Best of
American

1999

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue


Samuel R. Delany - 1999
    Between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 42nd Street was once known for its peep shows, street corner hustlers and movie houses. Over the last two decades the notion of safety-from safe sex and safe neighborhoods, to safe cities and safe relationships-has overcome 42nd Street, giving rise to a Disney store, a children's theater, and large, neon-lit cafes. 42nd Street has, in effect, become a family tourist attraction for visitors from Berlin, Tokyo, Westchester, and New Jersey's suburbs.Samuel R. Delany sees a disappearance not only of the old Times Square, but of the complex social relationships that developed there: the points of contact between people of different classes and races in a public space. In Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, Delany tackles the question of why public restrooms, peepshows, and tree-filled parks are necessary to a city's physical and psychological landscape. He argues that starting in 1985, New York City criminalized peep shows and sex movie houses to clear the way for the rebuilding of Times Square. Delany's critique reveals how Times Square is being renovated behind the scrim of public safety while the stage is occupied by gentrification. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue paints a portrait of a society dismantling the institutions that promote communication between classes, and disguising its fears of cross-class contact as family values. Unless we overcome our fears and claim our community of contact, it is a picture that will be replayed in cities across America.

The Cornel West Reader


Cornel West - 1999
    Whether he is writing a scholarly book or an article for Newsweek, whether he is speaking of Emerson, Gramsci, or Marvin Gaye, his work radiates a passion that reflects the rich traditions he draws on and weaves together: Baptist preaching, American transcendentalism, jazz, radical politics. This anthology reveals the dazzling range of West's work, from his explorations of ”Prophetic Pragmatism” to his philosophizing on hip-hop.The Cornel West Reader traces the development of West's extraordinary career as academic, public intellectual, and activist. In his essays, articles, books, and interviews, West emerges as America's social conscience, urging attention to complicated issues of racial and economic justice, sexuality and gender, history and politics. This collection represents the best work of an always compelling, often controversial, and absolutely essential philosopher of the modern American experience.

The Forever Hero


L.E. Modesitt Jr. - 1999
    E. Modesitt, Jr's first major work was a trilogy of SF adventure novels published as paperback originals in the 1980s: Dawn for a Distant Earth, The Silent Warrior, and In Endless Twilight. Together they form The Forever Hero.Thousands of years in the future, Earth is a desolate ruin. The first human ship to return in millennia discovers an abandoned wasteland inhabited only by a few degenerate or mutated human outcasts. But among them is a boy of immense native intelligence and determination who is captured, taken in, and educated, and disappears--to grow up to become the force behind a plan to make Earth flower again. He is, if not immortal, at least very long-lived, and he plans to build an independent power base out in the galaxy and force the galactic empire to devote centuries and immense resources to the restoration of the ecology of Earth.

Plainsong


Kent Haruf - 1999
    A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.

The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: Fifty North American Stories Since 1970


Lex WillifordSandra Cisneros - 1999
    JonesCold snap by Thom JonesDoe season by David Michael KaplanPatriotic by Janet KauffmanGirl by Jamaica KincaidTerritory by David LeavittThe kind of light that shines on Texas by Reginald McKnightYou're ugly, too by Lorrie MooreThe management of grief by Bharati MukherjeeMeneseteung by Alice MunroGhost girls by Joyce Carol OatesThe things they carried by Tim O'BrienThe shawl by Cynthia OzickBrokeback Mountain by Annie ProulxStrays by Mark RichardIntensive care by Lee SmithThe way we live now by Susan SontagTwo kinds by Amy TanFirst, body by Melanie Rae ThonAble, Baker, Charlie, Dog by Stephanie VaughnNineteen fifty-five by Alice WalkerFever by John Edgar WidemanTaking care by Joy Williams

Welcome to Felicity's World · 1774: Growing Up in Colonial America


Catherine Gourley - 1999
    Each offers new perspectives on the past as it really was during the times of the American Girls -- from major historical events to the details of everyday life. Filled with exquisite photos, illustrations, and cutaway scenes, these large-format books also feature letters and diaries of real girls and women, boys and men, that bring the voices of yesterday to life for today's readers.

Friendship with God: An Uncommon Dialogue


Neale Donald Walsch - 1999
    His Conversations with God series, book 1, book 2, and book 3, have all been New York Times bestsellers- book 1 for over two years.The essence of Neale Donald Walsch's message lies at the heart of faith- the sacred place in every person, where he stands alone with his God. Walsch urges each of us to forge our own unique relationship with God, a God who is everywhere and speaks to us in all we do. It is up to us to stop and listen. It is up to us to respond...to begin the conversation. And a conversation is the first step, just as in any relationship, in establishing trust, in building friendship, in creating communion.In Friendship with God, Neale Donald Walsch shares the next part of his journey, and leads us to deepen and strengthen our own bonds with God. He honors our heart's desire: a closer connection, richer and fuller. A friendship with God.

The Long Home


William Gay - 1999
    Gay's remarkable debut novel, The Long Home, is also the story of Amber Rose, a beautiful young woman forced to live beneath that evil who recognizes even as a child that Nathan is her first and last chance at escape. And it is the story of William Tell Oliver, a solitary old man who watches the growing evil from the dark woods and adds to his own weathered guilt by failing to do anything about it. Set in rural Tennessee in the 1940s, The Long Home will bring to mind once again the greatest Southern novelists and will haunt the reader with its sense of solitude , longing, and the deliverance that is always just out of reach.

Song of the Exile


Kiana Davenport - 1999
    In spellbinding, sensual prose, Song of the Exile follows the fortunes of the Meahuna family--and the odyssey of one resilient man searching for his soul mate after she is torn from his side by the forces of war. From the turbulent years of World War II through Hawaii's complex journey to statehood, this mesmerizing story presents a cast of richly imagined characters who rise up magnificent and forceful, redeemed by the spiritual power and the awesome beauty of their islands.

Invisible Monsters


Chuck Palahniuk - 1999
    But when a sudden motor 'accident' leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful centre of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists.Enter Brandy Alexander, Queen Supreme, one operation away from being a real woman, who will teach her that reinventing yourself means erasing your past and making up something better, and that salvation hides in the last place you'll ever want to look.The narrator must exact revenge upon Evie, her best friend and fellow model; kidnap Manus, her two-timing ex-boyfriend; and hit the road with Brandy in search of a brand-new past, present and future.

Close Range: Wyoming Stories


Annie Proulx - 1999
    Each of the portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace. These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent.The half-skinned steer --The mud below --55 miles to the gas pump --The bunchgrass edge of the world --A lonely coast --Job history --Pair a spurs --People in Hell just want a drink of water --The governors of Wyoming --The blood bay --Brokeback Mountain

First Course In Turbulence


Dean Young - 1999
    Here parody does not exclude the cri de coeur any more than seriousness excludes the joke. With surrealist volatility, these poems are the result of experiments that continue for the reader during each reading. Young moves from reworkings of creation myths, the index of the Norton Anthology of Poetry, pseudo reports and memos, collaged biographies, talking clouds, and worms, to memory, mourning, sexual playfulness, and deep sadness in the course of this turbulent book.

Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices on Resistance, Reform, and Renewal an African American Anthology


Manning MarableAmy Euphemia Jacques Garvey - 1999
    The essays, manifestos, interviews, and documents assembled here, contextualized with critical commentaries from Marable and Mullings, introduce the reader to the character and important controversies of each period of black history. The selections represent a broad spectrum of ideology. Conservative, radical, nationalistic, and integrationist approaches can be found in almost every period, yet there have been striking shifts in the evolution of social thought and activism. The editors judiciously illustrate how both continuity and change affected the African-American community in terms of its internal divisions, class structure, migration, social problems, leadership, and protest movements. They also show how gender, spirituality, literature, music, and connections to Africa and the Caribbean played a prominent role in black life and history. To view the companion study guide, please click here http: //www.rowmanlittlefield.com/ISBN/074252...

Rushmore


Wes Anderson - 1999
    It is a refreshingly offbeat comedy about young Max Fish, a precocious pupil at a conservative private school. He is a live wire, a teenager full of madcap entrepreneurial schemes that usually in failure. His personal life becomes similarly complicated when he falls for his elegant teacher, Rosemary Cross, and finds himself vying for her favor with Herman Blume-who is portrayed in the film by Bill Murray-the wealthy father of two of his classmates. Max ultimately proves himself a figure of some tenacity as he negotiates the minefield of love, desire, and adolescence.At the Toronto Film Festival, Screen International called Rushmore "a real charmer filled with surprise twists and emotions that avoid sentimentality . . . A little gem."

Vice: New and Selected Poems


Ai - 1999
    Employing her trademark ferocity, these new dramatic monologues continue to mine this award-winning poet's "often brilliant" (Chicago Tribune) vision.

Ernie: A Photographer's Memoir


Tony Mendoza - 1999
    By all accounts, Ernie was a phenomenon, selling an estimated 100,000 copies. Photographer Tony Mendoza had captured the mercurial character of that irascible, self-possessed, utterly lovable cat, telling the curiously moving story of their relationship in the voices of both himself and Ernie. Our beautifully produced hardcover edition of this classic tale is poised to charm legions of new readers. Featuring never-before-published pictures, and a few more private thoughts from Ernie himself, Ernie is sure to steal hearts all over again.

Spirit and Reason: The Vine Deloria, Jr. Reader


Vine Deloria Jr. - 1999
    Author of such classics as Red Earth, White Lies, and God is Red, Deloria takes readers on a momentous journey through Indian country and beyond by exploring some of the most important issues of the past three decades. The essays gathered here are wide-ranging and essential and include representative pieces from some of Deloria's most influential books, some of his lesser-known articles, and ten new pieces written especially for Spirit & Reason. Tellingly, in the course of reviewing his body of work, Deloria found much that he had written in the past remained current and compelling because "people have not made much progress in resolving issues." Whether disputing theories of religion and science, examining the problems of modern education, or expounding on our understanding of the world, Deloria consistently urges readers toward an intimate connection with the world in which we live. For those familiar with Deloria's works as well as those discovering him for the first time, this essential anthology will teach, provoke, and enlighten in equal measure.

Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong


James W. Loewen - 1999
    Loewen continues his mission, begun in the award-winning "Lies My Teacher Told Me," of overturning the myths and misinformation that too often pass for American history. "Lies Across America" is a one-of-a-kind examination of sites all over the country where history is literally written on the landscape, including historical markers, monuments, historic houses, forts, and ships. With one hundred entries, drawn from every state, Loewen reveals that: The USS Intrepid, the "feel-good" war museum, celebrates its glorious service in World War II but nowhere mentions the three tours it served in Vietnam.The Jefferson Memorial misquotes from the Declaration of Independence and skews Thomas Jefferson's writings to present this conflicted slaveowner as an outright abolitionist.Abraham Lincoln had been dead for thirty years when his birthplace cabin was built!"Lies Across America" is a reality check for anyone who has ever sought to learn about America through our public sites and markers. Entertaining and enlightening, it is destined to change the way we see our country.

American Surfaces


Stephen Shore - 1999
    It features unpublished photographs from Shore's influential work that has been widely exhibited in the US but never captured in a book for the general public.

Poachers


Tom Franklin - 1999
    His lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching—a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella (selected for the anthologies New Stories from the South: The Year's Best, 1999 and Best Mystery Stories of the Century), three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: "Jesus is not coming;" This terrain isn't pretty, isn't for the weak of heart, but in these desperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human.

Vipers in the Storm: Diary of a Gulf War Fighter Pilot


Keith Rosenkranz - 1999
    Here he recounts these experiences in searing, you-are-there detail, giving readers one of the most riveting depictions ever written of man and machine at war.

Usual Suspects


Christopher McQuarrie - 1999
    One of a hand-picked selection of some of the most popular and cult-worthy titles on Faber and Faber's extensive list of film scripts.

The Making of Milwaukee


John Gurda - 1999
    It's true that Milwaukee's German accent was unmistakable in the 1880s; it was the Beer Capital of the World; and it's the home of the steam shovels that dug the Panama Canal the engines that powered the New York City subway system, and the motorcycles that made Harley-Davidson an American legend.But the stereotypes don't begin to convey the richness of Milwaukee's past. They don't describe the five citizens killed by the state militia as they marched for the eight-hour day. The Jewish community leader who wrote The Settlement Cookbook. The Italian priest who led the local crusade for civil rights in the 1960s. The railroad promoter who bribed an entire state legislature. The Socialists who made Milwaukee the best-governed big city in America. Allis-Chalmers and Pabst Blue Ribbon. Summerfest and Irish Fest. Golda Meir. Carl Sandburg. Robin Yount.The Making of Milwaukee tells all those stories and a great many more. Well-written, superbly organized, and lavishly illustrated, it is sure to be the standard reference for many years to come.

In the Surgical Theatre


Dana Levin - 1999
    Each of Levin's poems is an astonishing investigation of human darkness, propelled by a sensuous syntax and a desire for healing."This is the language of a prophet: Levin's art, in this book certainly, takes place in a kind of mutating day of judgment: it means to wipe a film from our eyes. It is a dare, a challenge, and, for all its considerable beauty, the opposite of the seductive...Sensuous, compassionate, violent, extravagant: what an amazing debut this is, a book of terrors and marvels."-Louise Gluck, from the IntroductionDana Levin was raised in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Vermont Arts Council, and New York University, where she received her M.F.A. She lives in New Mexico and teaches Creative Writing at the College of Santa Fe.

The Chrome Borne


Mercedes Lackey - 1999
    Hot rods and high magic - previously published in two volumes as Born to Run and Chrome Circle - meet in a fast-paced, tongue-in-cheek fantasy.

The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay


John Irving - 1999
    It tells the story of Homer Wells, an orphan who is raised and mentored by Wilbur Larch, the doctor at the orphanage. Dr. Larch teaches Homer eveything about medicine. Yet though his capacity for kindness is saintly, Larch is also an ether addict. He and Homer come into conflict, which is typical of many father-son relationships, but in this case, their conflict is intensified by their disagreements about abortion. The result is Homer leaves the only family he has ever known.Homer's new life provides more excitement than he could have imagined, especially when he falls in love for the first time. But, when forced to make decisions that will change the course of his future, Homer finally realizes that he can't escape his past. The Cider House Rules is ultimately about the choices we make and the rules that are meant to be broken.

