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The Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton, Michael Everett Nowlin

ISBN 1551113368 (1-55111-336-8)
Softcover, Broadview Pr

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Book summary:
Winner of the 1921 Pulitzer Prize, The Age of Innocence is an elegant, masterful portrait of desire and betrayal in old New York. With vivid power, Wharton evokes a time of gaslit streets, formal dances held in the ballrooms of stately brownstones, and society people "who dreaded scandal more than disease." This is Newland Archer's world as he prepares to many the docile May Welland. Then, suddenly, the mysterious, intensely nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska returns to New York after a long absence, turning Archer's world upside down.
This classic Wharton tale of thwarted love is an exuberantly comic and profoundly moving look at the passions of the human heart, as well as a literary achievement of the highest order. [via]
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The Alienist
by Caleb Carr

ISBN 0812976142 (0-8129-7614-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
The year is 1896, the place, New York City. On a cold March night New York Times reporter John Schuyler Moore is summoned to the East River by his friend and former Harvard classmate Dr. Laszlo Kreizler, a psychologist, or "alienist." On the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, they view the horribly mutilated body of an adolescent boy, a prostitute from one of Manhattan's infamous brothels. The newly appointed police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, in a highly unorthodox move, enlists the two men in the murder investigation, counting on the reserved Kreizler's intellect and Moore's knowledge of New York's vast criminal underworld. They are joined by Sara Howard, a brave and determined woman who works as a secretary in the police department. Laboring in secret (for alienists, and the emerging discipline of psychology, are viewed by the public with skepticism at best), the unlikely team embarks on what is a revolutionary effort in criminology-- amassing a psychological profile of the man they're looking for based on the details of his crimes. Their dangerous quest takes them into the tortured past and twisted mind of a murderer who has killed before. and will kill again before the hunt is over. Fast-paced and gripping, infused with a historian's exactitude, The Alienist conjures up the Gilded Age and its untarnished underside: verminous tenements and opulent mansions, corrupt cops and flamboyant gangsters, shining opera houses and seamy gin mills. Here is a New York during an age when questioning society's belief that all killers are born, not made, could have unexpected and mortal consequences. [via]
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Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
by Michael Chabon

ISBN 0312282990 (0-312-28299-0)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:
Like the comic books that animate and inspire it, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is both larger than life and of it too. Complete with golems and magic and miraculous escapes and evil nemeses and even hand-to-hand Antarctic battle, it pursues the most important questions of love and war, dreams and art, across pages brimming with longing and hope. Samuel Klayman--self-described little man, city boy, and Jew--first meets Josef Kavalier when his mother shoves him aside in his own bed, telling him to make room for their cousin, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague. It's the beginning, however unlikely, of a beautiful friendship. In short order, Sam's talent for pulp plotting meets Joe's faultless, academy-trained line, and a comic-book superhero is born. A sort of lantern-jawed equalizer clad in dark blue long underwear, the Escapist "roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains!" Before they know it, Kavalier and Clay (as Sam Klayman has come to be known) find themselves at the epicenter of comics' golden age.
But Joe Kavalier is driven by motives far more complex than your average hack. In fact, his first act as a comic-book artist is to deal Hitler a very literal blow. (The cover of the first issue shows the Escapist delivering "an immortal haymaker" onto the Führer's realistically bloody jaw.) In subsequent years, the Escapist and his superhero allies take on the evil Iron Chain and their leader Attila Haxoff--their battles drawn with an intensity that grows more disturbing as Joe's efforts to rescue his family fail. He's fighting their war with brush and ink, Joe thinks, and the idea sustains him long enough to meet the beautiful Rosa Saks, a surrealist artist and surprisingly retrograde muse. But when even that fiction fails him, Joe performs an escape of his own, leaving Rosa and Sammy to pick up the pieces in some increasingly wrong-headed ways.
More amazing adventures follow--but reader, why spoil the fun? Suffice to say, Michael Chabon writes novels like the Escapist busts locks. Previous books such as The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys have prose of equal shimmer and wit, and yet here he seems to have finally found a canvas big enough for his gifts. The whole enterprise seems animated by love: for his alternately deluded, damaged, and painfully sincere characters; for the quirks and curious innocence of tough-talking wartime New York; and, above all, for comics themselves, "the inspirations and lucubrations of five hundred aging boys dreaming as hard as they could." Far from negating such pleasures, the Holocaust's presence in the novel only makes them more pressing. Art, if not capable of actually fighting evil, can at least offer a gesture of defiance and hope--a way out, in other words, of a world gone completely mad. Comic-book critics, Joe notices, dwell on "the pernicious effect, on young minds, of satisfying the desire to escape. As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life." Indeed. --Mary Park [via]
More editions of Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay:
- Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: ISBN 0679450041 (0-679-45004-1)
  Hardcover, Random House Inc
- Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay: ISBN 0312282990 (0-312-28299-0)
  Softcover, St Martins Pr
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American Roulette: How I Turned The Odds Upside Down, My Wild Twenty-Five-Year Ride Ripping Off The World's Casinos
by Richard Marcus

