Passage to Manhattan

Passage to Manhattan
Author: Lopamudra Basu
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2009-10-02
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443815497

Passage to Manhattan: Critical Essays on Meena Alexander is a unique compendium of scholarship on South Asian American writer Meena Alexander, who is recognized as one of the most influential and innovative contemporary South Asian American poets. Her poetry, memoirs, and fiction occupy a unique locus at the intersection of postcolonial and US multicultural studies. This anthology examines the importance of her contribution to both fields. It is the first sustained analysis of the entire Alexander oeuvre, employing a diverse array of critical methodologies. Drawing on feminist, Marxist, cultural studies, trauma studies, contemporary poetics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, the collection features fifteen chapters and an Afterword, by well-established scholars of postcolonial and Asian American literature like Roshni Rustomji, May Joseph, Anindyo Roy, and Amritjit Singh, as well as by emerging scholars like Ronaldo Wilson, Parvinder Mehta, and Kazim Ali. The contributors offer insights on nearly all of Alexander’s major works, and the volume achieves a balance between Alexander’s diverse genres, covering the spectrum from early works like Nampally Road to her forthcoming book The Poetics of Dislocation. The essays engage with a variety of debates in postcolonial, feminist, and US multicultural studies, as well as providing many nuanced and detailed readings of Alexander’s mutli-layered texts.

Breaking Ice for Arctic Oil

Breaking Ice for Arctic Oil
Author: Ross Coen
Publisher: University of Alaska Press
Total Pages: 249
Release: 2012-04-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1602231702

In 1969, an icebreaking tanker, the SS Manhattan, was commissioned by Humble Oil to transit the Northwest Passage in order to test the logistical and economic feasibility of an all-marine transportation system for Alaska North Slope crude oil. Proposed as an alternative to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, the Manhattan made two voyages to the North American Arctic and collected volumes of scientific data on ice conditions and the behavior of ships in ice. Although the Manhattan successfully navigated the Northwest Passage—closing a five-hundred-year chapter of Arctic exploration by becoming the first commercial vessel to do so—the expedition ultimately demonstrated the impracticality of moving crude oil using icebreaking ships. Breaking Ice for Arctic Oil details this historic voyage, establishing its significant impact on the future of marine traffic and resource development in the Arctic and setting the stage for the current oil crisis.

Crossing Broadway

Crossing Broadway
Author: Robert W. Snyder
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2014-12-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0801455170

Robert W. Snyder's Crossing Broadway tells how disparate groups overcame their mutual suspicions to rehabilitate housing, build new schools, restore parks, and work with the police to bring safety to streets racked by crime and fear. It shows how a neighborhood once nicknamed "Frankfurt on the Hudson" for its large population of German Jews became "Quisqueya Heights"—the home of the nation's largest Dominican community. The story of Washington Heights illuminates New York City's long passage from the Great Depression and World War II through the urban crisis to the globalization and economic inequality of the twenty-first century. Washington Heights residents played crucial roles in saving their neighborhood, but its future as a home for working-class and middle-class people is by no means assured. The growing gap between rich and poor in contemporary New York puts new pressure on the Heights as more affluent newcomers move into buildings that once sustained generations of wage earners and the owners of small businesses. Crossing Broadway is based on historical research, reporting, and oral histories. Its narrative is powered by the stories of real people whose lives illuminate what was won and lost in northern Manhattan's journey from the past to the present. A tribute to a great American neighborhood, this book shows how residents learned to cross Broadway—over the decades a boundary that has separated black and white, Jews and Irish, Dominican-born and American-born—and make common cause in pursuit of one of the most precious rights: the right to make a home and build a better life in New York City.

Manhattan, when I was Young

Manhattan, when I was Young
Author: Mary Cantwell
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Total Pages: 235
Release: 1995
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0395744415

An interesting autobiography of a fashion-magazine writer who came to New York in the 1950s fresh from college, lived in Greenwich Village, & found a new, exciting life.

Here is New York

Here is New York
Author: E. B. White
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Total Pages: 59
Release: 2011-03-30
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1590174798

In the summer of 1948, E.B. White sat in a New York City hotel room and, sweltering in the heat, wrote a remarkable pristine essay, Here is New York. Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, the author’s stroll around Manhattan—with the reader arm-in-arm—remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America’s foremost literary figures. Here is New York has been chosen by The New York Times as one of the ten best books ever written about the city. The New Yorker calls it “the wittiest essay, and one of the most perceptive, ever done on the city.”

