History of Washington County, Pennsylvania : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men. 1,216 Pages.
(38) "An insightful, dramatic and emotional tale that deserves a place alongside Dennis Smith's classic firefighting memoir, Report from Engine Co. 82." -Terry Golway, New York Post
Brooklyn's Rescue 2 has long been known as one of the country's top firehouses, a model for departments nationwide. Recognized for their expertise and commitment, Rescue 2's men handle only big blazes where civilians and their fellow firemen are in danger.
Beginning in 1996 with legendary Captain Ray Downey's promotion, the story follows the trials of his replacement, Phil Ruvolo, as he works to win over his headstrong men. A new Rescue 2 is forged through changes in firefighting methods and blazes that quickly become legend. Through the crisis of 9/11 and the subsequent rebuilding, Ruvolo triumphantly fills the late Downey's boots, heading Rescue 2 toward a future worthy of its past, its heroes, its city.
Filled with firefighting detail, raucous humor, and gritty real-life scenes, The Last Men Out is a new classic for an era in firefighting that is more risky, complicated, and dramatic than any before.
(278)The horse Susan Richards chose for rescue wouldn’t be corralled into her waiting trailer. Instead Lay Me Down, a former racehorse with a foal close on her heels, walked right up that ramp and into Susan’s life. This gentle creatureAmalnourished, plagued by pneumonia and an eye infectionAhad endured a rough road, but somehow her heart was still open and generous. It seemed fated that she would come into Susan’s paddock and teach her how to embrace the joys of life despite the dangers of living.
An elegant and often heartbreaking tale filled with animal characters as complicated and lively as their human counterparts, this is an inspiring story of courage and hope and the ways in which all loveAeven an animal’sAhas the power to heal.
(1)The annals of Newtown, in Queens County, New York; containing its history from its first settlement, together with many interesting facts concerning the adjacent towns. 454 Pages.
On July 28, 1797, an elderly Lenape woman stood before the newly appointed almsman of Pennsylvania’s Chester County and delivered a brief account of her life. In a sad irony, Hannah Freeman was establishing her residency—a claim that paved the way for her removal to the poorhouse. Ultimately, however, it meant the final removal from the ancestral land she had so tenaciously maintained. Thus was William Penn’s “peaceable kingdom” preserved.
(1)Marriage records, 1665-1800. The early marriage laws of New Jersey, by W. Nelson.--Index to marriage bonds and records in the office of the secretary of state at Trenton.--Marriage records of the following churches and county clerks: Hackensack Reformed [Dutch] church. 1695-1800. Schraalenburgh Reformed [Dutch] church, 1724-1801. Paramus Reformded [Dutch] church, 1664-1801. Essex county, 1795-1801. Lyons Farms Baptist church, 1795-1800. Second River Reformed [Dutch] church, 1730-1774, 1794-1800. Christ church. New Brunswick, 1778. New Brunswick Reformed [Dutch] church 1794-1799. Middlesex county, 1795-1800. Piscataway, Seventh Day Baptist church, 1745-1776. Scotch Plains Baptist church, 1758-1761. Chesterfield [Burlington county] Friends Monthly meeting, 1686-1800. 824 Pages.
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A memoir based on a collection of stories that range from the author's youth in Pennsylvania coal country to her escapades in marriage, motherhood, and travel.
History of Fayette County, Pennsylvania : with biographical sketches of many of its pioneers and prominent men. 1,314 Pages.
(72)Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery--a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop.
As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence is available in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the author.
Like the house built by Ann Peters’s father on a hill in eastern Wisconsin, House Hold offers many views: cornfields and glacial lakes, fast food parking lots and rural highways, Manhattan apartments and Brooklyn brownstones. Peters revisits the modern split-level where she grew up in Wisconsin, remembering her architect father. Against the background of this formative space, she charts her roaming story through two decades of New York City apartments, before traveling to a cabin in the mountains of Colorado and finally purchasing an old farmhouse in upstate New York. More than a memoir of remembered landscapes, House Hold is also an expansive contemplation of America, a meditation on place and property, and an exploration of how literature shapes our thinking about the places we live. A gifted prose stylist, Peters seamlessly combines her love of buildings with her love of books. She wanders through the rooms of her past but also through what Henry James called “the house of fiction,” interweaving personal narrative with musings on James, Willa Cather, William Dean Howells, Paule Marshall, William Maxwell, and others. Peters reflects on the romance of pastoral retreat, the hazards of nostalgia, America’s history of expansion and land ownership, and the conflicted desires to put down roots and to hit the road. Throughout House Hold, she asks how places make us who we are.
(232)A highly acclaimed writer and editor, Bill Buford left his job at The New Yorker for a most unlikely destination: the kitchen at Babbo, the revolutionary Italian restaurant created and ruled by superstar chef Mario Batali. Finally realizing a long-held desire to learn first-hand the experience of restaurant cooking, Buford soon finds himself drowning in improperly cubed carrots and scalding pasta water on his quest to learn the tricks of the trade. His love of Italian food then propels him on journeys further afield: to Italy, to discover the secrets of pasta-making and, finally, how to properly slaughter a pig. Throughout, Buford stunningly details the complex aspects of Italian cooking and its long history, creating an engrossing and visceral narrative stuffed with insight and humor.
