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Failed State
Dysfunction and Corruption in an American Statehouse
by Seymour P. Lachman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Shines a light on the dark corners of New York's legislature and points the way to much-needed reform.
Failed State is both an original account of a state legislature in urgent need of reform and a call to action for those who would fix it. Drawing on his experiences both in and out of state government, former New York State senator Seymour P. Lachman reveals and explores Albany's hush-hush, top-down processes, illuminating the hidden, secretive corners where the state assembly and state senate conduct the people's business and spend public money. Part memoir and part exposé, Failed State is a revision of and follow-up to Three Men in a Room, published in 2006. The focus of the original book was the injury to democratic governance that arises when three individuals-governor, senate majority leader, and assembly speaker-tightly control one of the country's largest and most powerful state governments. Expanding on events that have occurred in the decade since the original book's publication, Failed State shows how this scenario has given way to widespread corruption, among them the convictions of two men in the room-the senate and assembly leaders-as well as a number of other state lawmakers. All chapters have been revised and expanded, new chapters have been added, and the final chapter charts a path to durable reform that would change New York's state government from its present-day status as a national disgrace to a model of transparent, more effective state politics and governance.
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Going the Distance
A Novel
by Michael Joyce
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
His major league baseball dreams dashed, a former pitcher returns home to make a life or death family decision.
Going the Distance is a baseball novel with a difference; a multilayered love story, a celebration of both America's game and the New York landscape. John "Jack" Flynn was a major league pitcher with all-star promise. But on the day of the 1979 All-Star game, he finds himself back in the North Country of New York where he was born, his career cut short by an injury, no recollection as to how he came to be back there with a beautiful woman he doesn't recognize beside him in the passenger seat of his car. The mystery of this passenger is but the first of many mysteries in this richly poetic, deeply moving, and sometimes comic novel.
Flynn faces losses much greater than the end of an athletic career. In a journey both to recover his past and to find a place and time to begin life anew, he faces perhaps the most difficult decision a human being must make. In the process he garners support from a band of magical characters: a mystical girl who tells fortunes with baseball cards; a onetime "bird dog" baseball scout who dresses in a hazmat body suit to avoid polluting himself with human contact; a former teammate, a homerun hitter and juju man who comes to the rescue from the sky; and, most of all, that woman beside Flynn who teaches him how to love again, or perhaps for the first time.
Michael Joyce is Professor of English and Media Studies at Vassar College. He is the author of many books, including Disappearance, Liam's Going: A Novel, and Moral Tales and Meditations: Technological Parables and Refractions, also published by SUNY Press. He lives along the Hudson River near Poughkeepsie, New York.
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Forgetting Fathers
Untold Stories from an Orphaned Past
by David Marshall
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
An eloquent personal reflection on the fascination of family history and the desire to both discover and escape origins.
In Forgetting Fathers, David Marshall weaves together the stories of his grandfather and great-grandfather with his own quest to solve the mystery of his family's past. Beginning as a search for his lost family name, Marshall attempts to understand the origins of his grandfather, who spent part of his childhood in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of the City of New York. He also reconstructs the life and death of his great-grandfather, a Russian immigrant tailor who died at age thirty-six in a private sanitarium dedicated to the treatment of mental and nervous diseases. The narrative becomes a detective story that reflects on our ambivalence about origins, the relation between history and mourning, and the compulsion to search for life stories. Forgetting Fathers combines historical accounts based on records, reports, and public documents with autobiographical reflections and speculations. Included throughout are photographs, newspaper clippings, and facsimiles of original documents that provide a sense of both the texture of the times and the fabric of archival and genealogical research.
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The Impeachment of Governor Sulzer
A Story of American Politics
by Matthew L. Lifflander
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Brings to life the dramatic and colorful career of William Sulzer (1863—1941), former governor of New York State.
In The Impeachment of Governor Sulzer, Matthew L. Lifflander brings to life the dramatic story of a forgotten incident in New York State political history. When William Sulzer was elected to the office of governor of New York State in November 1912, it represented the culmination of a long and successful career in politics. The son of a German immigrant father and a Scotch-Irish American mother, Sulzer (1863—1941) rose through the powerful Tammany Hall machine to become the youngest man ever to serve as speaker of the New York State Assembly. In 1894, he was elected to Congress, where he served with distinction for eighteen years, rising to chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. When he became governor, it was with the support of the Tammany Hall machine, and everyone expected that he would duly perform his duties under the direction of Tammany boss Charles F. Murphy.
Political reform and the corrupt influence of political machines were significant issues of the day, however, and shortly after Sulzer's election he began to project a populist "man of the people" image, announcing that he "belonged to no man." After he rejected some of Murphy's recommendations for key appointments and initiated investigations into corrupt state officials-many of them with Tammany connections-it was decided that he was a threat to the party bosses and had to be removed. Incredibly, less than a year after his election to the highest office in New York State, Sulzer had been impeached and removed.
In addition to shedding light on the career of one of the most interesting and colorful figures in American political history, The Impeachment of Governor Sulzer explores legal, moral, and political issues that continue to this day, including pervasive questions about money and politics.
A longtime political insider, Matthew L. Lifflander began his career in Albany as assistant counsel to Governor W. Averell Harriman, where he first became acquainted with the story of Governor William Sulzer. As special counsel to the speaker of the New York State Assembly, he drafted laws that enhanced state tourism as a vital economic development program, including the world-famous "I Love NY" campaign. He was also instrumental in drafting the state's campaign finance reform legislation, and has served as finance chairman of the New York State Democratic Party, headed New York State fundraising for Democratic presidential candidates, and managed presidential and gubernatorial campaigns in New York State. He is currently counsel for SNR Denton US, LLP, and resides in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
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Truckin' with Sam
A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rockin' and Rollin', On the Road
by Lee Gutkind
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A father and son travel across North America in a pick-up truck-talking, laughing, fighting, and bonding.
After years of thinking he'd never have kids, Lee Gutkind became a father at forty-seven and, following his divorce, soon found himself taking over more and more of the primary care responsibilities for his son, Sam. As one of a growing number of "old new dads" (recent studies have shown that one in ten children are born to fathers over forty), Gutkind realized that he faced challenges-both mental and physical-not faced by younger dads, not the least of which was how to bond with a son who was so much younger than himself. For the past five years, Gutkind's approach to this challenge has been to spend several weeks of every summer "truckin'" with Sam, a term they define as a metaphor for spontaneity, a lack of restriction: "Truckin' means that you can what you want to do sometimes; you don't always need to do what's expected."
