Excelsior Editions
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Knickerbocker Commodore
The Life and Times of John Drake Sloat, 1781-1867
by Bruce A. Castleman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Knickerbocker Commodore chronicles the life of Rear Admiral John Drake Sloat, an important but understudied naval figure in US history. Born and raised by a slave-owning gentry family in New York's Hudson Valley, Sloat moved to New York City at age nineteen. Bruce A. Castleman explores Sloat's forty-five-year career in the Navy, from his initial appointment as midshipman in the conflicts with revolutionary France to his service as commodore during the country's war with Mexico. As the commodore in command of the naval forces in the Pacific, Sloat occupied Monterey and declared the annexation of California in July 1846, controversial actions criticized by some and defended by others. More than a biography of one man, this book illustrates the evolution of the peacetime Navy as an institution and its conversion from sail to steam. Using shipping news and Customs Service records from Sloat's merchant voyages, Castleman offers a rare and insightful perspective on American maritime history.
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Signs of Distinction
The History of New York State as Told by 51 Welcome Signs
by Chuck D'Imperio
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Across New York State, small towns and big cities alike have stories to tell. A unique travel guide for history buffs, Signs of Distinction delves into the varied stories revealed on town welcome signs. Welcome signs in every corner of the state beckon visitors, urging you to stop and explore. After all, who could resist stopping in a village that declares itself, "The Birthplace of Jell-O?" Similarly, the town that calls itself, "The Bandstand of the Finger Lakes," makes you want to dance! Fifty-one stories-each accompanied by a photograph of the welcome sign-share the history of these communities and their unique attributes. History lovers, road warriors, and folks who love trivia will enjoy reading about these New York towns and the stories behind their welcome signs.
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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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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 Spirit of Sacrifice
New York State in the First World War
by Aaron Noble
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Focuses on the posters of World War I as a medium to interpret the tremendous role played by New York State and its citizens in the war effort.
"New York's pride is the pride of things done. Her leadership is no more due to her great wealth or her large population than to the patriotism of her citizens and the uses to which her wealth is put. In every war in which this country has engaged, she has shown a spirit of sacrifice that has made her preeminent among the States."
It was with these words that New York State Governor Charles S. Whitman urged his fellow New Yorkers to purchase Liberty Bonds in support of the war effort on April 6, 1918. He reminded New Yorkers and the nation that the Empire State once again led all others in the numbers of men, the amount of money, and the tonnage of material supplied to American forces during World War I.
A companion catalog to the New York State Museum exhibition of the same name, A Spirit of Sacrifice documents the statewide story of New York in World War I through the collections of the State's Office of Cultural Education comprised of the New York State Museum, Library, and Archives. Within these world-class collections are the nearly 3,600 posters of the Benjamin W. Arnold World War I Poster Collection at the New York State Library. By interweaving the story of New York in the Great War and utilizing the tremendous artifacts within the pictorial history revealed by the posters of the era and primary source documentation, this exhibition catalog serves as both a display of poster art and a more comprehensive examination of the primacy of the state's contributions to America's foray into World War I. Posters and objects from museums, libraries, and historical societies from across New York State as well as iconic artifacts and images are all included here. Brought together they tell the story of New York State's essential role in the First World War.
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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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Bungalow Kid
A Catskill Mountain Summer
by Philip Ratzer
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Vividly and lovingly recreates a city kid's summer in the Catskills in the 1950s.
The year is 1958. Philip, a twelve-year-old kid from the Bronx, is getting ready for his family's annual trip upstate, where he'll spend the summer in a bungalow colony in the tiny village of Loch Sheldrake, New York, a faraway fairyland of mountains, lakes, starry nights, and dewy mornings. With his colony friends, he'll explore the woods and fields, have an array of adventures, and even experience the special charm of a childhood summer romance. It was a time and place of wonderful memories wistfully looked back upon fifty years later, and lovingly recalled in Philip Ratzer's memoir. What young Philip didn't know was that there would never be another summer like this one.
He was not alone. In the 1950s, about two thousand bungalow colonies dotted the countryside of Sullivan and Ulster counties, catering to an estimated one million people a year who spent all or part of their summer in "The Mountains." Among them were countless kids like Philip, who today carry with them the fondest of memories and a nostalgic longing for a precious moment in time that can never be equaled. Today, they find themselves returning to the country, seeking out the places where they stayed so long ago, only to find that the world has changed a lot in fifty years, and time has a way of erasing all evidence of a world that used to be. Bungalow Kid vividly recreates what it was like to be a city kid in the Catskills in the 1950s, and reaches out to all those kids, now grown, who would very much like to go back.
