The Hothouse by the East River

The Hothouse by the East River
Author: Muriel Spark
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2012-03-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1453245073

DIVDIVTouched by madness and haunted by a secret past, Paul and Elsa’s relationship reveals that there can be no normality for people who witnessed the worst of war/divDIV /divDIV/divDIVIn 1970s New York, Paul and Elsa are like many other well-off middle-aged couples, worrying over their apartment and psychoanalyst bills by day, and meeting friends at restaurants by night. But this is not an ordinary couple with ordinary neuroses, as becomes clear when Paul convinces himself that Elsa’s shadow always points in the wrong direction. As Paul and Elsa’s involvement in World War II espionage begins to surface, the glitz and glamor of their lives is revealed to be nothing more than illusion./divDIV /divDIVThe Hothouse by the East River is a delirious satire of superficial urban life in the shadow of one of modern history’s great horrors./divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Muriel Spark including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s archive at the National Library of Scotland./divDIV /divDIV/div/div

Hell on the East River

Hell on the East River
Author: Larry Lowenthal
Publisher:
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN:

"Far fewer people have heard of Wallabout Bay on the Brooklyn shore of the East River or know the terrible story of American sailors who were imprisoned there on wretched hulks like the Jersey. ... Hell on the East River uses the prisoners' own accounts to describe the agony of imprisonment, analyzes the number of deaths, examines the reasons for the tragedy, and describes the 100-year struggle to erect the present Prison Ship.

The East River Ripper

The East River Ripper
Author: George R. Dekle Sr
Publisher: Kent State University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 9781606354261

Innocent or guilty, or a more nuanced truth, in this Ripper-style killing Shortly after NYPD Chief of Detectives Thomas Byrnes publicly criticized the London police for failing to capture Jack the Ripper, he received a letter purportedly from Jack himself saying New York was his next target. Not long after, Byrnes was confronted by his own Ripper-style murder case in the death of Carrie Brown, a.k.a. "Old Shakespeare," a colorful character who worked as a prostitute and had a penchant for quoting Shakespeare. Given the near-hysteria surrounding this vicious murder soon after the Jack the Ripper murders in London, people were worried that Jack might have actually come to America. The detective bureau finally arrested Amir Ben Ali, an Algerian immigrant. The newspapers, however, immediately criticized Byrnes for moving too quickly, suggesting that he had tried to save face by pinning the crime on an easy target. When the verdict of murder in the second degree was announced, the papers erupted in anger and disbelief. With the aid of the French consulate, they embarked on a 10-year campaign to have Ben Ali pardoned and finally won his release by producing new evidence. Immediately upon Ben Ali's departure for France, fresh evidence of his guilt surfaced. Was Ben Ali falsely convicted or falsely exonerated? And if he did not commit the murder, then who did? Issues of false convictions, fake news, illegal immigration, police corruption, and racial prejudice are common tropes in today's news cycles. The East River Ripper demonstrates that these are not simply matters of recent vintage and seeks to answer such questions in trying to determine whether and in what way justice miscarried.

East River Column

East River Column
Author: Sui-jeung Chan 陳瑞璋
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2009-06-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9622098509

Hong Kong's story in the Second World War has been predominantly told as a story of the British forces and their defeat on Christmas Day 1941. But there is another story: the Chinese guerrilla forces who harassed the Japanese throughout the occupation played a crucial part in the escapes from Hong Kong's prisoner of war camps and in rescuing Allied airmen. This neglected part of Hong Kong's war is Chan Sui-jeung’s topic in this pioneering book informed by his many contacts with participants in the guerrilla warfare. The guerrilla group usually described as the East River Column gathered momentum in 1937 after China and Japan embarked on full-fledged war. Chan reports on its precursors and the formation of more formal structures that provided the basis for the guerrilla activities in Hong Kong between 1941 and 1945. Just as the guerrilla's story starts before the Second World War, so it goes on after 1945 and is entwined with the civil war and the establishment of the People's Republic of China. An important and valuable part of this book recounts how the leaders of the East River Column fared in the period up to and after the Communist victory. The book also sheds new light on the struggle between the Guangdong party members and the cadres from the north and "the problem of Guangdong" as it was characterized by Mao Zedong. This book thus finally gives due prominence to the role of the Chinese guerrillas in Hong Kong during the war, while at the same time setting that struggle into the broader contexts of Guangdong province, the long war between China and Japan, and the victory of the Communists and the early years of their rule in the South.

