Posts Tagged ‘American’

Questions From A to Z You Always Wanted To Ask A Black American (Paperback)

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Questions From A to Z You Always Wanted To Ask A Black American

Product Description

The book takes a light look at Black American thought on many of today’s issues. Answers to questions asked by every day people about Black Americans. The reader gets a behind closed door chance to discover many concepts that Black Americans discuss among themselves. Information in the book will create great conversation topics with any Black American person. It’s fun and informative. A must have book.



About the Author

Mr. Anthony Head is a native Southern Californian, USA. He is a graduate of UCLA and spent a number of years in Aerospace Administration. His work in Washington DC involved direct contact with many top Government offices. He entered the Education field to help children reach their educational goals. Meeting interesting people of all races just came natural to him. Many times the question of what or why Black Americans do something would keep coming up. After much listening and talking to Black Americans, he decided to write a book. A book that finally had answers to those questions about Black Americans. He wants readers to have fun reading the book as well as learning from it.


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From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals (Hardcover)

Thursday, December 10th, 2009

From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals

Amazon.com Review

Barbara Haber’s fascinating From Hardtack to Home Fries bills itself as “An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals.” More exactly, it locates the recurrent intersection of American women’s history and culinary practice and shows how one shaped the other. In lively chapters like “Pretty Much of a Muchness: Civil War Nurses and Diet Kitchens” and “The Harvey Girls: Good Women and Good Food Civilize the American West,” Haber focuses on the untold female contribution to 19th- and 20th-century food culture, an engrossing story. Readers not only encounter great anecdotes–Civil War nurses guarding barrels of whiskey from thieves, for example, or pioneer chain-restaurateur Fred Harvey’s female service corps in action–but discover a hidden American history.

The vividness of the narratives results, largely, from Haber’s excerpts of contemporary diaries and memoirs, like that of World War II POW Sarah Vaughan, who was held by the Japanese in Manila. (”There is a great rush for spinach juice,” Vaughan reported, “on the days this is served.”) In addition, Haber supplies pertinent recipes, like Ella Kellog’s Savory Nut Loaf, a chilling example of 19th-century food-reformist fare, and Baked Fudge, the formula of Cleora Butler, whose unsung cookbooks first explored African American food in the Southwest. These documents tell truths as no others can. Haber’s final and most personal chapter, “Growing Up with Cookbooks,” explores the importance of cookbooks more explicitly, revealing their “intimate power to make connections between people”–to make culture itself. The authors of most of these recipes are women, a fact not lost on Haber, as the delightful Hardtack shows. –Arthur Boehm



From Publishers Weekly

The tasty graham cracker, a beloved bedtime snack of many children, began its life as the linchpin of its originator Sylvester Graham’s fanatical early-19th-century health campaign to curtail sexual excess, especially masturbation and more then once-monthly marital coitus. Facts such as these, interwoven with informed, witty discussions of social, political and economic history, make Haber’s tour through the history of American food so entertaining. Since food has so often been consigned to the domestic realm of woman, Haber’s study is in essence a history of American women: the “Harvey Girls,” who worked in the chain of reasonably priced railroad depot restaurants that revolutionized public eating in the 1880s and ’90s; how Eleanor Roosevelt and her general housekeeper Henrietta Nesbitt had to balance White House menus, which had to seem both fancy and economical during WWII; the role of a small tea shop, started by faculty wives in Cambridge, Mass., as a boon to women refugees in the 1940s. While Haber doesn’t explore issues in depth (her discussion of why Irish immigrants were antagonistic to African-Americans would have been helped with references to Noel Ignatiev’s 1996 study How the Irish Became White), she does cover a wealth of material with a breezy style and a fine eye for historical detail.



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The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home (Hardcover)

Thursday, November 12th, 2009

The Big House: A Century in the Life of an American Summer Home

From Publishers Weekly

The epicenter of the Colt family is the Big House, built in 1903 on Wings Neck, a deserted strip of Cape Cod. It’s not only an architectural gem but a device to chronicle family, local history and the culture of Boston Brahmins-and it accomplishes that task with charm, style and solid research. For 42 summers, Colt traveled from winter homes across the U.S. to partake in this magical place. It’s where he learned to swim and play tennis, and where he kissed his first girl. Indeed, the Big House has seen five weddings, four divorces, parties, anniversaries and love affairs. The Colts, a once venerable tribe, had lost their money-”it is not wealth so much as former wealth that defines Old Money families”-but were determined to keep their ancestral home. Time may have marched on, but the Big House refused to cooperate: “Everything in this house breathes of the past.” Gilbert & Sullivan sheet music, rotary telephones and ancient globes grace its interiors. Yet all is not perfect in this palace by the sea. Colt, like playwright A.J. Gurney, is adept at exposing the dark underbelly of WASP restraint, recording the mental illness, alcoholism and despair that have plagued his family. His one comfort? The Big House. This love letter to the past is a quiet delight.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.