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Ingenious Machinists
Two Inventive Lives from the American Industrial Revolution
by Anthony J. Connors
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Uses the stories of two inventors who took different paths to examine the early industrial revolution in New York and New England.
Ingenious Machinists recounts the early development of industrialization in New England and New York through the lives of two prominent innovators whose work advanced the transformation to factory work and corporations, the rise of the middle class, and other momentous changes in nineteenth-century America.
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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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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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Inside Ocean Hill–Brownsville
A Teacher's Education, 1968-69
by Charles S. Isaacs
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The story of an Ocean Hill—Brownsville teacher who crossed picket lines during the racially charged New York City teachers' strike of 1968.
In 1968 the conflict that erupted over community control of the New York City public schools was centered in the black and Puerto Rican community of Ocean Hill—Brownsville. It triggered what remains the longest teachers' strike in US history. That clash, between the city's communities of color and the white, predominantly Jewish teachers' union, paralyzed the nation's largest school system, undermined the city's economy, and heightened racial tensions, ultimately transforming the national conversation about race relations.
At age twenty-two, when the strike was imminent, Charles S. Isaacs abandoned his full scholarship to a prestigious law school to teach mathematics in Ocean Hill—Brownsville. Despite his Jewish background and pro-union leanings, Isaacs crossed picket lines manned by teachers who looked like him, and took the side of parents and children who did not. He now tells the story of this conflict, not only from inside the experimental, community-controlled Ocean Hill—Brownsville district, its focal point, but from within ground zero itself: Junior High School 271, which became the nation's most famous, or infamous, public school. Isaacs brings to life the innovative teaching practices that community control made possible, and the relationships that developed in the district among its white teachers and its black and Puerto Rican parents, teachers, and community activists.
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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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King of the Bowery
Big Tim Sullivan, Tammany Hall, and New York City from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era
by Richard F. Welch
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The first full-length biography of Timothy D. "Big Tim" Sullivan, who dominated New York City politics in the three decades prior to World War I.
King of the Bowery is the first full-length biography of Timothy D. "Big Tim" Sullivan, the archetypal Tammany Hall leader who dominated New York City politics-and much of its social life-from 1890 to 1913. A poor Irish kid from the Five Points who rose through ambition, shrewdness, and charisma to become the most powerful single politician in New York, Sullivan was quick to perceive and embrace the shifting demographics of downtown New York, recruiting Jewish and Italian newcomers to his largely Irish machine to create one of the nation's first multiethnic political organizations. Though a master of the personal, paternalistic, and corrupt politics of the late nineteenth century, Sullivan paradoxically embraced a variety of progressive causes, especially labor and women's rights, anticipating many of the policies later pursued by his early acquaintances and sometimes antagonists Al Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Drawing extensively on contemporary sources, King of the Bowery offers a rich, readable, and authoritative potrayal of Gotham on the cusp of the modern age, as refracted through the life of a man who exemplified much of it.
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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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No Longer and Not Yet
Stories
by Joanna Clapps Herman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Stories of small-town life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
The stories in No Longer and Not Yet look at the ways our lives are lived in the split seconds between what is no longer but is still not yet. Most take place on Manhattan's iconic Upper West Side, in the shops, hallways, and parks that reveal this well-known "big city" neighborhood for the tiny, even backwater village it more often resembles. An Upper West Sider herself, Joanna Clapps Herman draws her characters honestly yet tenderly, revealing them as much through how they move-the slope of a shoulder, a vocal inflection, the weight of a football-as by what they do, as though their bodies speak the truths they can't express.
Here, Hannah Arendt's ghost haunts the building where she once lived, a hawk carries the apparition of a lost loved one, a homeless woman becomes Demeter. Small moments and intimacies of life weave together to form a bigger picture: the squeak of the hotel bed, a leaf on a saucer, the quality of light in the therapist's office, the doorman's familiar jokes, the open cupboards, the unspoken words. These stories show that, although we may think of ourselves in larger mythic narratives, our days are set in the terrain that is the opposite of the vast.
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The Moving of the Water
Stories
by David Lloyd
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Stories anchored in the Welsh American immigrant experience.