ISBN 0312336012 (0-312-33601-2)
Softcover, St Martins Pr

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Book summary:
In American Roulette, Richard Marcus tells his never-before-heard story, of ripping off casinos. The book follows Marcus, along with several of the world's great professional casino cheaters, as he travels from Las Vegas to London and Monte Carlo, pilfering large sums of money from casinos by performing sleight of hand magic tricks with gaming chips. As skilled cheaters, they back up their moves with psychological setups to convince pit bosses that they're watching legitimate high rollers getting lucky, while in fact they're being ripped off blind.

With the exploding growth of casino gambling, heightened by Indian reservation and riverboat expansion, more and more elaborate casino cheaters are illegally assaulting the green-felt, getting rich off of novice casino personnel. Richard Marcus's insider story is a window into the hidden world of intriguing personalities and tense situations he encounters as a member of expert casino-cheating teams who use their wits to turn the odds upside down and "earn" millions. American Roulette is a fascinating story not only for those who occasionally casino-gamble, but for everyone with a little larceny in their heart.
[via]
More editions of American Roulette: How I Turned The Odds Upside Down, My Wild Twenty-Five-Year Ride Ripping Off The World's Casinos:
- American Roulette: How I Turned The Odds Upside Down, My Wild Twenty-Five-Year Ride Ripping Off The World's Casinos: ISBN 0312336012 (0-312-33601-2)
  Softcover, St Martins Pr
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The Bell Jar
by Sylvia Plath, Frances McCullough

ISBN 0060573090 (0-06-057309-0)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity. [via]
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The Bell Jar
by Cliffs Notes Staff, Jeanne Inness

ISBN 0822002264 (0-8220-0226-4)
Softcover, Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, John

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Book summary:
Plath was an excellent poet but is known to many for this largely autobiographical novel. The Bell Jar tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s. The real Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly-written book, which remains one of the best-told tales of a woman's descent into insanity. [via]
More editions of The Bell Jar:
- The Bell Jar: ISBN 0822002264 (0-8220-0226-4)
  Softcover, Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, John
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The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger

ISBN 0316769177 (0-316-76917-7)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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Book summary:
Anyone who has read J.D. Salinger's New Yorker stories ? particularly A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut, The Laughing Man, and For Esme ? With Love and Squalor, will not be surprised by the fact that his first novel is fully of children. The hero-narrator of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE is an ancient child of sixteen, a native New Yorker named Holden Caulfield. Through circumstances that tend to preclude adult, secondhand description, he leaves his prep school in Pennsylvania and goes underground in New York City for three days. The boy himself is at once too simple and too complex for us to make any final comment about him or his story. Perhaps the safest thing we can say about Holden is that he was born in the world not just strongly attracted to beauty but, almost, hopelessly impaled on it. There are many voices in this novel: children's voices, adult voices, underground voices-but Holden's voice is the most eloquent of all. Transcending his own vernacular, yet remaining marvelously faithful to it, he issues a perfectly articulated cry of mixed pain and pleasure. However, like most lovers and clowns and poets of the higher orders, he keeps most of the pain to, and for, himself. The pleasure he gives away, or sets aside, with all his heart. It is there for the reader who can handle it to keep. [via]
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The Catcher in the Rye: New Essays
by J. P. Steed