Novels, 1957-1962: The Town / The Mansion / The Reivers


William Faulkner - 1999
    Faulkner wanted to use the time remaining to him to achieve a summing-up of his fictional world.. "The Town (1957) is the second novel in the Snopes trilogy that began with The Hamlet. Here the rise of the rapacious Flem Snopes and his extravagantly extended family, as they connive their way into power in the county seat of Jefferson is filtered through three separate narrative voices. Faulkner was particularly proud of the two women characters - the doomed Eula and her daughter Linda - who stand at the novel's center.. "Flem's relentless drive toward wealth and control plays itself out in The Mansion (1959), in which a wronged relative, the downtrodden sharecropper Mink Snopes, succeeds in avenging himself and bringing down the corrupt Snopes dynasty.. "His last novel, The Reivers: A Reminiscence (1962), is distinctly mellower and more elegiac than his earlier work. A picaresque adventure set early in the twentieth century and involving a Memphis brothel, a racehorse, and a stolen automobile, it evokes the world of childhood with a final burst of comic energy.

Mary Ellen Mark: An American Odyssey 1963-1999


Mary Ellen Mark - 1999
    She is unsurpassed at shaping both the odd and the everyday into genuinely surprising photographs that subtly yet powerfully challenge our preconceptions or intensify our convictions. Mary Ellen Mark's poetic and at times disquieting photographs form a fascinating portrait of a complex, amusing, and occasionally unsettling country and its people.

Gilliam on Gilliam (Directors on Directors)


Terry Gilliam - 1999
    From the medieval mock-epic Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the mythic, paranoid worlds of The Fisher King, Twelve Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Gilliam has pursued a totally personal, uncompromising vision. This has led to legendary battles with studios and financiers, notably over The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Brazil, which is now widely considered a classic. Gilliam is a famously candid commentator on his own work, and in these specially recorded interviews he reflects on how his Midwestern childhood and early career as an animator prepared him to undertake his extraordinary adventures in cinema.

Some Horses: Essays


Thomas McGuane - 1999
    Best of all, McGuane brings to life the horses he has known, celebrating the unique glories that make each of them memorable. McGuane's writing is infused with a love of the cowboy life and the animals and people who inhabit that world where the intimate dance between horse and rider is as magical as flight--well beyond what the human body could ever discover on its own.

James Madison: Writings


James Madison - 1999
    Arranged chronologically, it contains almost 200 documents written between 1772, the year after Madison's graduation from Princeton, and his death in 1836. Included are all 29 of Madison's contributions to The Federalist as well as speeches and letters that illuminate his role in framing and ratifying the Constitution. Also represented are early writings on religious freedom; correspondence with figures such as Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Monroe; writings from his terms as secretary of state and president; and letters and essays written during retirement.

Dogma


Kevin Smith - 1999
    Two fallen angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck), sentenced to eternal exile in Wisconsin, are trying to get back into heaven. A renegade cardinal in New Jersey (George Carlin), as part of his "Catholicism Wow!" campaign, has opened a loophole in Catholic doctrine that would give them their opportunity-and, in proving God's judgment wrong, destroy the universe. An abortion clinic counselor (Linda Fiorentino) who may or may not be of holy bloodlines is tapped as the very reluctant savior-and, accompanied by the thirteenth apostle (Chris Rock), a wayward muse (Salma Hayek), and two very questionable prophets (Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith, AKA Jay and Silent Bob), she sets off on a mission to save the world.

Edward Weston


Terence Pitts - 1999
    But along with innovators like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, Weston revolutionized the ways photographers chose subject material and used photographic techniques to create what gradually came to be accepted as fine art. This is an elegant book, designed and printed in Germany, with an essay by Terence Pitts, of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona. It presents 180 of Weston's finest images, including many--such as the pines of Point Lobos, the sand dunes of Oceano, and his stark, unadorned nudes--that have become icons. Whereas the photographs of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy were, to Weston's eyes, hopelessly mannered, his images are elemental, organic, and in harmony with nature's rhythms. Weston spent most of his working life in Mexico and California, and much of his work, replete with shadows, is illuminated with the harsh light of those places. In 1932, he and Ansel Adams founded the influential photographic collective Group f/64, named after the lens-aperture size that exposed an image at its most detailed and clear. This was Weston's aesthetic: to show the real world in its unrelieved integrity rather than create an imaginary construct. He was concerned with visual truth, not with character or storytelling. Weston was a true pioneer whose rigorous vision permanently changed the ways we see the world around us. --John Stevenson

π


Darren Aronofsky - 1999
    For the past ten years he has been attempting to decode the numerical pattern beneath the ultimate system of ordered chaos-the stock market. As Max verges on a solution, chaos is swallowing the world around him. He is pursued by an aggressive Wall Street firm set on financial domination as well as by a Kabbalah sect intent on unlocking the secrets behind its ancient holy texts. Max races to crack the code, hoping to defy the madness that looms before him. In succeeding, he uncovers a secret everyone is willing to kill for.Also included with the screenplay is a full journal of how Darren Aronofsky made this award-winning film on a minuscule budget of $60,000, providing practical advice and inspiration to film students and offering film buffs rare insight into how an independent film is made.

They Feed They Lion & The Names of the Lost: Two Books of Poems


Philip Levine - 1999
    In an essay on his career, Edward Hirsch describes They Feed They Lion as his "most eloquent book of industrial Detroit . . . The magisterial title poem--with its fierce diction and driving rhythms--is Levine's hymn to communal rage, to acting in unison." Of The Names of the Lost: "In these poems Levine explicitly links the people of his childhood whom 'no one remembers' with his doomed heroes from the Spanish Civil War."

The Last Cheater's Waltz: Beauty and Violence in the Desert Southwest


Ellen Meloy - 1999
    It is a land of absolutes, of passion and indifference, lush textures and inscrutable tensions. Here violence can push beauty to the edge of a razor blade. . . . Thus Ellen Meloy describes a corner of desert hard by the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, a place long forsaken as implausible and impassable, of little use or value—a place that she calls home. Despite twenty years of carefully nurtured intimacy with this red-rock landscape, Meloy finds herself, one sunbaked morning, staring down at a dead lizard floating in her coffee and feeling suddenly unmoored. What follows is a quest that is both physical and spiritual, a search for home.

Thinking of You


Barbara Kruger - 1999
    Kruger, one of the most influential artists of the last three decades, uses pictures and words through a wide variety of media and sites to raise issues of power, sexuality, and representation. Her works include photographic prints on paper and vinyl, etched metal plates, sculpture, video, installations, billboards, posters, magazine and book covers, T-shirts, shopping bags, postcards, and newspaper op-ed pieces.

Wild Fruits: Thoreau's Rediscovered Last Manuscript


Henry David Thoreau - 1999
    In transcribing the 150-year-old manuscript’s cryptic handwriting and complex notations, Thoreau specialist Bradley Dean has performed a "heroic feat of decipherment" (Booklist) to bring this great work to light. Readers will discover "passages that reach for the transcendentalist ideal of writing new scriptures, yet grounding this Bible in a vision of practical ecology" (Boston). Beautifully illustrated throughout with line drawings of the natural life Thoreau considers on his walks, Wild Fruits is "well worth any nature lover’s attention" (Christian Science Monitor).