What began as long, cross-country journeys in a pick-up truck, including one memorable trip up the Alaska-Canadian Highway en route to a writer's conference in Homer, Alaska, have in more recent years ranged farther afield, to Europe, Australia, and Tibet. Whether listening to rock and roll music, entertaining themselves with their secret jokes and code words, fishing for halibut, or fighting over tuna fish sandwiches and how best to butter one's toast, Lee and Sam have learned to respect one another. In the process of their travels and their adventures, Lee has also come to grips with the downside of middle age and the embarrassment of "senior moments," while Sam has inevitably begun to assert himself and shape his own life. Interspersed with Sam's own observations and journal entries, Truckin' with Sam is an honest, moving, and often hilarious account of one father's determination to bond with his son, a spontaneous travelogue that will appeal to old dads, new dads, and women who want to know more about how dads (and sons) think and behave.
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Grain Dust Dreams
by David W. Tarbet
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Explores the history and present-day reality of grain elevators on the Great Lakes.
Grain Dust Dreams tells the story of terminal grain elevators-concrete colossi that stand in the middle of a deep river of grain that they lift, sort, and send on. From their invention in Buffalo, New York, through their present-day operation in Thunder Bay, Ontario, David W. Tarbet examines the difficulties and dangers of working in a grain elevator-showing how they operate and describing the effects that the grain trade has on the lives of individuals and cities.
As Tarbet shows, the impact of these impressive concrete structures even extends beyond their working lives. Buildings that were created for a commercial purpose had a surprising and unintended cultural consequence. European modernist architects were taken by the size and elegance of American concrete elevators and used them as models for a revolution in architecture. When the St. Lawrence Seaway made it possible for large ships to bypass Buffalo, many Buffalo elevators were abandoned. Tarbet describes how these empty elevators are now being transformed into centers for artistic and athletic performance, and into a hub for technical innovation. Buffalo has found a way to incorporate its unused elevators into the life of the city long after the grain dust from them has ceased to fly.
David W. Tarbet is a retired attorney who lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.
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Tales of an Ecotourist
What Travel to Wild Places Can Teach Us about Climate Change
by Mike Gunter
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Combining humor and memorable anecdotes, five famous ecotourist destinations offer a breathtaking backdrop to better understanding climate change.
Crossing the far corners of the globe, Tales of an Ecotourist showcases travel, from the hot and humid Amazon jungle to the frozen but dry Antarctic, as a simple yet spellbinding lens to better understand the complex issue of climate change. At its core, climate change is an issue few truly understand, in large part due to its dizzying array of scientific, economic, cultural, social, and political variables.
Using both keen humor and memorable anecdotes, while weaving respected scientific studies along the way, Mike Gunter Jr. transports the reader to five famous ecodestinations, from the Galapagos Islands to the Great Barrier Reef, revealing firsthand the increasing threats of climate change. Part travelogue, part current events exposé, with a healthy dose of history, ecology, and politics, these tales of ecoadventure tackle such obstacles head on while fleshing out much-needed personal context to perhaps society's greatest threat of all.
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Breaching Jericho's Walls
A Twentieth-Century African American Life
by Allen B. Ballard
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
An award-winning African-American historian and novelist takes the reader on an exciting journey from a segregated Philadephia childhood in the 1930's to mid-century Paris, Moscow, Cambridge, and Manhattan.
A rich narrative recounting the life story of award-winning African American historian and novelist Allen B. Ballard, Breaching Jericho's Walls takes its readers on an exciting journey from a segregated Philadelphia community in the 1930s to mid-century Paris, Moscow, Cambridge, and Manhattan. The author reflects on his own pioneering role as he expands his horizons, as one of the first African American students at Ohio's Kenyon College, studying abroad in France and sharing a café table with Richard Wright and James Baldwin, serving in the military in the American South and attending graduate school at Harvard University. Becoming one of the nation's first black Russian specialists, Ballard studies in post-Stalinist Russia for a year, where, among other adventures, he spends a month with Michael Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, on a Soviet farm. Though he tells his own personal story within Breaching Jericho's Walls, Ballard also portrays the experiences of those northern African-Americans whose generations bridged the gap from the legacy of slavery to the breakdown of the segregated system in the 1950s and 1960s while revealing the crucial role that individuals like civil rights leader Paul Robeson, Olympic athletes Jesse Owens and Long John Woodruff, and scholar Alain Locke played in inspiring the hopes of an oppressed and downtrodden race. A memoir filled with entertaining anecdotes and insightful reflection, Breaching Jericho's Walls offers Ballard's compelling personal story and reveals how, brick by brick, African Americans built the road that led to the election of President Obama in 2008.
Allen B. Ballard is Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University at Albany—SUNY and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at City College of New York. His previously published works include two books of nonfiction, The Education of Black Folk: The Afro-American Struggle for Knowledge in White America and One More Day's Journey: The Story of a Family and a People; and two novels, Where I'm Bound, a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year and Carried by Six, winner of the "Honor Book Prize" in Afro-American Literature from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
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Hell Gate
A Nexus of New York City's East River
by Michael Nichols
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Depicts a man's exploration of the landscape, history, and toponymy of Hell Gate, a notorious stretch of water in New York City's East River.
Part history and part memoir, Hell Gate tells of a man's excursions along and through Hell Gate, a narrow stretch of water in New York City's East River, notorious for dangerous currents, shipwrecks, and its melancholic islands and rocks. Drawn to the area by his fascination with its name-from the Dutch Hellegat, translated into English as both "bright passage" and "hellhole"-what begins as a set of casual walks for Michael Nichols becomes an exploration of landscape and history as he traces these idyllic and hellish images in an attempt to discover Hell Gate's hidden character and the meaning of its elusive name. Using a loosely constructed set of sketches organized as a kind of tour along the edge of the river and then from a rowboat in the river, Nichols describes scenes and events as they present themselves, mixing history and lore with contemporary scenes.
Michael Nichols lives in Manhattan. This is his first book.