East River

East River
Author: Sholem Asch
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
Total Pages: 726
Release: 2017-06-28
Genre: History
ISBN: 1787205320

The unforgettable saga of two immigrant families and the forbidden love that could not keep them apart. “East River” is a novel by Sholem Asch, first published in 1946, and a New York Times bestseller of that year. Unlike the denser Jewish pockets of the lower East Side of New York, East 48th Street by the river was, even at the beginning of the twentieth century, an international neighborhood made up of Orthodox Jews, Catholic Irish, nostalgic Poles, chauvinistic Italians, all hungry, all overworked, all insecure. But although these folk were all, so to speak, melting in the same pot, they were kept at a certain distance from one another, by their inherited prejudices, the most pernicious of which were supplied by their religions. To allow them to live together and work together toward a happier life, and to turn them from their European pasts toward a high American future, they needed, in Asch’s view, the religion of love. And the same religion was needed to get the bosses and workers together in the garment industry, so as to end the sweatshops, the subcontracting system, and destructive strikes. Set in the diverse, impoverished neighborhood of 48th Street and the East River in Manhattan, during the years before World War I, Asch’s novel is a captivating tale of the inevitable and wrenching consequences of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Christians.

The Maltese Attack

The Maltese Attack
Author: Jay Perin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2021-05-14
Genre: Families
ISBN: 9781736468012

A gripping political saga, a tale of powerful men and women who fight ruthlessly, hate virulently, and love unwisely.

The Bowery Boys

The Bowery Boys
Author: Greg Young
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2016-06-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1612435769

Uncover fascinating, little-known histories of the five boroughs in The Bowery Boys’ official companion to their popular, award-winning podcast. It was 2007. Sitting at a kitchen table and speaking into an old karaoke microphone, Greg Young and Tom Meyers recorded their first podcast. They weren’t history professors or voice actors. They were just two guys living in the Bowery and possessing an unquenchable thirst for the fascinating stories from New York City’s past. Nearly 200 episodes later, The Bowery Boys podcast is a phenomenon, thrilling audiences each month with one amazing story after the next. Now, in their first-ever book, the duo gives you an exclusive personal tour through New York’s old cobblestone streets and gas-lit back alleyways. In their uniquely approachable style, the authors bring to life everything from makeshift forts of the early Dutch years to the opulent mansions of The Gilded Age. They weave tales that will reshape your view of famous sites like Times Square, Grand Central Terminal, and the High Line. Then they go even further to reveal notorious dens of vice, scandalous Jazz Age crime scenes, and park statues with strange pasts. Praise for The Bowery Boys “Among the best city-centric series.” —New York Times “Meyers and Young have become unofficial ambassadors of New York history.” —NPR “Breezy and informative, crowded with the finest grifters, knickerbockers, spiritualists, and city builders to stalk these streets since back when New Amsterdam was just some farms.” —Village Voice “Young and Meyers have an all-consuming curiosity to work out what happened in their city in years past, including the Newsboys Strike of 1899, the history of the Staten Island Ferry, and the real-life sites on which Martin Scorsese’s Vinyl is based.” —The Guardian

Meander

Meander
Author: Jeremy Seal
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 420
Release: 2012-07-05
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 1448139228

The course of the Meander is so famously indirect that the river's name has come to signify digression - an invitation Jeremy Seal is duty-bound to accept while travelling the length of it in a one-man canoe. At every twist and turn of his journey, from the Meander's source in the uplands of Central Turkey to its mouth on the Aegean Sea, Seal illuminates his account with a wealth of cultural, historical and personal asides. It is a journey that takes him from Turkey's steppe interior - the stamping ground of such illustrious adventurers as Xerxes, Alexander the Great and the Crusader Kings - to the great port city of Miletus, home of the earliest Western philosophers. Along the way Seal unpicks the history of this remarkable region, but he also encounters a rich assortment of contemporary characters who reveal a rural Turkey on the cusp of change. Above all, this is the story of a river that first brought the cultures of East and West into contact - and conflict - with one another, its banks littered with the spoil of empires, the marks of war, and the detritus of recent industrialisation. At once epic, intimate and insightful, Meander is a brilliant evocation of a land between two worlds.

Opening the East River

Opening the East River
Author: Thomas Barthel
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2021-08-31
Genre: History
ISBN: 1476682984

After the Civil War, the New York City's East River was a massive unsolved and dangerous navigation problem. A major waterway into and out of the Harbor--where customs revenue equaled 42 percent of the U.S. Government's income--the river's many hindrances, centered around Hell Gate, included whirlpools, rocks and reefs. These, combined with swirling currents and powerful tides, led to deaths, cargo losses and destruction of vessels. Charged with clearing the river, General John Newton of the Army Corps of Engineers went to work with the most rudimentary tools for diving, mining, lighting, pumping and drilling. His crews worked for 20 years, using a steam-drilling scow of his own design and a new and perilous explosive--nitroglycerine. In 1885, Newton destroyed the nine-acre Flood Rock with 282,730 pounds of high explosives. The demolition was watched by tens of thousands. This book chronicles the clearing of the East River and the ingenuity of the Army engineer whose work was praised by the National Academy of Sciences.