Download or read book From a High Place written by Matthew Spender and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "One of the finest biographies of an artist I have ever read."—John Ashbery

Download or read book Travelling Passions written by Gísli Pálsson and published by UPNE. This book was released on 2005 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Vilhjalmur Stefansson is widely known for his groundbreaking Canadian Arctic explorations of the early 1900s. He acquired a reputation almost larger than life with his discovery of the Copper Inuit - a hitherto unknown people - his insistence on living as the local people did, and, with Natkusiak, his Inuit co-explorer, his adventurous forays onto barren ice for months at a time. He was a fixture in the New York Greenwich Village scene and, later in his life, taught at Dartmouth College. However, despite his detailed field diaries and the frenzy of publicity that followed his every move, his private life has remained largely unknown." "Then, in 1987, an accidental discovery in a flea market of hundreds of private letters and documents proved to be those belonging to Stefansson, and they told a story of private relationships, in particular with two southern women, Orpha Cecil Smith, to whom Stefansson was engaged, and the novelist Fannie Hurst, with whom Stefansson was involved for many years. Moreover, letters between some of Stefansson's friends as well as his own field diaries alluded to an important relationship Stefansson had with an Inupiat woman in the Arctic, Pannigabluk, and to their son, Alex." "Gisli Palsson has followed the trail of these sources and conducted many interviews with Stefansson's northern descendants, uncovering a complex and perhaps torn personality. In Travelling Passions, we have a much more complete picture of the man who figured so largely in the imagination of the early twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Impossible Heights written by Adnan Morshed and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-01-15 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advent of the airplane and skyscraper in 1920s and ‘30s America offered the population an entirely new way to look at the world: from above. The captivating image of an airplane flying over the rising metropolis led many Americans to believe a new civilization had dawned. In Impossible Heights, Adnan Morshed examines the aesthetics that emerged from this valorization of heights and their impact on the built environment. The lofty vantage point from the sky ushered in a modernist impulse to cleanse crowded twentieth-century cities in anticipation of an ideal world of tomorrow. Inspired by great new heights, American architects became central to this endeavor and were regarded as heroic aviators. Combining close readings of a broad range of archival sources, Morshed offers new interpretations of works such as Hugh Ferriss’s Metropolis drawings, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion houses, and Norman Bel Geddes’s Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Transformed by the populist imagination into “master builders,” these designers helped produce a new form of visuality: the aesthetics of ascension. By demonstrating how aerial movement and height intersect with popular “superman” discourses of the time, Morshed reveals the relationship between architecture, art, science, and interwar pop culture. Featuring a marvelous array of never before published illustrations, this richly textured study of utopian imaginings illustrates America’s propulsion into a new cultural consciousness.