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The Stadium
Images and Voices of the Original Yankee Stadium
by Various Authors
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Photographs and recollections of one of baseball's most storied icons.
Through images and words, The Stadium brings to life the emotional and visual experience of the original Yankee Stadium, recalling a special time when children and their parents, joined by thousands of other fans, spent a joyful afternoon or evening together, watching their local heroes. Interspersed among photographer Jon Plasse's black-and-white images of the original Yankee Stadium are the recollections of individuals whose lives were intimately connected to the ballpark: an umpire, an usher, a beer vendor, a souvenir merchandiser, and a fan. Together, photographs and text combine to invoke a fan's memories of the sights and sounds of this beloved ballpark: waiting to buy tickets among throngs of fans, walking through dark cavernous hallways to the upper decks, seeing the dazzling outfield grass and the silky-smooth infield dirt, and listening to the roar of the crowd as the first batter steps up to the plate. The Stadium is a fitting tribute to one of baseball's most storied icons.
Jon Plasse is a fine arts photographer whose previous photography books are The Light Remains and Passing Moments. He lives in New York City.
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National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame
Celebrating 30 Years
by Lisa Schlansker Kolosek
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Explores the rich history, collections, and significance of the only museum in the United States dedicated solely to the art form of dance.
The only museum in the United States dedicated entirely to the art form of dance, the National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame opened in June 1987, after a short preview season the summer before. This unique and special place celebrates its thirtieth anniversary in 2017. To commemorate this milestone, Lisa Schlansker Kolosek has created a rich pictorial history tracing not only the museum's remarkable evolution but the relevance of the museum to the city of Saratoga Springs, New York.
Kolosek tells the story of the museum's origins, from its notable founders' grand idea to the selection and complete renovation of a historic 1920s bath house as its home. Combining a complete survey of exhibitions presented by the museum and the incredible history of the Hall of Fame, which recognizes dance luminaries across multiple genres, this book offers an in-depth look at the museum's expansive collection of costumes, visual art, and archival materials. The book also covers the history of the museum's Lewis A. Swyer Studios and School of the Arts, a leader in dance education. Beautifully illustrated with more than four hundred photographs, this book pays tribute to the immense impact of the National Museum of Dance and Hall of Fame.
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Grand Isle
A Novel
by Sarah Van Arsdale
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A river is a body of moving water. River water comes from sources that include glaciers, springs, and precipitation. Learn more in Rivers, part of the Aquatic Ecosystems series.
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An Extraordinary Ordinary Woman
The Journal of Phebe Orvis, 1820-1830
by Susan M. Ouellette
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A rare nineteenth-century journal of an everyday woman richly infused with the minutiae of antebellum daily life and work.
In 1820, Phebe Orvis began a journal that she faithfully kept for a decade. Richly detailed, her diary captures not only the everyday life of an ordinary woman in early nineteenth-century Vermont and New York, but also the unusual happenings of her family, neighborhood, and beyond. The journal entries trace Orvis's transition from single life to marriage and motherhood, including her time at the Middlebury Female Seminary and her observations about the changing social and economic environment of the period. A Quaker, Orvis also recorded the details of the waxing passion of the Second Great Awakening in the people around her, as well as the conflict the fervor caused within her own family.
In the first section of the book, Susan M. Ouellette includes a series of essays that illuminate Orvis's diary entries and broaden the social landscape she inhabited. These essays focus on Orvis and, more importantly, the experience of ordinary people as they navigated the new nation, the new century, and the emerging American society and culture. The second section is a transcript of the original journal. This combination of analytical essays and primary source material offers readers a unique perspective of domestic life in northern New England as well as upstate New York in the early nineteenth century.
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From Binghamton to the Battlefield
The Civil War Letters of Rollin B. Truesdell
by Amy J. Truesdell
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
From Binghamton to the Battlefield draws the reader alongside Rollin B. Truesdell, a prolific letter-writer and an early enlistee in the 27th NY Volunteers, an infantry regiment that was one of the first to form and that was in the thick of some of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War. Rollin vividly described his day-to-day life as a soldier in such clashes as Gaines' Mill, Crampton's Gap, and Antietam, and in the camps where soldiers were tormented by disease as well as the slow passage of time. Rollin's letters shine a light on the unbreakable bonds of comradeship borne of shared war experience even as he clearly ached for home and family. Through his own words and additional supporting context about the military and political environment within which Rollin soldiered, this book chronicles events from the day Rollin mustered into service as an eager recruit until the day he returned home a war-weary, battle-tested veteran disillusioned by the unseemly political machinations of war, yet steadfast in his commitment to victory for the North.
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Stories, Streets, and Saints
Photographs and Oral Histories from Boston's North End
by Anthony V. Riccio
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Stories, Streets, and Saints documents the history of an important Italian American neighborhood, Boston's North End, from the age of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century to the era of neighborhood upheaval in the "New Boston" of the 1980s. Drawing on years of fieldwork, on-site photography, and scholarly research, Anthony V. Riccio records, translates, and transcribes compelling oral histories of elderly Italian American storytellers who weave social history in their unique village idiom, providing an intimate look at daily life in an Italian American neighborhood. Testimonies of post-Unification southern Italy reconstruct the dire social and economic conditions that caused millions to pursue the promise of America. Rare firsthand stories of the Spanish Flu offer timely narratives in the wake of COVID-19, and eyewitness descriptions reconstruct the horrific Molasses Explosion of 1919. Riccio's own photographs from 1979 to1983, along with images from old family albums, illustrate these oral histories, creating a lasting record of the experiences of Italian Americans, who, like many other ethnic groups, contributed mightily to the building of America.
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Angry Rain
A Brief Memoir
by Maurice Kenny
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Reveals the development of Maurice Kenny's growing artistic consciousness, while attesting to both the beauty and brutality of the world in which he lived.
Maurice Kenny's career as a writer, teacher, publisher, and storyteller spanned more than six decades, during which he published over thirty books and became one of the most prominent voices in American poetry. From the early 1970s onward, he was instrumental in the resurgence of Native American literature through both his celebrated volumes of poetry, such as I Am the Sun and the award-winning The Mama Poems, and his work as an editor and publisher.
