Download or read book The Jazz Palace written by Mary Morris and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2016-03-08 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Boomtown Chicago, 1920s—a world of gangsters, musicians, and clubs. Young Benny Lehrman, born into a Jewish hat-making family, is expected to take over his father’s business, but his true passion is piano—especially jazz. After dark, he sneaks down to the South Side to hear the bands play. One night he is asked to sit in with a group. His playing is first-rate. The trumpeter, a black man named Napoleon, becomes Benny’s friend and musical collaborator. They are asked to play at a saloon Napoleon has christened The Jazz Palace. But Napoleon’s main gig is at a mob establishment, which doesn’t take kindly to their musicians freelancing . As Benny and Napoleon navigate the highs and the lows of the Jazz Age, a bond is forged between them that is as memorable as it is lasting. Morris brilliantly captures the dynamic atmosphere and dazzling music of an exceptional era.
Download or read book Gateway to the Moon written by Mary Morris and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2019-03-12 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1492, two history-altering events occurred: the Jews and Muslims of Spain were expelled, and Columbus set sail for the New World. Many Spanish Jews chose not to flee and instead became Christian in name only, maintaining their religious traditions in secret. Among them was Luis de Torres, who accompanied Columbus as an interpreter. Over the centuries, de Torres’ descendants traveled across North America, finally settling in the hills of New Mexico. Now, some five hundred years later, it is in these same hills that Miguel Torres, a young amateur astronomer, finds himself trying to understand the mystery that surrounds him and the town he grew up in: Entrada de la Luna, or Gateway to the Moon. Poor health and poverty are the norm in Entrada, and luck is rare. So when Miguel sees an ad for a babysitting job in Santa Fe, he jumps at the opportunity. The family for whom he works, the Rothsteins, are Jewish, and Miguel is surprised to find many of their customs similar to those his own family kept but never understood. Braided throughout the present-day narrative are the powerful stories of the ancestors of Entrada’s residents, portraying both the horrors of the Inquisition and the resilience of families. Moving and unforgettable, Gateway to the Moon beautifully weaves the journeys of the converso Jews into the larger American story.
Download or read book Record Palace written by Susan Wheeler and published by . This book was released on 2005-05 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in Chicago during the late 1970s, Record Palace is an eccentric debut novel about jazz, art, race, and identity.
Download or read book Miss Ella of Commander s Palace written by Ella Brennan and published by Gibbs Smith. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this culinary memoir, readers get a personal tour of the storied New Orleans restaurant with the woman who put it—and Creole cuisine—on the map. Meet Ella Brennan: mother, mentor, blunt-talking fireball, and matriarch of a New Orleans restaurant empire. Ella is famous for bringing national attention to Creole cuisine, and her unique vision is best summed up in her own words: "I don’t want a restaurant where a jazz band can’t come marching through." In this candid autobiography, Ella shares her life story from childhood in the Great Depression to opening acclaimed eateries. When the Brennans launched Commander’s Palace, it became the city’s most popular restaurant. Many of the city’s most famous chefs such as Paul Prudhomme, Emeril Lagasse, Troy McPhail, and many others, got their start there. Miss Ella of Commander’s Palace describes the drama, the disasters, and the abundance of love, sweat, and grit it takes to become the matriarch of New Orleans’ finest restaurant empire.
Download or read book Midnight at the Pera Palace The Birth of Modern Istanbul written by Charles King and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the Netflix series premiering March 3rd "Hugely enjoyable, magnificently researched, and deeply absorbing." —Jason Goodwin, New York Times Book Review At midnight, December 31, 1925, citizens of the newly proclaimed Turkish Republic celebrated the New Year. For the first time ever, they had agreed to use a nationally unified calendar and clock. Yet in Istanbul—an ancient crossroads and Turkey's largest city—people were looking toward an uncertain future. Never purely Turkish, Istanbul was home to generations of Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, as well as Muslims. It welcomed White Russian nobles ousted by the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik assassins on the trail of the exiled Leon Trotsky, German professors, British diplomats, and American entrepreneurs—a multicultural panoply of performers and poets, do-gooders and ne’er-do-wells. During the Second World War, thousands of Jews fleeing occupied Europe found passage through Istanbul, some with the help of the future Pope John XXIII. At the Pera Palace, Istanbul's most luxurious hotel, so many spies mingled in the lobby that the manager posted a sign asking them to relinquish their seats to paying guests. In beguiling prose and rich character portraits, Charles King brings to life a remarkable era when a storied city stumbled into the modern world and reshaped the meaning of cosmopolitanism.
