Mid-Atlantic Books

The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages: 1851-2008

CC The New York Times

Amazon Price: $37.80 List Price: $60.00 In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served. By: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $37.80

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Mid-Atlantic
Subjects -> History -> General AAS
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Politics -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 23 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This stunning and cutting-edge package provides access to the world as reflected in its most influential and respected newspaper. From wars and political assassinations to social movements and space exploration, all the news that is fit to print—or download—can be found in this extraordinary book-and-DVD set.

More than 300 of the most significant New York Times front pages have been carefully selected and beautifully reproduced in the book. Read the headlines and stories covering such world-changing events as Abraham Lincoln's assassination, Charles Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Ten foldouts present twenty key front pages at their magnificent full size. News summaries throughout highlight the most significant events of each era and put the front pages into a historical context. Seventeen insightful essays by prominent Times writers comment on pivotal moments, including "The End of Slavery" by William Safire, "Women’s Suffrage" by Gail Collins, and "The Age of Television" by Frank Rich.

The 3 DVDs include each of the 54,266 front pages printed by the Times over the past 157 years. Completely searchable and user-friendly, the disks are designed to provide access to the full stories that made front-page news each day since the paper’s founding in 1851. Click on a page—the day you were born, for example—and you're instantly transported to the Times' online archive.

The New York Times: The Complete Front Pages is the ultimate gift for history buffs, news junkies, students, and anyone who strives to be well-informed.

DVD-ROMs run on a PC (Windows 2000/XP or later) or Mac (OSX I0.4.8 or later) with Adobe 8.o or later.  Free download available on the DVD-ROMs.

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

David McCullough

List Price: $35.00 By: Simon & Schuster Audio Amazon Marketplace: 8 new & used starting at $36.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Mid-Atlantic
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> New York
Subjects -> History -> World -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 78 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF JOHN ADAMS

First published in 1972, The Great Bridge is the classic account of one of the greatest engineering feats of all time -- the building of the Brooklyn Bridge.

This monumental audiobook which presents extended unabridged passages from the book brings back a heroic vision of the America we once had. It is the enthralling story of one of the greatest events during the Age of Optimism -- a period when Americans were convinced that all great things were possible.

In the years around 1870, the concept of building a great bridge to span the East River between the cities of Manhattan and Brooklyn required a vision and determination comparable to that which went into the building of the pyramids. Throughout the fourteen years of the bridge's construction, the odds against its successful completion seemed staggering. Bodies were crushed and broken, lives were lost, political empires fell, and surges of public emotion constantly threatened the project. But this is not merely the saga of an engineering miracle: it is a sweeping narrative of the heroes and rascals who had a hand in either constructing or obstructing this great enterprise.

Johnstown Flood

David McCullough

Amazon Price: $26.53 List Price: $32.25 In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served. By: Peter Smith Publisher Amazon Marketplace: 3 new & used starting at $26.53

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 19th Century -> Gilded Age
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Mid-Atlantic
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Pennsylvania

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 90 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

David McCullough is known to millions as the author of the critically acclaimed, best-selling books The Great Bridge, The Path Between the Seas, and Mornings on Horseback, and as host of the popular PBS television series "Smithsonian World?' The Johnstown Flood, David McCullough's first book, was praised by Time magazine as a "meticulously researched, vivid account of one of the most stunning disasters in U.S. history."

At the end of the last century, Johnstown,.Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hard-working families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity: among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon. Despite repeated warnings of possible danger, nothing was done about the dam. Then came May 31, 1889, when the dam burst, sending a wall of water thundering down the mountain, smashing through Johnstown, and killing more than 2,000 townspeople. It was a tragedy that became a national scandal.

From research in the voluminous records, diaries, letters, interviews with numbers of survivors, and a rare, previously unknown transcript of a private investigation conducted by the Pennsylvania Railroad, David McCullough vividly re-creates the chain of events that led to the catastrophe, and then unfolds the incredible story of the flood itself and its aftermath.

Graced by David McCullough's remarkable gift for writing richly textured, sympathetic social history, The Johnstown Flood is an absorbing, classic portrait of life in 19th-century America, of overweening confidence, energy, and tragedy. It also offers a powerful historical lesson for our century and all times: the danger of assuming that because people are in positions of responsibility they are necessarily behaving responsibly.

Lessons in Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam

Gordon M. Goldstein

Amazon Price: $15.00 List Price: $25.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Times Books Amazon Marketplace: 46 new & used starting at $13.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> 1960s
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 20th Century -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A revelatory look at the decisions that led to the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, drawing on the insights and reassessments of one of the war’s architects

I had a part in a great failure. I made mistakes of perception, recommendation and execution. If I have learned anything I should share it."

