fidgety as he walked through a forest of microphones, Gehrig collected himself and delivered thirteen words that will live forever: "Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
Bronx Epitaph, the first comprehensive look at the slugger's epic speech, is the story of Lou Gehrig's finest hour, a homily of so little consequence when first delivered that few newspapers published more than a sentence or two the following day. Over time, however, Gehrig's "Luckiest Man" speech has settled into a sphere so timeless and essential that it seems he delivered it only yesterday. It was, to be sure, his Bronx Epitaph.
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Downstate New York Rock Walks
An Explorer's Guide to Amazing Boulders and Rock Formations
by C. Russell Dunn
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Downstate New York Rock Walks is both a hiking guidebook and a history book, calling attention to some of downstate New York's most spectacular and historic rocks: balanced rocks, perched rocks, rock shelters, talus caves, glacial potholes, split rocks, rock profiles, historic rocks, and massive, larger-than-life boulders.
Many large glacial erratics have a history going back thousands of years to when they were moved to their present location by advancing glaciers. Many served as points of navigational reference at a time when the landscape was featureless and heavily forested, and still others were ceremonial sites for Native Americans. Rock shelters and talus caves have also been used for thousands of years by Native Americans and Europeans seeking refuge from the elements. It is important that these amazing natural wonders of stone be remembered and recorded before they are lost to collective memory or destroyed by the encroachment of civilization.
Providing precise GPS location information along with length and degree of difficulty for each hike, Downstate New York Rock Walks will appeal to casual hikers, serious rock explorers, historians, geologists, and anyone wishing to explore some of nature's greatest wonders within the reach of the lower Hudson River valley.
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In the Hamptons 4Ever
Mostly True Tales from the East End
by Dan Rattiner
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
More stories of the outsized and the ordinary from the editor and publisher of Dan's Papers.
This is Dan Rattiner's fourth collection of essays about the fishermen, farmers, celebrities, billionaires, and artists who live, work, and play in the Hamptons. As the founder and publisher of Dan's Papers, a weekly community newspaper, Rattiner knows the Hamptons backwards and forwards, and stories of his encounters on the South Fork of Long Island give readers a greater understanding of how this community has changed over the years and the major figures who have shepherded these changes along.
In addition to well-known faces such as Dr. Oz and billionaires like Ira Rennert and his wife-who built the second-largest private home in America-you'll also read about motel owners, art gallery owners, an ad salesman for Dan's Papers, and a philanthropist who at one time had nearly a dozen historical buildings on her $100 million property in East Hampton. The book also provides some of the hoaxes and tall tales that the author has fabricated over the years to entertain the readers of Dan's Papers, including the moving radar tower at Montauk, the great Ecuadorian eel attack, and the Hamptons subway.
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Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws
Prohibition and New York City
by Ellen NicKenzie Lawson
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Uses previously unstudied Coast Guard records for New York City and environs to examine the development of Rum Row and smuggling in New York City during Prohibition.
With the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment, "drying up" New York City promised to be the greatest triumph of the proponents of Prohibition. Instead, the city remained the nation's greatest liquor market. Smugglers, Bootleggers, and Scofflaws focuses on liquor smuggling to tell the story of Prohibition in New York City. Using previously unstudied Coast Guard records from 1920 to 1933 for New York City and environs, Ellen NicKenzie Lawson examines the development of Rum Row and smuggling via the coasts of Long Island, the Long Island Sound, the Jersey shore, and along the Hudson and East Rivers. Lawson demonstrates how smuggling syndicates on the Lower East Side, the West Side, and Little Italy contributed to the emergence of the Broadway Mob. She also explores New York City's scofflaw population-patrons of thirty thousand speakeasies and five hundred nightclubs-as well as how politicians Fiorello La Guardia, James "Jimmy" Walker, Nicholas Murray Butler, Pauline Morton Sabin, and Al Smith articulated their views on Prohibition to the nation. Lawson argues that in their assertion of the freedom to drink alcohol for enjoyment, New York's smugglers, bootleggers, and scofflaws belong in the American tradition of defending liberty. The result was the historically unprecedented step of repeal of a constitutional amendment with passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1933.
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New York Art Deco
A Guide to Gotham's Jazz Age Architecture
by Anthony W. Robins
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The first guidebook devoted exclusively to New York City's Art Deco treasures.
Of all the world's great cities, perhaps none is so defined by its Art Deco architecture as New York. Lively and informative, New York Art Deco leads readers step-by-step past the monuments of the 1920s and '30s that recast New York as the world's modern metropolis. Anthony W. Robins, New York's best-known Art Deco guide, includes an introductory essay describing the Art Deco phenomenon, followed by eleven walking tour itineraries in Manhattan-each accompanied by a map designed by legendary New York cartographer John Tauranac-and a survey of Deco sites across the four other boroughs. Also included is a photo gallery of sixteen color plates by nationally acclaimed Art Deco photographer Randy Juster. In New York Art Deco, Robins has distilled thirty years' worth of experience into a guidebook for all to enjoy at their own pace.