Angry Rain, his bittersweet memoir, reveals this rich literary life by recounting its tumultuous "first half...plus a bit," a time during which he moved through a series of worlds that all left their marks on him. Kenny begins with his early years spent among his family in the small northern New York city of Watertown and continues through an adolescence marked by both significant awakenings and grievous traumas. Determined, Kenny sets out to seek his fortunes and find his poetic voice, landing in the Jim Crow-era South, in St. Louis, in Indiana, and finally in New York City, where he becomes part of a motley creative group of performers and poets that offers both fascinating inspiration and disheartening rejection. These recollections end with Kenny's maturation into a poet whose reaffirmed indigenous heritage unified an artistic vision that remained in conversation with a wide range of other themes and traditions until his death in 2016.
Maurice Kenny (1929—2016) was a Writer-in-Residence Emeritus at the State University of New York at Potsdam and the author of many books, including Tekonwatonti/Molly Brant: Poems of War. He was inducted into the New York State Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014.
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Adriaen van der Donck
A Dutch Rebel in Seventeenth-Century America
by J. Van den Hout
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The first comprehensive biography of an important yet understudied figure in the Dutch colony of New Netherland.
This book tells the compelling story of the young legal activist Adriaen van der Donck (1618—1655), whose fight to secure the struggling Dutch colony of New Netherland made him a controversial but pivotal figure in early America. At best, he has been labeled a hero, a visionary, and a spokesman of the people. At worst, he has been branded arrogant and selfish, thinking only of his own ambitions. The wide range of opinions about him testifies to the fact that, more than three centuries after his death, Van der Donck remains an intriguing character.
J. van den Hout follows Van der Donck from his war-torn seventeenth-century childhood and privileged university education to the New World, as he attempted to make his mark on the fledgling fur trading settlement. When he became embroiled in the politics of Manhattan, he took the colonists' complaints against their Dutch West India Company administrators to the highest level of government in the Dutch Republic, in what became a fight for his adopted homeland and a bicontinental showdown. Denounced and detained, but not deterred, Van der Donck wrote a landmark book that stands as a testament to his vision for the country, as the changes he set in motion continued long after his early death and his influence became firmly embedded in the American landscape. Van der Donck's determination to stand by his convictions offers a revealing look into the human spirit and the strong will that drives it against adversity and in search of justice.
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Somewhere in France
The World War I Letters and Journal of Private Frederick A. Kittleman
by Thomas J. Schaeper
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Previously unpublished letters and private journal provide an intimate view of World War I through the eyes of an ordinary soldier from western New York.
The United States entered World War I in April 1917, and by the end of the conflict, two million American soldiers were fighting on French soil. One of them was Private Frederick A. Kittleman, who was born in the small city of Olean in western New York. After being drafted in 1918, Kittleman was sent to France as a part of an artillery regiment. While overseas, he participated in several of the large battles in the final stages of the war, including the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. Throughout this time, he wrote regularly to his family.
In Somewhere in France, Thomas J. Schaeper transcribes these letters, which show a young man proud to join the army and excited about his adventures. The letters are contrasted with Kittleman's journal, which recounts the gritty details of battle that he shielded from his family in their correspondence. Schaeper provides detailed annotations of the journal and letters, which, together with a number of illustrations, paint a vivid picture of the experiences of a private in WWI, his opinion on America's participation in the final, bloody campaigns of the war, and the psychological and physical effects that the war had on him.
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Ghost Fleet Awakened
Lake George's Sunken Bateaux of 1758
by Joseph W. Zarzynski
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Chronicles the history and archaeological study of Lake George, New York's sunken bateaux of 1758.
In Ghost Fleet Awakened, Joseph W. Zarzynski reveals the untold story of a little-recognized sunken fleet of British warships, bateaux, from the French and Indian War (1755-1763). The story begins more than 250 years ago, when bateaux first plied the waters of Lake George, New York. Zarzynski enlightens readers with a history of these utilitarian vessels, considered the most important vessels that transported armies during eighteenth-century wars in North America, and includes their origins and uses. By infusing the book with underwater archaeology doctrine, Zarzynski shows the nautical significance of these colonial craft.
In the autumn of 1758, the British command at Lake George made a daring decision to deliberately sink two floating batteries (radeaux), some row galleys and whaleboats, a sloop, and 260 bateaux, thereby placing the warships into wet storage and protecting them from marauding French during the coming winter. In 1759, many submerged boats were raised but some were not. Then, in 1960, two divers rediscovered several sunken bateaux, dubbed the "Ghost Fleet." These shipwrecks were the focus of underwater archaeological investigations that provided archaeologists with opportunities to gain unprecedented insight into eighteenth-century lifeways. Zarzynski explores and explains shipwreck preservation techniques, the creation of shipwreck parks for scuba enthusiasts, and the many multifaceted programs developed by the nonprofit organization Bateaux Below to help protect these finite cultural treasures.
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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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Colonizing Southampton
The Transformation of a Long Island Community, 1870-1900
by David Goddard
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A study of the times and life in Southampton, New York between 1870 and 1900.
This book concerns the emergence and impact of the summer colony in the village of Southampton, New York, between the years 1870 and 1900, particularly the often fraught relations between the area's wealthy resort population and its year-round residents. Essentially a study in social change and conflict, the book revolves around a number of key issues that preoccupied inhabitants and summer residents alike and were the subject of great controversy at the time, including beach rights, oyster farming in Mecox Bay, and the loss of the Shinnecock Hills, first by the Native American inhabitants and then by the town itself to outside developers. Due consideration is given to those individuals who played major roles in these disputes. The book also explores salient and significant aspects of Southampton's early history insofar as they relate to the period in question.
David Goddard is a retired Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York and is the author of The Maidstone Links. He currently lives in Plattsburgh, New York.
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Farmingdale State College
A History
by Frank J. Cavaioli, Ph. D.
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Fascinating history of the oldest public college on Long Island.
Located on 380 acres on the Nassau-Suffolk border, Farmingdale State College (FSC) is the oldest public college on Long Island. In this fascinating and lavishly illustrated history, Frank J. Cavaioli chronicles the school's rich history from the time it was chartered in 1912 up to the present. He investigates the leadership of such important directors and presidents as Albert A. Johnson, Halsey B. Knapp, Charles W. Laffin Jr., and Frank A. Cipriani, and demonstrates how they motivated faculty to create progressive, innovative programs, and urged them to give service to the community. The school's original mission was to provide training in agricultural science, but over time it has transformed into a comprehensive college focused on applied science and technology with a strong humanities and social science component. Now a campus of the State University of New York with nearly seven thousand students, the story of FSC is unique, one that mirrors the transformation and growth of the surrounding Long Island community.
