Best of
New-York

1993

Body and Soul


Frank Conroy - 1993
    From Carnegie Hall to the smoky jazz clubs of London, Body & Soul burns with passion and truth--at once a riveting, compulsive read and a breathtaking glimpse into a boy's heart and an artist's soul.

When I Was Puerto Rican


Esmeralda Santiago - 1993
    Growing up, she learned the proper way to eat a guava, the sound of tree frogs in the mango groves at night, the taste of the delectable sausage called morcilla, and the formula for ushering a dead baby's soul to heaven. As she enters school we see the clash, both hilarious and fierce, of Puerto Rican and Yankee culture. When her mother, Mami, a force of nature, takes off to New York with her seven, soon to be eleven children, Esmeralda, the oldest, must learn new rules, a new language, and eventually take on a new identity. In this first volume of her much-praised, bestselling trilogy, Santiago brilliantly recreates the idyllic landscape and tumultuous family life of her earliest years and her tremendous journey from the barrio to Brooklyn, from translating for her mother at the welfare office to high honors at Harvard.

New York


Annelise Sorensen - 1993
     Dozens of Top 10 lists provide vital information on each destination, as well as insider tips, from uncovering a city's most memorable sights to finding the best restaurants and hotels in each neighborhood. And to save you time and money, there's even a Top 10 list of Things to Avoid. Each "Top 10" contains a pull-out map and guide that includes fold-out maps of city metro systems, useful phone numbers, and 60 great ideas on how to spend your day.

New York (Eyewitness Travel Guide)


Eleanor Berman - 1993
    Recommended star sights and star features help you to make the most of the city. The Survival Guide shows you, in pictures, how to use local currency, public transportation, and telephones. Easy-to-use 3-D aerial views give you instant access to districts, streets, and buidings. Hotels, restaurants, cafes, and bars in all price ranges. Unique cutaways and floor plans help you explore public buildings and landmarks - no need to purchase other guides. Wide-ranging entertainment listings: theaters, music, films, clubs, and children's acitvities.

Fires in the Mirror


Anna Deavere Smith - 1993
    Derived from interviews with a wide range of  people who experienced or observed New York's 1991  Crown Heights racial riots, Fires In The  Mirror is as distinguished a work of  commentary on current Black-White tensions as it is a  work of drama.

Stonewall


Martin Duberman - 1993
    At a little after one a.m. on the morning of June 28, 1969, the police carried out a routine raid on the bar. But it turned out not to be routine at all. Instead of cowering -- the usual reaction to a police raid -- the patrons inside Stonewall and the crowd that gathered outside the bar fought back against the police. The five days of rioting that followed changed forever the face of lesbian and gay life. In the years since 1969, the Stonewall riots have become the central symbolic event of the modern gay movement. Renowned historian and activist Martin Duberman now tells for the first time the full story of what happened at Stonewall, recreating in vivid detail those heady, sweltering nights in June 1969 and revealing a wealth of previously unknown material. This landmark book does even more: it unforgettably demonstrates that the Stonewall riots were not the beginning -- just as they were certainly not the end -- of the ongoing struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Duberman does all this within a narrative framework of novelistic immediacy. Stonewall unfolds through the stories of six lives, and those individual lives broaden out into the larger historical canvas. All six came of age in the pre-Stonewall era, and all six were drawn into the struggle for gay and lesbian rights as a result of the upheaval at the Stonewall bar and the events that followed.

City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara


Brad Gooch - 1993
    Gooch presents an unforgettable story of a man who was struck down at the height of his powers. 55 photos.

The Nonconformist's Memorial: Poems


Susan Howe - 1993
    Howe is a poet of language in history whose work resonates back through Melville, Dickinson, and Shelley to the seventeenth-century Metaphysicals and Puritans (the nonconformism of the title), and forward again to T. S. Eliot and the abstract expressionists. The sequences fall into two sections, "Turning" and "Conversion," in half-ironic nonconforming counterpart to Eliot's Four Quartets. Her collaging and mirror-imaging of words are concretions of verbal static, visual meditations on what can and cannot be said. For Howe, "Melville's Marginalia" is the essential poem in the collection, an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Melville's own reading and the notations in his library books. This, says Howe, is "Language a wood for thought."

Spidertown


Abraham Rodriguez Jr. - 1993
    Along with his roommate, an arsonist named Firebug, Miguel tries to fit a lifetime of partying, casual sex, and high times into a few short years. But when he meets the beautiful and practical-minded Cristalena, the shallowness and imminent danger of his world come crashing home. Tense, gritty, and moving, written in the fast, rhythmic language of the streets, "Spidertown" captures a world where children own guns, where death is a part of everyday life, and where, miraculously, hope manages to survive.