New Passages

New Passages
Author: Gail Sheehy
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2011-09-28
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0307763765

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Millions of readers literally defined their lives through Gail Sheehy's landmark bestseller Passages. Seven years ago she set out to write a sequel, but instead she discovered a historic revolution in the adult life cycle. . . People are taking longer to grow up and much longer to die. A fifty-year-old woman--who remains free of cancer and heart disease-- can expect to see her ninety-second birthday. Men, too, can expect a dramatically lengthened life span. The old demarcations and descriptions of adulthood--beginning at twenty-one and ending at sixty-five--are hopelessly out of date. In New Passages, Gail Sheehy discovers and maps out a completely new frontier--a Second Adulthood in middle life. "Stop and recalculate," Sheehy writes. "Imagine the day you turn forty-five as the infancy of another life." Instead of declining, men and women who embrace a Second Adulthood are progressing through entirely new passages into lives of deeper meaning, renewed playfulness, and creativity--beyond both male and female menopause. Through hundreds of personal and group interviews, national surveys of professionals and working-class people, and fresh findings extracted from fifty years of U.S. Census reports, Sheehy vividly dramatizes these newly developing stages. Combining the scholar's ability to synthesize data with the novelist's gift for storytelling, she allows us to make sense of our own lives by understanding others like us. New Passages tells us we have the ability to customize our own life cycle. This groundbreaking work is certain to awaken and permanently alter the way we think about ourselves. "SHEEHY CLEARLY STATES IDEAS ABOUT LIFE THAT HAVE NEVER BEFORE BEEN AS CLEARLY STATED." --Los Angeles Times Book Review "AN OPTIMISTIC ANALYSIS OF ADULT DEVELOPMENT IN PESSIMISTIC TIMES. . . It is grounded in the economic and psychological realities that make adult life so complex today." --The New York Times Book Review

American Passage

American Passage
Author: Vincent J. Cannato
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2009-06-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0060742739

For most of New York's early history, Ellis Island had been an obscure little island that barely held itself above high tide. Today the small island stands alongside Plymouth Rock in our nation's founding mythology as the place where many of our ancestors first touched American soil. Ellis Island's heyday—from 1892 to 1924—coincided with one of the greatest mass movements of individuals the world has ever seen, with some twelve million immigrants inspected at its gates. In American Passage, Vincent J. Cannato masterfully illuminates the story of Ellis Island from the days when it hosted pirate hangings witnessed by thousands of New Yorkers in the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth century when massive migrations sparked fierce debate and hopeful new immigrants often encountered corruption, harsh conditions, and political scheming. American Passage captures a time and a place unparalleled in American immigration and history, and articulates the dramatic and bittersweet accounts of the immigrants, officials, interpreters, and social reformers who all play an important role in Ellis Island's chronicle. Cannato traces the politics, prejudices, and ideologies that surrounded the great immigration debate, to the shift from immigration to detention of aliens during World War II and the Cold War, all the way to the rebirth of the island as a national monument. Long after Ellis Island ceased to be the nation's preeminent immigrant inspection station, the debates that once swirled around it are still relevant to Americans a century later. In this sweeping, often heart-wrenching epic, Cannato reveals that the history of Ellis Island is ultimately the story of what it means to be an American.

The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited

The Lower East Side Remembered and Revisited
Author: Joyce Mendelsohn
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2009-09-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780231519434

The Lower East Side has been home to some of the city's most iconic restaurants, shopping venues, and architecture. The neighborhood has also welcomed generations of immigrants, from newly arrived Italians and Jews to today's Latino and Asian newcomers. This history has become somewhat obscured, however, as the Lower East Side can appear more hip than historic, with wealth and gentrification changing the character of the neighborhood. Chronicling these developments, along with the hidden gems that still speak of a vibrant immigrant identity, Joyce Mendelsohn provides a complete guide to the Lower East Side of then and now. After an extensive history that stretches back to Manhattan's first settlers, Mendelsohn offers 5 self-guided walking tours, including a new passage through the Bowery, that take the reader to more than 150 sites and highlight the dynamics of a community of contrasts: aged tenements nestled among luxury apartment towers abut historic churches and synagogues. With updated and revised maps, historical data, and an entirely new community to explore, Mendelsohn writes a brand-new chapter in an old New York story.

American Passage

American Passage
Author: Katherine Grandjean
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2015-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 067474540X

New England was built on letters. Its colonists left behind thousands of them, brittle and browning and crammed with curls of purplish script. How they were delivered, though, remains mysterious. We know surprisingly little about the way news and people traveled in early America. No postal service or newspapers existed—not until 1704 would readers be able to glean news from a “public print.” But there was, in early New England, an unseen world of travelers, rumors, movement, and letters. Unearthing that early American communications frontier, American Passage retells the story of English colonization as less orderly and more precarious than the quiet villages of popular imagination. The English quest to control the northeast entailed a great struggle to control the flow of information. Even when it was meant solely for English eyes, news did not pass solely through English hands. Algonquian messengers carried letters along footpaths, and Dutch ships took them across waterways. Who could travel where, who controlled the routes winding through the woods, who dictated what news might be sent—in Katherine Grandjean’s hands, these questions reveal a new dimension of contest and conquest in the northeast. Gaining control of New England was not solely a matter of consuming territory, of transforming woods into farms. It also meant mastering the lines of communication.

Manhattan '45

Manhattan '45
Author: Jan Morris
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1990
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 9780195066647

In Manhattan '45, one of the greatest contemporary prose stylists leads us down the gang plank with the returning GIs, and allows us to discover for ourselves the island of Manhattan as it was 45 years ago--from Hudson River ferryboats to the El, Harlem and the Lower East Side to the menu at the legendary Le Pavillon.