Offering first-time players an easy-to-follow guide to this complex game, A Beginner's Guide to American Mah Jongg includes simple, easy-to-follow instructions and clear diagrams to walk the reader through each step of the game, including how to select a hand, how to play and how to develop winning strategies. A key feature is the color text which shows various hands and tiles.This Mahjong guide includes:Step-by-step instructions for gameplay.Hands-on "Do It" exercisesTips and quizzes for natural learningMahjong background and historyAn explanation of tile symbolismGlossary of Mahjong termsA Beginner's Guide to American Mah Jongg is the perfect guide for all skill levels to learn Mahjong—from Mahjong beginners to pros.

    He wanted to see the world. He especially wanted to visit New York City. What he didn’t want was to be joined by a duck. A crazy duck. A duck that misbehaves. Young readers will laugh out loud at the duck’s silly antics as Dodsworth has the unexpected adventure of his life in the Big Apple . . . and beyond.

    He is “one of the handful of living masters of the American language, as well as a singular historian and philosopher of American experience,” says the New Yorker’s Peter Schjeldahl. Kill All Your Darlings is the first collection of Sante’s articles—many of which first appeared in the New York Review of Books and the Village Voice—and offers ample justification for such high praise. Sante is best known for his groundbreaking work in urban history (Low Life), and for a particularly penetrating form of autobiography (The Factory of Facts). These subjects are also reflected in several essays here, but it is the author’s intense and scrupulous writing about music, painting, photography, and poetry that takes center stage. Alongside meditations on cigarettes, factory work, and hipness, and his critical tour de force, “The Invention of the Blues,” Sante offers his incomparable take on icons from Arthur Rimbaud to Bob Dylan, René Magritte to Tintin, Buddy Bolden to Walker Evans, Allen Ginsberg to Robert Mapplethorpe.

    Now, in this gripping narrative, Jill Jonnes tells this fascinating story?a high-stakes drama that pitted the money and will of the nation's mightiest railroad against the corruption of Tammany Hall, the unruly forces of nature, and the machinations of labor agitators. In 1901, the president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Alexander Cassatt, determined that it was technically feasible to build a system of tunnels connecting Manhattan to New Jersey and Long Island. Confronted by payoff-hungry politicians, brutal underground working conditions, and disastrous blowouts and explosions, it would take him nearly a decade to make Penn Station and its tunnels a reality. Set against the bustling backdrop of Gilded Age New York, "Conquering Gotham" will enthrall fans of David McCullough's "The Great Bridge" and Ron Chernow's "Titan."

    Spectacular, mysterious, elegant, or grotesque, the skeletons of the vertebrates that inhabit the earth today carry within them the imprint of an evolutionary process that has lasted several billion years. This book is the result of a dual approach, scientific as well as aesthetic, rigorous yet accessible. Each chapter is made up of a short text that illuminates one theme of the evolutionary process—repetition, adaptation, polymorphism, sexual selection, and more—and a series of exquisitely composed photographs of skeletons against a black background. Approximately three hundred photographs of whole skeletons or their details have been made possible by the French National Museum of Natural History. The reader learns, by experiencing each text and photograph together, how the structure of every creature has been shaped by its environmental and genetic inheritance.

    But she’s taught them well, and at the end of their adventures, each one proves himself a mensch—making Mama one proud gefilte indeed. Dave Horowitz’s playful rhyming tale, its illustrations packed with comic asides, will have readers giggling out loud and looking for opportunities to practice their Yiddish—with help from the handy glossary at the end of the book.

    Accompanying an exhibition touring the States throughout 2007 and 2008, this work reassesses Edward Hopper and examines the dynamics of his creative process and discusses his work within the cultural currents of his day, looking at the influence not only of other painters, but also of such media as literature and film.

    Beautifully crafted surfaces give way to sincere depth.Matthew Rohrer is the author of A Green Light (2004, shortlisted for the Griffin Prize), Satellite, and A Hummock in the Malookas. He has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing.

    What's hiding behind those curtains on the stage? How does a huge set appear so quickly between scenes? Just two of the many questions answered in this visual compendium.

