Download or read book The Chinatown Trunk Mystery written by Mary Ting Yi Lui and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 1909, the gruesome murder of nineteen-year-old Elsie Sigel sent shock waves through New York City and the nation at large. The young woman's strangled corpse was discovered inside a trunk in the midtown Manhattan apartment of her reputed former Sunday school student and lover, a Chinese man named Leon Ling. Through the lens of this unsolved murder, Mary Ting Yi Lui offers a fascinating snapshot of social and sexual relations between Chinese and non-Chinese populations in turn-of-the-century New York City. Sigel's murder was more than a notorious crime, Lui contends. It was a clear signal that attempts to maintain geographical and social boundaries between the city's Chinese male and white female populations had failed. When police discovered Sigel and Leon Ling's love letters, giving rise to the theory that Leon Ling killed his lover in a fit of jealous rage, this idea became even more embedded in the public consciousness. New Yorkers condemned the work of Chinese missions and eagerly participated in the massive national and international manhunt to locate the vanished Leon Ling. Lui explores how the narratives of racial and sexual danger that arose from the Sigel murder revealed widespread concerns about interracial social and sexual mixing during the era. She also examines how they provoked far-reaching skepticism about regulatory efforts to limit the social and physical mobility of Chinese immigrants and white working-class and middle-class women. Through her thorough re-examination of this notorious murder, Lui reveals in unprecedented detail how contemporary politics of race, gender, and sexuality shaped public responses to the presence of Chinese immigrants during the Chinese exclusion era.
Download or read book The Restless Sleep written by Stacy Horn and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2006-07-25 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1985 and 2004 a staggering 8,894 unsolved homicides were committed in New York City. Here is the first ever inside look at the elite NYPD squad that cracks these “unsolvable” cases. In this fascinating, in-depth narrative, Stacy Horn uses her unprecedented access to the NYPD Cold Case Squad to immerse herself into four unsolved murder cases—cases going back as far as 1951—investigated by three indefatigable Cold Case detectives. Each detective uses his own contacts, informants, and resources and sifts through decades-old evidence, searching for new leads, looking for what others missed, and uncovering any possible connections. These Cold Case detectives are on a constant hunt for the needle in the haystack, and Stacy Horn puts you there every step of the way. From the grisly circumstances and desperate reconstructions of the crimes, through the endless legwork, the scientific advances that don’t always yield hoped-for answers, and the harrowing politics and tangled history of the storied NYPD, Horn depicts the drama of each case, and lays out the puzzle as seen through the eyes of the detectives. At once contemplative and energetic, The Restless Sleep is a completely addictive, fly-on-the-wall story of a subculture of crime solving, and of the people who must beat the odds to offer a final resolution for the unavenged.
Download or read book New York Before Chinatown written by John Kuo Wei Tchen and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2001-09-21 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Piecing together various historical fragments and anecdotes from the years before Chinatown emerged in the late 1870s, historian John Kuo Wei Tchen redraws Manhattan's historical landscape and broadens our understanding of the role of port cultures in the making of American identities."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book The Woman in the Camphor Trunk written by Jennifer Kincheloe and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early-1900s Los Angeles-- an era of courting, ragtime, suffragettes, and widespread corruption-- a socialite turned police matron tracks down the murderer of a white woman in Chinatown, while trying to prevent the outbreak of a bloody tong war. Los Angeles, 1908. In Chinatown, the most dangerous beat in Los Angeles, police matron Anna Blanc and her former sweetheart, Detective Joe Singer, discover the body of a white missionary woman, stuffed in a trunk in the apartment of her Chinese lover. If news about the murder gets out, there will be a violent backlash against the Chinese. Joe and Anna work to solve the crime quietly and keep the death a secret, reluctantly helped by the good-looking Mr. Jones, a prominent local leader. Meanwhile, the kidnapping of two slave girls fuels existing tensions, leaving Chinatown poised on the verge of a bloody tong war. Joe orders Anna to stay away, but Anna is determined to solve the crime before news of the murder is leaked and Chinatown explodes.
