Lost Chicago

Lost Chicago
Author: David Lowe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2010-10
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0226494322

The City of Big Shoulders has always been our most quintessentially American—and world-class—architectural metropolis. In the wake of the Great Fire of 1871, a great building boom—still the largest in the history of the nation—introduced the first modern skyscrapers to the Chicago skyline and began what would become a legacy of diverse, influential, and iconoclastic contributions to the city’s built environment. Though this trend continued well into the twentieth century, sour city finances and unnecessary acts of demolishment left many previous cultural attractions abandoned and then destroyed. Lost Chicago explores the architectural and cultural history of this great American city, a city whose architectural heritage was recklessly squandered during the second half of the twentieth century. David Garrard Lowe’s crisp, lively prose and over 270 rare photographs and prints, illuminate the decades when Gustavus Swift and Philip D. Armour ruled the greatest stockyards in the world; when industrialists and entrepreneurs such as Cyrus McCormick, Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and Marshall Field made Prairie Avenue and State Street the rivals of New York City’s Fifth Avenue; and when Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Frank Lloyd Wright were designing buildings of incomparable excellence. Here are the mansions and grand hotels, the office buildings that met technical perfection (including the first skyscraper), and the stores, trains, movie palaces, parks, and racetracks that thrilled residents and tourists alike before falling victim to the wrecking ball of progress. “Lost Chicago is more than just another coffee table gift, more than merely a history of the city’s architecture; it is a history of the whole city as a cultural creation.”—New York Times Book Review

Finding Samuel Lowe

Finding Samuel Lowe
Author: Paula Williams Madison
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 211
Release: 2015-04-14
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0062331655

“Told through an intimate family portrait . . . a moving account of a vivid historic migration; an unyielding and dogged journey of the human spirit.” —Walter Mosley, New York Times–bestselling author Now an award–winning film directed by Jeanette Kong This powerful debut tells the story of Paula Williams Madison’s Chinese grandfather, Samuel Lowe. He became romantically involved with a Jamaican woman, Paula’s grandmother, and they lived together modestly with their daughter in his Kingston dry goods store. In 1920 his Chinese soon-to-be wife arrived to set up a “proper” family. When he requested to take his three-year-old daughter with him, Paula’s jealous grandmother made sure that Lowe never saw his child again. That began an almost one-hundred-year break in their family. Years later, the arrival of her only grandchild raising questions about family and legacy, Paula decided to search for Samuel Lowe’s descendants in China. With Finding Samuel Lowe, Paula has produced an emotional memoir that travels from Toronto to Jamaica to China. Using old documents, digital records, and referrals from the insular and interrelated Chinese-Jamaican community, she found three hundred long-lost relatives in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, China. She even located documented family lineage that traces back three thousand years to 1006 BC. Her wonderfully warm elders, all born in Jamaica and raised in China, shared the history and accomplishments of the Lowes in the East and the West, as well as the hardships and persecution suffered by her capitalist grandfather during the Communist era and the Cultural Revolution. Documented in Finding Samuel Lowe, Paula’s remarkable journey “will produce more OMG moments than any prime-time drama on cable or Netflix could ever hope to elicit” (Essence).

Love Life

Love Life
Author: Rob Lowe
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2014-04-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1451685750

On the heels of his New York Times bestselling Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe is back with an entertaining collection that “invites readers into his world with easy charm and disarming frankness” (Kirkus Reviews). After the incredible response to his acclaimed bestseller, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, Rob Lowe was convinced to mine his experiences for even more stories. The result is Love Life, a memoir about men and women, actors and producers, art and commerce, fathers and sons, movies and TV, addiction and recovery, sex and love. Among the adventures he describes in these pages are: · His visit, as a young man, to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, where the naïve actor made a surprising discovery in the hot tub. · The time, as a boy growing up in Malibu, he discovered a vibrator belonging to his best friend’s mother. · What it’s like to be the star and producer of a flop TV show. · How an actor prepares, for Californification, Parks and Recreation, and numerous other roles. · His hilarious account of coaching a kid’s basketball team dominated by helicopter parents. · How his great, great, great, great, great grandfather may have inspired everything from his love of The West Wing to his taste in classic American architecture. · His first visit to college, with his son, who is going to receive the education his father never got. · The time a major movie star stole his girlfriend. Linked by common themes and his philosophical perspective on love—and life—Lowe’s writing “is loaded with showbiz anecdotes, self-deprecating tales, and has a general sweetness” (New York Post).

Stories I Only Tell My Friends

Stories I Only Tell My Friends
Author: Rob Lowe
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-04-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1429996021

Actor Rob Lowe's memoir presents a wryly funny and surprisingly moving account of an extraordinary life lived almost entirely in the public eye. A teen idol at fifteen, an international icon and founder of the Brat Pack at twenty, and one of Hollywood's top stars to this day, Rob Lowe chronicles his experiences as a painfully misunderstood child actor in Ohio uprooted to the wild counterculture of mid-seventies Malibu, where he embarked on his unrelenting pursuit of a career in Hollywood. The Outsiders placed Lowe at the birth of the modern youth movement in the entertainment industry. During his time on The West Wing, he witnessed the surreal nexus of show business and politics both on the set and in the actual White House. And in between are deft and humorous stories of the wild excesses that marked the eighties, leading to his quest for family and sobriety. Never mean-spirited or salacious, Lowe delivers unexpected glimpses into his successes, disappointments, relationships, and one-of-a-kind encounters with people who shaped our world over the last twenty-five years. Rob Lowe's New York Times bestselling autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, shares tales that are as entertaining as they are unforgettable.

Titanic Valour

Titanic Valour
Author: Inger Sheil
Publisher: The History Press
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2011-11-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0752477706

Harold Lowe, Fifth Officer of RMS Titanic, was described by another survivor as 'the real hero of the Titanic.' After taking an active role in the evacuation, Lowe took command of a raft of lifeboats, distributing passengers among them so he could return to the wreckage and look for survivors – the only officer to do so. He succeeded in raising a sail, rescued the drenched inhabitants of a sinking lifeboat and towed another boat to safety. Lowe had a long and fascinating life at sea. The tragic sinking of the Titanic was only the most notorious incident in a career that took him as a fifteen-year-old runaway to the coast of West Africa and into action in Siberia during the Russian Revolution. Titanic historian Inger Sheil has worked closely with Lowe's family to compile a gripping biography of this heroic Welshman.

Napoleon's Jailer

Napoleon's Jailer
Author: Desmond Gregory
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 1996
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780838636572

Lowe's reputation has never recovered from the slanders and libels of the Bonapartists and their vocal Whig supporters, in spite of one or two attempts by historians to set the record straight.