Anchored in the community of first-, second-, and third-generation Welsh Americans in Utica, New York, during the 1960s, the stories in David Lloyd's The Moving of the Water delve into universal concerns: identity, home, religion, language, culture, belonging, personal and national histories, mortality. Unflinching in their portrayal of the traumas and conflicts of fictional Welsh Americans, these stories also embrace multiple communities and diverse experiences in linked, innovative narratives: soldiers fighting in World War I and in Vietnam, the criminal underworld, the poignant struggles of children and adults caught between old and new worlds. The complexly damaged characters of these surprising and affecting stories seek transformation and revelation, healing and regeneration: a sometimes traumatic "moving of the water."
David Lloyd is Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Le Moyne College. His previous books include the novel Over the Line, the short-story collection Boys: Stories and a Novella, and the poetry collections Warriors, The Gospel According to Frank, and The Everyday Apocalypse. He lives in upstate New York.
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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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The Art of the Watchdog
Fighting Fraud, Waste, Abuse, and Corruption in Government
by Daniel L. Feldman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Expert advice on how any citizen can fight government fraud, waste, abuse, and corruption.
In The Art of the Watchdog, Daniel L. Feldman and David R. Eichenthal show how to fight back. Based on their own work in federal, state, and local government over the last forty years, they will arm you with the tools and techniques needed to put the spotlight on those who cheat and steal from the public or who squander valuable taxpayer dollars through waste and inefficiency. At the same time, Feldman and Eichenthal outline what they see as the good and the bad of current oversight efforts based on case studies from across the nation. Ultimately, their goal is to ensure that the "art of the watchdog" does not become a lost one and to improve the quality and integrity of government and strengthen democracy.
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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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Stop at the Red Apple
The Restaurant on Route 17
by Elaine Freed Lindenblatt
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
An entertaining inside story of how Reuben Freed's roadside eatery became the famous Red Apple Rest.
The Red Apple Rest was a legendary restaurant open from the 1930s through the 1980s on New York's Route 17. Located midway between New York City and the resorts of the Catskill Mountains, the restaurant served as a who's who of entertainment luminaries. Elaine Freed Lindenblatt was born into restaurant royalty as the youngest child of the establishment's founder, Reuben Freed. For her, the Red Apple was the "family room" across the road-one she shared with over a million customers every year. In this book fifty-plus years unfold in a series of lively vignettes-enhanced with photos, memorabilia, and even a closely guarded recipe-as she recreates what it was like to be raised in the fishbowl of a round-the-clock family operation. Stop at the Red Apple is at once an account of growing up in 1950s small-town America, a glimpse into the workings of a successful food operation, and a swan song to a glorious slice of bygone popular culture.
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The Last Amateur
The Life of William J. Stillman
by Stephen L. Dyson
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The authoritative biography of a nineteenth-century polymath.
This fascinating biography tells the story of William J. Stillman (1828—1901), a nineteenth-century polymath. Born and raised in Schenectady, New York, Stillman attended Union College and began his career as a Hudson River School painter after an apprenticeship with Frederic Edwin Church. In the 1850s, he was editor of The Crayon, the most important journal of art criticism in antebellum America. Later, after a stint as an explorer-promoter of the Adirondacks, he became the American consul in Rome during the Civil War. When his diplomatic career brought him to Crete, he developed an interest in archaeology and later produced photographs of the Acropolis, for which he is best known today. In yet another career switch, Stillman became a journalist, serving as a correspondent for The Times of London in Rome and the Balkans. In 1871, he married his second wife, Marie Spartali, a Pre-Raphaelite painter, and continued to write about history and art until his death. One of the later products of the American Enlightenment, he lived a life that intersected with many strands of American and European culture. Stillman can indeed be called "the last amateur."
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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 Affair of the Veiled Murderess
An Antebellum Scandal and Mystery
by Jeanne Winston Adler
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
An account of a mysterious murder committed in nineteenth-century Troy, New York, and the sensational trial that ensued.
Troy, New York, 1853. Two Irish immigrants-a man and a woman-die shortly after drinking beer poured by a neighbor. Was it poisoned? And if so, was their slayer the beautiful mistress of an important Democratic politician? Many Trojans soon answer yes to both questions, but others question the guilt of the glamorous accused. Rumored to be the once-respectable Miss Charlotte Wood, a former student at Emma Willard's elite Troy Female Seminary and the runaway wife of a British lord, her identity remains in doubt, and the air of mystery is only heightened by her decision to remain hidden behind a veil during her trial, which earns her the nickname "The Veiled Murderess." As the affair widens to include the antebellum social and political worlds of Troy and Albany, the blossoming scandal threatens important people on both sides of the Atlantic.