Download or read book Nothing to Declare written by Mary Morris and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1998-11-15 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traveling from the highland desert of northern Mexico to the steaming jungles of Honduras to the seashore of the Caribbean, Mary Morris confronts the realities of place, of poverty, of machismo, and of self. "One gutsy woman and one fantastic writer".--"Cosmopolitan".
Download or read book 4 Years Trapped in My Mind Palace written by Johan Twiss and published by . This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I was paralyzed from head to toe--trapped in my own mind. But everything changed when an old man with dementia heard my thoughts.
Download or read book House Arrest written by Mary Morris and published by Nan A. Talese. This book was released on 2012-03-07 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In superbly crafted prose, Mary Morris captures the drama—and danger—in the everyday and on the road. In her novels, short stories, and travel memoirs, including the acclaimed Nothing to Declare, Morris has dazzled us with her command of location—rendering the unfamiliar places that are not home, the shadowy terrain of memory and love. Returning to the Latin America she knows so well, Morris tells the gripping tale of two women from different cultures whose lives intersect at a point that promises freedom to one and disaster to the other. Maggie Conover, a travel writer on assignment in the Caribbean island nation known as la isla, is being held in detention, restricted to her hotel. The authorities are interested in her friendship with Isabel Calderón, the fiery daughter of the island’s revolutionary leader. Maggie met Isabel on a previous visit and was struck by her independence, her disgust for her father, and her intense longing to escape. Now Isabel has disappeared, and Maggie is suspected of knowing her whereabouts. As Maggie is interrogated, bullied, and brought to a fever pitch of anxiety, she recalls Isabel’s courage, her own troubled past, and her conflicted feelings for her husband and father. Maggie’s struggle with her fear of confinement and need for flight brings the novel to a climax of rich psychological complexity. Mary Morris captures the terror at the heart of this ordeal with the same subtlety that she uses to probe the complicate relationship between Maggie and Isabel. Suspenseful, yet finely textured, House Arrest is a tour de force of political and personal intrigue.
Download or read book Songs in Ordinary Time written by Mary McGarry Morris and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1996-08-01 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's the summer of 1960 in Atkinson, Vermont. Maria Fermoyle is a strong but vulnerable divorced woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for dangerous con man Omar Duvall. Marie's children are Alice, seventeen—involved with a young priest; Norm, sixteen—hotheaded and idealistic; and Benny, twelve—isolated and misunderstood, and so desperate for his mother's happiness that he hides the deadly truth he knows about Duvall. We also meet Sam Fermoyle, the children's alcoholic father; Sam's brother-in-law, who makes anonymous "love" calls from the bathroom of his failing appliance store; and the Klubock family, who—in contrast to the Fermoyles—live an orderly life in the house next door. Songs in Ordinary Time is a masterful epic of the everyday, illuminating the kaleidoscope of lives that tell the compelling story of this unforgettably family.
Download or read book An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers written by Franklin Rosemont and published by Black Swan Books, Limited. This book was released on 2003 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like everyone else, you dial and receive Wrong Numbers. But what do you make of them? And what do they make of you? What do these calls, universally regarded as irritating, tell us about the society we live in, about ourselves as individuals, and about the possibilities of social transformation. These are just a few of the many provocative questions raised by Rosemont in his new book. Along the way we are introduced to many 'Friends of Wrong Numbers' through the ages - Gnostics, heretics, alchemists, nonconformist thinkers, poets and jazz people, from Meister Eckhart, Eiranaeus Philalethese, and Giambattista Vico through Isidore Ducasse, Saint-Pol-Roux, and Neve Leona Boyd to Andre Breton, Sun Ra and Nicole Mitchell. A major contribution tot he critique of miserabilism and an uncompromising celebration of the Marvelous, this book helps chart the way toward a new and truly free society, ground in humankind's recovery of freedom now, poetry, equality, solidarity, generosity, ecological balance and the triumph of the pleasure principle! With drawings by Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas.