These are not words that Americans ever expected to hear from McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. But in the last years of his life, Bundy—the only principal architect of Vietnam strategy to have maintained his public silence—decided to revisit the decisions that had led to war and to look anew at the role he played. He enlisted the collaboration of the political scientist Gordon M. Goldstein, and together they explored what happened and what might have been. With Bundy’s death in 1996, that manuscript could not be completed, but Goldstein has built on their collaboration in an original and provocative work of presidential history that distills the essential lessons of America’s involvement in Vietnam.

Drawing on Goldstein’s prodigious research as well as the interviews and analysis he conducted with Bundy, Lessons in Disaster is a historical tour de force on the uses and misuses of American power. And in our own era, in the wake of presidential decisions that propelled the United States into another war under dubious pretexts, these lessons offer instructive guidance that we must heed if we are not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

Mark Kurlansky

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Random House Trade Paperbacks Amazon Marketplace: 46 new & used starting at $5.89

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Cooking, Food & Wine -> Cooking by Ingredient -> Meat, Poultry & Seafood -> Seafood
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 19th Century -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Mid-Atlantic

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

“Part treatise, part miscellany, unfailingly entertaining.”
–The New York Times

“A small pearl of a book . . . a great tale of the growth of a modern city as seen through the rise and fall of the lowly oyster.”
–Rocky Mountain News

Award-winning author Mark Kurlansky tells the remarkable story of New York by following the trajectory of one of its most fascinating inhabitants–the oyster.
For centuries New York was famous for this particular shellfish, which until the early 1900s played such a dominant a role in the city’s life that the abundant bivalves were Gotham’s most celebrated export, a staple food for all classes, and a natural filtration system for the city’s congested waterways.

Filled with cultural, historical, and culinary insight–along with historic recipes, maps, drawings, and photos–this dynamic narrative sweeps readers from the seventeenth-century founding of New York to the death of its oyster beds and the rise of America’s environmentalist movement, from the oyster cellars of the rough-and-tumble Five Points slums to Manhattan’s Gilded Age dining chambers. With The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky serves up history at its most engrossing, entertaining, and delicious.

“Suffused with [Kurlansky’s] pleasure in exploring the city across ground that hasn’t already been covered with other writers’ footprints.”
–Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Fascinating stuff . . . [Kurlansky] has a keen eye for odd facts and natural detail.”
–The Wall Street Journal

“Kurlansky packs his breezy book with terrific anecdotes.”
–Entertainment Weekly

“Magnificent . . . a towering accomplishment.”
–Associated Press

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America

Russell Shorto

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 83 new & used starting at $5.74

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> Colonial Period -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> General
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Mid-Atlantic

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

When the British wrested New Amsterdam from the Dutch in 1664, the truth about its thriving, polyglot society began to disappear into myths about an island purchased for 24 dollars and a cartoonish peg-legged governor. But the story of the Dutch colony of New Netherland was merely lost, not destroyed: 12,000 pages of its records–recently declared a national treasure–are now being translated. Drawing on this remarkable archive, Russell Shorto has created a gripping narrative–a story of global sweep centered on a wilderness called Manhattan–that transforms our understanding of early America.

The Dutch colony pre-dated the “original” thirteen colonies, yet it seems strikingly familiar. Its capital was cosmopolitan and multi-ethnic, and its citizens valued free trade, individual rights, and religious freedom. Their champion was a progressive, young lawyer named Adriaen van der Donck, who emerges in these pages as a forgotten American patriot and whose political vision brought him into conflict with Peter Stuyvesant, the autocratic director of the Dutch colony. The struggle between these two strong-willed men laid the foundation for New York City and helped shape American culture. The Island at the Center of the World uncovers a lost world and offers a surprising new perspective on our own.

The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York

Matthew Goodman

Amazon Price: $17.16 List Price: $26.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Basic Books Amazon Marketplace: 57 new & used starting at $12.95

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> 19th Century -> Antebellum
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Mid-Atlantic
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> New York

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The remarkable true story of the hoax that bewildered Nineteenth-Century New York and created tabloid journalism.

In the sweltering summer of 1835, New York City, still reeling from the effects of a cholera epidemic, was coaxed into a mood approaching mass hysteria by a series of articles in the Sun, the first of New York City's penny papers. Seven articles, purporting to be the first report of the lunar discoveries made by a world-famous British astronomer, described in astonishing detail the existence of life on the moon--birds, buffalo, one-horned zebras, and four-foot-tall man bats. Intended as a satirical attack on the religious philosophers of the day, "The Moon Hoax" became the most widely circulated newspaper story in the world. And the Sun, a brash working-class upstart paper less than two years old, became the most widely read newspaper in the world, giving birth to a media revolution in the New World and a brand of tabloid journalism that prevails today.