    The works span the years from 1937, beginning with "Thing of Beauty," his first poem, until his death in 2004 and demonstrate his extraordinary range as well as his unquenchable enthusiasm. Mac Low is widely acknowledged as one of the major figures in twentieth-century American poetry, with much of his work ranging into the spheres of music, dance, theater, performance, and the visual arts. Comparable in stature to such giants as Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, and Allen Ginsberg, Mac Low is often associated with composer John Cage, with whom he shared a delight in work derived from "chance operations." This volume, edited by Anne Tardos, his wife and frequent collaborator, offers a balanced arrangement of early, middle, and late work, designed to convey not just the range but also the progressions and continuities of his writings and "writingways."

    Its walls are rich with stories. Its walls are rich with stories. In this book we hear myriad of those voices. First we follow a young person today. Her great-great-grandmother entered America through Ellis Island. As this young girl walks the halls of the famous site, she wonders about the past, the people, and their hopes, dreams and challenges. Here, too, is the voice of Sera, an Armenian girl from the early 1900s. Fleeing the unthinkable in her home country, she longs to join her father in America. As Sera enters the halls of Ellis Island, she lives those same hopes, dreams, and challenges. The voices of real immigrants -- their suffering in steerage, their first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, and their journey through the Great Hall -- complete this touching look into an important part of America's history. A pivotal time and place is brought to life through a combination of many voices speaking in harmony.

    Ex-lawyer Jack Gorse walls off his inner life with elaborate rituals and routines. Threatened with eviction from his longtime apartment and caught off-guard by an attraction to a near stranger, he takes steps that lead to the dramatic dissolution of the existence he's known.

    In 1809 he published A History of New York under the pseudonym Diedrich Knickerbocker to great acclaim. The public's appetite for all things Irving was insatiable; his name alone guaranteed sales. At the time, he was one of the most famous men in the world, a friend of Dickens, Hawthorne, and Longfellow, as well as Astor, Van Buren, and Madison. But his sparkling public persona was only one side of this gentleman author. In brilliant, meticulous strokes, Brian Jay Jones renders Washington Irving in all his flawed splendor: someone who fretted about money and employment, suffered from writer's block, and doggedly cultivated his reputation. Jones offers as never before a very human portrait of the often contrasting public and private lives of this true American original.

    Dark Reflections traces Hawley's life in three sections — in reverse order. Part one: Hawley, at 50 years old, wins the an award for his sixth book of poems. Part two explores Hawley's unhappy marriage, while the final section recalls his college days. Dark Reflections, moving back and forth in time, creates an extraordinary meditation on social attitudes, loneliness, and life's triumphs.

    . . takes the O’Hara city poet eye in his own direction, showing a sweet vision for the distance between public and private spaces.”—JacketAmerican Music, selected by C. D. Wright from over one thousand manuscripts as winner of the Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets, is uniquely attuned to the feedback symphony of a modern city, the lyrical product of “an earnest rage born of the absurd.”Chris Martin’s poems reflect all things found in the urban environment: asphalt, subways, technology, strangers, the drudgery of work, the garbage trucks and open parks, fist fights and snapshots, fears and paranoia, loves and joys. Here is the constant sense of life hurtling forward without the time to reflect, within a city rife with opportunities: “I can practically / Hear all those words out / There amassing to make the journey / Inward.”American Music is a jostling of the senses; a decadent descent into the throbbing of a metropolitan world filled with familiar but yet unresolved queries:. . . it strikes meThat every person in every passengerSeat in every car in Every town in every country Is having some goddamn Thought—this is mine.Chris Martin is a rapper, teacher, and editor of Puppy Flowers, an online magazine of the arts. He holds an MA in poetry, performance, and education from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. He lives in Brooklyn.