Download or read book The Palace Blues written by Brandy T. Wilson and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Set in the 1920s, The Palace Blues: A Novel tells the story of Frankie, a white Texas tomboy visiting her aunt and uncle in Chicago where she meets and falls for Jean Bailey, an African American, cross-dressing, blues singer. The novel is a physical and emotional journey of self-discovery and identity as told from a marginalized individual's quest to find a place in the midst of racial, cultural, gender and class conflicts"--Author's website.
Download or read book All the Way to the Tigers written by Mary Morris and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of NPR's Best Books of the Year From the author of Nothing to Declare, a moving travel narrative examining healing, redemption, and what it means to be a solo woman on the road. In February 2008, a casual afternoon of ice skating derailed the trip of a lifetime. Mary Morris was on the verge of a well-earned sabbatical, but instead she endured three months in a wheelchair, two surgeries, and extensive rehabilitation. One morning, when she was supposed to be in Morocco, Morris was lying on the sofa reading Death in Venice, casting her eyes over these words again and again: “He would go on a journey. Not far. Not all the way to the tigers.” Disaster shifted to possibility and Morris made a decision. When she was well enough to walk again, she would go “all the way to the tigers.” So begins a three-year odyssey that takes Morris to India on a tiger safari in search of the world’s most elusive apex predator. Written in over a hundred short chapters accompanied by the author’s photographs, this travel memoir offers an elegiac, wry, and wise look at a woman on the road and the glorious, elusive creature she seeks.
Download or read book The Salt Palace written by Darren DeFrain and published by New Issues Poetry and Prose. This book was released on 2005 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fiction. "If you think we don't need another heavily footnoted Mormon road trip basketball novel, think again. With this unorthodox gem, Darren DeFrain creates a genre of his own, with the athletic ease of the Angel Moroni going in for a lay-up. Thoughtful, deadpan, shot through with comic inspiration, it's a debut worth doing the wave for"--J. Robert Lennon.
Download or read book Palace of Tears written by Julian Leatherdale and published by Allen & Unwin. This book was released on 2015-05-27 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dazzling story of family, passion, secrets and vengeance, woven through the hardships of both World Wars, and revealing the intriguing history of the Palace, the opulent Blue Mountains hotel famed for its luxury and mysterious owner. Angie loved Mr Fox's magnificent, absurd hotel. In fact, it was her one true great love. But today Angie was so cross, so fed up with everybody and everything, she would probably cheer if a wave of fire swept over the cliff and engulfed the Palace and all its guests. A sweltering summer's day, January 1914: the charismatic and ruthless Adam Fox throws a lavish birthday party for his son and heir at his elegant clifftop hotel in the Blue Mountains. Everyone is invited except Angie, the girl from the cottage next door. The day will end in tragedy, a punishment for a family's secrets and lies. In 2013, Fox's granddaughter Lisa, seeks the truth about the past. Who is this Angie her mother speaks of: 'the girl who broke all our hearts'? Why do locals call Fox's hotel the 'palace of tears'? Behind the grandeur and glamour of its famous guests and glittering parties, Lisa discovers a hidden history of passion and revenge, loyalty and love. A grand piano burns in the night, a seance promises death or forgiveness, a fire rages in a snowstorm, a painter's final masterpiece inspires betrayal, a child is given away. With twist upon twist, this lush, strange mystery withholds its shocking truth to the very end. http://www.julianleatherdale.com/
Download or read book Hazel Scott written by Karen Chilton and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hazel Scott was an important figure in the later part of the Black renaissance onward. Even in an era where there was limited mainstream recognition of Black Stars, Hazel Scott's talent stood out and she is still fondly remembered by a large segment of the community. I am pleased to see her legend honored." ---Melvin Van Peebles, filmmaker and director "This book is really, really important. It comprises a lot of history---of culture, race, gender, and America. In many ways, Hazel's story is the story of the twentieth century." ---Murray Horwitz, NPR commentator and coauthor of Ain't Misbehavin' "Karen Chilton has deftly woven three narrative threads---Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Harlem, and Hazel Scott---into a marvelous tapestry of black life, particularly from the Depression to the Civil Rights era. Of course, Hazel Scott's magnificent