At the End of the Santa Fe Trail


Blandina Segale - 1999
     Gunslingers rubbed shoulders with Mexican outlaws in this rough and rugged country where there were “men with money looking to become millionaires, land-grabbers, experienced and inexperienced miners, quacks, professional deceivers, publicity men lauding gold mines that do not exist.” In the midst of all these dangerous and scheming men were the black-robed Sisters of Charity, one of whom was Sister Blandina Segale. Born in northern Italy she had moved with her family to Cincinnati at the age of four. Twelve years later she took her vows and boarded a stagecoach to Trinidad, Colorado, to begin life as a missionary. As the introduction states, this is an inspiring record of educational and charitable work carried on for many years in Colorado and New Mexico for Indian and Mexican, Catholics and non-Catholics, rich and poor, the criminal and law abiding. From 1872 through to 1893 she worked with the communities of Trinidad, Santa Fe and Albuquerque to suppress violence, educate and care for those she could, all the while providing religious council and comfort to the people of these wild lands. Throughout these years she kept a journal and wrote letters that would eventually become the basis for the book At the End of the Santa Fe Trail which provides fascinating insight into one nun’s perspective on life in the far west. Particularly fascinating is the relationships she builds with some of the notorious figures of the Old West, including Billy the Kid. “The story is told for the most part by means of extracts from Sister Blandina's journal and her letters to her sister. They reveal a very human figure, with a well-developed sense of humor and a fine measure of moral courage to buttress her religious faith.” Kirkus Reviews Sister Blandina Segale was an Italian-born American religious sister and missionary. During the course of her life she served as an educator and social worker who worked in Ohio, Colorado and New Mexico, assisting Native Americans, Hispanic settlers and European immigrants. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe has opened a process to canonize Segale, for which it has received the permission of the Holy See. For this, she is honored by the Catholic Church with the title of Servant of God. She is the first individual in New Mexico's 400-year history with the Roman Catholic Church to have a cause opened for their beatification and canonization. Her book At the End of the Santa Fe Trail was first published in 1932 and reprinted in 1948. She passed away in 1941.

Never Be the Horse


Beckian Fritz Goldberg - 1999
    The poems evoke this nighttime within the self haunted by mythic and shadow-paradises--of home, homeland, the original garden--where "every story is made to hide / the others." Here, Adam slips on a piece of Eve's clothing, a child falls in love with the bomb, and a mourner watching the whores chased from the cemetery laments. It is also a world of erotic disguises. Still, it remains recognizably this world. The parent lies to the child about death, and the child lies to the parent about death. In the journey between those lies, as in the journey taken by the horse of the title, language becomes the place of refuge. It is there that "one world is always beginning." From "willingness . . . speaking its motherese," to the devil's "gossamer gibber," the voices in these poems discover that to be human is, as Heidegger said, "to be a conversation."

Reading and Writing Lakota Language


Albert White Hat Sr. - 1999
    It presents the Sicangu dialect using an orthography developed by Lakota in 1982 and which is now supplanting older systems provided by linguists and missionaries. This new approach represents a powerful act of self-determination for Indian education.Though Reading and Writing the Lakota Language is thorough in its inclusion of conjugation, syntax, and sentence, it emphasizes vocabulary and pronunciation. Author Albert White Hat Sr. presents Lakota philosophy as it applies to specific grammar lessons. Moreover, he documents the impact of the acculturation process on the language, showing how Lakota evolved as a result of non-Indian influences. The textual example offers new information and interpretation of Lakota society, even to scholars who specialize n Plains cultures. Beyond language instruction, readers will value the book for its cultural insights, humorous stories, and its entertaining tone.

Kaplan & Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry


Benjamin James Sadock - 1999
    This Ninth Edition provides a wealth of new and updated information in neural science, genetics, neuropsychiatry, psychopharmacotherapy, and other key areas. A distinguished new co-editor, Pedro Ruiz, MD, has joined Drs. Benjamin and Virginia Sadock for this edition, and over 500 contributors provide the most up-to-date information in every area of psychiatry and mental health. The book includes case histories, the most current DSM-IV-TR criteria and tables, and up-to-date comparative classification codes from ICD-10.A companion Website will offer the fully searchable text.

The Road Show


Gary Jennings - 1999
    In The Road Show we meet Zachary Edge, a Confederate soldier, on his way home at the war's close. He stumbles upon a traveling troupe, a chance encounter that is the start of an unforgettable odyssey. Edge hits the road with bawdy showgirls, roguish tricksters, and a host of colorful characters. He soon finds himself in the arms of Autumn Auburn, the lithesome artiste known for her breathtaking sensuality.

In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art


Russell Ferguson - 1999
    As an associate curator at the Museum of Modern Art, O'Hara organized a series of important exhibitions, notably of the work of Franz Kline and of Robert Motherwell. In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art explores this key period in modern art by presenting artists who were associated with O'Hara and whose seminal works are reflected in his poetry.Featuring over 80 works by twenty-three artists, the book focuses on works closely tied to specific poems by Frank O'Hara, notably Jasper Johns's In Memory of My Feelings—Frank O'Hara and Grace Hartigan's Oranges. Included are direct collaborations between O'Hara and various artists such as Joe Brainard, Norman Bluhm, and Larry Rivers, as well as portraits of the poet by Elaine de Kooning and Alex Katz. Franz Kline, Alice Neel, and Joan Mitchell are some of the other artists highlighted.The book is a timely re-examination of the relationship between art and poetry at this crucial moment in American art. It also offers new insights into the charismatic figure of Frank O'Hara and his world.The exhibition, In Memory of My Feelings: Frank O'Hara and American Art, will be at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, from July 11 to November 14, 1999; at The Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, January 28 to April 16, 2000; and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, New York, in May, 2000.

Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings


Frederick Douglass - 1999
    Between 1950 and 1975, Philip S. Foner collected the most important of Douglass’s hundreds of speeches, letters, articles, and editorials into an impressive five-volume set, now long out of print. Abridged and condensed into one volume, and supplemented with several important texts that Foner did not include, this compendium presents the most significant, insightful, and elegant short works of Douglass’s massive oeuvre.

Narcissus Leaves the Pool


Joseph Epstein - 1999
    In Narcissus Leaves the Pool, he displays his signature verve and charm in sixteen agile, entertaining pieces. Among his targets in this collection are name-dropping, talent versus genius, the cult of youthfulness, and the information revolution.

Noble Strategy: Essays on the Buddhist Path


Thanissaro Bhikkhu - 1999
    

The Passionate Eye: The Collected Writing of Suzanne Vega


Suzanne Vega - 1999
    Her words can rattle and sting, exposing private crimes and inner wars, the pain of need, and the chains of unspoken law. With evocative image and clear-sighted truth she transforms experience into dark and beautiful art. She is a poet of the urban streets whose passionate eye catches the motion and vibrant color of the life that surrounds us all. In this volume are collected the writings of Suzanne Vega, poems and stories, remembrances of times past and far countries, interviews and song lyrics, overheard conversations and imagined thoughts, complex inner worlds realized in simple yet breathtaking strokes. And through her words a portrait emerges of an exemplary artist and unique individual whose passion embraces the entire scope of human existence, from love and longing to war and politics. It is a window into a guarded life, and a remarkable journey across an emotional landscape sometimes hard, often cruel, but never barren or devoid of hope.

