My American Dream

My American Dream
Author: Lidia Matticchio Bastianich
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1524731625

For decades, beloved chef Lidia Bastianich has introduced Americans to Italian food through her cookbooks, TV shows, and restaurants. Now she tells her own story for the first time in this “memoir as rich and complex as her mushroom ragú" (O, the Oprah Magazine). Born in Pula, on the Istrian peninsula, Lidia grew up surrounded by love and security, learning the art of Italian cooking from her beloved grandmother. But when Istria was annexed by a communist regime, Lidia’s family fled to Trieste, where they spent two years in a refugee camp waiting for visas to enter the United States. When she finally arrived in New York, Lidia soon began working in restaurants, the first step on a path that led to her becoming one of the most revered chefs and businesswomen in the country. Heartwarming, deeply personal, and powerfully inspiring, My American Dream is the story of Lidia’s close-knit family and her dedication and endless passion for food.

Oscar's American Dream

Oscar's American Dream
Author: Barry Wittenstein
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade
Total Pages: 38
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0525707697

If you want to see 20th century American history unfold before your eyes, stand on a city street corner and watch it change! It all starts when an immigrant named Oscar opens a barber shop... When Oscar lands on Ellis Island, he has only a suitcase and a down payment in his hands. And he has a dream-- to own his own barbershop. After it opens on the corner of Front St. and Second Ave, Oscar's barbershop becomes a beloved local fixture... until the day Oscar decides to move on and become a subway conductor. Over the years, this barbershop will change hands to become a lady's clothing store, then a soup kitchen. A coffee shop follows, then the space becomes an army recruitment center, then a candy shop. As the years pass and the world changes, the proud corner store stands tall, watching American history unfold around it. Barry Wittenstein and debut husband-and-wife illustration team Kristen and Kevin Howdeshell tell the rich, fascinating story of key moments in American history, as reflected through the eyes--and the patrons--of the corner store.

The American Dream

The American Dream
Author: Lloyd Miller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2020-10-14
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9781953912053

Born into a poor immigrant family, Charles works diligently to rise out of poverty. Because of this determination, he graduates from a university. While he is attending there, he meets the love of his life, Joann, who is from the opposite end of the social and economic spectrum.After graduation, Charles and Joann are married. They purchase Joann's dreamhouse, an idyllic home in the neighborhood where she grew up. The happy couple has two wonderful children, Elizabeth and Edward. Joann becomes a professor at her alma mater while Charles is a traveling salesman achieving his childhood goal of living an affluent lifestyle. Their lives cannot get any better than this! But can things get worse? After the children grow up and move away, Joann commits an "indiscretion" which causes the couple's model marriage to crumble. Charles is diagnosed with a potentially fatal disease. Will Joann be able to make the necessary amends for Charles to be willing to restore their marriage? Will Charles beat the doctor's diagnosis and go back to living the American Dream?The American Dream: Love, Lust, and Lies is a vivid, thought-provoking story that challenges the notion that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence! But even if it is, what will it require to keep it that way?

The Lemon Orchard

The Lemon Orchard
Author: Luanne Rice
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2013-07-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101622911

From bestselling author Luanne Rice—a captivating and sexy novel of love, both enduring and unexpected Year after year, Luanne Rice’s fans eagerly await her next book. Their enthusiasm is soon to be rewarded with The Lemon Orchard, Rice’s romantic new love story between two people from seemingly different worlds. In the five years since Julia last visited her aunt and uncle’s home in Malibu, her life has been turned upside down by her daughter’s death. She expects to find nothing more than peace and solitude as she house-sits with only her dog, Bonnie, for company. But she finds herself drawn to the handsome man who oversees the lemon orchard. Roberto expertly tends the trees, using the money to support his extended Mexican family. What connection could these two people share? The answer comes as Roberto reveals the heartbreaking story of his own loss—a pain Julia knows all too well, but for one striking difference: Roberto’s daughter was lost but never found. And despite the odds he cannot bear to give up hope. Set in the sea and citrus-scented air of the breathtaking Santa Monica Mountains, The Lemon Orchard is an affirming story about the redemptive power of compassion and the kind of love that seems to find us when we need it most.

I Was Their American Dream

I Was Their American Dream
Author: Malaka Gharib
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Total Pages: 162
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 052557512X

“A portrait of growing up in America, and a portrait of family, that pulls off the feat of being both intimately specific and deeply universal at the same time. I adored this book.”—Jonny Sun “[A] high-spirited graphical memoir . . . Gharib’s wisdom about the power and limits of racial identity is evident in the way she draws.”—NPR WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid. Malaka Gharib's triumphant graphic memoir brings to life her teenage antics and illuminates earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised. Malaka's story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream. Praise for I Was Their American Dream “In this time when immigration is such a hot topic, Malaka Gharib puts an engaging human face on the issue. . . . The push and pull first-generation kids feel is portrayed with humor and love, especially humor. . . . Gharib pokes fun at all of the cultures she lives in, able to see each of them with an outsider’s wry eye, while appreciating them with an insider’s close experience. . . . The question of ‘What are you?’ has never been answered with so much charm.”—Marissa Moss, New York Journal of Books “Forthright and funny, Gharib fiercely claims her own American dream.”—Booklist “Thoughtful and relatable, this touching account should be shared across generations.”– Library Journal “This charming graphic memoir riffs on the joys and challenges of developing a unique ethnic identity.”– Publishers Weekly