Download or read book Tong Wars written by Scott D. Seligman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A mesmerizing true story of money, murder, gambling, prostitution, and opium in a "wild ramble around Chinatown in its darkest days." (The New Yorker) Nothing had worked. Not threats or negotiations, not shutting down the betting parlors or opium dens, not house-to-house searches or throwing Chinese offenders into prison. Not even executing them. The New York DA was running out of ideas and more people were dying every day as the weapons of choice evolved from hatchets and meat cleavers to pistols, automatic weapons, and even bombs. Welcome to New York City’s Chinatown in 1925. The Chinese in turn-of-the-last-century New York were mostly immigrant peasants and shopkeepers who worked as laundrymen, cigar makers, and domestics. They gravitated to lower Manhattan and lived as Chinese an existence as possible, their few diversions—gambling, opium, and prostitution—available but, sadly, illegal. It didn’t take long before one resourceful merchant saw a golden opportunity to feather his nest by positioning himself squarely between the vice dens and the police charged with shutting them down. Tong Wars is historical true crime set against the perfect landscape: Tammany-era New York City. Representatives of rival tongs (secret societies) corner the various markets of sin using admirably creative strategies. The city government was already corrupt from top to bottom, so once one tong began taxing the gambling dens and paying off the authorities, a rival, jealously eyeing its lucrative franchise, co-opted a local reformist group to help eliminate it. Pretty soon Chinese were slaughtering one another in the streets, inaugurating a succession of wars that raged for the next thirty years. Scott D. Seligman’s account roars through three decades of turmoil, with characters ranging from gangsters and drug lords to reformers and do-gooders to judges, prosecutors, cops, and pols of every stripe and color. A true story set in Prohibition-era Manhattan a generation after Gangs of New York, but fought on the very same turf.
Download or read book Chinese St Louis written by Huping Ling and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Secret Life of Anna Blanc written by Jennifer Kincheloe and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's 1907 Los Angeles. Mischievous socialite Anna Blanc is the kind of young woman who devours purloined crime novels—but must disguise them behind covers of more domestically-appropriate reading. She could match wits with Sherlock Holmes, but in her world women are not allowed to hunt criminals. Determined to break free of the era's rigid social roles, Anna buys off the chaperone assigned by her domineering father and, using an alias, takes a job as a police matron with the Los Angeles Police Department. There she discovers a string of brothel murders, which the cops are unwilling to investigate. Seizing her one chance to solve a crime, she takes on the investigation herself. If the police find out, she'll get fired; if her father finds out, he'll disown her; and if her fiancé finds out, he'll cancel the wedding and stop pouring money into her father's collapsing bank. Midway into her investigation, the police chief's son, Joe Singer, learns her true identity. And shortly thereafter she learns about blackmail. Anna must choose—either hunt the villain and risk losing her father, fiancé, and wealth, or abandon her dream and leave the killer on the loose. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Download or read book Low Life written by Lucy Sante and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic social history of corruption and vice in nineteenth-century NYC: “A cacophonous poem of democracy and greed, like the streets of New York themselves” (John Vernon, Los Angeles Times Book Review). Lucy Sante’s Low Life is a portrait of America’s greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city’s slums; the teeming streets—scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape. Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era’s opportunities for vice and entertainment—theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn’t work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city’s tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was. Low Life is one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written—an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropolis, which has much to say not only about New York’s past but about the present and future of all cities.
Download or read book Irish Luck Chinese Medicine written by Molly Mahoney Matthews and published by Mulberry Chronicles. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irish Luck Chinese Medicine is about improbable allies set against the backdrop of the 19th-century Catholic church it tells the story of forbidden love, persistence and friendship that makes the improbable possible.
Download or read book The Luminaries written by Eleanor Catton and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 822 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The winner of the Man Booker Prize, this "expertly written, perfectly constructed" bestseller (The Guardian) is now a Starz miniseries. It is 1866, and Walter Moody has come to stake his claim in New Zealand's booming gold rush. On the stormy night of his arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of 12 local men who have met in secret to discuss a series of unexplained events: a wealthy man has vanished, a prostitute has tried to end her life, and an enormous cache of gold has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. Moody is soon drawn into a network of fates and fortunes that is as complex and exquisitely ornate as the night sky. Richly evoking a mid-nineteenth-century world of shipping, banking, and gold rush boom and bust, The Luminaries is at once a fiendishly clever ghost story, a gripping page-turner, and a thrilling novelistic achievement. It richly confirms that Eleanor Catton is one of the brightest stars in the international literary firmament.
