Steven Millhauser4.0 Young Martin Dressler begins his career as a helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top. His visions grow more and more fantastical as he plans his ultimate creation: the Grand Cosmo, in which he attempts to capture the entire world and its dreams. Accompanied on this journey by two sisters - one a dreamlike shadow, the other a wordly business partner - Martin walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry. The Grand Cosmo is his triumph and his undoing, the bold conclusion to this biography of the twentieth-century notion of progress, this mesmerizing journey to the heart of the American dream.
Джоанна Скотт0.0 The Manikin is not a mannequin, but the curious estate of Henry Craxton, Sr. in a rural western New York State. Dubbed the "Henry Ford of Natural History," by 1917 Craxton has become America's preeminent taxidermist. Into this magic box of a world-filled with eerily inanimate gibbons and bats, owls and peacocks, quetzals and crocodiles-wanders young Peg Griswood, daughter of Craxton's newest housekeeper. Part coming-of-age story, part gothic mystery, and part exploration of the intimate embrace between art and life, Joanna Scott's The Manikin is compulsively readable and beautifully written.
Ursula K. LeGuin0.0 In a superb collection of 18 short stories, National Book Award winner Le Guin shows that the boundaries between realism and magical realism lie in the eyes of the beholder. In each story, she finds the detail that reveals the strangeness of ordinary life or the unexpected depths of an ordinary person.
Фрэнк МакКорт4.4 Нищета гнала ирландцев через океан в Америку, — и нищета погнала их обратно во времена Великой депрессии. Одними из многих стала семья Маккорт, в 1934 году вернувшаяся в Лимерик. И вот тогда для них начался настоящий ад… Голод. Безработица. Беспробудное пьянство отцов семейств, оставлявших на кабацкой стойке немногие заработанные гроши. Смерть, ставшая частой гостьей в лимерикских трущобах. И тяжкий груз ответственности, который лег на плечи маленького мальчика, поневоле вынужденного стать настоящим главой семьи…
Ричард Клугер0.0 Ashes to Ashes is a monumental history of the American tobacco industry’s ironic success in developing the cigarette, modern society’s most widespread instrument of self-destruction, into the nation’s most profitable consumer product. Starting with its energized, work-obsessed royal families, the Dukes and the Reynoldses, and their embattled successors like the eccentric autocrat George Washington Hill and the feisty Joseph F. Cullman, the book vividly portrays the cigarrettemakers generations of entrepreneurial geniuses. Their problematic achievement was based on cunning business strategies and marketing dazzle, deft political power plays, and a relentless, often devious attack on antismoking forces in science, public health, and government. Enabling the whole process to unfold was the weirdly symbiotic relationship of an industry geared at any cost to sell, sell, sell cigarettes, and an American public habituated to ignore all health warnings and buy, buy, buy.
At the center of this epic is the continuing drama of the Philip Morris Company and the crafty men at its helm. The youngest, once smallest entry in the business, it remained an underdog until the marketing brainstorm that transformed the Marlboro brand from little more than a woman’s fashion accessory to the ultimate emblem of hairy-chested machismo (and made it America’s – and the world’s – #1 smoke). Remarkably, the company’s global prosperity mounted steadily even as the news about cigarettes and health grew more dire by the year.
Caught up in the Philip Morris story is the whole sweep of America’s cigarette history, from the glory days of rampant hucksterism – when smokers would “walk a mile for a Camel,” Winston tasted “good like a cigarette should,” and most of the nation could decipher “L.S. / M.F.T” – to the bombshell 1964 Surgeon General’s Report that definitively indicted smoking as a killer, to the age of the massive mergers that spawned RJR Nabisco and Philip Morris-Kraft General Foods.
Here we learn how the leaf that was the New World’s most passionately devoured gift to the Old grew into humankind’s most dangerous consumer product, employing a vast rural corps of laborers, fattening tax revenues, and propagating a ring of fiercely competitive corporate superpowers; how tobacco’s peerless public-relations spinners applied their techniques to becloud the overwhelming evidence of the cigarette’s lethal and addictive nature; and finally, how the besieged industry and the aroused public-health forces nationwide collided over whether to outlaw the butt habit altogether or bring it into ever more withering social disdain and under ever tighter government control
Cynthia Ozick0.0 From one of America's great literary figures, a new collection of essays on eminent writers and their work, and on the war between art and life. The perilous intersection of writers' lives with public and private dooms is the fertile subject of many of these remarkable essays from such literary giants as T.S. Eliot, Isaac Babel, Salman Rushdieand Henry James.
Samuel G. Freedman0.0 In telling the stories of the members of three immigrant families, Freedman recounts the political transformation of America--the shift from Democrat to Republican, from FDR to Reagan and Gingrich. America bears the imprints of obscure hands, the hands of these three families. In their story lies the essence of a century. 15 photos.
