80 results for "Biography"

The full Rudy: the man, the myth, the mania

Newfield, Jack
Newfield reminds us that in April 1999 Giuliani had only a 40 percent approval rating. A year later his divorce lawyer was savagely attacking his wife, Donna Hanover, while the mayor was flaunting his mistress in public. As a result, Giuliani's popularity plummeted again in the spring of 2000. He was almost a laughingstock when he withdrew from his Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton. He looked like a control freak who had lost control of himself. Then came 9/11, and Giuliani re-emerged as an international celebrity. He took charge when the towers fell, and he displayed leadership when others were dumbstruck. He was named Time magazine's "Person of the Year," the avatar of the stricken city. He did a victory lap around the country, raising money for Republican candidates and giving speeches for 100,000 a pop; he may rake in 10 million over the next year. Yet even as he became a part of pop iconography, celebrated as "America's Mayor," Giuliani was still loathed in some black neighborhoods in the city. People in Brownsville, Texas, might have thought of him as their mayor, but blacks in Brownsville, Brooklyn, did not. In The Full Rudy Newfield gives the devil his due, conceding that New York City did become a better place to live during Giuliani's two terms. He was skilled at solving problems that lent themselves to the application of a military-style strategy but he was a mayor of excess, a mayor of missed opportunities, political opportunism, and stunning harshness. Photographs and cartoons add to this Emmy award-winning journalist's myth-busting portrait. "In a time when American journalism is getting its share of slings and arrows ... Newfield stands out as a national treasure."—Peter Maas "He writes with the sharp eye of the trained observer and the engaged heart of a humanist."—Budd Schulberg " He is the loudest liberal voice in a time of timid whispers. Newfield's hands ... pull out the truth."—Jimmy Breslin "Newfield has made it his life's mission to uncover and share significant truths about important people and events."—Mario Cuomo
Thunder's Mouth Press/Nation Books 2002 176 pages

Daydreams and nightmares

Horowitz, Irving Louis
*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.
Transaction 2011-09-01 126 pages

Counsel in the crease: a big league player in the hockey wars

Swados, Robert O.
""A lively set of insights on the sports world as a whole makes Counsel in the Crease a highly recommended pick indeed." - Internet Bookwatch "Swados's Buffalo love seeps from every page...The book covers everything a Sabres fan could desire...It's all here...Written with wit, warmth, and an often surprising level of honesty, the book is a success for hockey freaks and even those with just moderate interest in the game...for a long-time Sabres fan, Counsel in the Crease is damn near un-missable, offering some of the juiciest views of the franchise's backroom dealings a fan will ever see." - Buffalo Spree "...an in-depth, detailed look at the Sabres' franchise through the eyes and ears of Swados....pro-Buffalo, pro-Sabres, pro-Knox group, a man who spills his blue and gold blood all over these pages. He takes the reader into the board rooms, into the locker rooms, into negotiations, everywhere but in the faceoff circles and the corners of the rink...This is the definitive history - or at least one version - of the first 35 years of the Sabres' franchise, told as oral history, by a man who was there. Many of the principals from the first 30 years of the franchise have taken these conversations and negotiations to their graves; Bob Swados has made sure the history will survive...this is a fascinating read for those who want to hear one man's version of what happened in the board rooms and behind the scenes." ." - The Buffalo News "[Swados] uses an obsession with detail in a sophisticated way to reveal the complexity behind his subject....fans of [the Buffalo Sabres] will thoroughly enjoy Swados's insider views of the Sabres and its various owners. General hockey fans will be enlightened by Swados's insights into the sport's various financial and legal imbroglios." - Publishers Weekly
Prometheus Books 2006 492 pages

Yeshiva days: learning on the Lower East Side

Boyarin, Jonathan
"This book is an ethnographic description of the experiences of the author at a yeshiva located near his home on New York's Lower East Side, Mesivtha Tifereth Jerusalem (MTJ). Jonathan Boyarin spent a good deal of time at MTJ in the 1980s, before his anthropological training, and returned to it in 2011 when he once again became a regular visitor and participant. This book, in essence, is a portrait of life in this yeshiva. Boyarin introduces the MTJ yeshiva and its place in the wider American Jewish community, then takes up the daily patterns, rituals, and rhythms of the place"--
Princeton University Press 2020-10-06 200 pages

Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul: a summer on the Lower East Side

