Garretts & Pretenders

Garretts & Pretenders
Author: Albert Parry
Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.
Total Pages: 389
Release: 2005-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 159605090X

Published in 1933, the first edition of this classic narrative chronicled the lives of America's bohemians, from Edgar Allen Poe in the early 1800s to Walt Whitman and Ambrose Bierce. The book caused a sensation when it was released in March 1933, with reviews and excerpts printed in magazines such as Esquire, American Mercury, and other popular titles of the time. Complete with a comprehensive index, the book was a major historical source for many years. This updated edition, first published in 1960, includes a meticulous and well-researched account of the Beat Generation, from Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, and their literary achievements. Not merely a sentimental collection of tales of days gone by, this is a fascinating study of vibrant and eccentric times. Complete with cartoons, illustrations, and photographs, this is an accurate depiction of the lives and manners of America's bohemians. AUTHOR BIO: Albert Parry was the author of the landmark 1933 book Tattoo, Secrets of a Strange Art as Practised by the Natives of the United States, and was an early contributor to the "reefer madness" craze with his article "The Menace of Marihuana" in the December 1935 issue of American Mercury.

The Notorious Ben Hecht

The Notorious Ben Hecht
Author: Julien Gorbach
Publisher: Purdue University Press
Total Pages: 504
Release: 2019-03-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1612495958

2019 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Biography. Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe. In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state. The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth-century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences. Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando’s career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe’s memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.

The Player and the Pretender

The Player and the Pretender
Author: Erin McCarthy
Publisher: Erin McCarthy
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2022-04-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Don’t fall in love with your boss, or onto his head, lap, or any other body parts… Miles Williams was not my target. So when I fall off a balcony and land on his head the last thing I expect is for him to hire me. I may be a private investigator, but the hot, sexy, pro football player wants me to be his girlfriend. Fake girlfriend, that is. He wants to be free of female attention for the last few games of his career before he retires, and certain women in his life haven’t gotten the message. It’s not my usual job, but I’m game. Only certain people don’t seem to believe we are actually a couple, which is ironic, because my plan to stay professional and not let Miles touch me is an epic failure. Worst. Plan. Ever. Not only am I deliciously ensconced in the player’s bed, I might just have broken through both our defenses and fallen off more than the balcony. I might have fallen head over heels (literally) into love…

Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread

Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread
Author: Lydia Goehr
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 721
Release: 2021
Genre: Arts
ISBN: 0197572448

A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? Lydia Goehr explores these narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?

The Pretender

The Pretender
Author: HelenKay Dimon
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2017-12-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062692194

“Sexy, emotional, funny . . . Dimon gives it all to her readers.” —New York Times Bestselling Author Jill Shalvis They say it takes a thief to catch a thief, and Harrison Tate is proof. Once a professional burglar, he now makes a lawful living tracking down stolen art. No one needs to know about his secret sideline, “liberating” artifacts acquired through underhanded methods. At least until one of those jobs sees him walking in on a murder. Gabrielle Wright has long been estranged from her wealthy family, but she didn’t kill her sister. Trouble is, the only person who can prove it is the sexy, elusive criminal who shouldn’t have been at the island estate on that terrible night. She’s not expecting honor among thieves—or for their mutual attraction to spark into an intense inferno of desire. Under the guise of evaluating her family’s art, Harris comes back to the estate hoping to clear Gabby’s name. But returning to the scene of the crime has never been riskier, with their hearts and lives on the line.