Drawing on newspapers, court documents, and other records of the time, Jeanne Winston Adler attempts to come to an understanding of the truth behind the strange affair of the veiled murderess. In the process, she addresses a number of topics important to our understanding of nineteenth-century life in New York State, including the changing roles of women, the marginal position of the Irish, and the contentious political firmament of the time.
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Hiding Places
A Mother, a Daughter, an Uncovered Life
by Diane Wyshogrod
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A daughter struggles to get her mother to talk about her Holocaust experiences, and tries to understand how those experiences have shaped her own life.
What's it like to spend sixteen months in hiding, crouching in a tiny cellar, during the dark years of World War II? To know that many of your friends and relatives have either been shot or sent to concentration camps? To have your life depend on the humanity of an elderly Christian couple who lets you hide under their floor? What if you knew it had been your mother crouching under that floor? Wouldn't you wonder how she stood it? How it felt? What it did to her? And how it all affected you? In Hiding Places, Diane Wyshogrod traces the process of discovery and self-discovery as she researched the experiences of her mother, Helen Rosenberg, who as a teenager hid in just such a cellar, in Zółkiew, Poland. The narrative, which moves between New York, pre-war and wartime Poland, and Jerusalem, is based on many hours of recorded interviews and covers Helen's life before, during, and after World War II.
Although Wyshogrod's original intention was simply to record her mother's experiences, piecing the narrative together proved difficult: there were numerous gaps, things her mother could (or would) no longer remember, and other things her daughter just couldn't comprehend. To fill in these gaps, Wyshogrod draws from all the facets of her identity-writer, clinical psychologist, daughter, mother-in an attempt not only to understand her mother's experiences, but to find out why it is so important for her (and for us) to make that attempt in the first place.
Diane Wyshogrod is a clinical psychologist and writer. Born in New York City, she currently lives in Jerusalem with her husband and three sons.
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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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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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The Truth and Legend of Lily Martindale
An Adirondack Novel
by Mary Sanders Shartle
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
When a successful New Yorker returns to her birthplace in the Adirondack Mountains to escape her publicly tragic life, she begins to find peace for the first time since she was five years old. Hired as a caretaker for an Adirondack Great Camp, she spends over ten years living alone. But Lily Martindale's days as a recluse are plagued by a secret which aggravates her fragile state of mind. On a winter day in the 1990s, deep in the mountains, she opens fire on a military flyover. Lily, once again, is a person of interest in the press, to the public, and now to the FBI-not an enviable position for a hermit. The Adirondack hamlet of Winslow Station is transformed by the unexpected return of its solitary prodigal child. She is driven to confront her own isolation, years of sadness, and her deteriorating health. She also finds something, and someone, she never expected to see again.
Mary Sanders Shartle is a writer and poet. She teaches writing workshops in the Albany, Saratoga, and Adirondack areas.
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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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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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Battling Editor
The Albany Years
by Harry Rosenfeld
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Recounts the transformation of two daily newspapers in the face of economic downturns and sweeping technological change.
In 1978, Harry Rosenfeld left the Washington Post, where he oversaw the paper's standard-setting coverage of Watergate, to take charge of two daily papers under co-ownership in Albany, New York: the morning Times Union and the evening Knickerbocker News. It was a particularly challenging moment in newspaper history. While new technologies were reducing labor costs on the production side and providing ever more sophisticated tools for journalists to practice their craft, those very same technologies would soon turn a comparatively short-lived boom into a grave threat, as ever more digitally distracted readers turned to sources other than print and other legacy media for their news. Between these boundaries, Rosenfeld set about to do his work.
Picking up where his previous memoir, From Kristallnacht to Watergate, left off, Battling Editor tells the story of how Rosenfeld and his colleagues transformed two daily publications into alert and aggressive newspapers even in times of economic downturn. Bringing the investigative habits he had honed in his years at the New York Herald Tribune and the Washington Post, Rosenfeld's objective was to tell the fully rounded stories of the region's cities, suburbs, and rural towns, with awareness of both their achievements and their shortcomings. Furthermore, the misuse of power, whenever it happened, whether in city hall or the state capitol, in courtrooms or prisons, or in hospitals, corporations, community organizations, was to be exposed, and those accountable were to be held responsible.
More importantly, however, Rosenfeld's account is enlisted in the growing call to arms for all who cover the news and all who consume it. Written at a time when the credibility of news organizations is under attack by those at the highest levels of government, Battling Editor is a full-throated defense of fact-based journalism and hard-hitting reporting at the local as well as national level.