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Jazz With a Beat
Small Group Swing, 1940–1960
by Tad Richards
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
“Jazz with a Beat” is the first book on the often overlooked but vitally important genre of small group swing jazz. Coming into being in the early 1940s, small group swing answered the need in the Black community for a form of jazz that was more accessible (and more danceable) than the new bebop. An adaptation of the big band Black swing (Erskine Hawkins, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb) of the 1930s to small combos, and with a more vigorous beat for the new generation, this music developed and was beloved through the 1940s, continued to be enjoyed through the rock and roll years of the 1950s, and was a major influence on the soul jazz of the 1960s. Among the many hit artists portrayed in its pages are Illinois Jacquet, Louis Jordan, Big Jay McNeely, Joe Liggins, Nat "King" Cole, Red Prysock, Ruth Brown, Nellie Lutcher, Camille Howard, T-Bone Walker, and Ray Charles. Dismissed as "rhythm and blues," this music has been ignored by jazz historians. Jazz with a Beat honors this music as a legitimate genre of jazz and is a stirring evocation of an era. It should be of interest to lovers of jazz and Americana.
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Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me
African American Narrative Poetry from Oral Tradition
by Bruce Jackson
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The classic work on African American toasts, the predecessor of rap.
“Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me” celebrates the African American oral tradition of toasting, one of the key roots of contemporary rap. Jackson was among the few to appreciate the profane energy and beauty of this rhymed form, collecting such classic toasts as "Stackolee," "The Titanic," "Signifying Monkey," "Dance of the Freaks," and dozens more. This unexpurgated edition offers the raw, vibrant, and still startling imagery of these toasts shaped by decades of oral transmission through the voices of countless rhymers. Just like rap, the toasting tradition enabled previously unheard or stifled topics, including racism, sexual exploitation, economic deprivation, and social oppression, to be expressed in a form that embodied multiple layers of meaning. Jackson helped preserve a rapidly dying art form to ensure that it would be available for many generations to come
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Hundred-Mile Home
A Story Map of Albany, Troy, and the Hudson River
by Susan Petrie
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A creative travelogue of landscape and memory.
We live in a future-facing world, consumed by a sense of urgency. Responsibilities press upon us and, inevitably, the stories of where we live scatter down unnamed streets and recede into the past. Hundred-Mile Home is an intimate portrait-a story map-of Albany, Troy, and the Hudson River that slows time and challenges us to reconsider what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget about the places we call home.
Inspired by the story of New York's capital region, Susan Petrie uses poetry, prose, photos, and drawings to uncover a place of intense natural beauty, legendary people, and remarkable events. She follows the course of its fabled Hudson River from Troy to Olana and back again, turning down dirt roads, wandering into forgotten terrains, and discovering layers of natural and human history that have become invisible.
As a work of art, Hundred-Mile Home moves between past and present. It revives a sense of wonder for what we speed past on our way to somewhere else, and reanimates the forgotten history and often-overlooked natural beauty of the mid-Hudson region. As a work of landscape and memory, it celebrates a place that-despite its instrumental role in the opening of America-has yet to take hold in the national imagination.
Susan Petrie is a writer, editor, and artist with an MFA from Bennington College. She lives in Albany, New York.
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Beyond the Xs and Os
Keeping the Bills in Buffalo
by Mark C. Poloncarz
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Inside account of the negotiations between the football Bills, New York State, and Erie County to sign a long-term stadium lease and thereby keep the team in Buffalo.
Beyond the Xs and Os is the previously unpublished story of how a long-term stadium lease was negotiated and signed by New York's Erie County, the state, and the Buffalo Bills football team. Mark C. Poloncarz, the elected executive of the community that owned the stadium, provides a rare glimpse into the long, difficult, but ultimately rewarding effort to successfully conclude negotiations between a National Football League (NFL) franchise, the NFL, and a multitude of players from the political arena, including Governor Andrew Cuomo and US Senator Chuck Schumer. Poloncarz discusses the financial side of sports and reveals how the county was able to navigate what proved to be often-turbulent waters. Complicating negotiations was an ongoing frenzy in the local news media, hungry for any news about the new lease, and Bills team owner Ralph C. Wilson Jr., who was ninety-two and had said the team would be sold upon his death, thereby possibly being relocated to another city. In the end, a new lease was signed and the Bills remained in Buffalo at a time when a number of similar sized communities watched their teams relocate to other cities in larger markets.
Mark C. Poloncarz is Erie County, New York's eighth county executive. Since taking office, Poloncarz has returned Erie County government to its core mission of serving the needs of its constituents in a common-sense, pragmatic manner that improves the lives of all, while also overseeing the economic turnaround of the City of Buffalo and the county. Before being elected as county executive, Poloncarz served as Erie County's comptroller for six years, and previously practiced corporate and finance law in Buffalo. He holds a bachelor's degree from the University at Buffalo, State University of New York and a law degree from the University of Toledo.
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A Place in History
Albany in the Age of Revolution, 1775-1825
by Warren Roberts
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A journey into Albany's historic past and the city's role in three pivotal historical narratives: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the construction of the Erie Canal.
In 1998, after completing a book on the French Revolution, Warren Roberts took a bicycle ride into the heart of the city in which he had lived for thirty-five years. Thus began a ten-year journey into the history of Albany, New York. Reading about the city's past, poring over old maps, and returning again and again to the city's historic sites with his camera, Roberts found that the more he delved into Albany's history, the more he uncovered about the city's important role in three larger historical narratives: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the construction of the Erie Canal. A Place in History is not only about Albany's role in these historical narratives, but is also about the men and women who were caught up in it, their public lives as well as their private intrigues, dalliances, and foibles. As Roberts shows, the history that unfolded along the Hudson River between 1775 and 1825 saved one revolution, caused another, transformed the city of Albany and the state of New York, and ultimately helped lay the foundations of a global economy.