ISBN 0820457299 (0-8204-5729-9)
Softcover, Peter Lang Pub Inc

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Book summary:
J. D. Salinger's novel, The Catcher in the Rye celebrated its fiftieth anniversary of publication in 2001. The Catcher in the Rye: New Essays presents a variety of new approaches to this extremely popular and intensely influential novel, ranging [via]
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- The Catcher in the Rye: New Essays: ISBN 0820457299 (0-8204-5729-9)
  Softcover, Peter Lang Pub Inc
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The Catcher in the Rye
by Not Available

ISBN 055311722X (0-553-11722-X)
Softcover, Bantam Books

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Book summary:
Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."
His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation. [via]
More editions of The Catcher in the Rye:
- The Catcher in the Rye: ISBN 055311722X (0-553-11722-X)
  Softcover, Bantam Books
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El Guardian Entre El Centeno/ The Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger

ISBN 8420666858 (84-206-6685-8)
Hardcover, Alianza Editorial Sa

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Book summary:
Por expreso deseo del autor, no esta ermitido que la editorial aporte en su material promocional ningu tipo de texto adicional, informacio biograica, cita o resen relacionados con esta obra. El lector interesado podra no obstante, encontrar abundante informacio al respecto en internet. [via]
More editions of El Guardian Entre El Centeno/ The Catcher in the Rye:
- El Guardian Entre El Centeno/ The Catcher in the Rye: ISBN 8420666858 (84-206-6685-8)
  Hardcover, Alianza Editorial Sa
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Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer

ISBN 0618329706 (0-618-32970-6)
Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Book summary:
Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent history. What he discovers is solace in that most human quality, imagination.
Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.
An inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone's heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who've lost loved ones before. As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father's grave. But now he is accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother's apartment. They are there to dig up his father's empty coffin.
[via]
More editions of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close:
- Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close: ISBN 0618329706 (0-618-32970-6)
  Hardcover, Houghton Mifflin
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Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
by Jonathan Safran Foer

ISBN 0618711651 (0-618-71165-1)
Softcover, Houghton Mifflin

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Book summary:
Jonathan safran foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, everything is illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent history.nine-year-old oskar schell has embarked on an urgent, secret mission that will take him through the five boroughs of new york. His goal is to find the lock that matches a mysterious key that belonged to his father, who died in the world trade center on the morning of september 11. This seemingly impossible task will bring oskar into contact with survivors of all sorts on an exhilarating, affecting, often hilarious, and ultimately healing journey [via]
More editions of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: ISBN 0618711651 (0-618-71165-1)
  Softcover, Houghton Mifflin
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
by Herbert Asbury

ISBN 1560252758 (1-56025-275-8)
Softcover, Basic Books

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Book summary:
The Gangs of New York has long been hand-passed among its cult readership. It is a tour through a now unrecognizable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence cobbled, as Luc Sante has written, from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, and solid historical research. Asbury presents the definitive work on this subject, an illumination of the gangs of old New York that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia and its depiction in films like The Godfather. A universal history of infamy [that] contains all the confusion and cruelty of the barbarian cosmologies....Jorge Luis Borges The tale is one of blood, excitement and debauchery.The New York Times Book Review The Gangs of New York is one of the essential works of the city....Luc Sante, The New York Review of Books
[via]
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Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898
by Mike Wallace, Edwin G. Burrows

ISBN 0195140494 (0-19-514049-4)
Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr

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Book summary:
Like the city it celebrates, Gotham is massive and endlessly fascinating. This narrative of well over 1,000 pages, written after more than two decades of collaborative research by history professors Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, copiously chronicles New York City from the primeval days of the Lenape Indians to the era when, with Teddy Roosevelt as police commissioner, the great American city became regarded as "Capital of the World." The sheer bulk of the book may be off- putting, but the reader can use a typically New York approach: Those who don't settle in for the entire history can easily "commute" in and out to read individual chapters, which stand alone nicely and cover the major themes of particular eras very well.
While Gotham is fact-laden (with a critical apparatus that includes a bibliography and two indices--one for names, another for subjects), the prose admirably achieves both clarity and style. "What is our take, our angle, our schtick?" ask the authors, setting a distinctly New York tone in their introduction. No matter what it's called, their method of weaving together countless stories works wonderfully. The startlingly detailed research and lively writing bring innumerable characters (from Peter Minuit to Boss Tweed) to life, and even those who think they know the history of New York City will no doubt find surprises on nearly every page. Gotham is a rarity, reigning as both authoritative history and page-turning story. --Robert McNamara [via]
More editions of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898:
- Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898: ISBN 0195116348 (0-19-511634-8)
  Hardcover, Oxford Univ Pr
- Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898: ISBN 0195140494 (0-19-514049-4)
  Softcover, Oxford Univ Pr
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The Island At The Center Of The World: The Epic Story Of Dutch Manhattan, The Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
by Russell Shorto

ISBN 1400078679 (1-4000-7867-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its recordsrecently declared a national treasureare now being translated. Drawing on this remarkable archive, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrativea story of global sweep centered on a wilderness called Manhattanthat transforms our understanding of early America.

The Dutch colony pre-dated the original thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own. [via]
More editions of The Island At The Center Of The World: The Epic Story Of Dutch Manhattan, The Forgotten Colony That Shaped America:
- The Island At The Center Of The World: The Epic Story Of Dutch Manhattan, The Forgotten Colony That Shaped America: ISBN 1400078679 (1-4000-7867-9)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
by Russell Shorto

ISBN 0385503490 (0-385-50349-0)
Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group

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Book summary:
In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today.

In the late 1960s, an archivist in the New York State Library made an astounding discovery: 12,000 pages of centuries-old correspondence, court cases, legal contracts, and reports from a forgotten society: the Dutch colony centered on Manhattan, which predated the thirteen original American colonies. For the past thirty years scholar Charles Gehring has been translating this trove, which was recently declared a national treasure. Now, Russell Shorto has made use of this vital material to construct a sweeping narrative of Manhattans founding that gives a startling, fresh perspective on how America began.

In an account that blends a novelists grasp of storytelling with cutting-edge scholarship, The Island at the Center of the World strips Manhattan of its asphalt, bringing us back to a wilderness islanda hunting ground for Indians, populated by wolves and bearsthat became a prize in the global power struggle between the English and the Dutch. Indeed, Russell Shorto shows that Americas founding was not the work of English settlers alone but a result of the clashing of these two seventeenth century powers. In fact, it was AmsterdamEuropes most liberal city, with an unusual policy of tolerance and a polyglot society dedicated to free tradethat became the model for the city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan. While the Puritans of New England were founding a society based on intolerance, on Manhattan the Dutch created a free-trade, upwardly-mobile melting pot that would help shape not only New York, but America.

The story moves from the halls of power in London and The Hague to bloody naval encounters on the high seas. The characters in the sagathe men and women who played a part in Manhattans foundingrange from the philosopher Rene Descartes to James, the Duke of York, to prostitutes and smugglers. At the heart of the story is a bitter power struggle between two men: Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony, and a forgotten American hero named Adriaen van der Donck, a maverick, liberal-minded lawyer whose brilliant political gamesmanship, commitment to individual freedom, and exuberant love of his new country would have a lasting impact on the history of this nation. [via]
More editions of The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America:
- The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America: ISBN 0385503490 (0-385-50349-0)
  Hardcover, Bantam Dell Pub Group
J.D. Salinger
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0877547165 (0-87754-716-5)
Hardcover, Chelsea House Pub

