Download or read book Topsy written by Michael Daly and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The true story of a nineteenth-century elephant caught between warring circuses and battling scientists, from the author of The Book of Mychal. In 1903, on Coney Island, an elephant named Topsy was electrocuted. Many historical forces conspired to bring her, Thomas Edison, and those 6,600 volts of alternating current together that day. Tracing them all in Topsy, journalist Michael Daly weaves together a fascinating popular history, the first book to tell this astonishing tale. At the turn of the century, circuses in America were at their apex with P. T. Barnum and Adam Forepaugh competing in a War of the Elephants. Their quest for younger, bigger, or more “sacred” pachyderms brought Topsy to America. Fraudulently billed as the first native-born elephant, Topsy was immediately caught between the disputing circuses as well as the War of the Currents, in which Edison and George Westinghouse (and Nikola Tesla) battled over the superiority of alternating versus direct current. Rich in period Americana, and full of circus tidbits and larger than life characters, Topsy is a touching and entertaining read. “A rollicking pachydermal tale . . . A summer escape.” —The New York Times “A nineteenth-century reality show that boggles the mind as the pages fly by with events that have you laughing out loud one moment and gasping in disbelief the next.” —Tom Brokaw “I’ve always respected Michael Daly as a great New York writer . . . He humanizes and speaks for those animals who cannot speak. He touches the hearts of those of us who are not animal activists.” —James McBride “A skillfully told and admirably researched reminder of a time not as long ago as we’d like to think.” —The Wall Street Journal

Download or read book The Only Harmless Great Thing written by Brooke Bolander and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 64 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novelette Finalist for the Hugo, Locus, Shirley Jackson, and Sturgeon Awards The Only Harmless Great Thing is a heart-wrenching alternative history by Brooke Bolander that imagines an intersection between the Radium Girls and noble, sentient elephants. In the early years of the 20th century, a group of female factory workers in Newark, New Jersey slowly died of radiation poisoning. Around the same time, an Indian elephant was deliberately put to death by electricity in Coney Island. These are the facts. Now these two tragedies are intertwined in a dark alternate history of rage, radioactivity, and injustice crying out to be righted. Prepare yourself for a wrenching journey that crosses eras, chronicling histories of cruelty both grand and petty in search of meaning and justice. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Behemoth written by Ronald B. Tobias and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the two hundred years since their arrival in America, elephants have worked on farms, mills, mines, and railroads, in Hollywood, and in professional baseball. They've contributed to the national discourse on civil rights, immigration, politics, and capitalism. They became so deeply ingrained in the American way that they were once accorded the rights of American citizenship, including the right to vote and the right to provide testimony under oath—and they have incurred brutal punishments when convicted of human crimes. In Behemoth, Ronald B. Tobias has written the first comprehensive history of the elephant in America. As tragic as it is comic, this enthralling chronicle traces this animal's indelible footprint on American culture.

Download or read book Weird New York written by Chris Gethard and published by Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.. This book was released on 2005 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a travel guide of sorts to New York's local legends and best kept secrets, filled with crazy characters, cursed roads, abandoned sites, and bizarre roadside attractions that the author feels reflect the shared modern folklore of our time.

Download or read book Seeing the Elephant written by Joseph Allan Frank and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2003-02-25 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the bloodiest battles in the Civil War, the two-day engagement near Shiloh, Tennessee, in April 1862 left more than 23,000 casualties. Fighting alongside seasoned veterans were more than 160 newly recruited regiments and other soldiers who had yet to encounter serious action. In the phrase of the time, these men came to Shiloh to “see the elephant.” Drawing on the letters, diaries, and other reminiscences of these raw recruits on both sides of the conflict, “Seeing the Elephant” gives a vivid and valuable primary account of the terrible struggle. From the wide range of voices included in this volume emerges a nuanced picture of the psychology and motivations of the novice soldiers and the ways in which their attitudes toward the war were affected by their experiences at Shiloh.

Download or read book Chained written by Lynne Kelly and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2012-05-08 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To work off a family debt, 10-year-old Hastin leaves his desert village in India to work as a circus elephant keeper but many challenges await him, including trying to keep Nandita, a sweet elephant, safe from the cruel circus owner.

