![]() ![]() historians, his vast awareness of the visual culture of the time and acuity in locating their presence in the details and shards of the pictorial record. ![]() That evening, Al delineated the artisans’ world in eighteenth-century Boston and the stakes for and impact on the city’s working people in their participation in making the Revolution-all offered with his intimate knowledge of their lives and, still so unusual among U.S. Herb dragged Steve Brier and me up to an unusually crowded session of the Columbia University Early American Seminar where Al presented his work on George Robert Twelves Hewes, the Boston shoemaker and participant of/witness to the Boston Massacre and Tea Party, the subject of his groundbreaking 1981 article in the William and Mary Quarterly (which he later expanded into his 2000 book The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution). I first met Al through Herb Gutman during the American Social History Project’s first year. The historian Alfred Young died yesterday at the age of 87. ![]()
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![]() He’s young, smart, self-sufficient and wily, a seasoned professional with an air of respectability about him. (At the time, the typical upper limit for a short con was $1,000, while anything above this threshold was considered a ‘big con’.) A fairly unassuming guy at first sight, Roy is the kind of man who makes friends easily. The story revolves around Roy Dillon, a ‘short-con’ grifter (or con artist) living in Los Angeles. With this in mind, I turned to another leading proponent of this genre, the American writer Jim Thompson and his 1963 novel, The Grifters. I never seem to tire of these stories and their insights into the darker side of human nature. Cain’s Double Indemnity or, more recently, Simenon’s The Widow (both of which I would highly recommend). Every now and again I find myself in need of a noir fix, preferably the vintage variety – something like James M. ![]() ![]() She had a beautiful child and a doting husband, Joe, who helped her catch a criminal who'd brazenly detonated a bomb in downtown San Francisco, killing twenty-five people. Still recovering from her husband's betrayal, Detective Lindsay Boxer faces a series of heart-stopping crimes and a deadly conspiracy that threatens to destroy San Francisco.įifteen months ago, Detective Lindsay Boxer's life was perfect.
![]() ![]() Unfortunately, Justin's an uncoordinated stringbean, and his bball skills come and go intermittently like a dying light bulb. ![]() Justin wants to be one of the ones who is cool enough to just jerk his chin up at girls and make them cross the blacktop to talk to him. He just wants to be somebody in his Oakland neighborhood, somebody who's worth a nickname, who stands, hipshot, and spits, his sleeves rolled up to show his tats. Synopsis: Fifteen-year-old Justin is a lot of things, but desperate to be seen as a baller is the least helpful of them. (And no, nobody is paying me to say this.) I really could have used a series like the Blacktop. I had some success with traditional books, of course, but these kids were a constant challenge. I read a lot of simplistic, misguided books which celebrated the dubious charms of ghetto life, and a lot of middle grade books which depicted worlds too sanitized and young to engage my older boys. Finding books which were at the appropriate reading levels yet which held my kids' interest was a constant challenge. I was a coteacher who worked in a classroom with another teacher and an aide, mostly 1:1, since my students were at wildly varying educational levels, due to housing instability and truancy. I taught junior high/high school in a group home, just out of college. Welcome to another session of Turning Pages! ![]() ![]() “I’d written the lyrics sitting on the edge of my bed in this shack in Long Branch, New Jersey, thinking “Here I come, world!,”” Springsteen once said. It was in the living room on an Aeolian piano that, as detailed in interviews given by Springsteen, he wrote “Born to Run,” “Thunder Road,” “Backstreets” and other songs that would end up in his breakout album Born to Run. He would move back to Long Branch – his birthplace – and live in this West End Court beach side bungalow in an attempt to craft a make-or-break album. ![]() ![]() That’s the buyer willing to pay for that.” While any successful homebuyer is free to do what they want with the home, “it is the hope to find someone with that passion for Springsteen,” added Holder.īuilt in 1920, the home was rented in 1974 for a year by Springsteen, months after his second album The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle struggled to find an audience. “We’re talking about the intrinsic value of this house, of the value of Springsteen’s history. “Yes, I mean, c’mon,” said real estate broker George “Rives” Holder when asked if the Springsteen factor helped raise the home’s value. Listed at $299,000, this property appears to have a significant “rock ‘n’ roll premium,” as similar places around the area list for anything between $170,000 to $275,000, according to Zillow. ![]() ![]() It is this piece of Bruce Springsteen’s history that has attracted much attention to a home at 7 1/2 West End Court on the Jersey Shore. ![]() ![]() ![]() The Scandal of Father Brown is the fifth and last collection of short stories in The Father Brown Series. When an American writer approaches Father Brown and asks him the secret of his excellent detective work, the modest clergyman decides it is time to reveal his methods. Chesterton's