A football tradition with Nathaniel Rich. A jog around the reservoir with Mark Helprin as he "protects" Jacqueline Onassis from imagined harm. The 843 carefully planned acres of Central Park have not only crept into the hearts of its 38 million annual visitors, but also into the life and work of a diverse array of writers who come to revel in its natural remedy for urban chaos.In Central Park, a dozen exclusive pieces commissioned especially for this book are accompanied by a handful of beloved classics. Francine Prose reflects on open-air performances by Nina Simone and James Brown; Jonathan Safran Foer writes a creation myth of the park; Buzz Bissinger meditates on how the park defined his early life; and Marie Winn definitively answers Holden Caulfield’s question of where the ducks go when the ponds freeze over.This vibrant collection presents Central Park in all its diverse glory, with an ode on every page to a fifty-one-block swath of special New York magic. A must-read for the thousands who consider the park their own, and a keepsake for the many more who visit, it will be a standard for years to come.Contents:Introduction by Adrian BenepeThe meadow by John Burnham SchwartzGoodnight moon by Ben DolnickThrough the Children's Gate by Adam GopnikFramed in silver by Mark HelprinCarp in the park by David MichaelisThe Colossus of New York by Colson WhiteheadSome music in the park by Francine ProseThe sixth Borough by Jonathan Safran FoerSquawkeye and gang on the Dendur Plateau by Nathaniel RichFogg in the Park by Paul AusterSunday in the park with mother by Susan SheehanNegative space by Thomas BellerThe hidden life by Alec WilkinsonMy little bit of country by Susan CheeverThe falconer of Central Park by Donald KnowlerAbout those ducks, Holden by Marie WinnLions and tigers and bears by Bill BufordBeastie by Brooks HansenThe goodbye by Buzz BissingerEpilogue by Doug Blonsky

    Jack Spielvogel's engaging, chronological narrative weaves the political, economic, social, religious, intellectual, cultural, and military aspects of history into a gripping story that is as memorable as it is instructive. Each chapter offers a substantial introduction and conclusion, providing students a context for these disparate themes. The clear narrative of a single gifted author makes it easy for students to follow the story of Western civilization. Spielvogel gives the book depth by including over 150 maps and excerpts of over 200 primary sources--including official documents, poems, and songs--that enliven the past while introducing students to source material that forms the basis of historical scholarship. Available in many split options: WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Comprehensive, 6th Edition (Chapters 1-29), ISBN: 0534646026; WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Volume I, To 1715, 6th Edition (Chapters 1-16), ISBN:0534646034; WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Volume II, Since 1500, 6th Edition (Chapters 13-29), ISBN:0534646042; WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Volume A: To 1500, 6th Edition (Chapters 1-12), ISBN: 0534646050; WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Volume B: 1300-1815, 6th Edition (Chapters 11-19), ISBN:0534646069; WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Volume C: Since 1789, 6th Edition (Chapters 19-29), ISBN: 0534646077; WESTERN CIVILIZATION, Since 1300, 6th Edition (Chapters 11-29), ISBN:0534646085.

    This riveting book offers 20 harrowing, real-life tales of sea kayaking accidents that will not only keep readers on the edge of their seats, but also instruct them with potentially life-saving lessons.

     We meet the people who most influenced Goodwin’s early life: her mother, who taught her the joy of books but whose debilitating illness left her housebound: and her father, who taught her the joy of baseball and to root for the Dodgers of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, Duke Snider, and Gil Hodges. Most important, Goodwin describes with eloquence how the Dodgers’ leaving Brooklyn in 1957, and the death of her mother soon after, marked both the end of an era and, for her, the end of childhood.

    Kodigehalli Mune Gowda was crowned the city's first 'don' back in the 1960s, but it was in the '80s and the '90s that powerhouses like Muthappa Rai, Sreedhar, 'Boot House' Kumar aka Oil Kumar, Bekkina Kannu Rajendra and Srirampura Kitty emerged. In Bhais of Bengaluru, Jyoti Shelar, a print journalist with ten years of work experience as a field reporter, explores this mysterious and fascinating underbelly of India's Garden City.