Harry Rosenfeld's award-winning book, From Kristallnacht to Watergate: Memoirs of a Newspaperman, was praised by Tom Brokaw as "a great American story ... the inspiring saga of Harry Rosenfeld, arriving as a refugee and rising to the inner circle of journalists who uncovered the greatest scandal in the history of the Presidency." Rosenfeld lives in Albany, New York, where he is Editor-at-Large and a consultant at the Times Union, and also a member of the newspaper's editorial board.
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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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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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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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Blows to the Head
How Boxing Changed My Mind
by Binnie Klein
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
A provocative tale of an unlikely contender and her midlife transformation through boxing.
"I peered through the Venetian blinds in our den, with its view of the playground next door, and watched mournfully as the popular girls played softball. I wanted to run fast, hit hard, and wear a cute uniform. These girls seemed to know something about life that I didn't."
When Binnie Klein took up boxing in her midfifties, the reaction from friends and acquaintances was always the same: "You?" Why, after all, would a middle-aged Jewish psychotherapist with no previous history of athletics take up boxing? In Blows to the Head, Klein offers a provocative tale of an unlikely contender whose unexpected fascination with boxing takes her beyond the ring and leads her back to her roots and to a surprising chapter of the Jewish immigrant experience. With candor and wit, she reveals a series of memories and insights that would never have been possible if she hadn't been drawn toward a pair of boxing gloves during a physical therapy session. In a story that will captivate and inspire women and men, athletes and nonathletes, Klein shows us that if we turn over the "weird stones" on our path, the ones we usually ignore, we may find ourselves on an unexpected journey that will summon vitality back into our lives.
Binnie Klein is a psychotherapist in private practice in New Haven, Connecticut, and a Lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. She also hosts a popular weekly music and interview show on WPKN radio.
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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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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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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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Still Speaking of Nature
Further Explorations in the Natural World
by Bill Danielson
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
An engaging and accessible introduction to the natural world in New England and upstate New York.
Through his popular newspaper column, "Speaking of Nature," and his 2001 book of the same title, professional naturalist Bill Danielson has introduced thousands of readers to the wonders and mystery of the natural world in New England and upstate New York. In Still Speaking of Nature, Danielson continues his observations of the nature, following the rhythm of the seasons in twenty-eight short essays that explore a diverse range of topics, from trilliums and katydids to meadow voles and moose. Taken together, they offer an engaging and accessible introduction to a fascinating world of nature that is often no farther away than our own backyards or neighborhood parks. "You cannot care for something you don't know about," Danielson writes, and whether you're a layperson or an experienced naturalist, his entertaining combination of science and humor will inspire you to explore the natural world and your place in it.
Bill Danielson is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he earned a master's degree in wildlife biology. In his career as a naturalist and environmental researcher, he has worked as a law enforcement ranger for the National Park Service, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Forest Service, a preserve steward for the Nature Conservancy, a field biologist for several research projects throughout the eastern half of North America, and a park interpreter and park ranger for the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Management. For the past six years he has taught biology, chemistry, and physics at Pittsfield High School in Massachusetts. His "Speaking of Nature" column is published weekly in the Albany Times Union and the Recorder of Greenfield, Massachusetts. He currently lives in Altamont, New York.
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A Most Glorious Ride
The Diaries of Theodore Roosevelt, 1877-1886
by Various Authors
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Encompasses key years and important events in Theodore Roosevelt's early life and career.
A Most Glorious Ride presents the complete diaries of Theodore Roosevelt from 1877 to 1886. Covering the formative years of his life, Roosevelt's entries show the transformation of a sickly and solitary Harvard freshman into a confident and increasingly robust young adult. He writes about his grief over the premature death of his father, his courtship and marriage to his first wife, Alice Hathaway Lee, and later the death of Alice and his mother on the same day. The diaries chronicle his burgeoning political career in New York City and his election to the New York State Assembly. With his descriptions of balls, dinner parties, and nights at the opera, they offer a glimpse into life among the Gilded Age elite in Boston and New York. They also recount Roosevelt's first birding and hunting trips to the Adirondacks, the Maine woods, and the American West. Ending with Roosevelt's secret engagement to his second wife, Edith Kermit Carow, A Most Glorious Ride provides an intimate look into the life of the man who would become America's twenty-sixth president.
Brought together for the first time in a single volume, the diaries have been meticulously transcribed, annotated, and introduced by Edward P. Kohn. Twenty-four black-and-white photographs are also included.