famous detective series, and the volume reveals the truth behind the Roman Catholic priest's ingenious crime-solving abilities. The Secret of Father Brown is the fourth collection of short stories in G. Set in the early twentieth century, each of the stories centres around the cunning investigations of Father Brown, an amateur detective who uses his incredible intuition to solve a variety of perplexing mysteries. The small Catholic priest at his best again! "The Wisdom of Father Brown" is full of tales of crime and discovery, clues and false leads and all the rest of the thrilling material which will make any normal human being sit up and keep on sitting up long past the proper hour for bed. Strange to say, his hero is not a Sherlock Holmes or a Lecoq, but a gentle little parish priest who uses his knowledge of human nature gained in his religious work to unravel mysterious crimes which have baffled the police. ![]() With Father Brown the author has entered upon a new literary field in a series of detective stories. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() “Packed with loads of sizzle and Snickerlicious fun, Lauren Layne’s After the Kiss is a knock-your-stilettos-off, total page-turning treat that had me fan-girling up within the first chapter. And, at the same time, he’s exactly what she wants. In other words, Mitchell is the polar opposite of what Julie needs right now. And the leggy journalist notorious for avoiding love is exactly the type of no-strings fling he’s looking for. A devastatingly hot workaholic who tends to stay in relationships for far too long, he should be the perfect subject for Julie’s “research.” But what Julie doesn’t know is that Mitchell is looking to cut loose for once in his life. Normally, Mitchell Forbes would be exactly that man. But when Julie gets assigned the hardest story of her career-a first-person account of that magical shift between dating and “I do”-she’ll need a man brave enough to give a total commitment-phobe a chance at more. ![]() Comfy pants, sleepy Sundays, movie nights on the couch? Shudder. Loves steamy first dates, sizzling first kisses, and every now and then, that first sexy romp between the sheets. Lauren Layne kicks off her Sex, Love & Stiletto series with a delightful short novel! In After the Kiss, the star columnist of Stiletto magazine will do anything for a story. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() He uses histories behind familiar food items - where they come from, how they are cooked and consumed, what they mean to different cultures - to explore economic theory. ![]() In Edible Economics, Chang makes challenging economic ideas more palatable by plating them alongside stories about food from around the world. Just as eating a wide range of cuisines contributes to a more interesting and balanced diet, so too is it essential we listen to a variety of economic perspectives. But this is bland and unhealthy - like British food in the 1980s, when bestselling author and economist Ha-Joon Chang first arrived in the UK from South Korea. Edible Economics: A Hungry Economist Explains the World | By Ha-Joon ChangĮconomic thinking - about globalisation, climate change, immigration, austerity, automation and much more - in its most digestible formFor decades, a single free market philosophy has dominated global economics. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The book does read like a mystery novel at times, as Maomao figures out more about the reasons behind various incidents, some of which tie in to events later in the book, so just because one “mystery” is solved doesn’t mean it is completely out of the picture. This does make her ideal for her eventual job as poison tester to one of the consorts, but also gives her a curious streak that gets her involved in all sorts of incidents, as well as draws the attention of the beautiful “eunuch” Jinshi. She’s also quite the “mad scientist” who likes personally testing poisons and seeing their effects and how much she can handle of them. The protagonist, Maomao, is a teenage girl and apothecary worker in a red-light district that had been kidnapped and sold into service in the rear palace. It features a unique setting inspired by a historic Chinese imperial palace, complete with consorts, eunuchs, internal politics, and people of varying levels of morality. This is quite a different light novel from what we’re used to seeing. ![]() ![]() ![]() In this setting, a gang of thieves decides that the prophecies were all lies and that they can’t trust in some fabled hero to save them. Ash falls from the sky in this barren land, and mists come every night, deep and mysterious. Only, he lost, and the Dark Lord took over and has been ruling with an iron fist for a thousand years. A thousand years ago, the prophesied hero from lore rose up to overthrow a great and terrible evil. What if the Dark Lord won? What if, in the final climactic moments, he killed the hero and took over the world? I wanted to take the standard fantasy story I’d read a dozen times, that of a young peasant hero who went on a quest to defeat a Dark Lord, and turn it on its head. The second idea was to write a story about a world where the good guys lost. I wanted to tell the story of how their different magics and abilities worked together for them to pull an incredible caper. ![]() ![]() The first was that of a heist story, like Sneakers or Ocean’s Eleven involving a gang of gentlemen thieves who each had a distinctive magic power. I came into this book with two big ideas for the plot. ![]() |