    Spoken word icons such as Saul Williams, Maggie Estep, Bob Holman and John S. Hall join scores of other poets, organizers, filmmakers, scholars and critics in bringing the story of the New York City Poetry Slam movement to life. Author Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz tells the story of slam's origins in the roofless, unheated Nuyorican Poets Cafe and then traces the explosive growth of slam as the media pick up on the trend--MTV's Unplugged begins to feature slam poets; PBS runs the mini-series The United States of Poetry, produced by then-Nuyorican impressario, Bob Holman; Lollapalooza adds a spoken word tent; and Holman also launches a spoken word label with Mercury Records. Aptowicz shows how, rather than depend on the fickle media for continued support, Slam instead deepens and broadens organically, avoiding the flash-in-the-pan flame-out of, say, the grunge scene. The author also establishes a relationship between the poetry slam world and the academic poetry world, encouraging interaction between academia and slammers, especially the poets of color, the youth slammers and the burgeoning hip hop poetry scene. She also shows how the scene has created the only non-academic way to make a living as a poet, as many poets are able to quit the day job through the opportunities created from touring, publishing, performing, audio downloads and matures to where it is a key component of educational initiatives and political campaigns.

    A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls presents the celebrated works of Tiffany Studios in an entirely new context, focusing on the "Tiffany Girls", the 27 women who laboured behind the scenes to create the masterpieces now inextricably linked to the Tiffany name.Recently discovered correspondence written by Ohio-born Clara Driscoll, head of the so-called "Women's Glass Cutting Department" at Tiffany Studios, reveals in convincing and vivid detail how it was in fact Driscoll who generated designs for such masterpieces as the famous Wisteria, Dragonfly and Peony goods. At the heart of the book are over 50 Tiffany lamps, windows, ceramics, enamels and mosaics, supplemented by a wide array of related documents and archival photographs.

    But the true origins of one of the most powerful pop-cultural influences in the world are in the spontaneous, progressive musical culture that grew out of tough Bronx neighborhoods of the 1970s and led to a renaissance of poetry, music, and fashion.Through years of research, writer and curator Johan Kugelberg has pulled together the scattered remains of a movement that never had its eye on posterity. The book includes the improvisational artwork of previously unpublished street flyers of the era, Polaroids buried for decades in basements across the Bronx, and testimonials from influential figures such as Tony Tone, LA Sunshine, and Charlie Chase. Through the work of pioneering hip-hop photographer Jow Conzo–the man The New York Times calls “the chronicler who took hip hop’s baby pictures”–Born in the Bronx presents a unique introduction to an explosive and experimental period in music history.

    He had attracted considerable attention with his Times Square Show the summer before, and reinforced that nascent notoriety with a wall of phenomenal works in Diego Cortez's New York/New Wave at P.S. 1, which opened the following winter. A few months later, the dealer Annina Nosei offered Basquiat an independent space in which to prepare work for her September group show, Public Address. He was only 20. Between the world of spray-painted poetry and what critic Peter Schjeldahl called "New York big-painting aesthetics" lies a fantastic coming-of-age: Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1981: The Studio of the Street includes paintings and drawings on everything from note cards to sheet metal to a leather jacket and conventional canvas. In them, as throughout his career, Basquiat married an exuberant spontaneity and art-brut sensibility with a firm command of not only art materials but art history. He would go on to define the 80s Neo-Expressionist idiom, and to remain its most compelling representative. The Studio of the Street examines this charged point of contact in works that show the artist's progression from text to text-and-image, from found materials to traditional canvasses, and from pure drawing to his uniquely evocative hybrid of drawing and painting.

    It's a true story, and it's told by someone who can honestly claim that he was there.

    She writes about bitterness, cruelty and compulsion with brutal acuity and tenderness. She has created a timeless collection in which Greek mythology, superstition and the religious and cultural experience of the Jewish diaspora in America collide. In these stories, we see Ozick defining herself and her literary territory. This is a dazzling collection of short stories by an internationally celebrated novelist.

