Other books that might interest you

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  Walks in My New York - A Story...

  Mikael Olrik

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  The acclaimed artist and architect shares a strolling, personal tour of a city that has become his creative muse and home away from home.   Over the years, Danish architect and artist Mikael Olrik has developed a special relationship with New York City, finding endless inspiration in the vibrant and ever-changing metropolis. In Walks in My New York, Olrik shares his fascinating perspective on New York life through a combination of watercolor, photography and text.   Olrik explores the city with the broad view of an architect, the specificity of an artist, the straight-forwardness of a photographer, and the companionable text of a diarist. He captures everything from street scenes of everyday life to pastoral views of Central Park and landmarks such as the Empire State Building and the Brooklyn Bridge. Small maps accompany each entry and act as a sort of ‘GPS’ in print.

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  Waterfront Manhattan - From...

  Kurt C. Schlichting

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  For hundreds of years, the shorefront of Manhattan Island served as the country's center of trade, shipping, and commerce. With its maritime links across the oceans, along the Atlantic coast, and inland to the Midwest and New England, Manhattan became a global city and home to the world's busiest port. It was a world of docks, ships, tugboats, and ferries, filled with cargo and freight, a place where millions of immigrants entered the Promised Land.In Waterfront Manhattan, Kurt C. Schlichting tells the story of the Manhattan waterfront as a struggle between public and private control of New York's priceless asset. Nature provided New York with a sheltered harbor but presented the city with a challenge: to find the necessary capital to build and expand the maritime infrastructure. From colonial times until after the Civil War, the city ceded control of the waterfront to private interests, excluding the public entirely and sparking a battle between shipping companies, the railroads, and ferries for access to the waterfront.Waterfront Manhattan is a wide-ranging history that will dazzle anyone who is fascinated by New York.

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  Tracking Giants - Big Trees Tiny...

  Amanda Lewis, Dr. Diana...

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  Amanda Lewis was an overachieving, burned-out book editor most familiar with trees as dead blocks of paper. A dedicated "indoorswoman," she could barely tell a birch from a beech. But that didn't stop her from pledging to visit all of the biggest trees in British Columbia, a Canadian province known for its rugged terrain and gigantic trees.The "Champion" trees on Lewis's ambitious list ranged from mighty Western red cedars to towering arbutus. The only problem? Well, there were many . . .Climate change and a pandemic aside, Lewis's lack of wilderness experience, the upsetting reality of old-growth logging, the ever-changing nature of trees, and the pressures of her one-year time frame complicated her quest. Burned out again—and realizing that her "checklist" approach to life might be the problem—she reframed her search for trees to something humbler and more meaningful: getting to know forests in an interconnected way.Weaving in insights from writers and artists, Lewis uncovers what we're really after when we pursue the big things—revealing that sometimes it's the smaller joys, the mindsets we have, and the companions we're with that make us feel more connected to the natural world.

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  Black Dragon River - A Journey...

  Dominic Ziegler

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  Black Dragon River is a personal journey down one of Asia's great rivers that reveals the region's essential history and culture. The world's ninth largest river, the Amur serves as a large part of the border between Russia and China. As a crossroads for the great empires of Asia, this area offers journalist Dominic Ziegler a lens with which to examine the societies at Europe's only borderland with east Asia. He follows a journey from the river's top to bottom, and weaves the history, ecology and peoples to show a region obsessed with the past-and to show how this region holds a key to the complex and critical relationship between Russia and China today. 
  One of Asia's mightiest rivers, the Amur is also the most elusive. The terrain it crosses is legendarily difficult to traverse. Near the river's source, Ziegler travels on horseback from the Mongolian steppe into the taiga, and later he is forced by the river's impassability to take the Trans-Siberian Railway through the four-hundred-mile valley of water meadows inland. As he voyages deeper into the Amur wilderness, Ziegler also journeys into the history of the peoples and cultures the river's path has transformed. 
  The known history of the river begins with Genghis Khan and the rise of the Mongolian empire a millennium ago, and the story of the region has been one of aggression and conquest ever since. The modern history of the river is the story of Russia's push across the Eurasian landmass to China. For China, the Amur is a symbol of national humiliation and Western imperial land seizure; to Russia it is a symbol of national regeneration, its New World dreams and eastern prospects. The quest to take the Amur was to be Russia's route to greatness, replacing an oppressive European identity with a vibrant one that faced the Pacific. Russia launched a grab in 1854 and took from China a chunk of territory equal in size nearly to France and Germany combined. Later, the region was the site for atrocities meted out on the Russian far east in the twentieth century during the Russian civil war and under Stalin. 
  The long shared history on the Amur has conditioned the way China and Russia behave toward each other-and toward the outside world. To understand Putin's imperial dreams, we must comprehend Russia's relationship to its far east and how it still shapes the Russian mind. Not only is the Amur a key to Putinism, its history is also embedded in an ongoing clash of empires with the West.

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  Uncle John's Bathroom Reader...

  Institute Bathroom Readers'

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  An entertaining trivia compendium flush with fun facts about all things music. From boogie-woogie to Beethoven, from Prince to Pavarotti, from the bards of Broadway to the rebels of rock ’n’ roll—it’s all here. Uncle John has created this harmonious collection of tuneful tales for music lovers everywhere.  Uncle John has proven once again that he is in tune with our legion of loyal readers. This 516-page musical masterpiece dedicated to all things noteworthy ranges from silly one-hit wonders to culture-changing musical milestones. You’ll get a glimpse into the future of music and go back to the days when prehistoric man first started communicating in song. So, plug in your amp, turn the dial up to eleven, and have a blast reading about:  ·      The origins of nearly every genre and style of music—including rock, country, jazz, the blues, rhythm-and-blues, hip hop, punk, folk, polka, opera, Muzak, disco, and even marching bands  ·      Musical legends, from “outsiders” like the Shaggs and the Carter family, to giants like the Beatles, Elvis, and Weird Al Yankovic  ·      The stories of legendary music venues like the Grand Ole Opry, the Apollo, and the Fillmore  ·      How a computer glitch led to Right Said Fred’s 1991 hit “I’m Too Sexy”  ·      Why waltzing was considered as scandalous in its early days as rock was in its early days  ·      The birth of the banjo, the electric guitar, karaoke, and the Stradivarius violin  ·      How John Williams struck a universal chord with his score for Star Wars ·      Go underground to play the world’s largest natural musical instrument  ·      What happened at Woodstock and other weird concert mishaps  And much, much more

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  Canaduh - Idiots from the Frozen...

  Leland Gregory

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  From absurd 911 calls to presidential philosophizing to his New York Times best-selling Stupid American History, Leland Gregory generates the best laughs by exposing the worst of human nature. Now, Gregory--sets his sights north to the frozen tundra of Canada to skewer Canadians, in Canaduh: Idiots from the Frozen North. Inside Canaduh: Idiots from the Frozen North, Gregory offers hundreds of accounts of Canadian stupidity at its most random and bizarre, starring French-speaking Quebecois, Yukon fur trappers, and Arctic Circle Eskimos.Because the stories Leland chronicles are just that unbelievable, each anecdote, quote, or factoid is presented with relevant background information--including its verified news source.

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