Warren Roberts is Distinguished Teaching Professor of History at the University at Albany–SUNY. He is the author of Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Louis Prieur, Revolutionary Artists: The Public, the Populace, and Images of the French Revolution, also published by SUNY Press; Jacques-Louis David, Revolutionary Artist: Art, Politics, and the French Revolution; Jane Austen and the French Revolution; and Morality and Social Class in Eighteenth-Century French Literature and Painting.
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Shipwrecked on a Traffic Island
And Other Previously Untranslated Gems
by Gabrielle Sidonie Colette
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A collection of Colette's best writings that have never before appeared in English.
The French writer Colette (1873–1954) is best known in the United States for such classic novels as Gigi and Cheri, which were made into popular movies, but she was a prolific author. This meticulously translated collection offers some of her best fiction, personal essays, articles, and talks, all appearing in English for the first time. The pieces showcase Colette's gifts as a writer: her deep wisdom about every age of human life, her skill as a storyteller, her wry humor, her persuasive powers, and her foresight as a social critic of issues such as gender roles.
The translators combed through journals and past editions of Colette's work to cull these gems, which cover an enormous array of topics-from French wines and perfumes to her friendships with Marcel Proust and Maurice Chevalier to uncanny insight into the curious habits of cats and dogs. Selections from an advice column that Colette wrote for the French women's magazine Marie Claire are also included, and her savvy suggestions for the lovelorn stand the test of time. Moving articles written during the two world wars, along with her memories of being an actor and playwright, reveal facets of her writing that are less often celebrated. The first new work by Colette to appear in English in half a century, it will delight devoted fans and new readers alike.
Zack Rogow is Associate Faculty member in the Department of Creative Writing and Literary Arts at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is the author, editor, or translator of many books and plays, including award-winning translations of George Sand, Colette, and André Breton. Raised in Paris, Renée Morel is a translator and an instructor in French and linguistics at City College of San Francisco. She lectures throughout the Bay Area on French culture, art, and civilization, from the Gauls to de Gaulle.
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The Adirondack Architecture Guide, Southern-Central Region
by Janet A. Null
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Explores the architectural treasures of the Southern-Central region of New York's Adirondack Park and places them in the context of Adirondack history and culture.
The Adirondack Architecture Guide, Southern-Central Region provides a professional and insightful survey of the built environment of a unique area within New York's Adirondack Park. This book is the first field guide to the architecture of the Park, revealing the ordinary and the extraordinary, the remarkable buildings by prominent designers, as well as the hidden, unexpected gems few know exist.
Based on more than seven thousand miles of fieldwork and years of research, the guide comprises more than seven hundred sites traversing the geographic range, socioeconomic strata, and historical span of the region from the late 1700s to the present. Organized according to clearly marked travel routes and fourteen tours on the ground and on the water, it features detailed maps and coordinates for each site, along with many beautiful photographs. Also included are eleven companion essays drawing on the expertise of professionals, local historians, and Adirondack residents that delve into the what, where, and why people built in the Adirondacks.
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Rebels on the Niagara
The Fenian Invasion of Canada, 1866
by Lawrence E. Cline
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Offers a detailed account of the political and military history of the Irish American Fenian Brotherhood in the nineteenth century.
In what is now largely considered a footnote in history, Americans invaded Canada along the Niagara Frontier in 1866. The group behind the invasion-the Fenian Brotherhood-was formed in 1858 by Irish nationalists in New York City in order to fight for Irish independence from Britain. At the end of the American Civil War, Fenian leaders attempted to use Irish Americans, many of them combat veterans, to seize Canada and make it the "New Ireland" as a means to force the British from "old" Ireland. New York State was both the epicenter of Fenian leadership and a key support base and staging area for the military operations. Although relatively short-lived and with some of its military operations being somewhere between farce and tragedy, the Fenian Brotherhood had a very important impact on nineteenth-century New York and America, but remains largely forgotten. In Rebels on the Niagara Lawrence E. Cline examines not only the Fenian operations and their impact on Canada, but also the role the United States and New York played in both the initial support for the Fenian movement and its subsequent collapse in America.
Lawrence E. Cline is Lecturer in Intelligence Analysis at Buffalo State College, State University of New York. He is the author of The Lord's Resistance Army.
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An Uncommon Cape
Researching the Histories and Mysteries of a Property
by Eleanor Phillips Brackbill
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Three mysteries precipitate an investigation into an otherwise ordinary suburban property, revealing a past inextricably woven into four centuries of American history.
When Eleanor Phillips Brackbill bought her suburban Westchester house in 2000, three mysteries came with it. First, from the former owner, came the information that the 1930s house was "a Sears house or something like that." Thrilled to think it might be a Sears, Roebuck & Co. mail-order house, Brackbill was determined to find evidence to prove it. She found instead a house pedigree of a different sort.
Second, and even more provocative, was the discovery of several iron stakes protruding from the property's enormous granite outcropping, bigger in square footage than the house itself. When queried about them, the former owner told her, "Someone a long time ago kept monkeys there, chained to the stakes." Monkeys? Was this some kind of suburban legend?