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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 Reason for Crows
A Story of Kateri Tekakwitha
by Diane Glancy
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The story of a 17th century Mohawk woman's interaction with her land, the Jesuits, and the religion they brought.
In The Reason for Crows, award-winning author Diance Glancy retells the story of Kateri Tekakwitha, a seventeenth-century Mohawk woman who converted to Christianity and later became known as the "Lily of the Mohawks." Left frail, badly scarred, and nearly blind from a smallpox epidemic that killed her parents, Kateri nevertheless took part in the daily activities of her village-gathering firewood, preparing meals, weaving, and treating the wounded after skirmishes with the French and enemy tribes. When the Jesuits arrived in her village, she received their message and converted to Christianity. After her conversion, she was scorned and persecuted by her fellow Indians and eventually left her home along the Mohawk River for a village the Jesuits had established for Christian Indians, where she died at the age of 24. In Glancy's imaginative and poetic retelling, Kateri's interior voice is intertwined with the interior voices of the Jesuit missionaries-the crows-who endured their own hardships crossing the ocean and establishing missions in an unfamiliar land. Together they tell a story of spiritual awakening and the internal conflicts that arise when cultures meet.
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Truant Pastures
The Complete Poems of Harry C. Staley
by Harry C. Staley
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
Poems that ponder the conundrums of existence and religious faith in wartime.
Caw
I try to hold my sleep against the dawn
I sleep against the outside light where crows
(nuns and Sergeants priests and colonels)
conspire in the brightening yard
calling me from play calling me from flight
back through the pillow calling me from flight
beyond Saigon,beyond Hanoi, and Seoul
calling me from flight
I fly high beyond the call
cursing God for every shattered wall
I sleep against the clarifying day against a plebiscite
of murdered selves forgotten relatives and mean
authorities bleeding friends parents and parishioners
conspiring with a squad of crows
to call me back again to call me down
to call me back to call and call and call
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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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Years I Walked at Your Side
Selected Poems
by Mordechai Geldman
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
The first book-length collection in English of this major Israeli poet.
Finalist for the 2018 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry presented by the Jewish Book Council
from "At Your Side"
Years I walked at your side
like our prophet Isaiah
barefoot naked and bare
I will put on no cover
until you see me
until you recognize an other
one person
at least
and so know yourself as well
Mordechai Geldman came of age as a poet in the seventies, an auspicious and transformative time in the development of modern Hebrew literature, as poets and writers rejected the flowery, the hyperbolic, and the sentimental and opted instead for a more direct and intimate speech. While his early poems tended to rely on linguistic exploration, his vision soon turned inward, as he came to favor the simple, the true, the authentic. Geldman's poems are direct and accessible, touching on and revealing the divine and the sacred in the so-called mundane.
Mordechai Geldman was born in Munich in 1946 and arrived in Israel in 1949. An art critic, artist, author, poet, and psychotherapist, Geldman has published fourteen volumes of poetry and five essay collections, and is the recipient of the Chomsky Award, the Brenner Prize, the Yehuda Amichai Prize for Hebrew Poetry, the Prime Minister's Prize for Hebrew Writers, and the Bialik Prize in Literature. His work has been translated into English, Arabic, Czech, French, Greek, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese, and Vietnamese. He lives and works in Tel Aviv. Tsipi Keller is a novelist and translator. Her previous translations include Poets on the Edge: An Anthology of Contemporary Hebrew Poetry and Reality Crumbs: Selected Poems, by Raquel Chalfi, both also published by SUNY Press.
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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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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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The Sadness of Antonioni
A Novel
by Frank Lentricchia
Part of the Excelsior Editions series
An American adventure in the Antonioni vein-visually rich and emotionally mysterious.
Part Mafia murder mystery, part novel of ideas, but most of all a love story, The Sadness of Antonioni follows Hank Morelli, a young assistant professor of film who is obsessed with Antonioni's L'Avventura. As he embarks on an unlikely romance with a Wendy's cashier, he is also drawn into the mystery of his grandfather's underworld connections and tempted by his department chair and his department chair's mysterious girlfriend, Nadia, to take part in a monstrous film project they are planning. Haunted throughout by the terror of time's raw present without exit, The Sadness of Antonioni is an American adventure in the Antonioni vein-visually rich and emotionally mysterious-in which an unlikely young couple navigates the difficult waters of their relationship, each suffering the remnants of a violent past that must be resolved if they hope to stay together.
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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.