Freedom and Resolve: Finding Your True Home in the Universe


Gangaji - 1999
    In it, teacher, author, and spiritual leader Gangaji offers the radical invitation to: Examine one's own life.Choose to wake up from the trance of who you think you are and experience the truth of who you really are.Resolve not to go back into the trance by turning away from that essential experience of waking up.Freshly inquire anew as thoughts or feelings of separation arise.Gangaji's invitation is radical in part because it is not based upon a particular philosophy or religion. There are no prescribed practices or rituals, unless one considers self-inquiry or self-observation a practice. Most radically, it calls into question the very structure of who we've believed ourselves to be. Who you are is not separate from God or Love or Truth or Freedom or Peace or Silence, whatever one chooses to call it.Therefore, there is nothing you have to do to "get there." No merit to be earned. Who you are is already here, has always been and will always be. The invitation in this book is to wake up and be Yourself.""My life is given to what I have received, which is the truth of living peace, freshfulfillment. My life is given to serving thattruth, that fulfillment in you.""

For the Relief of Unbearable Urges


Nathan Englander - 1999
    In Englander's amazingly taut and ambitious "The Twenty-seventh Man," a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison with twenty-six writers slated for execution at Stalin's command, and in the grip of torture Pinchas composes a mini-masterpiece, which he recites in one glorious moment before author and audience are simultaneously annihilated. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a Protestant has a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi. In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man incensed by his wife's interminable menstrual cycle gets a dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. The stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are powerfully inventive and often haunting, steeped in the weight of Jewish history and in the customs of Orthodox life. But it is in the largeness of their spirit-- a spirit that finds in doubt a doorway to faith, that sees in despair a chance for the heart to deepen--and in the wisdom that so prodigiously transcends the author's twenty-eight years, that these stories are truly remarkable. Nathan Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for Auschwitz and in a deft imaginative twist turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way; he takes an elderly wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. Again and again, Englander does what feels impossible: he finds, wherever he looks, a province beyond death's dominion.For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of stunning authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad, and that heralds the arrival of a profoundly gifted new storyteller.

Where is Elmo's Blanket? (Sesame Street)


Nancy Stevenson - 1999
    Oh no! Elmo's lost his very favorite blanket! Toddlers can help Elmo in his quest for it by  lifting over 30 flaps to reveal dozens of fun Sesame Street surprises.

In the Bear's House


N. Scott Momaday - 1999
    Scott Momaday has had one of the most remarkable careers in twentieth-century American letters. Here, in In the Bear's House, Momaday passionately explores themes of loneliness, sacredness and aggression through his depiction of Bear, the one animal that has both inspired and haunted him throughout his lifetime.Winner of the Oaklahoma Book Award for Poetry, In the Bear's House celebrates Momaday's extraordinary creative vision and evolution as one of our most gifted artists with transcendent dignity and gentleness.

Coercion: Why We Listen to What They Say


Douglas Rushkoff - 1999
    With a skilled analysis of how experts in the fields of marketing, advertising, retail atmospherics, and hand-selling attempt to take away our ability to make rational decisions, Rushkoff delivers a bracing account of media ecology today, consumerism in America, and why we buy what we buy, helping us recognize when we're being treated like consumers instead of human beings.

Savoy Cocktail Book


Savoy Group - 1999
    The Savoy continues to evoke a world of timeless elegance, and this updated edition of The Savoy Cocktail Book presents some marvelous new concoctions. With 750 classic cocktails, the tradition of sophisticated soirees can be recreated time and time again.

Survivor


Chuck Palahniuk - 1999
    He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. Before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed, steroid- and collagen-packed media messiah, author of a best-selling autobiography, Saved from Salvation, and the even better selling Book of Very Common Prayer (The Prayer to Delay Orgasm, The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss, The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms). He'll reveal the truth of his tortured romance with the elusive and prescient Fertility Hollis, share his insight that "the only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," and deny responsibility for the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill, a 20,000-acre repository for the nation's outdated pornography. Among other matters both bizarre and trenchant.Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night and Jerzy Kosinski's Being There has there been as dark and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Unpredictable, compelling, and unforgettable, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak; and it cements his place as one of the most original writers in fiction today.

Reluctant Gravities: Poems


Rosmarie Waldrop - 1999
    Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. "I decided to give the second person equal time", says Waldrop. "But I'm not interested in characters, psychology, or in poetry's traditional 'persona' or mask. The voices do not 'represent, ' but frame the synaptic space between them". Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. She "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in her attempts to compensate for the lack of a margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Her "gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text". But the point of the dialogues is purely human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging", "Depression", "Desire", and even "The Millennium".Author of over 15 books of poetry, prize-winning translator of Jabes and Celan, teacher, and (with husband Keith Waldrop) publisher of Burning Deck Press, Rosmarie Waldrop keeps re-establishing herself as one of our foremost avant-garde stylists and most original poet-philosophers.

HIV, Mon Amour


Tory Dent - 1999
    Her use of language is virtuosic, complex, and plangent. These are daring poems that also dare the reader. HIV positive, Dent writes out of her own experience and profound refusal to look away or suspend feeling or turn from love. When her first book of poems, What Silence Equals, appeared in 1993, it was recognized as "immediately one of the great, necessary books to come out of the AIDS crisis, flinging its challenge in the face of death." With HIV, Mon Amour she moves further into the whirlwind -- as witness, lover, and observer.

John James Audubon: Writings and Drawings


John James Audubon - 1999
    This volume provides the most comprehensive selection of Audubon's writings ever published, along with a portfolio of his drawings.

The Way of the Human Being


Calvin Luther Martin - 1999
    Yet the Europeans learned what they wished to learn—not necessarily what the natives actually meant by their stories and their lives—says Calvin Luther Martin in this unique and powerfully insightful book. By focusing on their own questions, Martin observes, those arriving in the New World have failed to grasp the deepest meaning of Native America.Drawing on his own experiences with native people and on their stories, Martin brings us to a new conceptual landscape—the mythworld that seems unfamiliar and strange to those accustomed to western ways of thinking. He shows how native people understand the world and how human beings can and should conduct themselves within it. Taking up the profound philosophical challenge of the Native American “way of the human being,” Martin leads us to rethink our entire sense of what is real and how we know the real.

Never the Sinner


John Logan - 1999
    and Richard Loeb -- abducted and killed fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks, horrifying a nation. Never the Sinner is John Logan's brilliant documentary play about the infamous Leopold and Loeb case, known in its time as the "crime of the century" and still one of the most notorious.Leopold and Loeb were richer than most, and smarter. They knew every hot topic of the day, from Freud to Nietzsche; they were also lovers. Considering themselves Nietzsche's "supermen, " they decided to commit the "perfect murder, " just for the thrill of it. But they proved to be considerably less than supermen, and within a matter of hours police questioners cracked their alibis. In the ensuing sensational trial, they were defended by the legendary Clarence Darrow, who got them life sentences rather than the expected execution.