A third mystery came to light at closing, when a building inspector's letter contained a reference to the house having had, at one time, a different address. Why would the house have had another address? Her curiosity aroused, and intent upon finding the facts, Brackbill gradually peeled back layers of history, allowing the house and the land to tell their stories, and uncovering a past inextricably woven into four centuries of American history. At the same time, she found thirty-two owners, across 350 years, who had just one thing in common: ownership of a particular parcel of land.
An Uncommon Cape not only tells the story of an eight-year odyssey of fact-finding and speculation but also answers the broader question: "What came before?" and, through material presented in twenty-two sidebars, offers readers insights and guidelines on how to find the stories behind their own homes.
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Flash Points
Lessons Learned and Not Learned in Malawi, Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan
by Jade Wu
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A compelling, intimate account of how US foreign assistance in war zones and developing countries does not achieve its intended goals.
From the hot savannah of Malawi to the cold, damp gray of Kosovo and into the volatile war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States and other donors have invested enormous financial and human resources in major peacekeeping and development efforts. Why then is the world no closer to being a "better and safer" place? Both a salient critique of US foreign assistance and a thought-provoking memoir, Flash Points describes the issues with personnel, language, and gender dynamics, as well as the cross-cultural challenges that often undermine and betray the best intentions of policy makers comfortably situated in Washington. Revealed in illuminating flashbacks, Jade Wu recalls her experiences in each of these four countries highlighting how, all too often, Americans in the field and the US government were unable to learn the lessons that ought to have been learned when dealing with host countries and their people. The final results were efforts poorly conceived and executed and, ultimately, detrimental to American national interests.
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Dead Reckoning
Transatlantic Passages on Europe and America
by Andrei Guruianu
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A comprehensive account of Roberto Assagioli's psychosynthesis, a type of therapy that addresses both spiritual development and psychological healing and growth.
Conceived by Italian psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, psychosynthesis is one of the first Western psychologies that addresses both spiritual development and psychological healing and growth by recognizing and supporting the particular life journey of the person-the individual's own unique path of Self-realization. Firman and Gila present a comprehensive account of psychosynthesis, providing a transpersonal integration of developmental, personality, and clinical theory. They reveal some of the relationships between psychosynthesis and contemporary developmental research, object relations theory, intersubjective psychology, trauma theory, the recovery movement, Jungian psychology, humanistic and transpersonal psychology, and common psychological diagnoses. Case examples and practical theory designed to support both the layperson and the professional seeking to understand and facilitate psychospiritual growth are included.
John Firman and Ann Gila are psychotherapists in private practice in Palo Alto, California and coauthors of The Primal Wound: A Transpersonal View of Trauma, Addiction, and Growth, also published by SUNY Press. Both were trained in psychosynthesis in the early 1970s, and Firman trained with Roberto Assagioli.
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Integral Leadership
The Next Half-Step
by John P. Forman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A groundbreaking book that brings the insights of Integral Theory to business and organizational development.
This groundbreaking book offers leaders a way to determine what theories, models, and tools best meet the needs of their organizations. Authors and organizational consultants John P. Forman and Laurel A. Ross know leaders are awash in business theory, often coming from well-thumbed bestsellers. But how do you match promising theories to real people and circumstances? Using the insights of Integral Theory, particularly Ken Wilber's AQAL framework, the authors provide a simple yet elegant outline that appreciates and engages a wide range of leadership theories and techniques. Four major leadership styles emerge: the Impulsive, Diplomatic, Achiever, and Pluralistic approaches. The authors describe the presuppositions, characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of each using a variety of real-life examples of individual leaders and organizations. Forman and Ross propose an emerging Integral perspective and suggest integral modes of performance management, change management, and teamwork. Ultimately, the Integral perspective gives leaders the insight and flexibility to use a range of resources to meet organizational needs in a rapidly changing world.
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Going Blind
A Memoir
by Mara Faulkner
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Memoir and meditation on blindness.
Mara Faulkner grew up in a family shaped by Irish ancestry, a close-to-the-bone existence in rural North Dakota, and the secret of her father's blindness-along with the silence and shame surrounding it. Dennis Faulkner had retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disease that gradually blinded him and one that may blind many members of his family, including the author. Moving and insightful, Going Blind explores blindness in its many permutations-within the context of the author's family, more broadly, as a disability marked by misconceptions, and as a widely used cultural metaphor. Mara Faulkner delicately weaves her family's story into an analysis of the roots and ramifications of the various metaphorical meanings of blindness, touching on the Catholic Church of the 1940s and 1950s, Japanese internment, the Germans from Russia who dominated her hometown, and the experiences of Native people in North Dakota. Neither sentimental nor dispassionate, the author asks whether it's possible to find gifts when sight is lost.
Mara Faulkner, OSB, is Associate Professor of English at the College of St. Benedict. She is the author of Protest and Possibility in the Writing of Tillie Olsen and Born of Common Hungers: Benedictine Women in Search of Connections.
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Bootlegger of the Soul
The Literary Legacy of William Kennedy
by Various Authors
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A celebration of the Pulitzer Prize—winning novelist who put Albany on the world's literary map.