    Includes all new multimedia and pedagogy to bring physical geography to a new audience. The new fourth edition of Introducing Physical Geography, focuses on both content and pedagogy. The text also includes current examples of environmental phenomena, such as Hurricane Isabel and the recent earthquakes in Turkey. The readability of the text has been enhanced with new placements of boxed features and supplementary material.

    Johnson’s hard-hitting investigative series won a Pulitzer Prize, inspired a screenplay by Arthur Miller, and prompted Elia Kazan’s Oscar-winning film On the Waterfront. And yet J. Edgar Hoover denied the existence of organized crime - even as the government’s dramatic hearings into waterfront misdeeds became mustsee television.Nathan Ward tells this archetypal crime story as if for the first time, taking the reader back to a city, and an era, at once more corrupt and more innocent than our own.

    This comprehensive text presents a wide range of excerpts and opinions from the most significant Supreme Court cases and provides the contextual material students need to interpret their historical significance. The Sixth Edition adds material on dozens of important recent cases, current through June 2004, and features carefully updated and refined pedagogy.Author Biography: David M. O'Brien is Leone Reaves and George W. Spicer Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, where he teaches the popular constitutional law course on which his book Constitutional Law and Politics (now in its Sixth Edition) is based. Professor O'Brien is a regular commentator on the Supreme Court's activities and rulings. He is the author of over fifteen books and regularly contributes op-ed pieces on the Court to the Los Angeles Times.

    When Bill Bratton was sworn in as New York City's police commissioner in 1994, he made what many considered a bold promise: The NYPD would fight crime in every borough...and win.  It seemed foolhardy; even everybody knows you can't win the war on crime.  But Bratton delivered.  In an extraordinary twenty-seven months, serious crime in New York City went down by 33 percent, the murder rate was cut in half--and Bill Bratton was heralded as the most charismatic  and respected law enforcement official in America..  In this outspoken account of his news-making career, Bratton reveals how his cutting-edge policing strategies brought about the historic reduction in crime.Bratton's success made national news and landed him on the cover of Time.  It also landed him in political hot water.  Bratton earned such positive press that before he'd completed his first week on the job, the administration of New York's media-hungry mayor Rudolph Giuliani, threatened to fire him.  Bratton gives a vivid, behind-the-scenes look at the sizzle and substance, and he pulls no punches describing the personalities who really run the city.Bratton grew up in a working-class Boston neighborhood, always dreaming of being a cop.  As a young officer under Robert di Grazia, Boston's progressive police commissioner, he got a ground-level view of real police reform and also saw what happens when an outspoken, dynamic, reform-minded police commissioner starts to outshine an ambitious mayor.  He was soon in the forefront of the community policing movement and a rising star in the profession.  Bratton had turned around four major police departments when he accepted the number one police job in America.When Bratton arrived at the NYPD, New York's Finest were almost hiding; they had given up on preventing crime and were trying only to respond to it.  Narcotics,  Vice,  Auto Theft, and the Gun Squads all worked banker's hours while the competition--the bad guys--worked around the clock.  Bratton changed that.  He brought talent to the top and instilled pride in the force; he listened to the people in the neighborhoods and to the cops on the street.  Bratton and his "dream team" created Compstat, a combination of computer statistics analysis and an unwavering demand for accountability.  Cops were called on the carpet, and crime began to drop.  With Bratton on the job, New York City was turned around.Today, New York's plummeting crime rate and improved quality of life remain a national success story.  Bratton is directly responsible, and his strategies are being studied and implemented by police forces across the country and around the world.  In Turnaround, Bratton shows how the war on crime can be won once and for all.

    Buried beneath these parallel conflicts--one for the soul of baseball, the other for the soul of the city--was the subtext of race. Deftly intertwined by journalist Jonathan Mahler, these braided Big Apple narratives reverberate to reveal a year that also saw the opening of Studio 54, the acquisition of the New York Post by Rupert Murdoch, a murderer dubbed the "Son of Sam," the infamous blackout, and the evolution of punk rock. As Koch defeated Cuomo, and as Reggie Jackson rescued a team racked with dissension, 1977 became a year of survival--and also of hope.