Download or read book Salute to the Romanian Jews in America and Canada 1850 2010 written by Vladimir F. Wertsman and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2010-07-22 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TRANSLATION FROM ROMANIAN INTO ENGLISH NEW YORK MAGAZINE No. 706, Wednesday, February 2, 2011, Cultural Page 16 University Professor and Doctor Aurel Sasu, HOMAGE TO THE JEWS FROM THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, Commentary regarding the volume SALUTE TO THE ROMANIAN JEWS IN AMERICA AND CANADA, 1850-2010: HISTORY, ACHIEVEMENTS, AND BIOGRAPHIES by Vladimir F. Wertsman The publication of SALUTE TO THE ROMANIAN JEWS IN AMERICA AND CANADA,1850-2010: HISTORY, ACHIEVEMENTS, AND BIOGRAPHIES, XLibris , Bloomington, IN, 2010, 287 pp. by Vladimir F. Wertsman, one of the most valued, respected and dedicated researchers on multiculturalism over the Ocean, was no surprise to anybody in light of the authors previous triptych: THE ROMANIANS IN AMERICA, 1748-1974: A CHNRONOLOGY AND FACT BOOK(1975), THE ROMANIANS IN AMERICA AND CANADA: A GUIDE TO INFORMTION SOURCES, (1980), and THE ROMANIANS IN THE UNITED STATES ANADA CANADA: A GUIDE TO ANCESTRY AND HERITAGE RESEARCH (2003). All of these titles reflect the authors older concerns regarding immigration, integration, and identity preserved via the values of organic tradition. Those who know this passionate book lover (he served many years as senior librarian at the New York Public Library) also know how much he is proud of his Romanian education (he is a graduate of the University "A.I. Cuza" Law School, 1953) and the prestige of Romanian people of culture abroad in whose spirit he was formed. Established in the USA in 1967, the future author did not forget the depth of his primary sources and his Romanian heritage. Regardless how often he appears in the Romanian community, he is admired for his work, advice, and wisdom. His main message is friendship, mutual understanding and respect. The above mentioned volume on Romanian Jews in America and Canada starts with a "microchronology" of Romanias two millennia Jewish community going back to the year 70 AD, when some Jews found asylum in Dacia after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. Under King Decebal, Jews are permitted to reside without any restriction. They were merchants, translators, and purveyors, Matei Basarab offers asylum to Hungarian Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism, under Alexander the Good and Stephen the Great, the Jews are free to live in any part of Moldavia. Also, Stephen the Great and his son Bogdan Voda kept Isaac Benjamin Shor as their logofat (chancellor). In the 16th century, first Sephardic communities are mentioned in Bucharest and Craiova, also Jewish stable communities are mentioned in Iasi (with a synagogue and cemetery), Suceava, Botosani, Sibiu, Cluj. Vasile Lupu (17th century) accepts several Jewish doctors and pharmacists at his court, Constantin Brancoveanu will do the same one century later. In 1665, a document mentions that along with Valachians and Serbs there were Jews in Michael the Braves Army. Constantin Mavrocordat accords fiscal immunity to Jews settled in Herta, Balti, Orhei, Ocna, and Harlau. From DESCRIPTIO MOLDAVIAE (1717) by Dimitrie Cantemir, we find that Jews could build wooden synagogues without any restrictions. Starting with the 18th century, mixed musical bands (lautari) are formed; they consisted of Romanians, Jews, and Gypsies. After the hardships endured by Jews during the Russian-Turkish War (1769-1774), Alexandru Mavrocordat and Nicolae Mavrogheni accord special protection to the Jewish population. In 1803, there were about 3,000 Jewish families in Moldova, fifty years later, the Jewish population increased to more than 130,000. In the Proclamation of Islaz (1848), the rights of the Jewish community are explicitly mentioned: "the emancipation of the Israelites and political rights for all compatriots of other creeds". In 1852, the first Jewish school is opened in Bucharest, and in 1847 appears ISRAELITUL ROMAN, the first newspaper of the Jewish communities from Moldavia and Walachia

