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In his inimitable prose, master storyteller Peter Quinn chronicles
his odyssey from the Irish Catholic precincts of the Bronx to the
arena of big-league politics and corporate hardball. Cross Bronx is
Peter Quinn’s one-of-a-kind account of his adventures as ad man,
archivist, teacher, Wall Street messenger, court officer, political
speechwriter, corporate scribe, and award-winning novelist. Like
Pete Hamill, Quinn is a New Yorker through and through. His
evolution from a childhood in a now-vanished Bronx, to his exploits
in the halls of Albany and swish corporate offices, to then walking
away from it all, is evocative and entertaining and enlightening
from first page to last. Cross Bronx is bursting with witty,
captivating stories. Quinn is best known for his novels (all
recently reissued by Fordham University Press under its New York
ReLit imprint), most notably his American Book Award–winning
novel Banished Children of Eve. Colum McCann has summed up
Quinn’s trilogy of historical detective novels as “generous and
agile and profound.” Quinn has now seized the time and
inspiration afforded by “the strange interlude of the pandemic”
to give his up-close-and-personal accounts of working as a
speechwriter in political backrooms and corporate boardrooms: “In
a moment of upended expectations and fear-prone uncertainty, the
tolling of John Donne’s bells becomes perhaps not as faint as it
once seemed. Before judgment is pronounced and sentence carried
out, I want my chance to speak from the dock. Let no man write my
epitaph. In the end, this is the best I could do.” (from the
Prologue) From 1979 to 1985 Quinn worked as chief speechwriter for
New York Governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, helping craft
Cuomo’s landmark speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention and his
address on religion and politics at Notre Dame University. Quinn
then joined Time Inc. as chief speechwriter and retired as
corporate editorial director for Time Warner at the end of 2007. As
eyewitness and participant, he survived elections, mega-mergers,
and urban ruin. In Cross Bronx he provides his insider’s view of
high-powered politics and high-stakes corporate intrigue. Incapable
of writing a dull sentence, the award-winning author grabs our
attention and keeps us enthralled from start to finish. Never have
his skills as a storyteller been on better display than in this
revealing, gripping memoir.
Photographer Barbara Mensch’s rediscovered photo archives and
interview tapes capture symbolic transformations of Lower
Manhattan. Many of these images are published here for the first
time. The photographs evoke the passage of time by dividing the
images into three parts: the 1980s, the 1990s, and the new
millennium (2000 and beyond). The photographer shares with the
viewer: “I would shoot ruins of buildings, the demolition of
famous waterfront saloons, ancient alleyways, and, in some cases,
nineteenth-century buildings destroyed by mysterious fires. There
were images of floods and other calamities/catastrophes in Lower
Manhattan, culminating with 9/11. These photos captured what had
been, what no longer exists. They served as my visual timeline.
What did the passage of the many decades reveal to me? What
dynamics were in my images of the same streets I repeatedly walked
for years?” The author’s images from the Fulton Fish Market in
the 1980s document the generations of immigrants and their children
pursuing a gritty American Dream next to the Brooklyn Bridge.
Photos from the 1990s present images of floods and fires that
paralyzed the area, juxtaposed with continued bulldozing to clear
the way for luxury housing. Politics reshaped Manhattan’s skyline
by encouraging new commercial shopping, food, and restaurant
destinations. This restructuring marked the beginning of the end of
downtown’s blue-collar origins and white-collar replacements,
challenging us to ask, “What was lost?” The seminal event of
the 2000s, September 11, 2001, reinforced downtown’s rebirth as
the global economic engine with no room for the past. Also included
in this section is an interview with an insider privy to the Mafia
leadership of the Fulton Fish Market during Mayor Rudolph
Giuliani’s opportunistic crusade against them in the 1980s. Dan
Barry, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, offers a poetic and
insightful tribute to the artist and photographer. “Definitions:
‘falling off’ suggests a decline in quality or quantity,
‘falling off’ suggests the passage of time or changes over
time, ‘falling off’ suggests a detachment, an alternative path
to a questionable destination, ‘falling off’ suggests a
separation, ‘falling off’ suggests something that comes to
pass.”
Following the death of Mac Raboy in 1968, Dan Barry took over
production of the Sunday Flash Gordon strip. This collection, the
first ever, features the first three years of a run that would last
for nearly 50 years from The Return of Chameleon 1/14/68, which he
completed after Raboy's death, to Radiation Giants in 12/26/71.
On April 18, 1981, a ball game sprang eternal. What began as a
modestly attended minor league game between the Pawtucket Red Sox
and the Rochester Red Wings became not only the longest ever played
in baseball history, but something else entirely.
With "Bottom of the 33rd," celebrated "New York Times"
journalist Dan Barry has written a lyrical meditation on small-town
lives, minor league dreams, and the elements of time and community
that conspired one fateful night to produce a baseball game
seemingly without end. This genre-bending book, a reportorial
triumph, portrays the myriad lives held by the night's unrelenting
grip.
An unforgettable portrait of ambition and endurance, "Bottom of
the 33rd" is the rare sports book, one that changes the way we
perceive America's pastime, and America's past.
Servitude and Salvation in the Heartland
The Ultimate Tool for MINDSTORMS(r) Maniacs
The new MINDSTORMS kit has been updated to include a programming
brick, USB cable, RJ11-like cables, motors, and sensors. This book
updates the robotics information to be compatible with the new set
and to show how sound, sight, touch, and distance issues are now
dealt with.
The LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT and its predecessor, the LEGO MINDSTORMS
Robotics Invention System (RIS), have been called "the most
creative play system ever developed." This book unleashes the full
power and potential of the tools, sensors, and components that make
up LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT. It also provides a unique insight on newer
studless building techniques as well as interfacing with the
traditional studded beams. Some of the world's leading LEGO
MINDSTORMS inventors share their knowledge and development secrets.
You will discover an incredible range of ideas to inspire your next
invention. This is the ultimate insider's look at LEGO MINDSTORMS
NXT system and is the perfect book whether you build world-class
competitive robots or just like to mess around for the fun of it.
Featuring an introduction by astronaut Dan Barry and written by
Dave Astolfo, Invited Member of the MINDSTORMS Developer Program
and MINDSTORMS Community Partners (MCP) groups, and Mario and
Guilio Ferrari, authors of the bestselling Building Robots with
LEGO Mindstorms, this book covers:
Understanding LEGO Geometry
Playing with Gears
Controlling Motors
Reading Sensors
What's New with the NXT?
Building Strategies
Programming the NXT
Playing Sounds and Music
Becoming Mobile
Getting Pumped: Pneumatics
Finding and Grabbing Objects
Doing the Math
Knowing Where You Are
Classic Projects
Building Robots That Walk
Robotic Animals
Solving a Maze
Drawing and Writing
Racing Against Time
Hand-to-Hand Combat
Searching for Precision
*Complete coverage of the new Mindstorms NXT kit
*Brought to you by the DaVinci's of LEGO
*Updated edition of a bestseller
With a poet's clear eye and a journalist's curiosity about how a
city works, Dan Barry shows us New York as no other writer has seen
it.
Evocative, intimate, piercing, and often funny, the essays in "City
Lights" capture everyday life in the city at its most ordinary and
extraordinary. Wandering the city as a columnist for "The New York
Times," Barry visits the denizens of the Fulton Fish Market on the
eve of its closing; journeys with an obsessed guide through the
secret underground of abandoned subway stops, tunnels, and
aqueducts; touches down in bars, hospitals, churches, diners,
pools, zoos, memorabilia-stuffed apartments, at births and
funerals, the places where people gather, are welcomed, or depart;
talks to the ex-athlete who caught the falling baby, the
performance artist who works as a mermaid, the octogenarian dancers
who find quiet joy in their partnership, and the guy who waves
flags over the Cross-Bronx Expressway to wish drivers safe passage.
Along the way, Barry offers glimpses of New York's distant and
recent past. He explains why the dust-coated wishbones hanging
above the bar at McSorley's Old Ale House belong to the doughboy
ghosts of World War I. He recalls a century of grandeur at the
Plaza Hotel throught the tales of longtime doormen who will soon be
out of a job. He finds that an old man's quiet death opens back
into a past that the man had spent his life denying. And, from the
vantage of the Circle Line cruise around Manhattan, he joins
tourists as they try to make sense of still-smoldering ruins in
Lower Manhattan three weeks after September 11, 2001.
Each story in "City Lights" illuminates New York, as it was and as
it is: always changing, always losing and renewing parts of itself,
every street corner an opportunity for surprise and revelation.
Nominated for the 2017 Hillman Prize and the Robert F. Kennedy
Human Rights AwardWith this Dickensian tale from America's
heartland, New York Times writer and columnist Dan Barry tells the
harrowing yet uplifting story of the exploitation and abuse of a
resilient group of men with intellectual disability, and the heroic
efforts of those who helped them to find justice and reclaim their
lives.In the tiny Iowa farm town of Atalissa, dozens of men, all
with intellectual disability and all from Texas, lived in an old
schoolhouse. Before dawn each morning, they were bussed to a nearby
processing plant, where they eviscerated turkeys in return for
food, lodging, and $65 a month. They lived in near servitude for
more than thirty years, enduring increasing neglect, exploitation,
and physical and emotional abuse--until state social workers, local
journalists, and one tenacious labor lawyer helped these men
achieve freedom.Drawing on exhaustive interviews, Dan Barry dives
deeply into the lives of the men, recording their memories of
suffering, loneliness and fleeting joy, as well as the undying hope
they maintained despite their traumatic circumstances. Barry
explores how a small Iowa town remained oblivious to the plight of
these men, analyzes the many causes for such profound and chronic
negligence, and lays out the impact of the men's dramatic court
case, which has spurred advocates--including President Obama--to
push for just pay and improved working conditions for people living
with disabilities.A luminous work of social justice, told with
compassion and compelling detail, The Boys in the Bunkhouse is more
than just inspired storytelling. It is a clarion call for a
vigilance that ensures inclusion and dignity for all.
A generational memoir of the American suburbs, "Pull Me Up" is a
deeply affecting book. With prose that to Frank McCourt "flashes
with poetry," "New York Times" columnist Dan Barry tells the story
of an unforgettable American family. He writes so crisply that we
not only feel his emotions but also recall our own: the joy of
Little League, the thrill of small-town reporting, the pain of
losing a parent, and the fear of facing a life-threatening illness.
Barry's writing has its own stalwart beauty, a single melody teased
out of the American symphony. Here is the voice of an authentic
American writer.
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