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- J.D. Salinger: ISBN 0877547165 (0-87754-716-5)
  Hardcover, Chelsea House Pub
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J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791056643 (0-7910-5664-3)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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Book summary:
Includes a brief biography of the author, thematic and structural analysis of the work, critical views, and an index of themes and ideas. [via]
More editions of J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye:
- J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye: ISBN 0791036626 (0-7910-3662-6)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
- J. D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye: ISBN 0791056643 (0-7910-5664-3)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
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J.D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye
by J. D. Salinger

ISBN 0671006916 (0-671-00691-6)
Softcover, Monarch Notes

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Book summary:
Plot synopsis of this classic is made meaningful with analysis and quotes by noted literary critics, summaries of the work's main themes and characters, a sketch of the author's life and times, a bibliography, suggested test questions, and ideas for essays and term papers. [via]
More editions of J.D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye:
- J.D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye: ISBN 0812034074 (0-8120-3407-4)
  Softcover, Barrons Educational Series Inc
- J.D. Salinger's the Catcher in the Rye: ISBN 0671006916 (0-671-00691-6)
  Softcover, Monarch Notes
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Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York
by Luc Sante

ISBN 0374528993 (0-374-52899-3)
Softcover, Farrar Straus & Giroux

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Book summary:
There are very few classics in the field of pop culture--the academic stuff tends to be too dry and the fun stuff is too quickly dated. This book by Luc Sante is the exception--in fluid prose liberally sprinkled with astute metaphors, Sante tells the story of New York's Lower East Side, circa 1840-1920. The personal histories of criminals, prostitutes, losers, and swindlers bring to life the social and statistical history that the author has meticulously researched. Not limiting himself to the usual sources, Sante finds his history in old copies of Police Gazette as well as actual police, fire, and social service records. Above all, what really makes this book work is the writing, which brings to life a culture of the streets that continues to form a silent influence on our contemporary popular culture. [via]
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
by Robert A. Caro

ISBN 0394720245 (0-394-72024-5)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
For the sheer magnitude, depth and authority of its revelations, The Power Broker stands alone---a huge and galvanizing biography revealing not only the virtually unknown saga of one man's incredible accumulation of power, but the hidden story of the shaping (and mis-shaping) of New York through the past half-century.

Robert Caro's monumental book makes public what few outsiders have known: that Robert Moses was the single most powerful man of our time in the City and in the State of New York. And in telling the Moses story, Caro both opens up to an unprecedented degree the way in which politics really happens--the way things really get done in America's City Halls and Statehouses--and brings to light a bonanza of vital new information about such national figures as Alfred E. Smith and Franklin D. Roosevelt (and the genesis of their blood feud), about Fiorello La Guardia, John V. Lindsay and Nelson Rockefeller.

But The Power Broker is first and foremost a brilliant multidimensional portrait of a man--an extraordinary man who, denied power within the normal framework of the democratic process, stepped outside that framework to grasp power sufficient to shape a great city and to hold sway over the very texture of millions of lives. We see how Moses began: the handsome, intellectual young heir to the world of Our Crowd, an idealist. How, rebuffed by the entrenched political establishment, he fought for the power to accomplish his ideals. How he first created a miraculous flowering of parks and parkways, playlands and beaches--and then ultimately brought down on the city the smog-choked aridity of our urban landscape, the endless miles of (never sufficient) highway, the hopeless sprawl of Long Island, the massive failures of public housing, and countless other barriers to humane living. How, inevitably, the accumulation of power became an end in itself.

Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He was held in fear--his dossiers could disgorge the dark secret of anyone who opposed him. He was, he claimed, above politics, above deals; and through decade after decade, the newspapers and the public believed. Meanwhile, he was developing his public authorities into a fourth branch of government known as "Triborough"--a government whose records were closed to the public, whose policies and plans were decided not by voters or elected officials but solely by Moses--an immense economic force directing pressure on labor unions, on banks, on all the city's political and economic institutions, and on the press, and on the Church. He doled out millions of dollars' worth of legal fees, insurance commissions, lucrative contracts on the basis of who could best pay him back in the only coin he coveted: power. He dominated the politics and politicians of his time--without ever having been elected to any office. He was, in essence, above our democratic system.