    Pitch-perfect and hilarious role-reversal featuring Hollywood Bliss Winterman, daughter of a pop idol - enormously rich, hugely famous and impressively high maintenance

    With enormous compassion, Dr. James Delaney tends to his hurt, sick, and poor neighbors, who include gangsters, day laborers, prostitutes, and housewives. If they can't pay, he treats them anyway. But in his own life, Delaney is emotionally numb, haunted by the slaughters of the Great War. His only daughter has left for Mexico, and his wife Molly vanished months before, leaving him to wonder if she is alive or dead. Then, on a snowy New Year's Day, the doctor returns home to find his three-year-old grandson on his doorstep, left by his mother in Delaney's care. Coping with this unexpected arrival, Delaney hires Rose, a tough, decent Sicilian woman with a secret in her past. Slowly, as Rose and the boy begin to care for the good doctor, the numbness in Delaney begins to melt. Recreating 1930s New York with the vibrancy and rich detail that are his trademarks, Pete Hamill weaves a story of honor, family, and one man's simple courage that no reader will soon forget.

    It is an enormous place that takes up five city blocks and has more than two million square feet of space, filled with treasures everywhere the eye can see. There are exquisite vases, jewelry, tapestry, baseball cards, Egyptian mummies, sculptures, and furniture, and many of the most famous and recognized paintings in the world, from Van Gogh to Rembrandt, Monet, and El Greco. But this famous institution, which attracts four million visitors a year, is not just about objects. This is a place that is supported and maintained by people, which is what this wonderful book celebrates. In the fifty-two interviews in "Museum," we meet some of the people who have given their lives to making the Met the success that it is. We are introduced to curators with endless knowledge who look after the collections; as well as cleaners; florists; police and security staff who maintain and secure the building; plus the philanthropists and millionaires who donate their money for new and wonderful art works, including well-known people like Henry Kravis and Annette de la Renta. Danziger has a rare touch for getting just the right detail, and these interviews are informative, moving, and compulsively readable. Oral history at its best, "Museum" will appeal not only to the millions who visit the Met every year, but also to anyone with an interest in museums and art.

    William Low's glorious illustrations pay close attention to detail while still encompassing the large-scale grandeur of Penn Station.Old Penn Station follows a very specific piece of New York City history, but it's not just a New York book. The author's research carefully addresses the whole history of the building, from construction to destruction, ending with an acknowledgment of its lasting legacy in terms of historical preservation. Spaces can be powerful, and Old Penn Station honors one particular powerful space which is sure to engender discussion about other historical buildings and monuments all across the nation.This is a classic, beautiful book for history lovers, train lovers, and art lovers alike.Old Penn Station is a 2007 New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year and a 2008 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

    The five boroughs sit atop one of the most naturally rich sites in North America, directly under the Atlantic migratory flyway, at the mouth of a 300-mile-long river, and on three islands—Manhattan, Staten, and Long.Leslie Day, a New York City naturalist, reveals this amazing world in her Field Guide to the Natural World of New York City. Combining the stunning paintings of Mark A. Klingler with a variety of photographs and maps, this book is a complete guide for the urban naturalist—with tips on identifying the city's flora and fauna and maps showing the nearest subway stop.Here is your personal guide to the real wild side of America’s largest city. Throw it in your backpack, hop on the subway, and explore.

    In the title sequence of this stunning debut, DEAR BODY: imagines the dialog between body and mind as a playful literary correspondence. One that begins whimsically: "We prayed to your effigy like to a beautiful library book you wanted to steal," but can turn violent "Cut off a finger to see if you would notice, but the blood said nothing and I/just stood there moments with an open mouth." Yet, these poems never abandon their innate optimism, as they explore diverse forms and vocabularies on their search for "an opening, an architecture."

    Following Henri to New York, Sloan joined a small circle of eight talented artists whose dissatisfaction with the dominating National Academy led to a protest exhibit in 1908, the emergence of a powerful movement for change in American art, and ultimately to the famous Armory Show of 1913. It was in part Sloan’s dark palette and views of city streets and working-class life that gave rise to the epithet now used to describe the works of the “Ashcan School.” Sloan’s compelling images of New York City are the subject of this generously illustrated book. His paintings, drawings, and prints clearly reflect his own experience of the city as he walked its neighborhoods and observed human dramas played out in streets and apartments. The contributors to the volume investigate a variety of topics, including Sloan’s understanding of the urban experience in America, his interest in social reform, his fascination with moving pictures and cinema aesthetics, and his relationship with Henri. The authors also situate Sloan’s paintings within the geography and social fabric of New York. John Sloan’s New York presents a unique perspective on New York and its people and also on the artist himself, who was captivated by the soul of the city.