career is the brightest thread, and Chilton handles it with the same finesse and brilliance as her subject brought to the piano." ---Herb Boyd, author of Baldwin's Harlem: A Biography of James Baldwin "A wonderful book about an extraordinary woman: Hazel Scott was a glamorous, gifted musician and fierce freedom fighter. Thank you Karen Chilton for reintroducing her. May she never be forgotten." ---Farah Griffin, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Columbia University In this fascinating biography, Karen Chilton traces the brilliant arc of the gifted and audacious pianist Hazel Scott, from international stardom to ultimate obscurity. A child prodigy, born in Trinidad and raised in Harlem in the 1920s, Scott's musical talent was cultivated by her musician mother, Alma Long Scott as well as several great jazz luminaries of the period, namely, Art Tatum, Fats Waller, Billie Holiday and Lester Young. Career success was swift for the young pianist---she auditioned at the prestigious Juilliard School when she was only eight years old, hosted her own radio show, and shared the bill at Roseland Ballroom with the Count Basie Orchestra at fifteen. After several stand-out performances on Broadway, it was the opening of New York's first integrated nightclub, Café Society, that made Hazel Scott a star. Still a teenager, the "Darling of Café Society" wowed audiences with her swing renditions of classical masterpieces by Chopin, Bach, and Rachmaninoff. By the time Hollywood came calling, Scott had achieved such stature that she could successfully challenge the studios' deplorable treatment of black actors. She would later become one of the first black women to host her own television show. During the 1940s and 50s, her sexy and vivacious presence captivated fans worldwide, while her marriage to the controversial black Congressman from Harlem, Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., kept her constantly in the headlines. In a career spanning over four decades, Hazel Scott became known not only for her accomplishments on stage and screen, but for her outspoken advocacy of civil rights and her refusal to play before segregated audiences. Her relentless crusade on behalf of African Americans, women, and artists made her the target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during the McCarthy Era, eventually forcing her to join the black expatriate community in Paris. By age twenty-five, Hazel Scott was an international star. Before reaching thirty-five, however, she considered herself a failure. Plagued by insecurity and depression, she twice tried to take her own life. Though she was once one of the most sought-after talents in show business, Scott would return to America, after years of living abroad, to a music world that no longer valued what she had to offer. In this first biography of an important but overlooked African American pianist, singer, actor and activist, Hazel Scott's contributions are finally recognized. Karen Chilton is a New York-based writer and actor, and the coauthor of I Wish You Love, the memoir of legendary jazz vocalist Gloria Lynne.
Download or read book Ice Palace written by Edna Ferber and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1958, Ice Palace is Pulitzer Prize winner Edna Ferber's classic and mighty novel about the taming of a great northern wilderness—Alaska. Czar Kennedy came to Alaska for money and power, Thor Storm for a dream. This is the story of their struggle, over a long half-century, for the future of Alaska and the destiny of their beautiful, rebellious granddaughter, Christine, a courageous woman who must make a choice that will shape the destiny of a new generation. Above all, it is the glowing and eloquent tale of Alaska itself—the last, great American frontier.
Download or read book Graffiti Palace written by A. G. Lombardo and published by Serpent's Tail. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It's August 1965 and Los Angeles is scorching - and when white police officers arrest an ordinary black Angeleno named Marquette Frye, they light the touchpaper on six days of rioting. Graffiti Palace follows young African-American graffiti expert Americo Monk as he tries to get home through the chaos, telling the secret history of the riots - and the unfolding story of Los Angeles and black America - along the way. As Monk travels through the streets of South Central LA, he orients himself by gang tags and more intricate and mysterious graffiti symbols towards home. But the cops and the gangs are after the notebook where Monk records the city's graffiti, and which might just be the key to the secret tides of power ebbing below the surface of the city... Bursting at the seams with memorable characters - including Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, sewer-dwelling crack dealers and a legendary Mexican graffiti artist no-one's even sure exists - Graffiti Palace conjures into being a fantastical, living, breathing portrait of Los Angeles in 1965.