More Matter: Essays and Criticism


John Updike - 1999
    . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”

The Spanish Prisoner & The Winslow Boy


David Mamet - 1999
    His dialogue--abrasive, rhythmic--illuminates a modern aesthetic evocative of Samuel Beckett. His plots--surprising, comic, topical--have evoked comparisons to masters from Alfred Hitchcock to Arthur Miller. Here are two screenplays demonstrating the astounding range of Mamet's talents.         The Spanish Prisoner, a neo-noir thriller about a research-and-development cog hoodwinked out of his own brilliant discovery, demonstrates Mamet's incomparable use of character in a dizzying tale of twists and mistaken identity. The Winslow Boy, Mamet's revisitation of Terence Rattigan's  classic 1946 play, tells of a thirteen-year-old boy accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order and the tug of war for truth that ensues between his middle-class family and the Royal Navy. Crackling with wit, intelligent and surprising, The Spanish Prisoner and The Winslow Boy celebrate Mamet's unique genius and our eternal fascination with the extraordinary predicaments of the common man.

In the Year 2000


Conan O'Brien - 1999
    Straight from Late Night with Conan O'Brien comes a saucy serving of outrageous--yet eerily plausible--predictions, and the last word on how the world may look on the other side of the millennial divide.

The Collected Mystery Stories


Lawrence Block - 1999
    The collection features many of Block's best-loved characters, including Matt Scudder (eight stories), Ehrengraf (nine stories), Chip Harrison (two stories) and Bernie Rhodenbarr (three stories).

Wandering Time: Western Notebooks


Luis Alberto Urrea - 1999
    Driving cross-country with a cat named Rest Stop, Urrea wandered the West from one year's spring through the next. Hiking into aspen forests where leaves "shiver and tinkle like bells" and poking alongside creeks in the Rockies, he sought solace and wisdom. In the forested mountains he learned not only the names of trees—he learned how to live. As nature opened Urrea's eyes, writing opened his heart. In journal entries that sparkle with discovery, Urrea ruminates on music, poetry, and the landscape. With wonder and spontaneity, he relates tales of marmots, geese, bears, and fellow travelers. He makes readers feel mountain air "so crisp you feel you could crunch it in your mouth" and reminds us all to experience the magic and healing of small gestures, ordinary people, and common creatures. Urrea has been heralded as one of the most talented writers of his generation. In poems, novels, and nonfiction, he has explored issues of family, race, language, and poverty with candor, compassion, and often astonishing power. Wandering Time offers his most intimate work to date, a luminous account of his own search for healing and redemption.

The Century for Young People


Peter Jennings - 1999
    These are also some of the chapter headings of this stunning tribute to the past 100 years. Adapting the bestselling adult version of The Century, journalists Peter Jennings and Todd Brewster take an unusual approach to the overwhelming task of capturing a century in 241 pages. Rather than using a standard didactic, textbook-style method, the authors choose to focus on the lives of ordinary people--those who influenced, and were most affected by, the radical changes of the 1900s. Marty Glickman describes the effect Teddy Roosevelt had on him as a boy. Gilda Snow's father, an electrician for the 1939 New York World's Fair, took her on a "backstage" tour of the event when she was 9 years old. Inez Jessie Baskin experienced the Montgomery bus boycotts firsthand. Stacy Horn, creator of an Internet virtual community, muses on the phenomenon of online relationships. Each sumptuous spread comes alive with Life magazine-style photos (over 200 total), compelling captions, feature essays on historical events and people, and pale blue sidebars with the stories of ordinary men and women of the century. With a new introduction aimed at young readers, and a higher personal story to narrative ratio than the full-length version, this magnificent volume belongs in any family's collection. (Ages 10 and older) --Emilie Coulter

Where Death and Glory Meet: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Infantry


Russell Duncan - 1999
    Confederate defenders killed, wounded, or made prisoners of half the regiment. Only hours later, the body of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the regiment's white commander, was thrown into a mass grave with those of twenty of his men. The assault promoted the young colonel to the higher rank of martyr, ranking him alongside the legendary John Brown in the eyes of abolitionists.In this biography of Shaw, Russell Duncan presents a poignant portrait of an average young soldier, just past the cusp of manhood and still struggling against his mother's indomitable will, thrust unexpectedly into the national limelight. Using information gleaned from Shaw's letters home before and during the war, Duncan tells the story of the rebellious son of wealthy Boston abolitionists who never fully reconciled his own racial prejudices yet went on to head the North's vanguard black regiment and give his life to the cause of freedom. This thorough biography looks at Shaw from historical and psychological viewpoints and examines the complex family relationships that so strongly influenced him.

Hotel Imperium: Poems


Rachel Loden - 1999
    Rachel Loden employs both strict and innovative forms in poetry that explores the post-Cold War unease that follows a century of harrowing conflicts. These contradictory elements flower in poems drawn from the ethereal world of pop myths and fairy tales that simultaneously unfold a reality full of absence and mystery. Speaking as intimately of the fall of the Soviet Union as they do of the cinematic crimes and misdemeanors of Woody Allen or the redemptive passion of Little Richard, their tone ranges from the furious to the elegiac, with a comic edge that borrows as much from the gallows as it does from the Borscht Belt. As rich in rhyme, music, and literary allusion as it is in multifaceted meaning, Hotel Imperium presents a surprising blend of sophistication, playfulness, and haunting truths.

War and the Intellectuals: Collected Essays, 1915-1919


Randolph Bourne - 1999
    The twenty-eight essays of this volume--among them, War and the Intellectuals, the analysis of the warfare state that made Bourne the foremost critic of American entry into World War 1, and Trans-National America, his manifesto for cultural pluralism in America--show Bourne at his most passionate and incisive as they trace his search for the true wellsprings of nationalism and American culture.

The World Is Filled with Mondays


Charles M. Schulz - 1999
    Line drawings.

Grace: An American Woman in China, 1934-1974


Eleanor McCallie Cooper - 1999
    . . A unique perspective on a period of -critical transformations in China."—Kirkus Reviews "Reads like a riveting and complex novel. Set against the fascinating backdrop of China during the Cultural Revolution, it is the story of a strong woman who followed her heart against the odds."—Lee Smith, The Last Girls Eleanor McCallie Cooper lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee. William Liu, Grace’s only surviving child, teaches at Simon Frasier University in Vancouver.

Hard Hitting Songs for Hard-Hit People


Woody Guthrie - 1999
    With characteristic modesty he tells us what’s missing and what’s wrong with the collection. But more important, he tells us what’s right and why it still matters, noting songs that have become famous the world over: “Union Made,” “Which Side Are You On?,” “Worried Man Blues,” “Midnight Special,” and “Tom Joad.” “Now, at the turn of the century, the millennium, what’s the future of these songs?” he asks. “Music is one of the things that will save us. Future songwriters can learn from the honesty, the courage, the simplicity, and the frankness of these hard-hitting songs. And not just songwriters. We can all learn.”

Sexually Speaking: Collected Sex Writings


Gore Vidal - 1999
    Here, fourteen essays and three rare, vintage interviews published over the past four decades tackle hot-button topics such as gay American founding fathers, sex and the Catholic church, gay bashing and the U.S. Congress, and bedding Jack Kerouac. “Vidal’s erudition, candor, and exceptional sense of humor shine.” — San Francisco Chronicle

Gold Fools


Gilbert Sorrentino - 1999
    Their guides, the grizzled prospector, Hank Crosby, and the leathery old cowpoke, Billee Dobb, accompany them through blistering heat, savage sandstorms, and the dangers posed by the evil Del Pinzo and his sinister Indian companion, Zapto, men who want the treasure for themselves. In this brilliant, witty, yet fond burlesque of the boys' adventure books, Sorrentino tells the story in interrogative sentences, forcing the reading to answer the very questions of the narrative itself.Gilbert Sorrentino teaches at Stanford University.