Download or read book Dial A for Aunties written by Jesse Q. Sutanto and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2021-04-27 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Sutanto brilliantly infuses comedy and culture into the unpredictable rom-com/murder mystery mashup as Meddy navigates familial duty, possible arrest and a groomzilla. I laughed out loud and you will too.”—USA Today (four-star review) “A hilarious, heartfelt romp of a novel about—what else?—accidental murder and the bond of family. This book had me laughing aloud within its first five pages… Utterly clever, deeply funny, and altogether charming, this book is sure to be one of the best of the year!”—Emily Henry, New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read One of NPR's Best Books of 2021! One of PopSugar’s "42 Books Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2021"! What happens when you mix 1 (accidental) murder with 2 thousand wedding guests, and then toss in a possible curse on 3 generations of an immigrant Chinese-Indonesian family? You get 4 meddling Asian aunties coming to the rescue! When Meddelin Chan ends up accidentally killing her blind date, her meddlesome mother calls for her even more meddlesome aunties to help get rid of the body. Unfortunately, a dead body proves to be a lot more challenging to dispose of than one might anticipate, especially when it is inadvertently shipped in a cake cooler to the over-the-top billionaire wedding Meddy, her Ma, and aunties are working at an island resort on the California coastline. It's the biggest job yet for the family wedding business—"Don't leave your big day to chance, leave it to the Chans!"—and nothing, not even an unsavory corpse, will get in the way of her auntie's perfect buttercream flowers. But things go from inconvenient to downright torturous when Meddy's great college love—and biggest heartbreak—makes a surprise appearance amid the wedding chaos. Is it possible to escape murder charges, charm her ex back into her life, and pull off a stunning wedding all in one weekend?
Download or read book New Jersey Noir written by Jonathan Safran Foer and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discover the darker side of the Garden State with this anthology of gritty mystery stories. Akashic Books continues its award-winning series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each volume is compromised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct location within the geographical area of the book. In New Jersey Noir, a star-studded cast of authors sifts through the hidden dirt of the Garden State. Featuring brand-new stories (and a few poems) by Joyce Carol Oates, Jonathan Safran Foer, Robert Pinsky, Edmund White & Michael Carroll, Richard Burgin, Pulitzer Prize–winner Paul Muldoon, Sheila Kohler, C.K. Williams, Gerald Stern, Lou Manfredo, S.A. Solomon, Bradford Morrow, Jonathan Santlofer, Jeffrey Ford, S.J. Rozan, Barry N. Malzberg & Bill Pronzini, Hirsh Sawhney, and Robert Arellano. Praise for New Jersey Noir “Oates’s introduction to Akashic’s noir volume dedicated to the Garden State, with its evocative definition of the genre, is alone worth the price of the book . . . Highlights include Lou Manfredo’s “Soul Anatomy,” in which a politically connected rookie cop is involved in a fatal shooting in Camden; S.J. Rozan’s “New Day Newark,” in which an elderly woman takes a stand against two drug-dealing gangs; and Jonathan Santlofer’s “Lola,” in which a struggling Hoboken artist finds his muse . . . . Poems by C.K. Williams, Paul Muldoon, and others—plus photos by Gerald Slota—enhance this distinguished entry.” —Publishers Weekly “It was inevitable that this fine noir series would reach New Jersey. It took longer than some readers might have wanted, but, oh boy, was it worth the wait . . . More than most of the entries in the series, this volume is about mood and atmosphere more than it is about plot and character . . . It should go without saying that regular readers of the noir series will seek this one out, but beyond that, the book also serves as a very good introduction to what is a popular but often misunderstood term and style of writing.” —Booklist, Starred Review “A lovingly collected assortment of tales and poems that range from the disturbing to the darkly humorous.” —Shelf Awareness
Download or read book Family Secrets written by Jeff Coen and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2010-09 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Painting a vivid picture of the pivotal case that broke apart a Chicago mob family, this narrative relies on court transcripts, police records, interviews, and notes to recreate the story as it unfolded in a 2007 courtroom.