The award-winning novelist William Kennedy is perhaps best known for his Albany Cycle, a series of novels that put Albany on the world's literary map alongside James Joyce's Dublin, Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo, and William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County. Bootlegger of the Soul offers a fresh and authoritative overview of Kennedy's long literary career and his astonishing trajectory from journalist to struggling novelist to Pulitzer Prize winner. Included here are reviews, interviews, and scholarly essays on Kennedy's work, as well as essays, speeches, a play, and a short story by the author himself, together with more than fifty historical and personal photographs. Lively, readable, and brimming with the infectious wit and lyrical prose that animates Kennedy's novels, Bootlegger of the Soul is a celebration of a writer still working hard at his craft at age ninety.
Suzanne Lance is Associate Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany, State University of New York. Paul Grondahl is Director of the New York State Writers Institute and is the author of several books, including Mayor Corning: Albany Icon, Albany Enigma and I Rose Like a Rocket: The Political Education of Theodore Roosevelt.
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Enough Blame to Go Around
The Labor Pains of New York City's Public Employee Unions
by Richard Steier
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Veteran labor journalist Richard Steier explores the tensions between New York City's public employee unions, their critics, and city and state politicians.
Since 1980 Richard Steier has had a unique vantage point to observe the gains, losses, and struggles of municipal labor unions in New York City. He has covered those unions and city government as a reporter and labor columnist for the New York Post and, since 1998, as editor and featured columnist of the Chief-Leader, a century-old independent newspaper that covers city and state government in greater detail than today's mainstream news organizations. Drawing from his column with the Chief-Leader, "Razzle Dazzle," Enough Blame to Go Around describes in vivid terms how the changed economy has drastically altered the city's labor landscape, and why it has been difficult for municipal unions to adapt. There can be no doubt, he writes, that public employee unions have contributed to the problems that confront them today, including corruption and failed leadership. But at the same time and for all their flaws, he believes unions represent the best chance for ordinary people to receive fair economic treatment.
Veteran labor journalist Richard Steier is editor and columnist for the Chief-Leader and the coauthor (with Len Ragozin and Len Friedman) of The Odds Must Be Crazy: Beating the Races with the Man Who Revolutionized Handicapping and Created The Sheets. He lives in Bellerose, New York.
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In Security
A Novel
by Edward Schwarzschild
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Part airport thriller, part family drama, part love story, In Security explores how those who strive to protect us are often unable to protect themselves.
Gary Waldman is a grief-stricken former tennis coach slowly reentering the world after the death of his wife. As he struggles to remain a good father to his six-year-old son, Waldman finds unexpected comfort and stability in the rule-bound confines of the TSA, working as a Transportation Security Officer in upstate New York. But his life is turned upside down again after he uses CPR to bring a passenger back from the dead.
Part airport thriller, part family drama, part love story, In Security explores how those who strive to protect us are often unable to protect themselves. Can someone who does security work ever feel truly safe? As the novel races toward its conclusion, Waldman discovers the limits of what he can control, both at the checkpoint and under his own roof.
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The Middle of Everywhere
A Novel
by Ray Petersen
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A young man's quest to keep his hometown's paper mill from closing turns into an odyssey across a rural upstate New York county.
One man's affliction is another's gift, and Kenny Hopewell's "special gift" is a terrible memory and virtually no sense of direction. Entrusted by a family friend to deliver a plea for help that might keep his hometown mill from closing, Kenny misses his ride and sets out on foot across an isolated rural area between Lake Ontario and the Adirondacks. Along the way he meets and comes to terms with some of the denizens of this lonely landscape-the Casimir family, who survive on the outskirts of the law; Johnny Percy, a Vietnam veteran still defending his family's abandoned homestead; and Gunnar Molshoc, a well-driller and "witcher"-refugees, like him, from the decay of rural America in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, several characters at the local college are struggling to define the college's role in the mill fight and to rescue the soul of higher education. John Harlan is an instructor attempting to write a meaningful dissertation that won't threaten his chances at tenure; Ernest Guppy's notion of himself as a political comic is driving his wife off the deep end; and college president Baxter McAdam and his administrative vice president are locked in a withering campaign to force each other out of power.
The novel's setting, a fictional county in upstate New York, is like a braided rug: smooth on the top, all knots underneath. Chained to a dying farm economy and losing its youth to greener pastures, it's the sort of place where refugees from Brooklyn might live next to Amish farmers, who might live next to Italian millworkers, who might live next to a bigot whose house was once a stop on the Underground Railroad. Like so many rural American communities, it has the feel of a self-inflicted wound, and as Kenny comes to understand, sometimes you have to feel pain just to know you're still alive.
Ray Petersen teaches political science and history and lives in a lake-locked village in northern New York State. He is the author of Cowkind: A Novel.
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Fight All Day, March All Night
A Medal of Honor Recipient's Story
by Wayne Mahood
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
An inspiring narrative of a young Civil War soldier, as told though his letters from the battlefield.
In 1862 twenty-one-year-old Morris Brown Jr. left his studies at Hamilton College to take up the Union cause. He quickly rose in rank from sergeant major to captain and acting regimental commander for the 126th New York Volunteers. In letters written to his family in Penn Yan, New York, Brown describes his experiences at war: the unseemly carping between fellow officers, the fear that gripped men facing battle, and the longing to return home. Brown's letters also reveal an ambitious young man who not only wanted recognition but also wanted to assure himself of a financial future. Above all, this is the story of a courageous young man, told mostly in his own words. Few Civil War soldiers were as articulate as Morris Brown Jr., fewer served in a regiment that saw so much combat, still fewer commanded a regiment at such a young age, and even fewer were recognized by the newly minted Medal of Honor.