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The Interpreter
A Story of Two Worlds
by Robert Moss
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A visionary journey into the crucible in which America was born, a tale of love and war and of a master shaman who folds time to seek the key to the survival of his people.
A vivid narrative of the clash of cultures on the colonial New York frontier, The Interpreter tells the story of a master shaman and his twin apprentices-the Mohawk dreamer called Island Woman and the young immigrant Conrad Weiser-who become critical players in their two peoples' struggle for survival. Island Woman will grow to become mother of the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk nation and a revered atetshents (dream healer). Conrad, transported to North America with the Palatine German refugees from the wars in Europe, helps lead his people's rebellion against the abuses of colonial governors and magnates. Sent to live among the Mohawk, he learns their language and their dreamways, is able to build bridges between communities, and later rises to fame in Pennsylvania as an indispensable Indian interpreter.
In the Mohawk language, the word for interpreter, sakowennakarahtats, speaks of a person who can transplant something from one soil to grow in another. The Interpreter is such a book. Through its pages, we are able to find ourselves in another time, and in other worlds. We accompany the Four Indian Kings on their 1710 visit to London to see the Queen; they were not kings in their own matriarchal society, but they included Hendrick, the redoubtable warrior who later instructed Ben Franklin that he must urge the colonists to unite in a confederacy on the Iroquois model. We travel with Vanishing Smoke, the Bear dreamer, on his journey into the afterlife. And we learn, with Island Woman and Conrad, how we can travel across time as well as space in shamanic lucid dreaming, and guide souls to where they belong.
In his new preface, Robert Moss describes how his Cycle of the Iroquois-Fire Along the Sky, The Firekeeper, and The Interpreter-began with dreams and visions in which an ancient Iroquois arendiwanen (woman of power) insisted on teaching him in her own language, until he was obliged to learn it.
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Beauty in the City
The Ashcan School
by Robert A. Slayton
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
At the beginning of the twentieth century the Ashcan School of Art blazed onto the art scene, introducing a revolutionary vision of New York City. In contrast to the elite artists who painted the upper class bedecked in finery, in front of magnificent structures, or the progressive reformers who photographed the city as a slum, hopeless and full of despair, the Ashcan School held the unique belief that the industrial working-class city was a fit subject for great art. In Beauty in the City, Robert A. Slayton illustrates how these artists portrayed the working classes with respect and gloried in the drama of the subways and excavation sites, the office towers, and immigrant housing. Their art captured the emerging metropolis in all its facets, with its potent machinery and its class, ethnic, and gender issues. By exposing the realities of this new, modern America through their art-expressed in what they chose to draw, not in how they drew it-they created one of the great American art forms.
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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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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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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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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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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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The Italian Actress
A Novel
by Frank Lentricchia
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A has-been American filmmaker encounters love, cruelty, and death in Italy.
Set in Italy, Frank Lentricchia's sixth novel features a has-been Italian American filmmaker, once internationally acclaimed for the beauty of his images and his experiments in pornography but now stuck in prolonged creative drought. At an obscure film festival in Volterra he meets the aging but still stunning Claudia Cardinale, star of Fellini's 8½. She falls in love with him, but he resists, yet all the while wanting not to resist. Instead of remaining with Cardinale, he casts his lot with a perverse but compelling couple who convince him that he can regain his renown and achieve artistic immortality if he will only make a new film starring the two of them-an explicitly sexual film of shocking violence.
The Italian Actress is a meditation, by turns lyrical and bluntly brutal, on our obsession with celebrity, ambition, the cult of youthful beauty, romantic desire, the aging body, mortality, the power of the visual image, and underneath it all, the nature of visuality itself.
Frank Lentricchia is Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature at Duke University. He is the author or editor of many books of literary criticism and theory, as well as six novels, including The Music of the Inferno, Lucchesi and the Whale, and The Book of Ruth. A theatrical adaptation by Jody McAuliffe of The Italian Actress was performed to acclaim in Durham, North Carolina, in 2009.
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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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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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Fifty Years in Sing Sing
A Personal Account, 1879-1929
by Alfred Conyes
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A fascinating personal account of life at this infamous prison during a bygone era.
Written more than eighty years ago, Fifty Years in Sing Sing is the personal account of Alfred Conyes (1852—1931), who worked as a prison guard and then keeper at Sing Sing Prison in Ossining, New York, from 1879 to 1929. This unpublished memoir, dated 1930, was found among his granddaughter's estate by his great-granddaughter Penelope Kay Jarrett. Near the end of his life, Conyes told his story to family member Alfred Van Buren Jr., relating, in detail, harrowing and humorous accounts of what prison life was like from his perspective and how prison conditions changed over the course of a half century. The book covers prison hardship, cruel punishments deemed appropriate at the time, daring and clever escapes, the advent of death by electricity, Prohibition, doughboys, and prison reform.
Penelope Kay Jarrett is Biological Technician for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission and Education Coordinator at the Mound House in Fort Myers Beach, Florida.
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Sweet Solitude
New and Selected Poems
by Leonard A. Slade Jr.
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
New and selected poems on love, faith, and the African American experience.
Drawing deeply from the well of the African American experience, Leonard Slade's poetry addresses a wide variety of subjects and themes, from beauty, family, and nature to racism, religion, and politics. Running throughout, however, are the importance of love, faith, and the human need to be connected to others. Included in Sweet Solitude are new poems, previously uncollected in book form, as well as selections from the author's twelve volumes of previously published poetry. These are poems of celebration and endurance for all readers.
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Dancing With Ophelia
Reconnecting Madness, Creativity, and Love
by Jeanne Ellen Petrolle
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Uses real-life episodes of psychosis and recovery to show how poetic paradigms for thinking about psychiatric symptoms can enlarge contemporary understandings of mental illness and improve long-term treatment outcome.
"Twenty-two years ago, I lost my mind." So begins Jeanne Ellen Petrolle's fascinating personal narrative about her mental illness and recovery. Drawing on literature, art, and philosophy, Petrolle explores a unique understanding of madness that allowed her to achieve lasting mental health without using long-term psychiatric drugs.