Download or read book Her Mother s Secret written by Natasha Lester and published by Hachette Australia. This book was released on 2017-03-28 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping story of love and ambition from England to the Manhattan of the 1920s and 1940s by the New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Seamstress 1918, England. Armistice Day should bring peace into Leonora's life. Rather than secretly making cosmetics in her father's chemist shop to sell to army nurses such as Joan, her adventurous Australian friend, Leo hopes to now display her wares openly. Instead, Spanish flu arrives in the village, claiming her father's life. Determined to start over, she boards a ship to New York City. On the way she meets debonair department store heir Everett Forsyth . . . In Manhattan, Leo works hard to make her cosmetics dream come true, but she's a woman alone with a small salary and a society that deems make-up scandalous. 1939, New York City. Everett's daughter, Alice, a promising ballerina, receives a mysterious letter inviting her to star in a series of advertisements for a cosmetics line. If she accepts she will be immortalized like dancers such as Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker and Ginger Rogers. Why, then, are her parents so quick to forbid it? Her Mother's Secret is the story of a brave young woman chasing a dream in the face of society's disapproval. '[Lester's] engaging writing style and ability to create characters that connect with readers make her a welcome addition to the historical fiction market.' Herald Sun 'Had me at page one. This book should come with a 'Do Not Disturb' sign' VANESSA CARNEVALE 'Lester's storytelling is truly captivating; her voice an essential addition to Australian fiction' AUSROM TODAY 'utterly compelling' Good Reading 'A delightful and multi-faceted romp through the jazz era ... Her Mother's Secret is a sweeping historical saga about an inspiring woman tackling society's expectations head on, war paint and all' NATALIE SALVO Praise for A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald 'A glamorous, transporting read.' Woman's Weekly 'Loving A Kiss From Mr Fitzgerald - it's wonderful!" KATE FORSYTH 'I love this book' RACHAEL JOHNS 'Stunning. Will have you captivated' LIZ BYRSKI 'If you're mad about the roaring twenties and all things Gatsby, this romance will have you enchanted' Woman's Day 'At the novel's heart is the sparkling Evie, an endearing combination of intelligence, determination and naivety' West Australian 'Wonderful. I love this author. You will not be disappointed' SALLY HEPWORTH

Download or read book My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village written by Maxwell Bodenheim and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2018-12-12 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the poet Maxwell Bodenheim and his common-law wife, Ruth Fagan, were found brutally murdered by the insane man whose single room they were sharing, the press made much of the sensation. Persons safely distant from Bodenheim’s bitter struggle for existence, who thought of him merely as a drunken shambles, felt, somewhat smugly, he had met a suitable end. But Bodenheim’s funeral was richly attended by poets and artists who know better. They knew that to the last minute of his precarious life Bodenheim was a working writer and a productive poet, though he often had no place but a doorstep to lay his head. They came with tears instead of flowers to say goodbye. Alfred Kreymbourg read an eloquent tribute to Max’s undying sense of the beauty of life. Maxwell Bodenheim knew Greenwich Village as no one else did, because he was Greenwich Village. Its waywardness, its dreams, its love life, were his to cherish. These memoirs are filled with irony, with compassion, with love, laughter and unquenchable dignity. He had intended to write a summing-up, but death, most grotesquely, intervened. The publishers are proud to present Maxwell Bodenheim’s last and most fascinating work.

Download or read book American Moderns written by Christine Stansell and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2001-05 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the early years of the 20th century, a band of talented individualists living in Greenwich Village set out to change the world. Committed to free speech, free love, and political art, they swept away sexual prudery, stodgy bourgeois art, and political conservatism. Stansell offers a comprehensive history of this period that flourished briefly until America entered the First World War and patriotism trumped self-expression. Illustrations.

Download or read book Slumming written by Chad Heap and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-11-15 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During Prohibition, “Harlem was the ‘in’ place to go for music and booze,” recalled the African American chanteuse Bricktop. “Every night the limousines pulled up to the corner,” and out spilled affluent whites, looking for a good time, great jazz, and the unmatchable thrill of doing something disreputable. That is the indelible public image of slumming, but as Chad Heap reveals in this fascinating history, the reality is that slumming was far more widespread—and important—than such nostalgia-tinged recollections would lead us to believe. From its appearance as a “fashionable dissipation” centered on the immigrant and working-class districts of 1880s New York through its spread to Chicago and into the 1930s nightspots frequented by lesbians and gay men, Slumming charts the development of this popular pastime, demonstrating how its moralizing origins were soon outstripped by the artistic, racial, and sexual adventuring that typified Jazz-Age America. Vividly recreating the allure of storied neighborhoods such as Greenwich Village and Bronzeville, with their bohemian tearooms, rent parties, and “black and tan” cabarets, Heap plumbs the complicated mix of curiosity and desire that drew respectable white urbanites to venture into previously off-limits locales. And while he doesn’t ignore the role of exploitation and voyeurism in slumming—or the resistance it often provoked—he argues that the relatively uninhibited mingling it promoted across bounds of race and class helped to dramatically recast the racial and sexual landscape of burgeoning U.S. cities. Packed with stories of late-night dance, drink, and sexual exploration—and shot through with a deep understanding of cities and the habits of urban life—Slumming revives an era that is long gone, but whose effects are still felt powerfully today.