From The New Yorker

In 1903, the author’s great-grandfather, a Boston Brahmin named Edward W. Atkinson, built his family a house on Cape Cod, at Wings Neck, the last undeveloped peninsula overlooking Buzzards Bay. The Big House, as this multi-storied conglomeration of gables, dormers, and bays came to be called, included “eleven bedrooms, seven fireplaces, and a warren of closets, cupboards, and crannies that four generations of Wings Neck children have used for games of Sardines.” It was also an expensive firetrap with sixty-seven windows in need of attention, leaking roofs, wildlife procreating in its walls, and no indoor shower. In 1992, after agonized debate, the family decided to put it on the market. Colt’s account, like the house that lies at its center, is full of surprises and contains more than seems humanly possible: a family memoir, a brief history of the Cape, an investigation of nostalgia, a catalogue of local fauna, a study of class, and a meditation on the privileges and burdens of the past.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker
–This text refers to the

Paperback
edition.



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The American Family Home, 1800-1960 (Paperback)

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

The American Family Home, 1800-1960

From Library Journal

Professors Gowans and Clark (History of Art and American Studies respectively) have each authored a scholarly treatment of the American home in its cultural context. Both books include analyses of architectural style, but the authors are also concerned with the symbolic functions of the middle-class home. Both identify the qualities that were of importance in the perception of home and hearth: security, roots in the past, respectability, and the virtue of family stability. The Comfortable House has the narrower scope, as it sorts out the proliferation of house styles in the period when more homes were built than in the country’s entire previous history. This was an era of flight from the city, and the “comfortable home” was most importantly one that was removed from the squalor of urban living. Although there were new styles, designs of this time often incorporated architectural traditions of past eras; Gowans explores how the prefabricated models differed in social functions from those of earlier times. The American Family Home, 1800-1960 is broader in both chronology and treatment. Clark chronicles the idealized vision of the middle-class home and uses a variety of sources, including popular magazines, builders’ plan books, and advertising. He analyzes four building styles (Gothic, Queen Anne, Bungalow, and Ranch House Modern), setting forth the reformers’ vision and comparing those ideals to the houses that were built and the experiences of individual families. His discussion extends to changes in interior space, decor, and furnishings. Both books are heavily illustrated and include extensive notes and bibliographies. Both are highly recommended, although Clark’s is the more substantial work and will be of interest to a wider readership. Douglas G. Birdsall, North Dakota State Univ. Lib., Fargo
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.



Review

An excellent and needed study of the important relation between houses and the fabric of American family life.

Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Scripps College

A stimulating book, one that should appeal to readers interested in architecture as well as in family or women’s history.

North Carolina Historical Review



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A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland in the Forties and Fifties (Paperback)

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

A Long Way from Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland in the Forties and Fifties

Amazon.com Review

In his earlier books, TV news anchor Tom Brokaw has leaned heavily on the experiences of others to remember and define what he calls “the Greatest Generation”–those who came of age during World War II and its aftermath. In A Long Way Home Brokaw turns inward to focus on his own experiences growing up in South Dakota, his early years a broadcaster working in a then-novel medium, and his still-deep connection to the Midwestern people, places, and values that shaped him. In this bluntly effective and homespun memoir, Brokaw argues that, no matter how far one may travel–say, to New York and through five decades of a successful broadcast journalism career–it’s possible to remain a true creature of the heartlands. It’s a message that is likely to resonate most emphatically with those of Brokaw’s generation, though its basic premise can be applied more universally as well. –David Bombeck
–This text refers to the

Hardcover
edition.



From Publishers Weekly

“For as long as I or anyone in my family can remember, I have been a chatterbox, someone with a verbal facility and an eager attitude about exercising it,” writes news anchor Brokaw in this follow-up to An Album of Memories: Personal Histories from the Greatest Generation. The author’s tendency to fill space with words comes across loud and clear in these pages, as the book is essentially a soup to nuts oral history of an all-American kid’s years growing up in the Midwest. Brokaw was born in 1940 in Webster, S.Dak., and lived in the area for the first 22 years of his life. The son of upstanding farmers who lived by the motto of “waste not, want not,” Brokaw had a squeaky-clean childhood and adolescence, ruled by work, sports and family. His memoir reflects that straight-arrowed monotony, with chapters entitled “Games,” “Boom Time” and “On the Air.” And although the prose and subject matter are largely dry and mundane, Brokaw does occasionally reflect on the bigger picture, recalling, for example, that while he was going to high school basketball games, Rosa Parks’s bus boycott was making history hundreds of miles away. His sweet recollections of his early journalism career-he got his start volunteering at a small radio station-will probably interest nostalgic readers more than young journalists. Peppered with photographs of “Mother and Dad helping out at Yankton’s Teen Canteen, 1958″ and other similar images, this tribute to an idyllic childhood should please Brokaw’s loyal fans. Photos.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
–This text refers to the

Hardcover
edition.



