Catalog Search Results
Author
Publisher
Sarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Description
Explores the ethos of a restless generation, starting with its first fashionable acts of rebellion before World War I and continuing to the Wall Street crash of 1929, discovering what exemplified the range and daring of the flapper spirit. The women who defined this age were Josephine Baker, Tallulah Bankhead, Diana Cooper, Nancy Cunard, Zelda Fitzgerald and Tamara de Lempicka. They would shape the role of women for generations to come.
42) Snow
Author
Series
Description
Following years of lonely political exile in Western Europe, Ka, a middle-aged poet, returns to Istanbul to attend his mother's funeral. Only partly recognizing this place of his cultured, middle-class youth, he is even more disoriented by news of strange events in the wider country: a wave of suicides among girls forbidden to wear their head scarves at school. An apparent thaw of his writer's curiosity - a frozen sea these many years - leads him...
43) Poor people
Author
Description
"Because I was bad in my last life." "Because Allah has willed it." "Because the rich do nothing for the poor." "Because the poor do nothing for themselves." "Because it is my destiny." These are just some of the answers to the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asks in cities and villages around the globe: "Why are you poor?" In the tradition of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, writer Vollmann struggles to confront poverty...
Author
Publisher
Basic Books
Pub. Date
2012
Description
Award-winning food writer Bee Wilson's secret history of kitchens, showing how new technologies - from the fork to the microwave and beyond - have fundamentally shaped how and what we eat.
Since prehistory, humans have braved sharp knives, fire, and grindstones to transform raw ingredients into something delicious -- or at least edible. But these tools have also transformed how we consume, and how we think about, our food. In Consider the Fork,...
Author
Formats
Description
"In his international bestsellers Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, Jared Diamond transformed our understanding of what makes civilizations rise and fall. Now, in his third book in this monumental trilogy, he reveals how successful nations recover from crises while adopting selective changes -- a coping mechanism more commonly associated with individuals recovering from personal crises. Diamond compares how six countries have survived recent upheavals...
Author
Formats
Description
The author follows in the footsteps of America's most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators to offer a new perspective on how the most powerful nation on Earth came together.
Illuminates the men who toiled fearlessly to discover, connect, and bond the citizenry and geography of the U.S.A. from its beginnings and ponders whether the historic work of uniting the States has succeeded, and to what degree.
Author
Publisher
Yale University Press
Pub. Date
1994
Description
Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold wrote the essays that constitute Culture and Anarchy between 1867 and 1869, a time of rapid social change and uncertainty. Defining culture as "the best that has been thought and said," Arnold offers concrete suggestions for its role as a corrective to the chaos of materialism, industrialism, and self-interest. Acclaimed by Commentary as "the classic defense of high culture against the depredations of modernity,"...
Author
Description
"An unprecedented look at that most commonplace act of everyday life -- throwing things out -- and how it has transformed American society. Susan Strasser's pathbreaking histories of housework and the rise of the mass market have become classics in the literature of consumer culture. Here she turns to an essential but neglected part of that culture -- the trash it produces -- and finds in it an unexpected wealth of meaning. Before the twentieth century,...
Author
Description
"In the spirit of 'A short history of nearly everything, ' an energetic and wide-ranging book of discovery and discoverers, of exploitation and celebration, and of superstition and science, all in search of the ways the chemical elements are woven into our culture, history, and language"--Provided by publisher.
Author
Publisher
Princeton University Press
Pub. Date
[2015]
Description
"Nellie Dowell was a match-factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soul mates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christ's teachings. The Match Girl and the Heiress paints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century...
Author
Publisher
The University of Chicago Press
Pub. Date
2023.
Description
"There's no such thing as rural America. Or, rather, as Steven Conn argues, "rural America" is a phrase that has been made to mean so many things that it doesn't mean anything. In fact, he maintains, rural America--so often characterized as in crisis or in danger of being left behind--has been shaped by the same major forces as the rest of the country since at least the end of the Civil War: militarization, industrialization, corporatization, and...
Author
Publisher
Seven Stories Press
Pub. Date
2014.
Edition
10th anniversary edition.
Description
The living history of the American people is a history of ongoing struggle. It is told here, in speeches, letters, poems, and songs, by the people who make history happen but are often left out of the history books. These texts were chosen and arranged by Howard Zinn.
53) Medieval people
Author
Publisher
Dover Publications
Pub. Date
2000
Description
This book contains a series of sketches that aim to illustrate various aspects of social life in the Middle Ages. This volume is highly recommended for those with an interest in European history. Contents include: "The Precursors", "Bodo, A Frankish Peasant In The Time Of Charlemagne", "Marco Polo, A Venetian Traveller Of The Thirteenth Century", "Madame Eglentyne, Chaucer's Prioress In Real Life", "The Ménagier's Wife, A Paris Housewife In The Fourteenth...
Author
Pub. Date
2015.
Formats
Description
"In Mike Huckabee's new book God, Guns, Grits and Gravy, he asks the question, "Have I been taken to a different planet than the one on which I grew up?" The New York Times bestselling author explores today's American culture, drawing from his travels as a presidential candidate to present average, small-town people and families, and their optimistic resilience in the face of hard times; their stories, says Huckabee, "will inspire readers to think...
Author
Publisher
PublicAffairs
Pub. Date
2018
Edition
First edition
Description
Is civilization teetering on the edge of a cliff? Or are we just climbing higher than ever? Most people who read the news would tell you that 2017 is one of the worst years in recent memory. We're facing a series of deeply troubling, even existential problems: fascism, terrorism, environmental collapse, racial and economic inequality, and more. Yet this narrative misses something important: by almost every meaningful measure, the modern world is better...
56) Inside U.S.A
Author
Publisher
New Press
Pub. Date
1997
Edition
50th anniversary ed.
Description
The seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Gunther's classic portrait of America
John Gunther's Inside series were among the most popular books of reportage of the 1930s and 1940s. For Inside U.S.A., his magnum opus, Gunther set out from California and visited every state in the country, offering frank, lucid, and humorous observations along the way in what legendary publisher Robert Gottlieb, writing in the New York Times, calls Gunther's "fluent,...
Publisher
PBS Distribution
Pub. Date
[2015]
Edition
Original UK edition.
Description
As Season Five begins in 1924, the radio is the latest miracle, a new Labour government heralds changes through the land, and Downton's traditional ways are besieged on all fronts. Robert, Mary, and Branson must navigate these shifting sands together to ensure the future of the estate for generations to come. As Branson finds himself playing a more crucial role at Downton than ever before, he can't help but question his place in the world. Mary is...
Author
Publisher
Basic Books
Pub. Date
[2016]
Description
"Twenty-five-hundred years ago, civilizations around the world entered a revolutionary new era that overturned old order and laid the foundation for our world today. In the face of massive social changes across three continents, radical new forms of government emerged; mighty wars were fought over trade, religion, and ideology; and new faiths were ruthlessly employed to unify vast empires. The histories of Rome and China, Greece and India--the stories...
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