Download or read book Collected Memoirs written by Ruth Gruber and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 842 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three poignant and powerful memoirs from the award-winning journalist, human rights advocate, and “fearless chronicler of the Jewish struggle” (The New York Times). Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for her biography of the pioneering Israeli nurse, Raquela Prywes, Ruth Gruber lived an extraordinary life as a foreign correspondent, photographer, humanitarian, and author. This collection is comprised of three of her most gripping memoirs, covering many of the most significant historical events in the first half of the twentieth century. Ahead of Time: At the tender age of eighty, the trailblazing journalist looked back on her remarkable first twenty-five years: growing up in a Brooklyn shtetl; entering New York University at fifteen; becoming the world’s youngest person to earn a PhD at nineteen in Cologne, Germany; being exposed to Hitler’s rise to power; and becoming the first American to travel to Siberia at the age of twenty-four, reporting on Gulag conditions for the New York Herald Tribune, in this “beautifully crafted” memoir (Publishers Weekly). “Ruth Gruber’s singular autobiography is both informative and poignant. Read it and your own memory will be enriched.” —Elie Wiesel Haven: In 1943, nearly one thousand European Jewish refugees were chosen by President Roosevelt to receive asylum in the United States. Working for the secretary of the interior, Gruber volunteered to shepherd them on their secret route across the Atlantic from Italy. She recorded the refugees’ dangerous passage, along with the aftermath of their arrival, which involved a fight to stay in the US after the war ended. The “remarkable story” was made into a TV miniseries starring Natasha Richardson as Gruber (Booklist). “[A] touching story . . . [Ruth Gruber] has put us into the full picture and humanized it.” —The New York Times Inside of Time: Unstoppable at ninety-one, Gruber, “with clarity, insight and humor,” revisited the years 1941 to 1952, recounting her eighteen months spent surveying Alaska on behalf of the US government, her role assisting Holocaust refugees’ emigration from war-torn Europe to Israel, and her relationships with some of the most important figures of the era, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Golda Meir (Publishers Weekly). “Gruber bore witness, spoke bluntly, galvanized public opinion, inspired people to action.” —Blanche Wiesen Cook, Los Angeles Times

Download or read book Ahead of Time written by Ruth Gruber and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2010-10-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned journalist and Jewish activist looks back on her first 25 years in “one of the most evocative journalistic autobiographies to appear” (Publishers Weekly). In this fascinating memoir, Ruth Gruber recalls her first twenty-five years, from her youth in Brooklyn to her astonishing academic accomplishments and groundbreaking journalistic career. She shares her experiences entering New York University at fifteen and just five years later becoming the world’s youngest person to earn a PhD. She recounts her time in Cologne, Germany, studying during Hitler’s rise to power, and her adventures in Europe and the Arctic as a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune. Spirited and compelling, Ahead of Time is a striking account of the early years of a woman at the center of the twentieth century’s turning points.