Wayne Mahood is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the School of Education at Geneseo—SUNY. His many books include Alexander "Fighting Elleck" Hays: The Life of a Civil War General, From West Point to the Wilderness, General Wadsworth: The Life and Times of Brevet General James S. Wadsworth, and Written in Blood: A History of the 126th New York Infantry in the Civil War.
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The History of Here
A House, the Pine Hills Neighborhood, and the City of Albany
by Akum Norder
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
How the Pine Hills neighborhood in Albany, New York, changed and grew, as reflected in the history of one house and the lives of its residents.
When you buy an old house, you get much more than a house. In all its quirks, its alterations, in fragments of memory and traces left behind, you get a bundle of small mysteries. Who used to live here? Why did they come here, and where did they go? Whose name is that written on the attic wall? When did that odd little bathroom get shoehorned in there, and what did the room look like before? If you're lucky, one or two of your house's mysteries might unfold into stories. Akum Norder was very lucky.
The History of Here follows Albany, New York's, Pine Hills neighborhood through more than one hundred years of change. At its heart is the story of Norder's 1912 house and the people who built and lived in it. As Norder traced their histories, she came to see the development of her house, her street, and her neighborhood as a piece of Albany's story. In the lives of its residents, their struggles and triumphs, she saw a reflection of twentieth-century America.
Drawing on interviews, city records, newspapers, out-of-print books, and other sources, Norder's narrative makes a case for city neighborhoods: their value, their preservation, and the grassroots involvement that turns a jumble of houses into a community. Funny and thought-provoking, readable and relevant, The History of Here celebrates the sense of place that fuels the new urbanism.
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Birth Chart
by Rachel Feder
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A collection of poems weaving together astrology, motherhood, music, and literary history.
In Birth Chart, a collection of heartfelt, ruthless poetry, Rachel Feder rethinks the relationship between astrology and motherhood. She asks, if astrology constellates the universe around the moment of one's birth, then how might it serve as shorthand for a vast number of personal experiences and cultural phenomena? How might it speak to and of friendship, motherhood, authorship, the mysteries of literary history, and the wonders of watching a child come into language? Across four sections, including a serial poem in sustained conversation with the modernist poet H.D., Feder's references range from group texts to the Talmud to ʼ90s song lyrics. In her hands-and her inimitable yet familiar, often straight-up funny voice-astrology is less a means of explaining the world than of communicating, of capturing a feeling, of sealing a bond. The result is an equally sentimental and sardonic collection in which "the language of explanation is a heart emoji. It means you know what I mean." And we do.
Rachel Feder is Assistant Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She is the author of Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the Sign of Frankenstein, Bad Romanticisms, and the chapbook Words with Friends.
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Fearless
A. Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness in America
by Neil Thomas Proto
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Biography of the early years of A. Bartlett Giamatti, who would become Yale University's first non-Anglo-Saxon Protestant president and commissioner of Major League Baseball.
In 1977, a thirty-nine-year-old Italian American professor of Renaissance literature, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was chosen as the next president of Yale University, a radical act that was immediately perceived as a threat to the university's embedded, eugenics-driven, Anglo-Saxon mentality. Eugenics, as practiced in America, and especially at Yale, locked into place those who were deemed "unfit" due to beliefs about their ethnicity, class, and racial character, beliefs that had endured for decades and to which Giamatti's selection, as an Italian American and therefore, to some, one of the "unfit," was an open rebuke.
In Fearless, Neil Thomas Proto explores the origins of Giamatti's ethical convictions, including his insistence on fairness, his respect for the duty of responsible citizenship, and his advocacy for people on the margins. Proto argues that these convictions, which would inform Giamatti's time at Yale as well as his brief tenure as commissioner of Major League Baseball, can be understood only in the context of Giamatti's family and the deeply entwined and conflicted histories of Yale and New Haven itself-a history that Giamatti, who had been both a student and a professor at Yale and who had Italian American relatives in New Haven, knew very well.
Historian Sean Wilentz wrote that "Bart Giamatti was a phenomenon who lived the lives of several men even though his own ended tragically early." Giamatti confirmed his underlying imperative through to the end of his life: "Rest," he wrote, "will come by never resting." Fearless is a story about persistence against forces ugly, embedded, and more pernicious than simply racial and ethnic discrimination, and about the principled embrace of civic duty passed on generationally and used fully as the ethical sword and shield necessary to challenge them.
Neil Thomas Proto is a lawyer who has also taught at Yale University and Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. His books include The Rights of My People: Liliuokalani's Enduring Battle with the United States 1893—1917. He lives in Washington, DC.
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The Old Guard
by Mieczysław Lurczyński
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A brutal and unflinchingly honest portrayal of the effects of concentration camp life on the human psyche.