(1)At the beginning of the 21st-century, a vanguard of young, affluent black leadership has emerged, often clashing with older generations of black leadership for power. The 2002 Newark mayoral race, which featured a contentious battle between the young black challenger Cory Booker and the more established black incumbent Sharpe James, was one of a series of contests in which young, well-educated, moderate black politicians challenged civil rights veterans for power. In The New Black Politician, Andra Gillespie uses Newark as a case study to explain the breakdown of racial unity in black politics, describing how black political entrepreneurs build the political alliances that allow them to be more diversely established with the electorate.
(7)André Schiffrin was born the son of one of France’s most esteemed publishers, in a world peopled by some of the day’s leading writers and intellectuals, such as André Gide and Jean-Paul Sartre. But this world was torn apart when the Nazis marched into Paris on young André's fifth birthday.Beginning with the family’s dramatic escape to Casablanca—thanks to the help of the legendary Varian Fry—and eventually New York, A POLITICAL EDUCATION recounts the surprising twists and turns of a life that saw Schiffrin become, himself, one of the world’s most respected publishers.Emerging from the émigre community of wartime New York (a community including Hannah Arendt and Kurt Wolff), he would go on to develop an insatiable appetite for literature and politics: heading a tiny student group at Yale that he renamed the Students for a Democratic Society—the SDS ... leading student groups at European conferences—once, as an unwitting front man for the CIA ... and eventually being appointed by Random House chief Bennet Cerf to head the very imprint co-founded by his father—Pantheon. There, he would discover and publish some of the world’s leading writers, including Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Art Spiegelman, and Marguerite Duras.Schiffrin would ultimately rebel at corporate ownership and form his own publishing house—The New Press—where he would go on to set a new standard for independent publishing.A POLITICAL EDUCATION is a fascinating intellectual memoir that tells not only the story of a unique and important figure, but of the tulutuous political times that shaped him.
AI don’t know where he’s buried, but if I did I’d piss on his grave.” AJerry Wexler, best friend and mentor
Here Comes the Night: Bert Berns and the Dirty Business of Rhythm and Blues is both a definitive account of the New York rhythm and blues world of the early A60s, and the harrowing, ultimately tragic story of songwriter and record producer Bert Berns, whose meteoric career was fueled by his pending doom. His heart damaged by rheumatic fever as a youth, doctors told Berns he would not live to see twenty-one. Although his name is little remembered today, Berns worked alongside all the greats of the era A Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, Ahmet Ertegun and Jerry Wexler, Burt Bacharach, Phil Spector, Gerry Goffin and Carole King, anyone who was anyone in New York rhythm and blues. In seven quick years, he went from nobody to the top of the pops A producer of monumental r&b classics, songwriter of ATwist and Shout,” AMy Girl Sloopy” and others.
His fury to succeed led Berns to use his Mafia associations to muscle Atlantic Records out of a partnership and intimidate new talents like Neil Diamond and Van Morrison he signed to his record label, only to drop dead of a long expected fatal heart attack, just when he was seeing his grandest plans and life’s ambitions frustrated and foiled.
As familiar as we are with images of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the charming former first lady, fewer know the dynamic woman who called New York City home. Shortly after JFK's assassination in 1964, Jackie moved to Manhattan and lived there for the next three decades. This intimate collection of photographs celebrates her life in the city as a mother, book editor, style icon, and most of all, a New Yorker. Eating ice cream with her kids on Fifth Avenue, working with authors at Doubleday Books, riding her bike through Central Park—these images capture the real-life joy, creative passion, and effortless grace of New York Jackie.
(7)In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the rest of his life. In his madness, the world was revealed to him as an enormous architecture of nerves, dominated by a predatory God. It became clear to Schreber that his personal crisis was implicated in what he called a "crisis in God's realm," one that had transformed the rest of humanity into a race of fantasms. There was only one remedy; as his doctor noted: Schreber "considered himself chosen to redeem the world, and to restore to it the lost state of Blessedness. This, however, he could only do by first being transformed from a man into a woman...."
(44)In Dog Days, Jon Katz, the squire of Bedlam Farm, allows us to live our dreams of leaving the city for the country, and shares the unpredictable adventure of farm life. The border collies, the sheep, the chickens, the cat, the ram, and one surprisingly sociable steer named Elvis all contribute to the hum (and occasional roar) of Bedlam. On timeless summer days and in punishing winter storms, Katz continues his meditation on what animals can selflessly teach us–and what we in turn owe to them. With good neighbors, a beautiful landscape, and tales of true love thrown in, Dog Days gives us not only marvelous animal stories but a rich portrait of the harmonious world that is Bedlam Farm.
Praise for Dog Days:
“Anyone who has ever loved an animal, who owns a farm or even dreams of it, will read Dog Days with appreciation and a cathartic lump in his or her throat.”
–The Washington Post
“Katz proves himself a Thoreau for modern times as he ponders the relationships between man and animals, humanity and nature, and the particularly smelly qualities of manure.”
–Fort Worth Star-Telegram
“Katz constructs the perfect blend between self-revelation and his subtle brand of humor.”
–The Star-Ledger
“City-dweller-turned-farmer Katz . . . returns with further adventures from his animal-filled upstate New York sheep farm. Charming.”
–People
“The perfect summer book . . . You will not be disappointed.”
–The Philadelphia Inquirer
“A new twist on the American dream.”
–The Christian Science Monitor
“Thoroughly enchanting.”
–The Dallas Morning News
(172)Rudolph Giuliani demonstrates how the leadership skills he practices can be employed successfully by anyone who has to run anything. Opens with a gripping account of Giuliani's immediate reaction to the September 11 attacks, including a narrow escape from the original crisis command headquarters, and closes with the efforts to address the aftermath during his remaining tenure.