Boyarin, Jonathan
This lively ethnography traces a fraught three months in the life of a Jewish congregation stubbornly persisting on the Lower East Side, and affords a candid, lucid and intimate introduction to contemporary synagogue practice. In these pages Jonathan Boyarin invites us to share the intimate life of the Stanton Street Shul, one of the last remaining Jewish congregations on New York's historic Lower East Side. This narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement, is full of clamorous voices the generations of the dead, who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation, keeping the building and its memories alive and making themselves Jews in the process. Through the eyes of Boyarin, at once a member of the congregation and a bemused anthropologist, the book follows this congregation of "year-round Jews" through the course of a summer during which its future must once again be decided. The Lower East Side, famous as the jumping off point for millions of Jewish and other immigrants to America, has recently become the hip playground of twenty-something immigrants to the city from elsewhere in America and from abroad. Few imagine that Jewish life there has stubbornly continued through this history of decline and regeneration. Coming inside with Boyarin, we see the congregation's life as a combination of quiet heroism, ironic humor, disputes for the sake of Heaven and perhaps otherwise, and above all the ongoing search for ways to connect with Jewish ancestors while remaining true to oneself in the present. Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul illustrates in poignant and humorous ways the changes in a historic neighborhood facing the challenges of gentrification. It offers readers with no prior knowledge of Judaism and synagogue life a portrait that is at once intimate and intelligible. Most important, perhaps, it shows the congregation's members to be anything but a monochromatic set of uniform "believers" but rather a gathering of vibrant, imperfect, indisputably down-to-earth individuals coming together to make a community.
Fordham University Press 2013-09 209 pages

The odd woman and the city: a memoir

Gornick, Vivian
"A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis"--
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2015-05-19 175 pages

Storm in my heart: memories from the widow of Johann Most

Minkin, Helene
Partner of one of the most infamous anarchists of her time, Johann Most, Helene Minkin joined the anarchist movement after emigrating from Russia in 1888 with her father and sister. Framed as a reaction and corrective to Emma Goldman’s Living My Life, Minkin’s memoir provides a unique account of turn-of-the-century anarchism and immigrant life in the United States. Published in the Yiddish-language newspaper Forverts in 1932, this is its first English translation.
AK Press 2015-01-21 161 pages

The Donigers of Great Neck: a mythologized memoir

Doniger, Wendy
"This is the story of the contrasting Judaisms that Wendy Doniger's two parents brought from their very different homes in Europe during World War I; of their paths to a shared but sharply bifurcated life in America during World War II, her father a publisher, her mother a political activist; and of the ways in which their attitudes to religion in general, and Judaism in particular, influenced the author's development as a Jewish woman and a scholar of religion"--
Brandeis University Press 2019-03-15 172 pages

In silence: growing up hearing in a deaf world

Sidransky, Ruth
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.
Gallaudet University Press 2006 343 pages

From Baghdad to Brooklyn: growing up in a Jewish-Arabic family in midcentury America : a memoir

Marshall, Jack
"[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.
Coffee House Press 2005 252 pages

Irving Howe: socialist, critic, Jew

Alexander, Edward
" . . . scrupulous, fair-minded and richly-detailed study . . . the book charts one of the most remarkable intellectual careers of the 20th century's latter half. . . . What is most heartening about Mr. Alexander's biography is its exemplary civility and nuance in discussing ideas across the lines of political difference." ―Nathan Glick, Washington Times "Anyone interested in Howe's varied career, and the historical context that has given it its particular shape―American radicalism, the Cold War and anticommunism, the New Left, literary modernism, Jewish life―will profit handsomely from reading Alexander's respectful book." ―Wilson Quarterly "Edward Alexander's captivating study of Irving Howe is illuminating and scrupulous; it is also temperate, generous, and deeply fair-minded. If Howe were alive, he would thank the author―and even now, in Paradise, he is surely doing so (while hotly continuing the discussion)." ―Cynthia Ozick " . . . a singular achievement." ―Jerusalem Post " . . . a masterpiece" ―National Jewish Post and Opinion ". . . meticulous scholarship, felicitous writing style and a literate feistiness." ―Chicago Jewish Star "An excellent work of insight and criticism, recommended for academic libraries." ―Library Journal "An insightful, balanced contribution . . ." ―Booklist "Edward Alexander's estimable intellectual biography . . . studiously avoids both undue sentimentality and overly harsh censure." ―Sanford Pinsker, Philadelphia Inquirer "Edward Alexander's well-informed and engaging portrait of Irving Howe does full justice to the complexities of mind and the political passions of one of this country's leading intellectuals. This bracing, perceptive study honors Howe's admirable career by treating it with the same high degree of moral seriousness that characterized Howe's own work at its best." ―Alvin H. Rosenfeld Irving Howe, author of World of Our Fathers, the prize-winning history of American Jewish immigrant culture, and founding editor of the influential magazine Dissent, was for over 50 years a dominant―and controversial―figure in American intellectual life. Through a clear and eloquent study of Howe's politics, writings, and thought, Edward Alexander constructs a sympathetic yet critical intellectual biography of this complex individual.
Indiana University Press 1998 284 pages