Traditionally, Western literature, art, and philosophy have portrayed madness through six concepts created from myth-Escape into the Wild, Flight from a Scene of Terror, Visit to the Underworld, Dark Night of the Soul, Spiritual Passion, and Fire in the Mind. Rather than conceptualizing madness as "illness," a mythopoetic concept assumes that madness contains symbolic meaning and offers valuable insight into human concerns like love, desire, sex, adventure, work, fate, spirituality, and God. Madness becomes an experience that unleashes extraordinary creativity by generating the spiritual insight that fuels artistic productivity and personal transformation. By weaving her personal experiences with the life stories and work of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and modernist novelist Djuna Barnes, Petrolle shows how poetic thinking about severe mental distress can complement strategies for managing mental illness. This approach allowed her, and hopefully others, to produce better long-term treatment outcomes.
Jeanne Ellen Petrolle is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Columbia College Chicago and the author of Religion without Belief: Contemporary Allegory and the Search for Postmodern Faith, also published by SUNY Press.
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Still in the Hamptons
More Tales of the Rich, the Famous, and the Rest of Us
by Dan Rattiner
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
More encounters with sometimes rich, sometimes famous, but always quirky residents of the Hamptons, by the editor and publishers of Dan's Papers.
Yes, Dan Rattiner is still in the Hamptons, and after fifty-plus years on the eastern end of Long Island, most of them as publisher of the region's free weekly newspaper, Dan's Papers, he still has a lot of stories to tell. Here, offered in his signature dry, observant, and self-deprecating wit, are Rattiner's further encounters with the billionaires and celebrities, the farmers and fishermen, the eccentric artists and ordinary folks, who together make the Hamptons one of the most fashionable, exclusive, and entertaining communities in the United States. As Tom Wolfe once noted, "If a guy says it happened in the Hamptons, and Dan Rattiner doesn't know about it, it didn't."
The people he writes about are presented in chronological order from 1959 to today, just as Rattiner lived it and has remembered it. Still in the Hamptons will help you understand what the Hamptons used to be and what it has become, and will provide an entertaining read along the way.
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Endtimes?
Crises and Turmoil at the New York Times
by Daniel R. Schwarz
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A groundbreaking study of ten difficult years in the life of America's most important newspaper.
From false stories about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to growing competition from online and twenty-four-hour cable news, the first decade of the twenty-first century was not particularly kind to the New York Times. In this groundbreaking study of the recent life and times of America's most important newspaper, Daniel R. Schwarz describes the transformation of the Times as it has confronted not only its various scandals and embarrassments but also the rapid rise of the internet and blogosphere, the ensuing decline in circulation and print advertising, and the change in what contemporary readers want and how they want to get it.
Drawing on more than forty one-on-one interviews with past and present editors (including every living executive editor), senior figures on the business and financial side, and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Schwarz discusses virtually every aspect of the contemporary Times, from columnists to cultural coverage. He explains how, in response to continuous online updating and twenty-four-hour all-news radio and television, the Times has become much more like a daily magazine than a traditional newspaper, with increased analysis (as opposed to reporting) of the news as well as value-added features on health, travel, investing, and food.
After carefully tracing the rise of the Times's website, Schwarz asks whether the Times can survive as a print newspaper, whether it can find a business model to support its vast print and online newsgathering operation, and whether the Sulzberger family can survive as controlling owners. He also asks whether the Times, in its desperate effort to survive, has abandoned its quality standards by publishing what he calls "Timeslite" and "Timestrash."
Writing as a skeptical outsider and devoted lifelong reader, Schwarz concludes that the Times is the worst newspaper in the world-except for all the others. End times? is a must-read for Times readers as well as anyone interested in the radical change in print and broadcast media in the rapidly evolving Internet Age.
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The Journal of Ann McMath
An Orphan in a New York Parsonage in the 1850s
by Ann McMath
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
An account of an ordinary young woman coming of age in the "Burned-Over District" of Western New York during the Second Great Awakening.
In 1851, fourteen-year-old orphan Ann McMath was sent to live with her uncle and his family in their parsonage in Horseheads, New York. Lonely and full of self-doubt, anxious to establish female friendships in a new place, and questing for intellectual and moral perfection, she began keeping journal when she was seventeen and wrote in it regularly for the next five years, until she was married. A fascinating example of "biography from below," McMath's journal offers a rare glimpse of of life in the 1850s as it was lived by ordinary women, told in the authentic voice of a young woman coming of age in the Burned-Over District of Western New York. In addition to the journal itself, the book includes an introduction by editor C. Stewart Doty, as well as a geneaology, notes on the text, and a section entitled "People in the Life of Ann McMath," which gives brief biographies of everyone mentioned in the journal.
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The Prophet of Tenth Street
A Novel
by Tsipi Keller
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A literary love story.
In this literary love story, Marcus Weiss, a loyal denizen of New York City, retires at age fifty to work on a dictionary he has grandly titled "The Human Gesture in Western Literature." Comparing himself to Flaubert, who read fifteen hundred books in order to compose his Bouvard and Pécuchet-Marcus immerses himself in literature, culling quotations and passages for his dictionary and treating his friends to impromptu readings of the "pearls" he finds, all the while lecturing them about the emptiness and futility of consumerism. His lover, Gina, and his best friend, Oscar, do their best to indulge him, but when they've had enough, they poke fun at this modern-day "prophet." One day, while Marcus is at work in his warm and secluded study, an old man invades his imagination, and Marcus, enchanted, allows the old man entry and begins to write his biography. Soon, time distinctions blur: does Marcus, as he looks far into the future, imagine himself as an old man, living alone with his books, or is the old man the actual Marcus, now eighty years old, looking back and recounting a time in his life when his dear ones-Gina, Oscar, and all his other contemporaries-were still living?
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Hudson River Towns
Highlights from the Capital Region to Sleepy Hollow Country
by Joanne Michaels
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A captivating journey, in words and photographs, through the cities, towns, and villages of the Hudson Valley.
