The untold life story of All-of-a-Kind Family author Sydney Taylor, highlighting her dramatic influence on American children's literature.

It is 1955, and Colette Rossant, newly married, has just arrived in America with her husband Jimmy. She is bemused by American customs and most importantly by the food: the ubiquitous mayonnaise, the iceberg lettuce. But post-war New York is humming and they discover a whole new world in Greenwich Village; Colette slowly falls in love with her adopted country. When Jimmy and Colette buy a house downtown, Colette finds a place she can truly call home. It is in this house that they raise their four children and where Colette progresses from being a passionate cook to an acclaimed food writer. Madeleines in Manhattan is the story of her journey from young housewife to successful professional.

Before gentrification, New York City was a gritty and inspiring place. In its midst was Arlene Gottfried, whose eye for the sublime caught it all. Sometimes Overwhelming is a manic yet romantic ode to the people of New York City in the 1970s and 80s. From Coney Island to a Hasid at Riis Beachs nude bay to the disco nights of sexual abandon and the children in the original Village Halloween parade, this book is a delightfully lighthearted look at the most outrageous people you might ever see.

Town and Gown is the story of the birth in the 1960s and survival through the 1970s of an inner city college, York College of the City University of New York, in Jamaica, Queens. Created as a liberal arts college to provide increased access to minority students, it was placed in a mainly minority neighborhood, where it received exceptionally strong support from a middle class African American community seeking access to quality higher education for its children and a business community striving to overcome the effects of “white flight.” Operating in rented quarters without a permanent campus and regarded as academically illegitimate owing to its location, the college was regarded as expendable in hard times. From 1971 to 1979 critics both inside and outside of the City University, such as Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Mayor Edward Koch, questioned the school’s right to exist, especially during the New York City and State Fiscal Crisis of 1975 and 1976. Undaunted, the college and its diverse supporters rallied and won. An amazing groundswell of support from Southeast Queens, and intense political pressure, saved it. Though the fight was often bitter, York College and Jamaica would not be denied. The college moved onto its permanent campus as a new Jamaica Center emerged.

*Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Biography and Autobiography This is the story of the making of a world-famous sociologist. It is even more the story of a boy hustling to survive. Here in an astonishing and candidly written memoir by one of America's premier social scientists recounting the intensely personal story of his tormented youth in a ghetto within a ghetto. It etches the painful details of a boy's overcoming alienation and isolation in a hostile place in an unloving family. In the 1930s a small remnant community of Eastern European Jewish immigrants still resided in predominantly black Harlem. As shopkeepers trying to make out a marginal existence, Harlem's Jews were a minority within a minority. Into this restricted world the author of this book was born. Irving Louis Horowitz's parents had fled Russia, his father the victim of persecution in the Tsarist army during World War I. The boy's schoolmates were the children of black sharecroppers who had immigrated to the North. Poverty, language, and culture all cut off the Horowitz family from traditional community life, and the stress of a survival existence led to the trauma of a deteriorating family unit. Harlem and its environs, the Apollo and the Alhambra theaters, the Polo Grounds, and Central Park were the stage on which a youngster from this ghetto built a kind of self-reliance at the cost of social graces. The recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Biography and Autobiography, this new, augmented edition contains the author's reflection of the impact of the Great Depression on Harlem family life.

Text and photographs examine the daily life and experiences of a ten-year-old boy growing up in New York City.

When her parents separate, twelve-year-old Sarah Stein feels split into her mother's daughter and daddy's girl, but a disgraced firefighter who lives in a hidden room in the Brooklyn Bridge, and her grandmother's story of her own childhood, help Sarah find her true self.

Five friends meet weekly at a restaurant called Yellowbird on New York's Upper East Side, revealing the long-hidden secrets of their pasts and how each, in her fashion, has become a survivor beyond all expectations. Texas-born Billie Redmond, the owner of Yellowbird, has come a long way from singing in her daddy's honky-tonk roadhouse. She escapes small town life for the glamour of New York City, where she can be a star like her idol Janis Joplin, and for a brief incandescent moment she lives her dream. But when the hits dry up, so do the high times, and Billie searches her soul to avoid the same fate as her idol. Beautiful, sexy, smart, and black, Felicity Johnson is a successful lawyer whose extramarital affair is part salvation, part invitation to disaster. It will take courage to finally escape from a loveless marriage but, she wonders, does she have the strength to break the self-destructive bond? Kathryn O'Mara Henry comes from a long line of Boston cops, including her hard-drinking father, who terrorizes the family. But one cold night her mother puts a violent end to the nightmare of abuse. From this hell, Kathryn develops into a vivacious and independent woman who finally finds a "good" man who can give her children the stability they need or scar them - and her - for life. Raised in Florida, Eve Bader is a free spirit who dreams of a career on the silver screen. She is so determined to make it as an actress in Hollywood that she forsakes her young daughter, Nicole, for a chance at stardom. Only when she starts a new life with her daughter in New York does she begin to prosper as an actress. But once again, her blind ambition threatens her relationship with her daughter, and friendship within the group. Gara Whiteman has worked hard to become a prominent psychologist, and after resolving her love/hate relationship with her controlling mother and a divorce from her husband of twenty-two years, she takes on the biggest struggle of her life - and is finally open to finding someone to love again. The intimacies from each woman's past and present are brought to the shared table at Yellowbird, where they variously support, amuse, encourage, and betray each other, finally emerging stronger than any of them dared imagine.