    Picano presents sweet and sometimes controversial anecdotes of his precocious childhood, odd, funny, and often disturbing encounters from before he found his calling as a writer and later as one of the first GLBT publishers. Throughout are his delightful encounters and surprising relationships with the one-of-a-kind and the famous-including Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Charles Henri Ford, Bette Midler, and Diana Vreeland.

    Drawing on his eleven- year tenure at the New York Tribune (which began in 1852), this completely new collection presents Marx's writings on an abundance of topics, from issues of class and state to world affairs. Particularly moving pieces highlight social inequality and starvation in Britain, while others explore his groundbreaking views on the slave and opium trades. Throughout, Marx's fresh perspective on nineteenth-century events reveals a social consciousness that remains inspiring to this day.

    While Celeste experiences the Harlem Renaissance in full swing, she sees as much grit as glamour. A passionate writer, talented violinist, and aspiring doctor, she eventually faces a choice between ambition and loyalty, roots and horizons. The decision will change her forever.

    As sole photographer at the Department of Bridges/Plant and Structures during that period of dizzying growth, he documented the creation of the city's modern infrastructure--including bridges, major municipal buildings, roads and subways. For years, de Salignac's remarkably lyrical photographs have been featured in books and films, but never credited to their author. New York Rises, which will accompany a traveling exhibition, is the first monograph to present this unprecedented work as an aesthetically coherent oeuvre by a photographer with a unique vision. As meticulous in his record keeping as he was creative in his photography, de Salignac left five handwritten logs that identify each negative by place and exact date. This information is complemented throughout the book by narrative captions expanding on themes such as accidents, bridges, workers and the Depression. Essayist Michael Lorenzini unearths primary sources to reconstruct de Salignac's biography and Kevin Moore explores the photographer's work in the context of other masters of the period, including Eugene Atget and Berenice Abbott.

    These heady years saw the births of Punk at CBGB and Max's Kansas City, of Hip Hop in the Bronx, the emerging art music activities of Philip Glass and Laurie Anderson, Free Jazz and the No Wave art/rock scene around James Chance, Lydia Lunch and Mars. "New York Noise" is Paula Court's photographic tour of these colliding worlds. From her arrival in New York City in 1978, Court diligently photographed the likes of Glenn Branca, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, David Byrne, Rhys Chatham, Lou Reed, James Chance, Patti Smith, Afrika Bambaata, John Cage, Robert Longo, Jim Jarmusch, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, as well as bands like DNA, Suicide, Bush Tetras, ESG and the Rock Steady Crew. Also captured in these pages are nascent musicians and actors such as Michael Stipe, Steve Buscemi, Willem Dafoe and Madonna, who came into artistic maturity amid these diverse scenes. With over 400 images, many of them previously unpublished, "New York Noise" follows Soul Jazz Records' critically acclaimed CD series, providing an unprecedented visual record of one of New York's liveliest cultural eras.

    There in New York City they struggled and ultimately flourished in a neighborhood that was the center of Jewish work, family, and culture. For more than fifty years, the Lower East Side spawned newly-mined Americans, including entertainment icons like George Burns and Ira Gershwin, gangsters like Meyer Lansky, and an extraordinary array of people who would go on to transform American society.

     Two soldiers march off to war in Europe. Both from the same neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Only one returns home. Rose Kaufman's grief is soul deep. Her husband, Joe, had been her one true love, so right for her that a lifetime together wouldn't be enough. When Charlie Shapiro shows up with stories of Joe--eager to rebuild his war-shattered life with Rose and her baby daughter--she warns that a marriage of convenience would be unfair--to him. She cannot promise her heart to this kind and gentle man. Through the years, Charlie wonders if love can grow or if he'll always be second best. Who is her true love? The man she married with all her heart, or the man who married her with all of his? It's a question only Rose can answer.