Download or read book The Shores of Bohemia written by John Taylor Williams and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2022-05-17 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intimate portrait of a legendary generation of artists, writers, activists, and dreamers who created a utopia on the shores of Cape Cod during the first half of the twentieth century. Their names are iconic: Eugene O’Neill, Willem de Kooning, Josef and Anni Albers, Emma Goldman, Mary McCarthy, Edward Hopper, Walter Gropius—the list goes on and on. Scorning the devastation that industrialization had wrought on the nation’s workforce and culture in the early decades of the twentieth century, they gathered in the streets of Greenwich Village and on the beach - fronts of Cape Cod. They began as progressives but soon turned to socialism, then communism. They founded theaters, periodicals, and art schools. They formed editorial boards that met in beach shacks and performed radical new plays in a shanty on the docks, where they could see the ocean through cracks in the floor. They welcomed the tremendous wave of talent fleeing Europe in the 1930s. At the end of their era, in the 1960s, as the postwar economy boomed, they took shelter in liberalism when the anticapitalist movement fragmented into other causes. John Taylor “Ike” Williams, who married into the Cape’s artistic world and has spent half a century talking about and walking along its shores with these cultural and political luminaries, renders the twisting lives and careers of a generation of staggering American thinkers and creators. The Shores of Bohemia records a great set of shifts in American culture and the ideas and arguments fueled by drink, infidelity, and competition that made for a fifty-year conversation among intellectual leaders and creative revolutionaries. Together they found a community as they created some of the great works of the American Century. This is their story. Welcome to the party!

Download or read book Transnational Traditions written by Ava F. Kahn and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-03 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No other single work in the field systematically focuses on this subject, nor covers the range of themes explored in this volume.

Download or read book Teatimes written by Helen Saberi and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 522 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Teatimes, food historian Helen Saberi takes us on a stimulating journey beyond the fine porcelain, doilies, crumpets, and jam into the fascinating and diverse history of tea drinking. From elegant afternoon teas, hearty high teas, and cricket and tennis teas, to funeral teas, cream teas, and many more, Saberi investigates the whole panoply of teatime rituals and ephemera—including tea gardens, tea dances, tea gowns, and tearooms. We are invited to spend time in the sophisticated salons de thé of Paris and the cozy tearooms of the United States; to enjoy the teatime traditions of Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, where housewives prided themselves on their “well-filled tins”; to sit in on the tea parties of the Raj and Irani cafes in India; to savor teatimes along the Silk Road, where the samovar and chaikhana reign supreme; and to delight in the tasty dim sum of China and the intricate tradition of cha kaiseki in Japan. Steeped in evocative illustrations and recipes from around the world, Teatimes shows how tea drinking has become a global obsession, from American iced tea and Taiwanese bubble tea to the now-classic English afternoon tea. Pinkies up!

Download or read book Tea at the Blue Lantern Inn written by Jan Whitaker and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A delightful tour of the tearooms that dotted the nation in the first half of the twentieth century . . . [an] irresistible slice of American popular culture.” —Booklist The Gypsy Tea Kettle. Polly’s Cheerio Tea Room. The Mad Hatter. The Blue Lantern Inn. These are just a few of the many tea rooms—most owned and operated by women—that popped up across America at the turn of the last century, and exploded into a full-blown craze by the 1920s. Colorful, cozy, festive, and inviting, these new-fangled eateries offered women a way to celebrate their independence and creativity. Sparked by the Suffragist movement, Prohibition, and the rise of the automobile, tea rooms forever changed the way America eats out, and laid the groundwork for the modern small restaurant and coffee bar. In this lively, well-researched book, Jan Whitaker brings us back to the exciting days when countless American women dreamed of opening their own tea room—and many did. From the Bohemian streets of New York’s Greenwich Village to the high-society tea rooms of Chicago’s poshest hotels, from the Colonial roadside tea houses of New England to the welcoming bungalows of California, the book traces the social, artistic, and culinary changes the tea room helped bring about. Anyone interested in women’s history, the early days of the automobile, the Bohemian lives of artists in Greenwich Village, and the history of food and drink will revel in this spirited, stylish, and intimate slice of America’s past. “The book is both informative and clear-eyed, and leavened with wonderful illustrations.” —House & Garden

