Muck City

Muck City
Author: Bryan Mealer
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2013-08-13
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 0307888630

In a town deep in the Florida Everglades, where high school football is the only escape, a haunted quarterback, a returning hero, and a scholar struggle against terrible odds. The loamy black “muck” that surrounds Belle Glade, Florida once built an empire for Big Sugar and provided much of the nation's vegetables, often on the backs of roving, destitute migrants. Many of these were children who honed their skills along the field rows and started one of the most legendary football programs in America. Belle Glade’s high school team, the Glades Central Raiders, has sent an extraordinary number of players to the National Football League – 27 since 1985, with five of those drafted in the first round. The industry that gave rise to the town and its team also spawned the chronic poverty, teeming migrant ghettos, and violence that cripples futures before they can ever begin. Muck City tells the story of quarterback Mario Rowley, whose dream is to win a championship for his deceased parents and quiet the ghosts that haunt him; head coach Jessie Hester, the town’s first NFL star, who returns home to “win kids, not championships”; and Jonteria Willliams, who must build her dream of becoming a doctor in one of the poorest high schools in the nation. For boys like Mario, being a Raider is a one-shot window for escape and a college education. Without football, Jonteria and the rest must make it on brains and fortitude alone. For the coach, good intentions must battle a town’s obsession to win above all else. Beyond the Friday night lights, this book is an engrossing portrait of a community mired in a shameful past and uncertain future, but with the fierce will to survive, win, and escape to a better life.

All Things Must Fight to Live

All Things Must Fight to Live
Author: Bryan Mealer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-01-08
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1608196674

In All Things Must Fight to Live, Bryan Mealer takes readers on a harrowing two-thousand mile journey through Congo, where gun-toting militia still rape and kill with impunity. Amidst burnt-out battlefields where armies still wrestle for control, into the dark corners of the forests, and along the high savanna, where thousands have been slaughtered and quickly forgotten, Mealer searches for signs that Africa's most troubled state will soon rise from ruin. At once illuminating and startling, All Things Must Fight to Live is a searing portrait of an emerging country facing unimaginable upheaval and almost impossible odds, as well as an unflinching look at the darkness that continues to exist in the hearts of men. It is non-fiction at its finest-powerful, moving, necessary.

Muck

Muck
Author: Dror Burstein
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2018-11-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0374215839

“Those who lament that the novel has lost its prophecy should pay heed and cover-price: Muck is the future, both of Jerusalem and of literature. God is showing some rare good taste, by choosing to speak to us through Dror Burstein.” —Joshua Cohen, author of Moving Kings and Book of Numbers In a Jerusalem both ancient and modern, where the First Temple squats over the populace like a Trump casino, where the streets are literally crawling with prophets and heathen helicopters buzz over Old Testament sovereigns, two young poets are about to have their lives turned upside down. Struggling Jeremiah is worried that he might be wasting his time trying to be a writer; the great critic Broch just beat him over the head with his own computer keyboard. Mattaniah, on the other hand, is a real up-and-comer—but he has a secret he wouldn’t want anyone in the literary world to know: his late father was king of Judah. Jeremiah begins to despair, and in that despair has a vision: that Jerusalem is doomed, and that Mattaniah will not only be forced to ascend to the throne but will thereafter witness his people slaughtered and exiled. But what does it mean to tell a friend and rival that his future is bleak? What sort of grudges and biases turn true vision into false prophecy? Can the very act of speaking a prediction aloud make it come true? And, if so, does that make you a seer, or just a schmuck? Dramatizing the eternal dispute between poetry and power, between faith and practicality, between haves and have-nots, Dror Burstein’s Muck is a brilliant and subversive modern-dress retelling of the book of Jeremiah: a comedy with apocalyptic stakes by a star of Israeli fiction.

Maximum City

Maximum City
Author: Suketu Mehta
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2009-10-21
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0307574318

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider’s view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse, opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood, and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks. As each individual story unfolds, Mehta also recounts his own efforts to make a home in Bombay after more than twenty years abroad. Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.

The Karl Muck Scandal

The Karl Muck Scandal
Author: Melissa D. Burrage
Publisher:
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2019
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1580469507

The demonization, internment, and deportation of celebrated Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Dr. Karl Muck, finally told, and placed in the context of World War I anti-German sentiment in the United States. BEST CLASSICAL MUSIC BOOK RELEASE OF 2019 by Classical-music.com, the official website of BBC Music Magazine. 2019 SUMMER READS ABOUT CLASSICAL MUSIC by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 2019 BEST BOOK AWARD FINALIST in both the History and Performing Arts categories, sponsored by American Book Fest. 2019 SUBVENTION AWARD by the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. One of the cherished narratives of American history is that of the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants to its shores. Accounts of the exclusion and exploitation of Chinese immigrants in the late nineteenth century and Japanese internment during World War II tell a darker story of American immigration. Less well-known, however, is the treatment of German-Americans and Germannationals in the United States during World War I. Initially accepted and even welcomed into American society at the outbreak of war, this group would face rampant intolerance and anti-German hysteria. Melissa D. Burrage's book illustrates this dramatic shift in attitude in her engrossing narrative of Dr. Karl Muck, the celebrated German conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, who was targeted and ultimately disgraced by a New York Philharmonic board member and by capitalists from that city who used his private sexual life as a basis for having him arrested, interned, and deported from the United States. While the campaign against Muck made national headlines, and is the main focus of this book, Burrage also illuminates broader national topics such as: Total War; State power; vigilante justice; internment and deportation; irresponsible journalism; sexual surveillance; attitudes toward immigration; anti-Semitism; and the development of America's musical institutions. The mistreatment of Karl Muck in the United States provides a narrative thread that connects these various wartime and postwar themes. MELISSAD. BURRAGE, a former writing consultant at Harvard University Extension School, holds a Master's Degree in History from Harvard University and a PhD in American Studies from University of East Anglia. Support for thispublication was provided by the Howard Hanson Institute for American Music at the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester.