    In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein. This collaboration has had environmental, economic, and cultural consequences.Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created the great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water.The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation's ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence writers and artists had upon urban residents - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation.In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish "Borscht Belt" in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

     When Dorothy West died in 1998, she was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, a contemporary of Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright. Popular history holds that between the publication of her two novels (The Living is Easy in 1948 and The Wedding in 1995), Dorothy West fell silent. In fact, there was never a time in Dorothy West’s life in which she was not writing and publishing. The Last Leaf of Harlem gathers West’s writing from these supposedly silent years--syndicated fiction in the New York Daily News, pieces for the Work Progress Administration’s Federal Writer’s Project, and publications in small journals and magazines--along with known and beloved pieces by this extraordinary writer. Many of these stories, describing and exploring marriage, loss, family life, and poverty were lost until now. The Last Leaf of Harlem brings together the almost-forgotten pieces of Dorothy West’s lifework, and gives the reader a fresh look into a remarkable writer and career. DOROTHY WEST was born in Boston circa 1908. At her death in 1998, she was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance. Her works include: The Living is Easy, The Wedding, and The Richer, The Poorer. LIONEL C. BASCOM is a professor of English at Western Connecticut State University. A long-time investigative journalist, Bascom has specialized lately in the discovery of forgotten or neglected literary manuscripts by early 20th Century African-Americans, black folklore and stories about black culture in the United States. He is the editor of A Renaissance in Harlem and lives in Danbury, Connecticut.

    It is about the ultimate rescue, for in a startling reversal of roles the firefighters help to heal the author's own traumatic past.In a tone both poignant and thoughtful, Ms. Locke provides an authentic, historical account of life in a New York City firehouse. Her acceptance past the "big red doors" and a line of battle-hardened firefighters is a heartwarming tribute to how giving to others can become the ultimate experience of receiving.

    In this remarkable collection of writings chronicling the author's exploration of his own past, Quinn paints a brilliant new portrait of the Irish-American men and women whose culture and values now play such a central role in all of our identities as Americans.

    Mendel's klezmer band travels from village to village in Eastern Europe playing happy music and sad music, until hard times force the players to seek a better life in America.

    Susan, the stories’ main character, is a woman trapped in her own border region between youth and adulthood, familial roots in the Middle East and a typical American existence, the pull of Jewish tradition and the independence of a secular life.In “Helicopter Days,” Susan discovers that the Israeli cousin she grew up with has joined a mysterious cult. “Lila’s Story” braids Susan’s memories of her grandmother--a German Jew arriving in Palestine to escape the Holocaust--with the story of her own affair with a married man and an invented narrative of her grandmother’s life. In “Borderland,” while trekking in Nepal, Susan meets an Israeli soldier who carries with him the terrible burden of his experience as a border guard in the Gaza Strip. And in the haunting title story, bedtime tales are set against acts of terrorism and memories of a love beyond reach. The stories of The Pale of Settlement explore the borderland between Israelis and American Jews, emigrants and expatriates, and vanished homelands and the dangerous world in which we live today.

    Offering a new approach to an often misunderstood political movement, Tom Goyens puts a human face on anarchism and reveals a dedication less to bombs than to beer halls and saloons where political meetings, public lectures, discussion circles, fundraising events, and theater groups were held.Goyens brings to life the fascinating relationship between social space and politics by examining how the intersection of political ideals, entertainment, and social activism embodied anarchism not as an abstract idea, but as a chosen lifestyle for thousands of women and men. He shows how anarchist social gatherings were themselves events of defiance and resistance that aimed at establishing anarchism as an alternative lifestyle through the combination of German working-class conviviality and a dedication to the principle that coercive authority was not only unnecessary, but actually damaging to full and free human development as well. Goyens also explores the broader circumstances in both the United States and Germany that served as catalysts for the emergence of anarchism in urban America and how anarchist activism was hampered by police surveillance, ethnic insularity, and a widening gulf between the anarchists' message and the majority of American workers.