PILGRIM STATE is a stunning memoir which tells the story of Dorothy Walker - equal parts beautiful, headstrong, brave and tragic. Her life is lovingly recreated by her daughter Jacqueline in homage to the remarkable woman she was. In the haunting opening pages, set in Pilgrim State mental facility in New York State in 1951, Dorothy has been forcibly sectioned and is battling to keep her children and her sanity. She will struggle all her life to retain both. Dorothy and her children return to Jamaica before finally making a home in post-Windrush London in the early 60s. Dorothy and her children face prejudice and loss but are bound by incredible love and their unique sense of family. This will prove to be Dorothys greatest gift. Stories like PILGRIM STATE dont come along that often. And when they do you recognise you have something very special. And when a voice is this strong and original, you stop to listen. PILGRIM STATE celebrates place, the life-affirming nature of family and the bonds between mothers and daughters that can never be broken. The story is haunting and powerful and speaks for generations of women, resonating long after the story ends. Jacqueline Walker has done her mother proud.

At last, Ruth Sidranksy’s groundbreaking book In Silence: Growing Up Hearing in a Deaf World is back in print. Her account of growing up as the hearing daughter of deaf Jewish parents in the Bronx and Brooklyn during the 1930s and1940s reveals the challenges deaf people faced during the Depression and afterward. Inside her family’s apartment, Sidransky knew a warm, secure place. She recalls her earliest memories of seeing words fall from her parents’ hands. She remembers her father entertaining the family endlessly with his stories, and her mother’s story of tying a red ribbon to herself and her infant daughter to know when she needed anything in the night. Outside the apartment, the cacophonous hearing world greeted Sidransky’s family with stark stares of curiosity as though they were “freaks.” Always upbeat, her proud father still found it hard to earn a living. When Sidransky started school, she was placed in a class for special needs children until the principal realized that she could hear and speak. Sidransky portrays her family with deep affection and honesty, and her frank account provides a living narrative of the Deaf experience in pre- and post-World War II America. In Silence has become an invaluable chronicle of a special time and place that will affect all who read it for years to come.

"[Marshall] understands that the neighborhoods and cities that no longer exist can be conjured by memory and reanimated by art."-- San Francisco Chronicle "Born in Brooklyn of Arabic/Jewish heritage, Marshall may represent the keynote, most critical multicultural mixture of our time."--Naomi Shihab Nye, Hungry Mind Review Inspired by the posthumous discovery of letters written by his father but never mailed, Jack Marshall's memoir is both a moving story of a writer's artistic coming-of-age and a lush, lyrical recollection of a childhood spent in Brooklyn's Arabic-speaking Jewish community. Born in 1936 to an Iraqi father and Syrian mother who had immigrated to the United States, Marshall grew up in the hardworking Sephardic community--enveloped in an extended family that spoke little English, no Yiddish, and whose way of life owed more to their Middle Eastern homelands than to European Jewish traditions. As the sights, sounds, and tastes of midcentury New York leap off the page, Marshall beautifully evokes the magic of youth and discovery. From playing "running bases" in the Brooklyn streets to making egg creams at Coney Island, from his mother's rich kibbeh and baklava to the vast world revealed in the books of the New York Public Library, from the pleasures of music to the mysteries contained under a microscope, Marshall's story is as enduring as it is original. And before he sets sail for Africa as a seaman on a Norwegian freighter, Marshall has, through his negotiation of language, culture, family strife, and issues of education, faith, and politics, shined a light upon the possibilities of our collective future. A critically acclaimed poet, Jack Marshall has received a PEN Center USA West Award, two Bay Area Book Reviewers awards, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.