Download or read book Shanghai Girls written by Lisa See and published by Random House Digital, Inc.. This book was released on 2010 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two sisters leave Shanghai to find new lives in 1930s Los Angeles in this fresh, fascinating adventure.
Download or read book Lost Light written by Michael Connelly and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2003-04-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this New York Times bestseller, retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch wants justice for a murdered production assistant -- but without his police badge, can he take down a powerful and ruthless killer? The vision has haunted him for four years -- a young woman lying crumpled in death, her hand outstretched in silent supplication. Harry Bosch was taken off the Angella Benton murder case when the production assistant's death was linked with the violent theft of two million dollars from a movie set. Both files were never closed. Now retired from the L.A.P.D., Bosch is determined to find justice for Angella. Without a badge to open doors and strike fear into the guilty, he's on his own. And even in the face of an opponent more powerful and ruthless than any he's ever encountered, Bosch is not backing down.
Download or read book Chasing Secrets written by Gennifer Choldenko and published by Yearling. This book was released on 2016-07-19 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Newbery Honor–winning author Gennifer Choldenko deftly combines humor, tragedy, fascinating historical detail, and a medical mystery in this exuberant new novel. San Francisco, 1900. The Gilded Age. A fantastic time to be alive for lots of people . . . but not thirteen-year-old Lizzie Kennedy, stuck at Miss Barstow’s snobby school for girls. Lizzie’s secret passion is science, an unsuitable subject for finishing-school girls. Lizzie lives to go on house calls with her physician father. On those visits to his patients, she discovers a hidden dark side of the city—a side that’s full of secrets, rats, and rumors of the plague. The newspapers, her powerful uncle, and her beloved papa all deny that the plague has reached San Francisco. So why is the heart of the city under quarantine? Why are angry mobs trying to burn Chinatown to the ground? Why is Noah, the Chinese cook’s son, suddenly making Lizzie question everything she has known to be true? Ignoring the rules of race and class, Lizzie and Noah must put the pieces together in a heart-stopping race to save the people they love. Winner of a Los Angeles Public Library FOCAL (Friends of Children and Literature) Award Nominated for: Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards Tennessee Volunteer State Book Award (Middle School division) Missouri Association of School Librarians (MASL) Readers Award California Library Association’s Beatty Award, Eureka List
Download or read book Recovering History Constructing Race written by Martha Menchaca and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2002-01-15 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An unprecedented tour de force . . . [A] sweeping historical overview and interpretation of the racial formation and racial history of Mexican Americans.” —Antonia I. Castañeda, Associate Professor of History, St. Mary’s University Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book The history of Mexican Americans is a history of the intermingling of races—Indian, White, and Black. This racial history underlies a legacy of racial discrimination against Mexican Americans and their Mexican ancestors that stretches from the Spanish conquest to current battles over ending affirmative action and other assistance programs for ethnic minorities. Asserting the centrality of race in Mexican American history, Martha Menchaca here offers the first interpretive racial history of Mexican Americans, focusing on racial foundations and race relations from preHispanic times to the present. Menchaca uses the concept of racialization to describe the process through which Spanish, Mexican, and U.S. authorities constructed racial status hierarchies that marginalized Mexicans of color and restricted their rights of land ownership. She traces this process from the Spanish colonial period and the introduction of slavery through racial laws affecting Mexican Americans into the late twentieth-century. This re-viewing of familiar history through the lens of race recovers Blacks as important historical actors, links Indians and the mission system in the Southwest to the Mexican American present, and reveals the legal and illegal means by which Mexican Americans lost their land grants. “Martha Menchaca has begun an intellectual insurrection by challenging the pristine aboriginal origins of Mexican Americans as historically inaccurate . . . Menchaca revisits the process of racial formation in the northern part of Greater Mexico from the Spanish conquest to the present.” —Hispanic American Historical Review