The cities, towns, and villages along the banks of the Hudson River are the lifeblood of a region bursting with historic sites, cultural attractions, and natural beauty. Hudson River Towns pairs the spectacular work of renowned Hudson Valley photographer Hardie Truesdale with the vivid descriptions of Joanne Michaels, one of the region's most experienced travel writers. Together they document, in words and photographs, the dynamic nature of the river's population centers, offering readers a captivating personal journey down the Hudson River.
Although Main Street continues to struggle across America, there has been a movement afoot in the Hudson Valley to support local enterprise, and many of the region's communities are currently enjoying a renaissance. Newburgh, for instance, has a beautiful waterfront and a new crop of businesses emerging in the inner city. Poughkeepsie's "Walkway Over the Hudson" has drawn thousands of visitors since its opening in 2009, turning the city's Mount Carmel neighborhood, once a sleepy Italian enclave, into a tourist destination. And Kingston was recently named one of the top ten most desirable-and affordable-cities in America for artists. Festivals, parks, and recreational activities are part of the fabric of contemporary Hudson Valley life, and they are represented in these pages as well.
The journey begins in the Upper Hudson River region, stopping in Albany, Coxsackie, Athens, Hudson, and Catskill; continues through the Mid-Hudson River region, featuring Saugerties, Kingston, Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Beacon, Cold Spring, and Garrison; and culminates in the Lower Hudson River towns of Peekskill, Nyack, Tarrytown, and Piermont. With more than 120 full-color photographs that lavishly display the dramatic faces of these cities, towns, and villages, Hudson River Towns reveals a dimension of the region unseen by most travelers and local residents, who will be inspired to think differently about their surroundings after taking this armchair journey through one of America's most beautiful and historic regions.
Hardie Truesdale's photography has been represented by galleries throughout the country. National Geographic Books, the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the Mohonk Preserve, and the Nature Conservancy have all featured his work. His previous books are Hudson River Journey: Images from Lake Tear of the Clouds to New York Harbor and Adirondack High: Images of America's First Wilderness, both with Joanne Michaels. He lives in Gardiner, New York. Joanne Michaels is the author of many books, including Hudson River Valley Farms: The People and the Pride behind the Produce; The Hudson Valley and Catskill Mountains: An Explorer's Guide, Seventh Edition; and Let's Take the Kids! Great Places to Go in New York's Hudson Valley, Third Edition. The former editor-in-chief of Hudson Valley magazine, she lives in Woodstock, New York.
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Clear Skies, Deep Water
A Chautauqua Memoir
by Beth Peyton
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A memoir about loss, restoration, and finding home on a lake in western New York.
After a year of devastating personal and financial loss, Beth Peyton and her husband, Jeff, moved to the hamlet of Maple Springs, New York, on Chautauqua Lake to pick up the pieces of their lives, certain to be in a place that they loved and certain of nothing else. As they worked to restore a neglected old house, the community, the beauty of the lake, and the old-fashioned sensibility of the place comforted them. While Peyton's story traces the couple's progress toward recovery, it also includes tales of the silly, colorful, and warm characters who became their neighbors and friends. Whether it's the mystery of Emil and Betty's lost blue plate, dead bodies in the water, or memories of karaoke at the Village Casino, Clear Skies, Deep Water is a testament to the healing power of rituals, friendships, the beauty of the natural world, and the possibility of grace. Filled with nostalgia about an America that has slipped, or is slipping away, it will resonate with anyone who has searched for meaning and home.
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Water Drops
Celebrating the Wonder of Water
by Peter E. Black
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
An introduction to our most precious natural resource.
In this engaging book, hydrologist Peter E. Black celebrates the wonder of our planet's most precious natural resource. In these brief, nontechnical essays, readers are introduced to water's unique scientific properties, the vital role it plays in Earth's ecology and ecosystems, and the impact it has had on human history, culture, art, law, and economics. At turns educational and inspirational, humorous and reverent, the book also sounds a cautionary note: water is abundant, but it is also scarce. Only three percent of the earth's water is fresh, and only a small percentage of that fresh water is available for human use and consumption. Therefore, it must be managed carefully, and understood, lest we find ourselves with too little, too late.
Peter E. Black is Distinguished Teaching Professor of Water and Related Land Resources, Emeritus, at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. His previous books include Watershed Hydrology, Second Edition (with Brian L. Fisher) and Conservation of Water and Related Land Resources, Third Edition. He lives in Syracuse, New York.
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Flight Paths
A Field Journal of Hope, Heartbreak, and Miracles with New York's Bird People
by Darryl McGrath
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
How a small group of New York biologists brought the peregrine falcon and bald eagle back from the brink of extinction.
In the late 1970s, the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon were heading toward extinction, victims of the combined threats of DDT, habitat loss, and lax regulation. Flight Paths tells the story of how a small group of New York biologists raced against nature's clock to bring these two beloved birds back from the brink in record-setting numbers.
In a narrative that reads like a suspense tale, Darryl McGrath documents both rescue projects in never-before-published detail. At Cornell University, a team of scientists worked to crack the problem of how to breed peregrine falcons in captivity and then restore them to the wild. Meanwhile, two young, untested biologists tackled the overwhelming assignment of rebuilding the bald eagle population from the state's last nesting pair, one of whom (the female) was sterile.
McGrath interweaves this dramatic retelling with contemporary accounts of four at-risk species: the short-eared owl, the common loon, the Bicknell's thrush, and the piping plover. She worked alongside biologists as they studied these elusive subjects in the Northeast's most remote regions, and the result is a story that combines vivid narrative with accessible science and is as much a tribute to these experts as it is a call to action for threatened birds.
Readers are taken to a snow-covered meadow as an owl hunts her prey, a loon family's secluded pond, an eagle nest above the Hudson River, and a mountaintop at dusk in search of the Bicknell's thrush, one of the planet's rarest birds. Combining a little-known chapter of New York's natural history with a deeply personal account of a lifelong devotion to birds, Flight Paths is not only a story of our rapidly changing environment and a tribute to some of New York's most heroic biologists, but also a captivating read for anyone who has ever thrilled to the sight of a rare bird.
Darryl McGrath is a journalist living in Albany, New York. She has written about upstate New York's environment and rural regions for over twenty years and has won numerous awards for her reporting from the New York Press Association, the New York Associated Press Association, and the Society of Professional Journalists.
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Here, Everything Is Dreaming
Poems and Stories
by Robert Moss
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Poems and stories that stream directly from dreams and shamanic adventures in the world-behind-the-world.
