Synopses & Reviews
One of America's most talked about Jazz Age personalities, Peggy Hopkins Joyce was the quintessential gold digger, the real-life Lorelei Lee. Married six times, to several millionaires and even a count, Joyce had no discernible talent except self-promotion. A barber's daughter who rose to become a Ziegfeld Girl and, briefly, a movie star, Joyce was the original modern celebrity -- a person famous for being famous. Her scandalous exploits -- sping a million dollars in a week, conducting torrid love affairs with both Charlie Chaplin and Walter Chrysler -- were irresistible to tabloid journalists in search of sensation and to audiences hungry for the glamour her life seemed to promise.
Joyce's march across Broadway, Hollywood, and the nation's front pages was only slowed by the true nemesis of the glamour girl: old age. She died in 1957, alone and forgotten -- until now.
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"Bold and mesmerizing" (The Baltimore Sun)
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"McCann's prose shines. Nothing escapes his eye." (Lise Funderburg, The Philadelphia Inquirer)
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"McCann [writes] a dazzling blend of menace and heartbreak." (David Willis McCullough, The New York Times Book Review)
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"Christine Stansell has restored the pre-WWI avant-garde to the central place they deserve in the creation of twentieth-century American culture. A fascinating and important contribution." (Eric Foner, author of The Story of American Freedom)
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"Chalmers Johnson is one of the most influential, brilliant, and provocative intellectuals writing about Asia today." (John Dower, author of War Without Mercy, winner of the NBCC Award)
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"Entertaining and meticulously researched." (The New York Times Book Review )
"A good biography of a bad girl." (The New Yorker)
"Compelling as any tabloid serial, Gold Digger is a brilliant parable for both the power and perishability of celebrity. Unputdownable." (Neal Gabler, author of Life the Movie)
"Gold Digger pairs a scandalous vamp living in an unbridled era with an entertaining and resourceful journalist-delicious!" (USA Today)
Synopsis
A sparkling biography of the original blonde whom gentlemen preferred, a woman who made a career out of marrying millionaires and became the first tabloid celebrity. of photos.
Description
An explosive account of the resentments American policies are sowing around the world and of the payback that will be our harvest in the twenty-first century.
Blowback, a term invented by the CIA, refers to the unintended consequences of American policies. In this sure-to-be-controversial book, Chalmers Johnson lays out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our overextended empire, which insists on projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using American capital and markets to force global economic integration on its own terms. From a case of rape by U.S. servicemen in Okinawa to our role in Asia's financial crisis, from our early support for Saddam Hussein to our actions in the Balkans, Johnson reveals the ways in which our misguided policies are planting the seeds of future disaster.
In the wake of the Cold War, the United States has imprudently expanded the commitments it made over the previous forty years, argues Johnson. In Blowback, he issues a warning we would do well to consider: it is time for our empire to demobilize before our bills come due.
A compelling story of sharks, the men who hunt them, and a primeval world on the edge of destruction.
Nicaragua's Atlantic coast is home to the most dangerous of fish, the bullshark, a lethal predator with a fearsome appetite and the only shark that swims in inland waters. Braving Nicaragua's hurricane-torn wilderness of mangrove swamps and brackish lagoons, Edward Marriott joins the last surviving shark fishermen-a fierce ethnic brew of black Caribs, Nicaraguan Indians, and the descendants of seventeenth-century English pirates-to sail in a dugout canoe and fish for shark with a handline.
As Marriott charts the life of the bullshark, its migrations, its voracious feeding patterns, and the treasures it offers-oil for vitamins, hide for leather, and fins for soup-he reveals lives spent in fear and awe in the shadow of a monster that can sniff fresh blood a mile away. He also tells a tale of human greed: an elemental community, battered by civil war and natural disasters, is now degraded beyond repair to provide bounty for modern-day pirates.
A gripping narrative of risk and adventure, a poignant record of loss and corruption, Savage Shore confirms Edward Marriott as one of our most original and insightful travel writers.
In a daring tour de force, one of our writers takes on the most intractable of conflicts-the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
In his fourth book, Colum McCann, a writer of fierce originality and haunting lyricism, turns to the Troubles and reveals, as only fiction writers can, the reverberations of political tragedy in the most intimate lives of men and women, parents and children. In the title story, a teenage girl must choose between allegiance to her Catholic father and gratitude to the British soldiers who have saved the family's horse. The young hero of Hunger Strike, a novella, tries to replicate the experience of his uncle, an IRA prisoner on hunger strike. And in Wood, a small boy does his part for the Protestant marches, concealing his involvement from his blind father.
Writing in a new form, but with the skill and force and sparkling poetry that have brought him international acclaim, Colum McCann has delivered masterful, memorable short fiction.
A brilliant account of the American bohemians whose experiments in
living, writing, and loving created the modern world and made New York its capital.
In the early years of the twentieth century, an exuberant band of talented individualists living in a shabby neighborhood called Greenwich Village set out to change the world. Committed to free speech, free love, and politically engaged art, they swept away sexual prudery, stodgy bourgeois art, and political conservatism as they clamorously declared the birth of the new.
Christine Stansell offers the first comprehensive history of this legendary period. She takes us deep into the downtown bohemia, which brought together creative dissenters from all walks of life: hobos and Harvard men, society matrons and immigrant Jews, wobblies and New Women, poets and anarchists. And she depicts their lyrical hopes for the century they felt they were sponsoring-a radiant vision of modernity, both egalitarian and artful, that flourished briefly, poignantly, until America entered the First World War and patriotism trumped self-expression.
Includes bibliographical references (p. [273]-280) and index.
About the Author
Constance Rosenblum, editor of the City Section at The New York Times, was for many years editor of the paper's Arts and Leisure Section. She lives in Brooklyn.