Bad Rabbi

Bad Rabbi
Author: Eddy Portnoy
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2017-10-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 1503603970

Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

The Pretender One the Intender

The Pretender One the Intender
Author: Ignaziano Lafluer Garnier
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 202
Release: 2020-10-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1664136932

“The Pretender Series’ of fictional books are a book series of characters and the book has CIA trained government killers’ who themselves’ are assets to the United States Government, Military, and law enforcement. They help with population downsizing in The United States and other countries’ by helping to eliminate, eradicate, and exterminate, sex-offenders from society and are America’s and The World’s first globally celebrated, and embraced avengers of violent crimes. I, Lafluer Garnier, want to also take a moment to say thank you to our United States of America’s Military, and all our veterans, especially those of foreign and domestic wars for their brave, courageous, and valorous acts, and the blanket of freedoms’ that we are afforded by those brave, courageous, and valorous acts. Also, I’d also like to thank the brave men, and women, women, and men, of law enforcement for protecting and serving day in, and day out, and the sacrifices they make on the job for the safety of all our citizens’. Total Truth!”

Fearless

Fearless
Author: Don Dahler
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2022-06-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1648961312

In the spirit of the bestseller Fly Girls comes the definitive and compelling true story of Harriet Quimby, the first American woman to receive a pilot's license. In the early twentieth century, headlines declared that "the era of women has dawned." Against this changing historical backdrop, Harriet Quimby's extraordinary life stands out as the embodiment of this tumultuous, exciting era—when flight was measured in minutes, not miles. This untold piece of feminist history unveils Quimby's incredible story: rising from humble beginnings as a dirt-poor farm girl to become a globe-trotting journalist, history-making aviator, and international celebrity. With her tragic death in 1912 at the age of thirty-seven, her story faded, with her many accomplishments—the first woman to fly solo over the English Channel among them—overshadowed by major events, including the sinking of the Titanic. With black and white illustrations throughout, Fearless is the definitive biography of the first licensed female American pilot: one of the most inspiring hidden figures of history.

Open Borders to a Revolution

Open Borders to a Revolution
Author: Jaime Marroquin Arredondo
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2013-10-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1935623222

Open Borders to a Revolution is a collective enterprise studying the immediate and long-lasting effects of the Mexican Revolution in the United States in such spheres as diplomacy, politics, and intellectual thought. It marks both the bicentennial of Latin America’s independence from Spain and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution, an anniversary with significant relevance for American history. The Smithsonian partnered with several institutions and organized a series of cultural events, among them an academic symposium whose program was envisioned and developed by the editors of this volume: “Creating an Archetype: The Influence of the Mexican Revolution in the United States.” The symposium gathered scholars who engaged in conversation and debate on several aspects of U.S.-Mexico relations, including the Mexican-American experience. This volume consolidates the results of those intellectual exchanges, adding new voices, and providing a wide-ranging exploration of the Mexican Revolution.

The Heart of the Mission

The Heart of the Mission
Author: Cary Cordova
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2017-05-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812294149

An illustrated, in-depth examintion of the avant-garde and politically radical Latino art of San Francisco's Mission District In The Heart of the Mission, Cary Cordova combines urban, political, and art history to examine how the Mission District, a longtime bohemian enclave in San Francisco, has served as an important place for an influential and largely ignored Latino arts movement from the 1960s to the present. Well before the anointment of the "Mission School" by art-world arbiters at the dawn of the twenty-first century, Latino artists, writers, poets, playwrights, performers, and filmmakers made the Mission their home and their muse. The Mission, home to Chileans, Cubans, Guatemalans, Mexican Americans, Nicaraguans, Puerto Ricans, and Salvadorans never represented a single Latino identity. In tracing the experiences of a diverse group of Latino artists from the 1940s to the turn of the century, Cordova connects wide-ranging aesthetics to a variety of social movements and activist interventions. The book begins with the history of the Latin Quarter in the 1940s and the subsequent cultivation of the Beat counterculture in the 1950s, demonstrating how these decades laid the groundwork for the artistic and political renaissance that followed. Using oral histories, visual culture, and archival research, she analyzes the Latin jazz scene of the 1940s, Latino involvement in the avant-garde of the 1950s, the Chicano movement and Third World movements of the 1960s, the community mural movement of the 1970s, the transnational liberation movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and the AIDS activism of the 1980s. Through these different historical frames, Cordova links the creation of Latino art with a flowering of Latino politics.