Our earliest poets were shamans. Today as in the earliest times, true shamans are poets of consciousness who know the power of song and story to teach and to heal. They understand that the right words open pathways between the worlds and draw closer the gods and goddesses who wish to live through us.
Robert Moss brings this ancient bardic tradition to life in this collection of poems and stories that stream directly from dreams and shamanic adventures in the world-behind-the-world. You'll be carried into a reality where everything is alive and conscious, where tigers and bears can lend you their forms and raven and hawk can give you their sight, where the ancestors are talking, talking, and the gates to the Otherworld open from wherever you are.
You'll awaken, through these pages, to how shamans use poetic speech to call the soul back home, into the bodies of those who have lost vital energy through pain or trauma or heartbreak. You'll travel to the Island of No Pain where lost boys and girls are kept safe. And you'll learn to make the return journey, and sing the lost soul back into the body where it belongs.
Robert Moss is a novelist, poet, historian, and lifelong dream explorer. For many years he has taught and practiced Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanic techniques. His many books include Conscious Dreaming: A Spiritual Path for Everyday Life; Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination, and Life Beyond Death; The Three "Only" Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination; and The Secret History of Dreaming. His novels include the three-volume Cycle of the Iroquois-The Firekeeper; Fire Along the Sky; and The Interpreter. He lives in upstate New York.
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Over a Barrel
The Rise and Fall of New York's Taylor Wine Company
by Thomas Pellechia
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
How a small family company in the Finger Lakes became one of the most important wine producers in the United States, only to be taken down by corporate greed and mismanagement.
In 1880, Walter Stephen Taylor, a cooper's son, started a commercial grape juice company in New York's Finger Lakes region. Two years later, wine production was added, and by the 1920s, the Taylor Wine Company was firmly established. Walter Taylor's three sons carefully guided the company through Prohibition and beyond, making it the most important winery in the Northeast and profoundly affecting the people and community of Hammondsport, where the company was headquartered.
In the 1960s, the Taylor family took the company public. Ranked sixth in domestic wine production and ripe for corporate takeover, the company was sold to Coca-Cola in 1977. Three more changes of corporate ownership followed until, in 1995, this once-dynamic and important wine producer was obliterated, tearing apart the local economy and changing a way of life that had lasted for nearly a century.
Drawing on archival research as well as interviews with many of the principal players, Thomas Pellechia skillfully traces the economic dynamism of the Finger Lakes wine region, the passion and ingenuity of the Taylor family, and the shortsighted corporate takeover scenario that took down a once-proud American family company. In addition to providing important lessons for business innovators, Over a Barrel>/i> is a cautionary tale for a wine region that is repeating its formative history.
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Delicious December
How the Dutch Brought Us Santa, Presents, and Treats: A Holiday Cookbook
by Peter G. Rose
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Food and history combine in this exploration of the Dutch influence on American holiday traditions. Includes more than one hundred easy-to-make holiday recipes.
Delicious December mixes food and history in a celebration of Dutch and American Christmas traditions. In more than one hundred tried-and-true recipes, award-winning food historian Peter G. Rose draws on traditions that date back to the Middle Ages, as well as her own reminiscences of her native country, and suggests many ways to incorporate these true Dutch treats into American celebrations.
The book not only talks about the history and recipes of St. Nicholas Day celebrations, but also about Dutch specialties for Christmas and New Year's. Rose includes recipes for savory cookies and party treats as well as menus and recipes for the parties that might happen between the feast days. Divided into two parts, part one discusses the history of St. Nicholas, how he was brought to America and became Santa, and the other changes that have taken place here as well as in the Netherlands. The second part consists of 111 recipes that are easy to make and easy to love.
Delicious December is for anyone interested in food and history, and those of Dutch descent will find many old favorites here, together with new, fresh ideas based on long traditions.
Peter G. Rose has published numerous articles and books on Dutch, Dutch American, and Hudson Valley cuisine, including Summer Pleasures, Winter Pleasures: A Hudson Valley Cookbook, also published by SUNY Press; Food, Drink and Celebrations of the Hudson Valley Dutch; The Sensible Cook: Dutch Foodways in the Old and the New World; and Foods of the Hudson: A Seasonal Sampling of the Region's Bounty. She is the coauthor (with Donna R. Barnes) of both Matters of Taste: Food and Drink in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art and Life and Childhood Pleasures: Dutch Children in the Seventeenth Century. In 2002 she was the recipient of the Alice P. Kenney Award for research and writing on the food customs and diet of the Dutch settlers in New Netherland. She lives in South Salem, New York.
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Mr. New York
Lew Rudin and His Love for the City
by Seymour P. Lachman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The life and times of an instrumental figure in New York City's recovery from the fiscal and social crises of the 1970s and 1980s, and in the general revitalization of the city over two generations.
Lew Rudin was one of New York City's most influential power brokers in the latter part of the twentieth century, but he was also one of its most indefatigable boosters. Born in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx on April 4, 1927, Rudin rose to become cochairman, with his brother, Jack, of one of New York's oldest real estate dynasties, Rudin Management. It is for his civic involvement, however, that he is best remembered. Whether helping to get the New York City Marathon off the ground, or rallying corporate and labor leaders to come to the city's aid during the fiscal crises of the 1970s, Rudin worked tirelessly on behalf of the city he loved. The Association for a Better New York, which he founded in 1971 in response to growing concerns about the city's decline, continues to play a vital role in virtually every area of municipal life, from transportation to education.
In Mr. New York, Seymour P. Lachman chronicles Rudin's life and interesting times, and his love affair with the city he never ceased to believe in. Drawing on published materials as well as personal interviews with family members, business associates, and federal, state, and city officials, Lachman paints a portrait of a man who, by the time of his death in 2001, had truly earned the nickname "Mr. New York."
Seymour P. Lachman served as President of the New York City Board of Education and University Dean of the City University of New York before being elected to the New York State Senate, where he served five terms. With Robert Polner, he is the author of The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975 (also published by SUNY Press) and Three Men in a Room: The Inside Story of Power and Betrayal in an American Statehouse. He is currently Dean of the Hugh L. Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College, Staten Island, where he is also a Distinguished University Professor of Government in Residence.
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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.