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Judaism


Benjamin Blech - 1999
    One of our most popular religion and history titles - updated and reivsed.This guide contains a complete, authoritative account of the Jewish people - including profiles of Biblical and political leaders - and focuses on understanding the Jewish influence on American and world culture, offering insights into the Yiddish and Hebrew languages, theater, art, literature, comedy, film, television, and more.

The Race: The Complete True Story of How America Beat Russia to the Moon


James Schefter - 1999
    Like Undaunted Courage and D-Day, this is a tale of achieving the extraordinary against extraordinary odds.  As incredible as the "official" story of the space program is, the true, behind-the-scenes tale is more thrilling, more entertaining, and ultimately more ennobling.

Maya Angelou: The Poetry of Living


Margaret Courtney-Clarke - 1999
    Closer to home, she has also profoundly influenced her many friends and family members--by counseling, encouraging, praising, and exhorting, and not least, teaching by example. One of those whose lives she touched, photographer Margaret Courtney-Clarke, offers a tribute in these pages--moving and revealing portraits of her friend. Taken over the course of a year, at bookstore signings, on stage, and at home, Courtney-Clarke's photographs both celebrate and illuminate one of the great figures of our time.Supporting the visual story are thoughts on Angelou's powers of friendship as interpreted by her friends, in chapters that highlight the poet's virtues--Joy, Giving, Learning, Perseverance, Creativity, Courage, Self-Respect, Spirituality, Love, and Taking Risks. Among those represented here, all of whom count Dr. Angelou as one of the most important persons in their lives, are leaders Coretta Scott King, Reverend Barbara King, and Andrew Young; singers Ashford and Simpson; and Dr. Angelou's son, the writer Guy Johnson. And in her touching foreword, Oprah Winfrey describes how Dr. Angelou came to be her "counsel, consultant, advisor, shoulder to cry on, Rock, Shield, Protector, Defender, Mama Bear, and Mother-Sister-Friend."Maya Angelou's strength in the face of a difficult life, her concern for others, and the singular artistry of her writings give guidance to all who seek their own spiritual way in the world. In Courtney-Clarke's photographs and in the words of Dr. Angelou's closest friends, the true wisdom of her spirit emerges.

Train Man


P.T. Deutermann - 1999
    In Washington, the FBI scrambles--sending Assistant Director Hush Hanson and agent Carolyn Lang to investigate the deadly act of domestic terror.Hanson is a team player and killer marksman. Lang has an agenda of her own. By the time the two agents leave Washington, they are on a collision course with each other. And another bridge has exploded.Now, the investigation is exploding into an inter-agency feud. The brass is after a terrorist cell, while Hanson and Land suspect a single man--the Train Man--is bringing down the bridges on by one. But as more death and destruction strike the river, on one can guess that far greater danger is looming. A top-secret, emergency shipment of unstable nuclear waste has been sent west by train. And when the nukes meets the river there will be no way across, no time to turn back, and almost no chance to stop the deadliest disaster of all...

The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane


Paul L. Mariani - 1999
    Few poets have lived as extraordinary and fascinating a life as Hart Crane, the American poet who made his meteoric rise in the late 1920s and then as suddenly flamed out, killing himself at the age of thirty-two and thus turning his life and poetry into the stuff of myth.

Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression


Errol Lincoln Uys - 1999
    They were looking for work and adventure; some wanted to leave their homes, and some had to. They grew up in speeding boxcars, living in hobo jungles, begging on the streets, and running from the police and club-wielding railroad guards.The restless youth of these boxcar boys and girls, many who went from 'middle-class gentility to dirt poor' overnight, is recaptured in Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression. Whether as runaways or with blessings of parents, these boys and girls hit the road and went in search of a better life.Illustrated with rare archival photos and drawing primarily on letters and oral histories of three thousand men and women who hopped freight trains, Riding the Rails brings to life a neglected saga of America in the 1930s. Self-reliance, compassion, frugality, and a love of freedom and country are at the heart of the lessons these teens learned. At journey's end, the resilience of these survivors is a testament of the indomitable strength of the human spirit.

Seven and 8mm


Andrew Kevin Walker - 1999
    Seven, which starred Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow, followed the trail of a serial killer, whose victims were murdered in accordance with the seven deadly sins. 8mm focuses on Tom Welles -- portrayed by Nicolas Cage -- an honest and hardworking private detective, who discovers an appalling 8mm "snuff" film in which a teenage girl was raped and killed. Hired to track down the masked murderers shown in the film, Welles reconstructs the dead girl's unhappy life; in the course of his investigation, he learns that all fantasies can be filmed to order, at a terrible price, and he becomes obsessed with avenging the girl's death.

Over the River and Through the Woods


Joe DiPietro - 1999
    His parents retired and moved to Florida. That doesn't mean his family isn't still in Jersey. In fact, he sees both sets of his grandparents every Sunday for dinner. This is routine until he has to tell them that he's been offered a dream job. The job he's been waiting for - marketing executive - would take him away from his beloved, but annoying, grandparents. He tells them. The news doesn't sit so well. Thus begins a series of schemes to keep Nick around. How could he betray his family's love to move to Seattle for a job, wonder his grandparents? Well, Frank, Aida, Nunzio, and Emma do their level best, that includes bringing the lovely - and single - Caitlin O'Hare as bait.

Sit on a Potato Pan, Otis!: More Palindromes


Jon Agee - 1999
    These palindromes and their accompanying cartoons will inspire laughs long after first sight. One may feel compelled to go through the book again backwards -- appropriately palindromically -- to revisit his or her favorites.

Gardens in the Dunes


Leslie Marmon Silko - 1999
    Placed in a government school to learn the ways of a white child, Indigo is rescued by the kind-hearted Hattie and her worldly husband, Edward, who undertake to transform this complex, spirited girl into a “proper” young lady. Bit by bit, and through a wondrous journey that spans the European continent, traipses through the jungles of Brazil, and returns to the rich desert of Southwest America, Indigo bridges the gap between the two forces in her life and teaches her adoptive parents as much as, if not more than, she learns from them.

The Oldest Map with the Name America: New and Selected Poems


Lucia Perillo - 1999
    Many of her poems are candid and affecting--some document how she negotiates life with multiple sclerosis; others concern her working-class Catholic childhood in a small Hudson River town. But in general, and even in these personal works, her poetry picks up the fragments of American culture--Bart Simpson, crimes of violence, Girl Scouting, teen rebellion, redneck survivalists--and assembles them into a highly readable and illuminating cultural commentary. One poem, "Foley," blends the subjects of  movie sound effects and phone sex to make the point that in electronic America things are seldom as they seem--or sound. In "For I Have Taught the Japanese," an ESL instructor confesses, "I was such/an idiot I even tried to apologize more than once/for Nagasaki." In a third, Perillo thumbs through a survivalist magazine to see what it has to offer to her newborn nephew: "They're hawking a T-shirt: I entered the world/fat, mad, and bald, and I plan on leaving that way."       The texture of Lucia Perillo's writing is conversational, poignant, often mordantly funny. The structure of her work is architectural in its grandeur, dramatic in its impact. Taken together, the poems in The Oldest Map with the Name America present the reader with an important new way of looking at the world--a vision that in its coherence provides us with a deep and original understanding of what we're all about, as individuals and as a culture.