Robert Moses held power in the state for 44 years, through the governorships of Smith, Roosevelt, Lehman, Dewey, Harriman and Rockefeller, and in the city for 34 years, through the mayoralties of La Guardia, O'Dwyer, Impellitteri, Wagner and Lindsay, He personally conceived and carried through public works costing 27 billion dollars--he was undoubtedly America's greatest builder.

This is how he built and dominated New York--before, finally, he was stripped of his reputation (by the press) and his power (by Nelson Rockefeller). But his work, and his will, had been done. [via]
More editions of The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York:
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York: ISBN 0394480767 (0-394-48076-7)
  Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
- The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York: ISBN 0394720245 (0-394-72024-5)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Rats: Observations On The History And Habitat Of The City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
by Robert Sullivan

ISBN 1582344779 (1-58234-477-9)
Softcover, Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA

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Book summary:
Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled little alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants-by observing the rat.

Rats live in the world precisely where humans do; they survive on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage. While dispensing gruesomely fascinating rat facts and strangely entertaining rat-stories-everyone has one, it turns out-Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat. With a notebook and night-vision gear, he sits nightly in the streamlike flow of garbage and searches for fabled rat-kings, sets out to trap a rat, and eventually travels to the Midwest to learn about rats in Chicago, Milwaukee, and other cities of America. With tales of rat fights in the Gangs of New York era and stories of Harlem rent strike leaders who used rats to win tenants basic rights, Sullivan looks deeper and deeper into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses-its herd-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.

Did you know?

- 26% of all electric cable breaks and 18% of all phone cable disruptions are caused by rats, 25% of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused, and rats destroy an estimated 1/3 of the world's food supply each year. The rat has been called the world's most destructive mammal-other than man.

- Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day. A female can produce up to twelve litters of twenty rats a year: one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year.
[via]
More editions of Rats: Observations On The History And Habitat Of The City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants:
- Rats: Observations On The History And Habitat Of The City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants: ISBN 1582343853 (1-58234-385-3)
  Hardcover, Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA
- Rats: Observations On The History And Habitat Of The City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants: ISBN 1582344779 (1-58234-477-9)
  Softcover, Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA
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Time and Again
by Jack Finney

ISBN 0684801051 (0-684-80105-1)
Softcover, Touchstone Books

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Book summary:
An anniversary edition of a timeless classic tells what happens when Simon Morley is selected by a secret government agency to test Einstein's theory of the past co-existing with the present and is transported back to 1880s New York. Reissue. NYT. [via]
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
by Betty Smith

ISBN 0060736267 (0-06-073626-7)
Softcover, Harpercollins

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Book summary:
Francie Nolan, avid reader, penny-candy connoisseur, and adroit observer of human nature, has much to ponder in colorful, turn-of-the-century Brooklyn. She grows up with a sweet, tragic father, a severely realistic mother, and an aunt who gives her love too freely--to men, and to a brother who will always be the favored child. Francie learns early the meaning of hunger and the value of a penny. She is her father's child--romantic and hungry for beauty. But she is her mother's child, too--deeply practical and in constant need of truth. Like the Tree of Heaven that grows out of cement or through cellar gratings, resourceful Francie struggles against all odds to survive and thrive. Betty Smith's poignant, honest novel created a big stir when it was first published over 50 years ago. Her frank writing about life's squalor was alarming to some of the more genteel society, but the book's humor and pathos ensured its place in the realm of classics--and in the hearts of readers, young and old. (Ages 10 and older) --Emilie Coulter [via]
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Winter's Tale
by Mark Helprin

ISBN 0156031191 (0-15-603119-1)
Softcover, Harcourt

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Book summary:
A bestseller that takes readers on a journey to New York of the Belle Epoque, where Peter Lake attempts to rob a Manhattan mansion only to find the daughter of the house at home. Thus begins the love between the middle-aged Irishman and Beverly Penn, a young girl who is dying. This novel...is a gifted writers love affair with the language (Newsday).
[via]
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