Brutally and unflinchingly honest in its depiction of the effects of concentration camp life on the human psyche, Mieczysław Lurczyński's The Old Guard is one of the earliest works of Holocaust literature and one of the few works written by a non-Jew who was also a survivor of the camps. Begun during his imprisonment on fragments and scraps of paper and completed immediately after the war, in 1945, the play is based on Lurczyński's experiences in Buchenwald and its subcamp in Eschenhausen, SS-kommando Hecht. The action takes place in the Block Elder's room at Hecht, where the prisoners who hold privileged positions in the camp-old-timers from Auschwitz, Majdanek, and other camps-play cards, drink moonshine, and steal from one another. The play's hero, based on the pre-war Polish actor Fryderyk Jarosy, who was also interned at Hecht, attempts to uphold the values of Western civilization in this depraved environment, an impossible task that ultimately leads to his death at the hands of the Camp Elder. As Lurczysnki writes in his preface, the play contains no great atrocities: "The focus, rather, is on internal experiences and on depicting pained, sick, desparate, and resigned psyches, on depicting the methods by which people were turned into beasts, and beasts into freaks of nature." Available for the first time in English, The Old Guard is an important and compelling work of Holocaust literature that stands on a par with the work of Tadeusz Borowski and Primo Levi.
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How to Escape
Magic, Madness, Beauty, and Cynicism
by Crispin Sartwell
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Passionate and rollicking personal and intellectual essays by philosopher Crispin Sartwell.
Philosopher, music critic, and syndicated columnist Crispin Sartwell has forged a distinctive and fiercely original identity over the years as a cultural commentator. In books about anarchism, art and politics, Native American and African American thought and culture, Eastern spirituality, and American transcendentalism, Sartwell has relentlessly insisted on an ethos rooted in unadorned honesty with oneself and a healthy skepticism of others. This volume of selected popular writings combines music and art criticism with personal memoir about addiction and rebellion, as well as cultural commentary on race, sexuality, cynicism, and the meaning of life.
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The Three Graces of Raymond Street
Murder, Madness, Sex, and Politics in 1870s Brooklyn
by Robert E. Murphy
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A compelling story about three murders in Brooklyn between 1872 and 1873 and the young women charged with the crimes.
Between January 1872 and September 1873, the city of Brooklyn was gripped by accounts of three murders allegedly committed by young women: a factory girl shot her employer and seducer, an evidently peculiar woman shot a philandering member of a prominent Brooklyn family, and a former nun was arrested on suspicion of having hanged her best friend and onetime convent mate. Two were detained at the county jail on Raymond Street, while one remained at large, and her pursuit and eventual arrest was complicated by dissension in the police department. Lawyers for all three women prepared insanity defenses, and citizens thronged the courtrooms to witness the suspenseful trials. An intriguing account of the events surrounding the cases, which became entwined with Brooklyn's politics and religious differences, The Three Graces of Raymond Street offers insights into the sexual mores of the times and illustrates the development of the modern American city.
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America's First Crisis
The War of 1812
by Robert P. Watson
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Engaging and accessible account of the war that helped forge the American nation.
The War of 1812, sometimes called "America's forgotten war," was a curious affair. At the time, it was dismissed as "Mr. Madison's War." Later it was hailed by some as America's "Second War for Independence" and ridiculed by others, such as President Harry Truman, as "the silliest damned war we ever had." The conflict, which produced several great heroes and future presidents, was all this and more.
In America's First Crisis Robert P. Watson tells the stories of the most intriguing battles and leaders and shares the most important blunders and victories of the war. What started out as an effort to invade Canada, fueled by anger over the harassment of American merchant ships by the Royal Navy, soon turned into an all-out effort to fend off an invasion by Britain. Armies marched across the Canadian border and sacked villages; navies battled on Lake Ontario, Lake Champlain, and the world's oceans; both the American and Canadian capitals were burned; and, in a final irony, the United States won its greatest victory in New Orleans-after the peace treaty had been signed.
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Shame the Devil
A Novel
by Debra Brenegan
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The remarkable and true story of the nineteenth-century novelist, journalist, and feminist Fanny Fern.
"There may be married people who do not read the morning paper. Smith and I know them not ... It is not too much to say the newspapers are one of our strongest points of sympathy; that it is our meat and drink to praise and abuse them together; that we often in our imagination edit a model newspaper, which shall have for its motto, 'Speak the truth, and shame the devil.'" - Fanny Fern
Shame the Devil tells the remarkable and true story of Fanny Fern (the pen name of Sara Payson Willis), one of the most successful, influential, and popular writers of the nineteenth century. A novelist, journalist, and feminist, Fern (1811—1872) outsold Harriet Beecher Stowe, won the respect of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and served as literary mentor to Walt Whitman. Scrabbling in the depths of poverty before her meteoric rise to fame and fortune, she was widowed, escaped an abusive second marriage, penned one of the country's first prenuptial agreements, married a man eleven years her junior, and served as a nineteenth-century Oprah to her hundreds of thousands of fans. Her weekly editorials in the pages of the New York Ledger over a period of about twenty years chronicled the myriad controversies of her era and demonstrated her firm belief in the motto, "Speak the truth, and shame the devil." Through the story of Fern and her contemporaries, including Walt Whitman, Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Shame the Devil brings the intellectual and social ferment of mid-nineteenth-century America to life.
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The Man Who Saved New York
Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975
by Seymour P. Lachman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A dramatic and colorful portrait of one of New York's most remarkable governors, Hugh L. Carey, with emphasis on his leadership during the fiscal crisis of 1975.
The Man Who Saved New York offers a portrait of one of New York's most remarkable governors, Hugh L. Carey, with emphasis on his leadership during the fiscal crisis of 1975. In this dramatic and colorful account, Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner's examine Carey's youth, military service, and public career against the backdrop of a changing, challenged, and recession-battered city, state, and nation.