A Legacy of Shadows: Selected Poems


David Lee - 1999
    Lee's small-town universe is frequented by tragedy and near-tragedy, and transcendence most often arrives in the form of salvaged humor, whether ironic, self-depricating, or ribald."David Lee's pig poems are the best thing to happen to animals in poetry since Kit Smart's cat.'-Thomas McGrath"Lee's calculatedly simple narratives are wonderfully wrought. His is a welcome voice, neither academic nor urban."-BooklistAlso available by David LeeDavid Lee: A Listener's Guide Reading from: A Legacy of Shadows and News from Down to the CaféAudio CD $12.00, 1-55659-137-3.

Moments with Jackie


Jean Mills - 1999
    Despite a life whose triumphs and tragedies alike were a source of intense public fascination, she set an example of personal dignity and integrity that deeply touched our lives.Filled with captivating photos and intimate details about her remarkable life, Moments With Jackie is a celebration of the life of this world-renowned and beloved cultural icon.

Maxfield Parrish: 1870-1966


Sylvia Yount - 1999
    Published to accompany a travelling exhibition in the USA, this is a critical examination of Parrish's place in the history of American art and culture.

The Messenger: The Rise and Fall of Elijah Muhammad


Karl Evanzz - 1999
    of photos.

No Equal Justice: Race and Class in the American Criminal Justice System


David Cole - 1999
    Hailed as a “shocking and necessary book” by The Economist, it has become the standard reference point for anyone trying to understand the fundamental inequalities in the American legal system. The book, written by constitutional law scholar and civil liberties advocate David Cole, was named the best nonfiction book of 1999 by the Boston Book Review and the best book on an issue of national policy by the American Political Science Association.No Equal Justice examines subjects ranging from police behavior and jury selection to sentencing, and argues that our system does not merely fail to live up to the promise of equality, but actively requires double standards to operate. Such disparities,Cole argues, allow the privileged to enjoy constitutional protections from police power without paying the costs associated with extending those protections across the board to minorities and the poor.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds II


Dean Wesley SmithKen Rand - 1999
    Culled from a second nationwide contest/author search, they represent some of the finest Star Trek writing available today.

Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton


Graham Lock - 1999
    Providing an alternative to previous analyses of their work, Lock shows how these distinctive artists were each influenced by a common musical and spiritual heritage and participated in self-conscious efforts to create a utopian vision of the future. A century after Ellington’s birth, Lock reassesses his use of music as a form of black history and compares the different approaches of Ra, a band leader who focused on the future and cosmology, and Braxton, a contemporary composer whose work creates its own elaborate mythology. Arguing that the majority of writing on black music and musicians has—even if inadvertently—incorporated racial stereotypes, he explains how each artist reacted to criticism and sought to break free of categorical confines. Drawing on social history, musicology, biography, cultural theory, and, most of all, statements by the musicians themselves, Lock writes of their influential work. Blutopia will be a welcome contribution to the literature on twentieth-century African American music and creativity. It will interest students of jazz, American music, African American studies, American culture, and cultural studies.

Henry James: A Life in Letters


Henry James - 1999
    Wells and Edith Wharton. This fully-annotated selection from James's eloquent correspondence allows the writer to reveal himself and the fascinating world in which he lived. The letters provide a rich and fascinating source for James' views on his own works, on the literary craft, on sex, politics and friendship. Together they constitute, in Philip Horne's own words, James' 'real and best biography'.

Mosquito and Ant: Poems


Kimiko Hahn - 1999
    Here in this exciting and totally original book of poems the narrator corresponds with L. about her hidden passions, her relationship with her husband and adolescent daughters, lost loves, and erotic fantasies. Kimiko Hahn's collection takes shape as a series of wide-ranging correspondences that are in turn precocious and wise, angry and wistful. Borrowing from both Japanese and Chinese traditions, Hahn offers us an authentic and complex narrator struggling with the sorrows and pleasures of being a woman against the backdrop of her Japanese-American roots.

Bye Bye Baby: My Tragic Love Affair with the Bay City Rollers


Caroline Sullivan - 1999
    For four years I lived for them. It's not a pretty story.'Bye, Bye Baby is the true tale of a passionate obsession with possibly the most untalented bunch of musicians in the history of rock and roll. Even in their heyday, Leslie, Eric, Woody, Alan, and Derek of the Bay City Rollers were hideously uncool among everyone but fourteen-year-old girls. Their tartan knickerbockers and striped socks were sneered at, while their feeble teenybopper music was ridiculed.And yet for Caroline Sullivan, a teenager in suburban New Jersey, these pasty-faced Scottish youths ruled her heart. Over four hot summers from 1975 to 1979, Sullivan and her band of lust-crazed friends, the Tacky Tartan Tarts, crisscrossed the United States in the Rollers' wake, staking out airports and hotels, tricking airline clerks and wheedling information out of bodyguards and PR companies-all in pursuit of that one big night.Bye Bye Baby is a confessional memoir that invites the reader into some of Sullivan's most excruciatingly embarrassing moments. More than just an uproarious tale of teenage passion and teen-adulation, it is also an inspired exploration of the intimate bonds that tie teenage girls.

Why Not, Lafayette?


Jean Fritz - 1999
    "Informative, interesting, and immensely readable."--"School Library Journal." Illustrations.

50 Successful Harvard Application Essays: What Worked for Them Can Help You Get into the College of Your Choice


Harvard Crimson - 1999
    Each was used by a Harvard student on his or her application and is followed with analysis by the staff of the Harvard Crimson, who help give perspective on what works well, what is a necessary evil, and what detracts from an otherwise compelling essay. With pointers on avoiding common essay pitfalls and stepping back to evaluate strengths applicants never realized they had, Fifty Successful Harvard Application Essays is an inspiration for every student trying to find the one thing that sets him or her apart from the crowd.

Prayers of an Accidental Nature


Debra Di Blasi - 1999
    Stylistically innovative fiction that tests the borders of gender and class issues, skirting the edge of post-modern erotica.

Fire on the Plateau: Conflict And Endurance In The American Southwest


Charles F. Wilkinson - 1999
    Examines the sometimes violent conflicts between indigenous populations and more recent settlers, the political machinations by industry and the legal establishment, the contentious disputes over resources and land use, and provides a compelling look at the epic events that have shaped the region.

Roller Coasters, Flumes And Flying Saucers


R.R. Reynolds - 1999
    Inventors of the tubular steel roller coaster, flume ride, corkscrew roller coaster and many Disneyland and Walt Disney World ride systems.Starting with a small machine shop in 1946, Ed Morgan and Karl Bacon would become the premier ride designers of the modern age of amusement parks. Having been picked by Walt Disney in 1954 to help construct Disneyland, Ed and Karl maintained a twenty-year working relationship with the Disney organization. Many of the most popular attractions at Disneyland and Walt Disney world contain Ed and Karl’s ride systems.Ed and Karl are the inventors behind the tubular steel roller coaster, the looping roller coaster and the flume ride; three attractions that have changed the way the world has fun.This is the story of their journey, in their own words, from a poor machine shop with one burnt-out truck, to a company of over 200 employees building attractions for customers throughout the world.