Wild City

Wild City
Author: Thomas Hynes
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2020-05-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0062938568

An illustrated guide to 40 of the most well-known, surprising, notorious, mythical, and sublime non-human citizens of New York City, and love letter to its surprising ecological diversity. From refugee parrots and prodigal beavers to gorgeous Fifth Avenue hawks and vengeful groundhogs, Wild City tells the funny, quirky, and memorable stories of forty of New York City’s most surprising nonhuman citizens. This unconventional wildlife guide and concise environmental history of the Big Apple includes tales of the well-known, notorious, and legendary creatures who are as much New Yorkers as their human counterparts. A celebration of some of the city’s most surprising residents and a love letter to this always evolving metropolis, Wild City is an enchanting illustrated volume that is a must-have for every Big Apple devotee and animal lover.

Plague Town

Plague Town
Author: Dana Fredsti
Publisher: Titan Books
Total Pages: 378
Release: 2012-04-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0857686380

People are dying. Then they are waking up hungry. In the small university town of Redwood Grove, people are succumbing to a lethal strain of flu. They are dying—but not for long. Ashley Parker and her boyfriend are attacked by these shambling, rotting creatures that crave human flesh. Their lives will never be the same again. When she awakes Ashley discovers that she is a "wild card"— immune to the virus—and is recruited by a shadowy paramilitary organization that offers her the chance to fight back. Trained by gorgeous vegan Gabriel, and bonding with her fellow wild cards, Ashley begins to discover skills she never knew she had. As the town falls to ever-growing numbers of the infected, Ashley and her team fight to contain the outbreak—but will they be enough?

Flâneuse

Flâneuse
Author: Lauren Elkin
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-02-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0374715890

FINALIST FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD FOR THE ART OF THE ESSAY A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 The flâneur is the quintessentially masculine figure of privilege and leisure who strides the capitals of the world with abandon. But it is the flâneuse who captures the imagination of the cultural critic Lauren Elkin. In her wonderfully gender-bending new book, the flâneuse is a “determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.” Virginia Woolf called it “street haunting”; Holly Golightly epitomized it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s; and Patti Smith did it in her own inimitable style in 1970s New York. Part cultural meander, part memoir, Flâneuse takes us on a distinctly cosmopolitan jaunt that begins in New York, where Elkin grew up, and transports us to Paris via Venice, Tokyo, and London, all cities in which she’s lived. We are shown the paths beaten by such flâneuses as the cross-dressing nineteenth-century novelist George Sand, the Parisian artist Sophie Calle, the wartime correspondent Martha Gellhorn, and the writer Jean Rhys. With tenacity and insight, Elkin creates a mosaic of what urban settings have meant to women, charting through literature, art, history, and film the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes fraught relationship that women have with the metropolis. Called “deliciously spiky and seditious” by The Guardian, Flâneuse will inspire you to light out for the great cities yourself.

La Vida Vampire

La Vida Vampire
Author: Nancy Haddock
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2008-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101206993

First in a delightfully irreverent new series-and second to none when it comes to beautiful 227-year-old career women. Being dead isn't all it's cracked up to be. Take it from Francesca Marinelli, trapped underground for over 200 years and rediscovered during the renovation of a Victorian mansion in historic St. Augustine. A tourist attraction herself, she's well suited for a job as an Old Ghost Town Tour guide. Francesca's due for a new lease on afterlife-and with enough sunblock, she can finally live it. Unfortunately, everything she learned about men is a little dated. And when people in her tour group turn up dead, naturally the police suspect her. After all, she is a vampire. Which is why a crazed vampire-hunting vigilante squad is out to get her as well. Between the dead bodies, the stalkers, and a seriously non-existent love life, she's starting to wish she was dead. Or at least buried, where she was safe.

Yuck! Stuck in the Muck

Yuck! Stuck in the Muck
Author: Corinne Demas
Publisher: Cartwheel Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2006
Genre: Dogs
ISBN: 9780439794312

Dog chases Duck into the swamp, setting off a very muddy chain of events. Chuck tries to pull Dog out of the muck and also gets stuck. One by one, each character gets stuck while trying to help another. At last, a helicopter rescues them, and Duck flies back to build a nest on the still-stuck truck!