My New York


Kathy Jakobsen - 1993
    and gives a seek-and-find, kid's eye-view of the Big Apple. Engagingly described and sumptuously illustrated with paintings full of details to pore over again and again, the city's pleasures almost burst off the page: the thrill of riding your own special horse on Central Park's colorful carousel, the magic of seeing the spectacular Fourth of July firewords explode over the New York skyline, and much, much more. Oversized fold-out pages of the Empire State Building, the dinosaurs at the Museum of Natural History, and Rockefeller Center at Christmastime add to the fun, while a map in the front and fun facts in the back make a helpful guide for visitors and locals alike.

Snapshot Poetics: A Photographic Memoir of the Beat Era


Allen Ginsberg - 1993
    These candid photographs are intimate, behind-the-scenes portraits of the legendary Beat writers and personalities who inspired a generation and are a vital part of the American literary landscape. (Adapted from jacket copy.)

Escape from Slavery: The Boyhood of Frederick Douglass in His Own Words


Frederick Douglass - 1993
    in black-and-white. Opening note by Coretta Scott King. For the first time, the most important account ever written of a childhood in slavery is accessible to young readers. From his days as a young boy on a plantation to his first months as a freeman in Massachusetts, here are Douglass's own firsthand experiences vividly recounted--expertly excerpted and powerfully illustrated.

Enough is Enough: Weekly Meditations for Living Dysfunctionally


Karen Finley - 1993
    Taking a topic a week, Finley shows how to parlay dysfunctional qualities into power and success. Illus.

Making the Mummies Dance: Inside the Metropolitan Museum of Art


Thomas Hoving - 1993
    In a decade, Hoving changed almost everything people had grown accustomed to from the Met, shaking the institution out of royal repose and transforming it into the most vital cultural presence in the country. Now, the irrepressible former director delivers a fearless account of his life at the pinnacle of the art world - a modern Vanity Fair, a true story of masterpieces and money, society and scandal, intrigue and international theft. The Met is more than a dazzling art showplace. The museum is a vibrant if quietly influential community, inhabited and run by singular sorts of people: trustees and curators, connoisseurs and conservators. It is steeped in history and tradition and seems to move in a serene and elegant world of impeccable manners and the finest taste. Behind the proper social veneers and pristine marble galleries, Hoving reveals the cutthroat precincts where the real business of the Met is carried out. From seducing important patrons like Robert Lehman, Nelson Rockefeller, Walter Annenberg, and Brooke Astor to spiriting ancient treasures across international borders; from striking secret agreements with the world's most powerful dealers to sidestepping rivals; from securing blockbuster exhibitions, like "Tut" and "The Glory of Russian Costume," to seizing the most phenomenal Velazquez portrait, Hoving shares not only the nimbleness and brashness that made him so effective, but also the zeal and passion that made the Met so exciting. Making the Mummies Dance is told in the head-on, even naughty, way that is trademark Hoving. This is an important, shocking museum story and more - an unforgettable tale of power struggles and one-upmanship, fame, big money, and, of course, great art.

Luxury Apartment Houses of Manhattan: An Illustrated History


Andrew Alpern - 1993
    175 illustrations — many from private sources — depict both interiors and exteriors. Introduction. Index.

Ramones: An American Band


Jim Bessman - 1993
    Today's new music-makers are looking back at the bands that broke the ground, and the Ramones are it: the original high priests of punk, the stars of rock 'n roll high school, the royal avatars of rock, raunch, and rebellion. 60 photographs and illustrations.

Papa Andrea's Sicilian Table: Recipes and Remembrances of My Grandfather


Vincent Schiavelli - 1993
    Illustrations & photos.

Coming Unbuttoned


James Broughton - 1993
    His groundbreaking films were championed by Jean Cocteau and Maya Deren, and he wrote poetry in company with Robert Duncan and Alan Watts. On these frank and witty pages, he gives firsthand witness to life in the artistic underground from the 1940s into the '90s as he becomes an icon of the gay counterculture, culminating with his winter-years' romance with Joel Singer, the love of his life.This Query Books edition contains a new Foreword by Mark Thompson, author of Gay Spirit; and two never-before published, unexpurgated chapters.

Canoeing the Adirondacks with Nessmuk: The Adirondack Letters of George Washington Sears


George Washington Sears - 1993
    The letters of George Washington Sears should interest not only the wilderness lover, but also the boater and craftsman who longs to own the perfect canoe.

Maxi, the Star


Debra Barracca - 1993
    producer invites Maxi to try out for the new Doggie Bites commercial. Technicolor illustrations and a bouncy rhyming text make this a winner.--Booklist. Full color.

Save Me, Joe Louis


Madison Smartt Bell - 1993
    They move to Baltimore, where they hook up with a black ex-con called Porter, from whom Macrae begins to learn the perils of living an unexamined life.