Author: Judith S. Goldstein
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 081353884X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 231
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Book Description
Although frequently recognized as home to well-known personalities, Great Neck is also notable for the conspicuous way it transformed itself from a Gentile community, to a mixed one, and, finally, in the 1960s, to one in which Jews were the majority. In Inventing Great Neck, Judith S. Goldstein recounts these histories in which Great Neck emerges as a leader in the reconfiguration of the American suburb. The book spans four decades of rapid change, beginning with the 1920s. First, the community served as a playground for New York's socialites and celebrities. In the forties, it developed one of the country's most outstanding school systems and served as the temporary home to the United Nations. In the sixties it provided strong support to the civil rights movement.
Author: Ginger Strand
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416546561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
Strand reveals the hidden history of America's most iconic natural wonder, Niagara Falls, illuminating what it says about our history, our relationship with the environment, and ourselves.
Author: Vanessa Manko
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698146441
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Austin Voronkov is many things. He is an engineer, an inventor, an immigrant from Russia to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1913, where he gets a job at a rifle factory. At the house where he rents a room, he falls in love with a woman named Julia, who becomes his wife and the mother of his three children. When Austin is wrongly accused of attending anarchist gatherings his limited grasp of English condemns him to his fate as a deportee, retreating with his new bride to his home in Russia, where he and his young family become embroiled in the Civil War and must flee once again, to Mexico. While Julia and the children are eventually able to return to the U.S., Austin becomes indefinitely stranded in Mexico City because of the black mark on his record. He keeps a daily correspondence with Julia, as they each exchange their hopes and fears for the future, and as they struggle to remain a family across a distance of two countries. Austin becomes convinced that his engineering designs will be awarded patents, thereby paving the way for the government to approve his return and award his long sought-after American citizenship. At the same time he becomes convinced that an FBI agent is monitoring his every move, with the intent of blocking any possible return to the United States. Austin and Julia's struggles build to crisis and heartrending resolution in this dazzling, sweeping debut. The novel is based in part on Vanessa Manko's family history and the life of a grandfather she never knew. Manko used this history as a jumping off point for the novel, which focuses on borders between the past and present, sanity and madness, while the very real U.S.-Mexico border looms. The novel also explores how loss reshapes and transforms lives. It is a deeply moving testament to the enduring power of family and the meaning of home.
Author: Brian Selznick
Publisher: Scholastic
ISBN: 1407166573
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
An orphan and thief, Hugo lives in the walls of a busy train station. He desperately believes a broken automaton will make his dreams come true. But when his world collides with an eccentric girl and a bitter old man, Hugo's undercover life are put in jeopardy. Turn the pages, follow the illustrations and enter an unforgettable new world!
Author: Nelson W. Aldrich Jr.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493022881
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Born to wealth, adventuresome in spirit, shrewd in business, gallant in war, and a beau ideal of his class, Tommy Hitchcock was the epitome of the American hero, a legend even in his own time. To Scott Fitzgerald, Tommy embodied the ideal of the aristocratic man of action, basing two of his characters loosely on Tommy. Tommy joined the Lafayette Escadrille during WWI at the age of 17. He was shot down, captured by the Germans, and then made a dramatic escape to Switzerland. Within a few years after the war, he had become one of the stars of the “Golden Age of Sport.” In the 20s and 30s, Tommy dominated polo more decisively than Bobby Jones did golf or Babe Ruth did baseball. Settling in New York with his growing family, he became an investment banker and threw famous parties in Great Neck, Long Island, which attracted the rich and famous as well as celebrities such as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Always impecunious, the Fitzgeralds were easy to attract to a lavish party, but not so easy to convince to leave. When America entered WWII, Tommy re-entered the service, but was told he was “too old” for combat flying. He became the biggest booster of the new P-51, then in development, becoming instrumental in convincing the Army to build it to protect Flying Fortresses on their bombing raids over Germany. We were losing hundreds of the heavy bombers to Luftwaffe Messerschmitt’s because we didn’t have a fighter that could reach Germany with the bombers. The P-51 was a game-changer. Hermann Goering, commander of the Luftwaffe, told his American interrogators after the war that when he saw P-51s flying unopposed in the skies over Berlin, he knew the gig was up and Germany would lose the war. Tragically, on April 18, 1944, Tommy died test-flying one of the new P-51s in England. He will forever be an American hero.
Author: Tom Stoppard
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802191703
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 116
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Book Description
It is 1936 and A. E. Housman is being ferried across the river Styx, glad to be dead at last. His memories are dramatically alive. The river that flows through Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love connects Hades with the Oxford of Housman's youth: High Victorian morality is under siege from the Aesthetic movement, and an Irish student called Wilde is preparing to burst onto the London scene. On his journey the scholar and poet who is now the elder Housman confronts his younger self, and the memories of the man he loved his entire life, Moses Jackson—the handsome athlete who could not return his feelings. As if a dream, The Invention of Love inhabits Housman's imagination, illuminating both the pain of hopeless love and passion displaced into poetry and the study of classical texts. The author of A Shropshire Lad lived almost invisibly in the shadow of the flamboyant Oscar Wilde, and died old and venerated—but whose passion was truly the fatal one?
Author: Jon Langmead
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826274951
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 317
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Book Description
Ballyhoo! The Roughhousers, Con Artists, and Wildmen Who Invented Professional Wrestling is a history of professional wrestling’s formative period in the U.S., from roughly 1874 to 1941, and the contested interplay of wrestlers and promoters who built the “sport” as we know it. During this period, the major conventions that would define wrestling to the present day were perfected and codified, as wrestling morphed from a rough sport practiced on farms and at town gatherings to melodramatic mass entertainment that reliably drew large crowds in cities across the nation. The narrative uses the life and career of Jack Curley—a boxing promoter whose fortune took a turn for the better when he began promoting wrestling matches—as a compass as it charts the development of wrestling. By the late 1910s, Curley’s shows were selling out Madison Square Garden monthly. Ballyhoo chronicles his competition with the other promoters, as well as the lives of colorful athletes like “Strangler” Ed Lewis, Frank Gotch, the “Masked Marvel,” Jim Londos, “Gorgeous George” Wagner, “Farmer” Martin Burns, and “Dynamite” Gus Sonnenberg.
Author: Ed Catmull
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593594657
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve. “Might be the most thoughtful management book ever.”—Fast Company For nearly thirty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner eighteen Academy Awards. The joyous storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable. As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the twenty-five movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as: • Give a good idea to a mediocre team and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. Creativity, Inc. has been significantly expanded to illuminate the continuing development of the unique culture at Pixar. It features a new introduction, two entirely new chapters, four new chapter postscripts, and changes and updates throughout. Pursuing excellence isn’t a one-off assignment but an ongoing, day-in, day-out, full-time job. And Creativity, Inc. explores how it is done.
Author: Samantha Hunt
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054708577X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
Hunt's novel is a wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between theeccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla lived out his last days.
Author: David Slucki
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813551685
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945 charts the efforts of the surviving remnants of the movement to salvage something from the wreckage. Covering both the Bundists who stayed in communist Eastern Europe and those who emigrated to the United States, France, Australia, and Israel, the book explores the common challenges they faced.