The Sun and the Moon overflows with larger than life characters--known and unknown to modern readers, including Richard Adams Locke, British radical turned newspaper editor and creator of the hoax; a young, upwardly mobile, and ever industrious P. T. Barnum; and the fledgling editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, a fellow named Edgar Allan Poe. These three men, along with countless others, have parts to play in the delightful, entertaining, and surprisingly true story of how the Moon Hoax captivated New Yorkers and ultimately triggered the birth of the modern newspaper business.

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires

Selwyn Raab

Amazon Price: $12.89 List Price: $18.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: St. Martin's Griffin Amazon Marketplace: 30 new & used starting at $5.89

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Mid-Atlantic
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> New York
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> True Accounts -> True Crime

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 42 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

"Best Mafia Book Ever" 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I've read this book and a few other Mafia books and I can say that after reading this one this is by far the best one. It is a very throughly researched and accurate account of the five main mafia families in the united states. It describes many different individuals in each family from the lowest soldier/associate to the heads of the family themselves.The book also describes about the power that the five mafia families executed throughout the whole New York City area from the beginning of the 1900's up until the 1980's when the were being sought after much more by the FBI and Rudy Gilliani, which eventually led to many of them being prosecuted and convicted.

Editorial Review:

For half a century, the American Mafia outwitted, outmaneuvered, and outgunned the FBI and other police agencies, wreaking unparalleled damages to America’s social fabric and business enterprises while emerging as the nation’s most formidable crime empire.  The vanguard of this criminal juggernaut is still led by the Mafia’s most potent and largest borgatas: New York’s Five Families.
Five Families is the vivid story of the rise and fall of New York’s premier dons from Lucky Luciano to Paul Castellano to John Gotti and more. This definitive history brings the reader right up to the possible resurgence of the Mafia as the FBI and local law-enforcement agencies turn their attention to homeland security and away from organized crime.  The paperback has been revised and updated, with a new epilogue focusing on the trial of the notorious “Mafia Cops.”

The President's House: A History (v. 1)

William Seale

Amazon Price: $62.49 List Price: $75.00 Usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks By: The Johns Hopkins University Press Amazon Marketplace: 4 new & used starting at $53.90

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> History & Criticism -> General AAS
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> General
Subjects -> Arts & Photography -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This engaging history of the house that has served as home to U.S. presidents for more than two centuries revises and enlarges William Seale's 1986 classic account of the White House's architectural, social, and cultural history. Besides updating the original volumes, the new edition includes chapters on the presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. An epilogue covers the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush years. The President's House is an unforgettable account of the White House from its origins during the nation's beginning to today, a continuing story of adapting and altering, yet always keeping close to the original image and purpose of the landmark. Seale carefully documents the ways in which different presidents and their families used and lived in the White House, showing not only the lives of the first families but also scores of characters known and unknown who achieve importance in the story and play their parts in the keeping and management of the house -- butlers, housemaids, caterers, gardeners, coachmen, architects, interior decorators, and even fortune-tellers.

Filled with behind-the-scenes glimpses of the private and public lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, this richly detailed social history includes 175 images culled from the White House files and other archival collections.

The Soprano State: New Jersey's Culture of Corruption

Bob Ingle, Sandy McClure

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Not yet published By: St. Martin's Griffin

Buy at Amazon.com

Browse similar items by category:
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> Mid-Atlantic
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> State & Local -> New Jersey
Subjects -> History -> Americas -> United States -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 26 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The New York Times Bestseller
Updated with the Latest Scandals

It’s not a joke
New Jersey leads the country in corruption

The Soprano State details the you-couldn't-make-this-up true story of the corruption that has pervaded New Jersey politics, government, and business for the past thirty years. From Jimmy Hoffa purportedly being buried somewhere beneath the end zone in Giants Stadium, through allegations of a thoroughly corrupt medical and dental university, through Mafia influence at all levels, the Garden State might indeed be better named after the HBO mobsters.

Where else would:
- A state attorney general show up after police pulled over her boyfriend who was driving without a valid license?
- A state senator and mayor of Newark (the same guy) spend thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money on a junket to Rio days before leaving office?
- A politically connected developer hire a prostitute to tape sex acts with his own brother-in-law and then send the tape to his sister?
Only in the Soprano State.