    Kennedy, Jefferson Morley is asked, “So who killed JFK? What’s your theory?” Morley, a former reporter for the Washington Post and author of Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, invariably disappoints. “I don’t know. It’s too early to tell.” Fifty-plus years after JFK’s death, this answer is laughable but serious. The JFK story remains unsettled well into the 21st century, no matter what the various conspiracy and anti-conspiracy theorists may proclaim. Indeed, the complex reality of how a president of the United States came to be gunned down on a sunny day, and no one lost his liberty — or his job — continues to live and grow in popular memory. This is a book that reveals deceit and deception on the part of the CIA relating to the Kennedy assassination and why the CIA should reveal to the American people what it is still keeping secret. Employing his investigative reporting skills through interviews and examination of long-secret records, Morley reveals that the CIA was closely monitoring the movements of accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald in the months preceding the assassination of President Kennedy. Questions naturally arise: Did the CIA suspect that Oswald was up to no good? Or was its surveillance part of a CIA scheme to frame Oswald for the assassination of President Kennedy? Why did the CIA keep its surveillance secret from the Warren Commission?Morley also reveals a close relationship between the CIA and an American anti-Castro group that began advertising Oswald’s connections to communism and the Soviet Union immediately after the assassination? That raises questions: Why didn’t the CIA reveal that relationship to official agencies investigating the assassination of President Kennedy? Why did a federal judge and the chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations accuse the CIA of deceit and deception?The U.S. government retains almost 3,600 assassination-related records, consisting of tens of thousands of pages that have never been seen by the public. More than 1,100 of these records are held by the CIA.What is in those secret files? What do they reveal about JFK’s death? Why has the CIA been so reluctant to release them? And when will they finally be revealed to the public? Will they answer the disturbing questions that the revelations in this book raise?

     Marcus Aurelius wrote the 12 books of the Meditations as a source for his own guidance and self-improvement. These books have been carefully adapted into a contemporary form to allow for easy reading.

    But New Yorkers don't give it much attention. They leave their trash on the curb or drop it in a litter basket, and promptly forget about it. And why not? On a schedule so regular you could almost set your watch by it, someone always comes to take it away.But who, exactly, is that someone? And why is he—or she—so unknown?In Picking Up, the anthropologist Robin Nagle introduces us to the men and women of New York City's Department of Sanitation and makes clear why this small army of uniformed workers is the most important labor force on the streets. Seeking to understand every aspect of the Department's mission, Nagle accompanied crews on their routes, questioned supervisors and commissioners, and listened to story after story about blizzards, hazardous wastes, and the insults of everyday New Yorkers. But the more time she spent with the DSNY, the more Nagle realized that observing wasn't quite enough—so she joined the force herself. Driving the hulking trucks, she obtained an insider's perspective on the complex kinships, arcane rules, and obscure lingo unique to the realm of sanitation workers.Nagle chronicles New York City's four-hundred-year struggle with trash, and traces the city's waste-management efforts from a time when filth overwhelmed the streets to the far more rigorous practices of today, when the Big Apple is as clean as it's ever been.Throughout, Nagle reveals the many unexpected ways in which sanitation workers stand between our seemingly well-ordered lives and the sea of refuse that would otherwise overwhelm us. In the process, she changes the way we understand cities—and ourselves within them.

    These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.

    His natural gift for entertaining and his penchant for hobnobbing with the very rich earned him entry to the powerful circle of the New York and Newport social elite, where Harry clowned his way to a position of prominence. One of his admirers and patrons, Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish, introduced him to a young widow, Elizabeth Wharton Drexel. Elizabeth was smitten with young Harry, his elegant dress, and outrageous behavior. They were soon married. But King Lehr had a secret-he was not what he seemed. (He was very gay). On their wedding night he dictated to his new bride the rules of their "special" alliance. For twenty-three years, Mrs. Lehr protected his secret and remained in a sexless marriage. But Harry gave her a lot of fun. After Harry's death, Elizabeth remarried, to the Baron Decies. Lady Decies wrote down her secret story in 1938, incorporating Harry's most intimate diaries, and told all in this scandalous tale of power, desire, and deception.