Clearance Books
Black Kripple Delivers Poetry & Lyrics
BLACKOUT (P)
"Riveting . . . An engrossing, street-level recounting and ambivalent ode to a great city."--Jamie Berger, San Francisco Chronicle
On July 13, 1977, there was a blackout in New York City. With the dark came excitement, adventure, and fright in subway tunnels, office towers, busy intersections, high-rise stairwells, hotel lobbies, elevators, and hospitals. There was revelry in bars and restaurants, music and dancing in the streets. On block after block, men and women proved themselves heroes by helping neighbors and strangers make it through the night. Unfortunately, there was also widespread looting, vandalism, and arson. Even before police restored order, people began to ask and argue about why. Why did people do what they did when the lights went out? The argument raged for weeks but it was just like the night: lots of heat, little light-a shouting match between those who held fast to one explanation and those who held fast to another. James Goodman cuts between accidents, encounters, conversations, exchanges, and arguments to re-create that night and its aftermath in a dizzying accumulation of detail. Rejecting simple dichotomies and one-dimensional explanations for why people act as they do in moments of conflict and crisis, Goodman illuminates attitudes, ideas, and experiences that have been lost in facile generalizations and analyses. Journalistic re-creation at its most exciting, Blackout provides a whirlwind tour of 1970s New York and a challenge to conventional thinking.Book of Growing
BROWN GIRL, BROWNSTONES (P)
CANCER JOURNALS: SPECIAL ED (P)
"Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet." Adrienne Rich
"This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me." Alice Walker"
COLLECTED STORIES OF MARIA CRISTINA MENA
Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil: Beyond Brasilia
Cooking Data
Crowd Scenes: Movies and Mass Politics
The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued politicians and filmmakers alike.
Movies seemed to speak directly to the masses, via a form of crowd psychology that bypassed individual personality. Many political commentators believed that movies were inherently aligned with the new forms of collectivist mass politics--indeed, government control of the movie industry became a cornerstone of Communist and Fascist regimes, new political movements that embraced the crowd as the basis of social order. Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses--the crowd scenes--in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions. In Hollywood films, this is depicted as molding private loves, while collectivist movies present it as turning into organized mass movements. Crowd scenes do more than provide backgrounds for stories, that is: they also function as models for the crowd in the theater. The book concludes with an examination of the films of Fritz Lang, who first in pre-Nazi Germany, then in Hollywood, created movies that can be seen as meditations on both these ways of using the crowd.Dancing on the Edge
A young adult novel of loss, travel, healing and adventure
Twelve year-old Dot is spunky and full of zest for life, but after her mother's sudden and senseless death, she finds herself dancing on the edge...of everything. With all familiar anchors swept away, Dot is propelled with her offbeat aunt on an international voyage of curiosity...and maybe even time travel.
With a little help from Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and other trailblazing ladies of literature, Dot's trip to England becomes anything but predictable. Pack your bags for a memorable, powerful journey into life in the wake of profound loss, as our young heroine discovers the meaning of her past, and of her mother's greatest gift to her.
"A wonderful and endearing story about the power of books and travel to heal us. ...A perfect mother-daughter book."
--Jim Lynch, author of national bestseller The Highest Tide