It was Carey's leadership, Lachman and Polner argue, that helped rescue the city and state from the brink of financial and social ruin. While TV comedians mocked and tabloids shrieked about the Big Apple's rising muggings, its deteriorating public services, and the threats and walkouts by embattled police, firefighters, and teachers, all amid a brutal recession, Carey and his team managed to hold on and ultimately prevailed, narrowly preventing a huge disruption to the state, national, and global economy. At one point, the city came within a few hours of having to declare itself incapable of paying its debts and obligations, but in the end stability and consensus prevailed, and America's largest city stayed out of bankruptcy court. The center held.
Based on extensive interviews with Carey and his family, as well as numerous friends, observers, and former advisors, including Steven Berger, David Burke, John Dyson, Peter Goldmark, Judah Gribetz, Richard Ravitch, and Felix Rohatyn, The Man Who Saved New York aims to place Carey and his achievements at the center of the financial maelstrom that met his arrival in Albany. While others were willing to let the city go into default, Carey was strongly opposed, since it would not only affect the state as a whole but would have reverberations both nationally and internationally.
In recounting the 1975 rescue of New York City and the aftershocks that nearly sank the state government, Lachman and Polner illuminate the often-volatile interplay among elite New York bankers, hard-nosed municipal union leaders, the press, and influential conservatives and liberals from City Hall to the Albany statehouse to the White House. Although often underappreciated by the public, it was Carey's force of will, wit, intellect, judgment, and experiences that allowed the state to survive this unparalleled ordeal and ultimately to emerge on a stronger footing. Further, Lachman and Polner argue, Carey's accomplishment is worth recalling as a prime example of how governments-local, state, and federal-can work to avoid the renewed the threat of bankruptcy that now confronts many overstretched states and localities.
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A Beautiful and Fruitful Place, Volume 2
Selected Rensselaerwijck Papers
by Various Authors
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Second volume of papers from a well respected annual seminar that showcase the latest research on Dutch colonial history in New York State.
New Netherland's distinctive regional history as well as the colony's many relationships with Europe and the seventeenth-century Atlantic world are featured in the second collection of papers from the widely praised annual Rensselaerwijck Seminar. Leading scholars from both sides of the Atlantic critique and offer the latest research on a dynamic range of topics: the age of exploration, domestic life in New Netherland, the history and significance of the West India Company, the complex era of Jacob Leisler, the southern frontier lands of the colony, relations with New England, Dutch foodways in the Hudson Valley and their use of beer, the endurance of the Dutch legacy into 19th century New York, and contemporary genealogical research on colonial Dutch ancestors.
Cogent and informative, these papers are an indispensable source for better understanding the lives and legacies of the long ago New Netherland colony.
Elisabeth Paling Funk was born in Woerden, the Netherlands. She is an independent scholar, freelance editor and translator, and former adjunct assistant professor at Manhattanville College. Her articles on early American and Dutch-American literature have been published in the United States and the Netherlands. She is preparing her dissertation, "Washington Irving and His Dutch-American Heritage as Seen in A History of New York, The Sketch-Book, Bracebridge Hall, and Tales of a Traveller," for publication as a book. Martha Dickinson Shattuck is the editor and researcher with the New Netherland Research Center and the editor of Explorers, Fortunes, and Love Letters: A Window on New Netherland. She has published various articles on New Netherland, was the New Netherland and Colonial editor for The Encyclopedia of New York State, and is currently editing and annotating the New Netherland papers from the Bontemantel Collection in the New York Public Library.
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Up on a Hill and Thereabouts
An Adirondack Childhood
by Gloria Stubing Rist
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Childhood recollections of life in the Adirondack Mountains during the Great Depression.
In the 1930s, life for kids tucked away in the quiet woodlands of the Adirondack Mountains was rich with nature and filled with human characters. This captivating memoir contains the recollections of one woman who spent her childhood on the hillsides and in the woods near Ticonderoga. A child's-eye view of days long gone, the book describes a time and place of poverty and hardship tempered by compassion, hope, and humor.
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Dead Woman Hollow
by Kass Fleisher
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Three generations of Northern Appalachian women confront poverty, violence, and isolation.
Dead Woman Hollow, a shady glade named for a rattlesnake-bit mother left to die in 1908, is a novel that testifies to the true grit that is a birthright of the women of Northern Appalachia's remote mountain areas-a beautiful and brutal land with a culture hostile to change.
The novel spans three generations of women's lives connected by geography and history. It begins during World War I, when a Philadelphian pro-suffrage group attempts to bring their replica Liberty Bell to every one of the sixty-seven county seats in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, drawing the interest of a young woman with a mysterious past. Then during the Depression, a headstrong girl finds the means to feed her sisters, her cousin, and her stepfather, even as the latter scours the region looking for work to stave off starvation. And in the waning years of the Reagan Era, two lesbian hikers are stalked by a local mountain man. Propelled by prose that is as stylistically stark as the events it depicts, this novel is testament to the enduring mettle of women who find themselves at the crosshairs of history and circumstance.
Kass Fleisher is Associate Professor of English at Illinois State University. She is the author of Talking Out of School: Memoir of an Educated Woman; The Adventurous; Accidental Species; and The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History, also published by SUNY Press.