Love and the American Dream

Love and the American Dream
Author: Robert Indiana
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 140
Release: 1999
Genre: Architecture
ISBN:

Robert Indiana's works all speak to the vital forces that have shaped American culture in the last half of the 20th century. The American Dream is the cornerstone of Indiana's mature work. It was the theme of his first major painting, sold to the Museum of Modern Art in 1961, as well as an ongoing series. Indiana also created one of the most widely recognized works of art in the world, Love. Much of Indiana's important contribution to American art has been overshadowed by the proliferation, pirating, and mass production of works bearing the image of Love. Daniel E. O'Leary discusses the artist's development through an examniation of his journal/sketchbooks from 1958-1963; Susan Elizabeth Ryan investigates Indiana's painting Love, its origins and impact on the artist's career; and Aprile Gallant contributes an essay on Indiana's preoccupation with the idea of the American Dream.

The Myth of the American Dream

The Myth of the American Dream
Author: D. L. Mayfield
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 083084824X

Affluence, autonomy, safety, and power—the central values of the American dream. But are they compatible with Jesus' command to love our neighbor as ourselves? In essays grouped around these four values, D. L. Mayfield asks us to pay attention to the ways they shape our own choices, and the ways those choices affect our neighbors.

América's Dream

América's Dream
Author: Esmeralda Santiago
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 387
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061846945

América Gonzalez is a hotel housekeeper on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, cleaning up after wealthy foreigners who don't look her In the eye. Her alcoholic mother resents her; her married boyfriend, Correa, beats her; and their fourteen-year-old daughter thinks life would be better anywhere but with América. So when América is offered the chance to work as alive-in housekeeper and nanny for a family in Westchester County, New York, she takes it as a sign that a door to escape has been opened. Yet even as América revels in the comparative luxury of her new life, daring to care about a man other than Correa, she is faced with dramatic proof that no matter what she does, she can't get away from her past.

The Strip

The Strip
Author: Stefan Al
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 267
Release: 2017-03-03
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 026203574X

The transformations of the Strip—from the fake Wild West to neon signs twenty stories high to “starchitecture”—and how they mirror America itself. The Las Vegas Strip has impersonated the Wild West, with saloon doors and wagon wheels; it has decked itself out in midcentury modern sleekness. It has illuminated itself with twenty-story-high neon signs, then junked them. After that came Disney-like theme parks featuring castles and pirates, followed by replicas of Venetian canals, New York skyscrapers, and the Eiffel Tower. (It might be noted that forty-two million people visited Las Vegas in 2015—ten million more than visited the real Paris.) More recently, the Strip decided to get classy, with casinos designed by famous architects and zillion-dollar collections of art. Las Vegas became the “implosion capital of the world” as developers, driven by competition, got rid of the old to make way for the new—offering a non-metaphorical definition of “creative destruction.” In The Strip, Stefan Al examines the many transformations of the Las Vegas Strip, arguing that they mirror transformations in America itself. The Strip is not, as popularly supposed, a display of architectural freaks but representative of architectural trends and a record of social, cultural, and economic change. Al tells two parallel stories. He describes the feverish competition of Las Vegas developers to build the snazziest, most tourist-grabbing casinos and resorts—with a cast of characters including the mobster Bugsy Siegel, the eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes, and the would-be political kingmaker Sheldon Adelson. And he views the Strip in a larger social context, showing that it has not only reflected trends but also magnified them and sometimes even initiated them. Generously illustrated with stunning color images throughout, The Strip traces the many metamorphoses of a city that offers a vivid projection of the American dream.

To America with Love

To America with Love
Author: A.A. Gill
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2013-07-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1416596216

A celebrated British provocateur and Vanity Fair columnist serves up an “immensely entertaining book inspired by his love and knowledge of America” (Sunday Times, London). IN TO AMERICA WITH LOVE, celebrated British provocateur and Vanity Fair colum­nist A. A. Gill traverses the Atlantic to become the freshest chronicler of American identity in recent memory. With a fiery temper, a sharp-tongued wit, and an insatiable curiosity to figure out what makes more than 300 million of the world’s population tick, Gill traces the history and logic of our nation’s habits, collecting wild stories and startling facts along the way. From Colorado, where he meets a local vegeta­tion expert and learns which flowers were in Poca­hontas’s nuptial bouquet, to Kentucky, where he visits the Creationist Museum and drinks moonshine with a hog farmer, and to Harlem, where he misses a turn and stumbles into the wrong barbershop for a once-in-a-lifetime haircut, Gill embarks on a tour of not only the nation’s landscape but also its psyche, playing adventurer, philosopher, statistician, and raconteur all at once. In inimitable fashion he explains why pressing a button in a Manhattan elevator means entering a social contract of American etiquette and inverting conventional hierarchies of space; why browsing through Playboy centerfolds becomes the perfect litmus test for a generation’s political views; and how Hollywood is the metaphysical marketplace for movies, the place where Americans are sold on American romance and taught how to dream the American dream. Weaving together a tapestry of historical erudition and outrageous anecdotes, Gill ultimately captures the scope and spirit of a nation that started off as a conceptual experiment and became a political, sci­entific, and cultural fortress. This humorous and revelatory book shows us why we are who we are by transforming ordinary experiences into extraordinary lessons and promising to never let us look in the mirror the same way again.