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Time It Was: American Stories from the Sixties (Paperback)

Wednesday, September 30th, 2009

Time It Was: American Stories from the Sixties

Product Description

What was it like to live through the Sixties?  The writers of these 27 memoirs offer the essence of life and youth in the period. In first-person narratives that range from poignant reminiscences to dramatic adventures, the writers convey what it felt like to land a helicopter in the middle of a firefight in Vietnam, to be beaten and jailed for trying to integrate restaurants in the American South, to run for cover when soldiers opened fire on a campus peace rally in Ohio.  Other stories describe the writers’ experiences organizing farm workers with Cesar Chavez, campaigning to elect Barry Goldwater, striking for Free Speech at Berkeley, living in a commune, joining the women’s liberation movement, becoming caught up in a religious cult, or camping in the rain at Woodstock.

 

Karen Manners Smith and Tim Koster, the editors of “Time it Was,” created this book to make the Sixties accessible and alive for today’s students, who may know only that the period was unique and exciting, but have few resources to help them see beyond the stereotypical “sex and drugs and rock-n-roll.”  The editors felt there was a lot that today’s students could identify with–idealism, commitment, risk, hard work, fear, hope, disappointment–if they could read the stories of people who, at their age, did important things with their own lives during a volatile historical period.

 

The stories in “Time it Was” focus on events and experiences consistent with the “Sixties” as historians understand that term–i.e., it is broadly interpreted to include a span of years from the 1950s through the mid-1970s. Readers who are not students will enjoy the chance to reconnect with their own memories or learn more about this important period in American history.


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Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy (Paperback)

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Escape from Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy

From School Library Journal

Grade 5-9–Warren relates the story of the 1975 Operation Babylift as seen through the eyes of Long, an eight-year-old Amerasian boy who was part of the airlift. The author uses narrative and reconstructions of conversations from interviews with those involved to trace Long’s life, beginning with his indistinct memories of his American father and his more vivid recollections of his Vietnamese mother’s suicide and his grandmother’s struggle to protect and support him during wartime. She describes his stay at the Saigon orphanage operated by Holt International Children’s Services, which housed, schooled, and arranged for his adoption by an American family. Long recalls the fear and excitement during the fall of Saigon, his journey out of Vietnam, his sorrow at the separation from his grandmother, and his emotional transition to his new identity as Matt Steiner. The book concludes with a moving account of Matt’s 1995 return to Vietnam, where he finally understood the magnitude of the sacrifice his grandmother made for his safety and future. Photos of Long in both Vietnam and America illustrate the text. Although Warren mentions the cruelties of the communist Vietnamese government and America’s abandonment of its South Vietnamese allies, this is a personal story, one that is so well written that it will be sure to hold readers’ attention. An outstanding choice.–Mary Mueller, Rolla Junior High School, MO
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
–This text refers to the

Hardcover
edition.



From Booklist

*Starred Review* Gr. 5-12. At the end of the Vietnam War, eight-year-old Amerasian orphan named Long fled his country and found a loving home with his adoptive family in Ohio. With a new name, Matt Steiner, he grew up to be high-school valedictorian and athletic star, and now he is a doctor with his own happy family. But this stirring photo-essay is more than a rags-to-riches story. Always true to the child’s viewpoint, Warren’s clear narrative, with many documentary photos, begins as the boy struggles to survive in Vietnam, then describes the anguish of his abandonment by a loving grandmother no longer able to care for him; the kindness of rescuers at the orphanage, who arranged his adoption; and his terrifying evacuation on a plane under fire. The child-at-war story and the facts about the Operation Babylift rescue are tense and exciting. Just as gripping is the boy’s personal conflict: his struggle to become American; his attempt to deny his sadness at what he left behind; and, finally, his pride in his roots (”I will never forget that my American heart is half Vietnamese”). Framing the biography is fascinating information, including Warren’s account of the evacuation of her own adopted baby daughter on Operation Babylift; discussion about international adoption and Amerasian children; and a lengthy annotated list of sources. Hazel Rochman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
–This text refers to the

Hardcover
edition.



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