Download or read book Calder The Conquest of Time written by Jed Perl and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics. Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved and widely admired artists of the twentieth century. Anybody who has ever set foot in a museum knows him as the inventor of the mobile, America's unique contribution to modern art. But only now, forty years after the artist's death, is the full story of his life being told in this biography, which is based on unprecedented access to Calder's letters and papers as well as scores of interviews. Jed Perl shows us why Calder was--and remains--a barrier breaker, an avant-garde artist with mass appeal. This beautifully written, deeply researched book opens with Calder's wonderfully peripatetic upbringing in Philadelphia, California, and New York. Born in 1898 into a family of artists--his father was a well-known sculptor, his mother a painter and a pioneering feminist--Calder went on as an adult to forge important friendships with a who's who of twentieth-century artists, including Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Georges Braque, and Piet Mondrian. We move through Calder's early years studying engineering to his first artistic triumphs in Paris in the late 1920s, and to his emergence as a leader in the international abstract avant-garde. His marriage in 1931 to the free-spirited Louisa James--she was a great-niece of Henry James--is a richly romantic story, related here with a wealth of detail and nuance. Calder's life takes on a transatlantic richness, from New York's Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to the Left Bank of Paris during the Depression, and then back to the United States, where the Calders bought a run-down old farmhouse in western Connecticut. New light is shed on Calder's lifelong interest in dance, theater, and performance, ranging from the Cirque Calder, the theatrical event that became his calling card in bohemian Paris to collaborations with the choreographer Martha Graham and the composer Virgil Thomson. More than 350 illustrations in color and black-and-white--including little-known works and many archival photographs that have never before been seen--further enrich the story.

Download or read book Harry Kemp the Last Bohemian written by William Brevda and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first critical biography of the American writer. The Tramp Poet Harry Kemp (1883-1960). His creative works included poetry, drama, fiction, and the best-selling autobiography in prose, Tramping on Life.

Download or read book The Brazen Age written by David Reid and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant, sweeping, and unparalleled look at the extraordinarily rich culture and turbulent politics of New York City between the years 1945 and 1950, The Brazen Age opens with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s campaign tour through the city’s boroughs in 1944. He would see little of what made New York the capital of modernity—though the aristocratic FDR was its paradoxical avatar—a city boasting an unprecedented and unique synthesis of genius, ambition, and the avant-garde. While concentrating on those five years, David Reid also reaches back to the turn of the twentieth century to explore the city’s progressive politics, radical artistic experimentation, and burgeoning bohemia. From 1900 to 1929, New York City was a dynamic metropolis on the rise, and it quickly became a cultural nexus of new architecture; the home of a thriving movie business; the glittering center of theater and radio; and a hub of book, magazine, and newspaper publishing. In the 1930s, the rise of Hitler and World War II would send some of Europe’s most talented men and women to America’s shores, vastly enriching the fields of science, architecture, film, and arts and letters—the list includes Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, Walter Gropius, George Grosz, André Kertész, Robert Capa, Thomas Mann, Hannah Arendt, Vladimir Nabokov, and John Lukacs. Reid draws a portrait of the frenzied, creative energy of a bohemian Greenwich Village, from the taverns to the salons. Revolutionaries, socialists, and intelligentsia in the 1910s were drawn to the highly provocative monthly magazine The Masses, which attracted the era’s greatest talent, from John Reed to Sherwood Anderson, Djuna Barnes, John Sloan, and Stuart Davis. And summoned up is a chorus of witnesses to the ever-changing landscape of bohemia, from Malcolm Cowley to Anaïs Nin. Also present are the pioneering photographers who captured the city in black-and-white: Berenice Abbott’s dizzying aerial views, Samuel Gottscho’s photographs of the waterfront and the city’s architectural splendor, and Weegee’s masterful noir lowlife. But the political tone would be set by the next president, and Reid looks closely at Thomas Dewey, Henry Wallace, and Harry Truman. James Forrestal, secretary of the navy under Roosevelt, would be influential in establishing a new position in the cabinet before ascending to it himself as secretary of defense under Truman, but not before helping to usher in the Cold War. With The Brazen Age, David Reid has magnificently captured a complex and powerful moment in the history of New York City in the mid-twentieth century, a period of time that would ensure its place on the world stage for many generations.