Download or read book Lulu the One and Only written by Lynnette Mawhinney and published by American Psychological Association. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 18 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NCSS-CBC 2021 Notable Social Studies Trade Book One of Bank Street’s 2021 Best Children’s Books of the Year STARRED REVIEW! “Armed with her own unique power phrase—'I’m Lulu Lovington, the ONE and only!’—Lulu feels empowered to handle any questions that come her way…. This book does more than simply tell a single story of biracial experience: it talks about navigating everyday racism in sensitive, but frank, ways. This affirmation is just as important as the power phrase…. All children will benefit from this pitch-perfect discussion of race, identity, complexity, and beauty.”--Kirkus Lulu loves her family, but people are always asking What are you? Lulu hates that question. Her brother inspires her to come up with a power phrase so she can easily express who she is, not what she is. Includes a note from the author, sharing her experience as the only biracial person in her family and advice for navigating the complexity of when both parents do not share the same racial identity as their children.

Download or read book Thomas Edison written by Kay Barnham and published by Capstone. This book was released on 2015-12-21 with total page 32 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the life of Thomas Edison, from his early childhood and education through his sources of inspiration and challenges faced, early successes, and the many inventions for which he is best known. A timeline at the end of the book summarizes key milestones and achievements of Edison's life.

Download or read book Bad Elephant Far Stream written by Samuel Jay Hawley and published by . This book was released on 2013-09 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The story of a circus elephant's journey through life" "Bad Elephant Far Stream" is an animal story for adults, a novel about the odyssey of a circus elephant, told from her own perspective, through her own eyes. Inspired by the true story of the circus elephant Topsy, it begins in the forests of Ceylon in the late 1860s with the capture of a baby elephant known to her own kind as Far Stream. She is taken to America and sent to the Adam Forepaugh Circus in Philadelphia. There, Far Stream embarks on a new life under the big top, appearing as "Topsy," part of Forepaugh's famed elephant dancing quadrille. She crisscrosses North America for thirty years with the circus, experiencing hardships, kidnapping, escapes and adventure. But when she comes to outweigh her keepers by a factor of forty-it's hard not to hurt somebody. It's hard not to be "bad." Praise for "Bad Elephant Far Stream" "Meticulously researched and well told...an important story...I urge people to read this book." (Stewart McFarlane, author of "Of Mice and Zen: Animal Encounters in the Life of a Wandering Buddhist") "Intriguing and haunting...Moving and thought-provoking ... an intense and emotional novel. A highly recommended read." ("Shalini's Book Reviews") "Well researched, well written and compelling...gripping, heart felt, and filled with compassion." ("Lynelle Clark Aspired Writer") "Far Stream captured my heart immediately...I enjoyed this book so much that I had to research the story further." ("The Writers Lounge") "This historically significant novel is one that will stick with me for a long while. It's a must read for those who enjoy this genre." ("Pure Jonel: Bibliographic Ramblings of a Bookworm") "I found myself having a hard time putting down the book as I wanted to find out what would happen next. Topsy's story was just that engrossing." ("If It Has Words")

Download or read book AC DC written by Tom McNichol and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-01-06 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AC/DC tells the little-known story of how Thomas Edison wrongly bet in the fierce war between supporters of alternating current and direct current. The savagery of this electrical battle can hardly be imagined today. The showdown between AC and DC began as a rather straightforward conflict between technical standards, a battle of competing methods to deliver essentially the same product, electricity. But the skirmish soon metastasized into something bigger and darker. In the AC/DC battle, the worst aspects of human nature somehow got caught up in the wires; a silent, deadly flow of arrogance, vanity, and cruelty. Following the path of least resistance, the war of currents soon settled around that most primal of human emotions: fear. AC/DC serves as an object lesson in bad business strategy and poor decision making. Edison's inability to see his mistake was a key factor in his loss of control over the ?operating system? for his future inventions?not to mention the company he founded, General Electric.

Download or read book The Invention of Everything Else written by Samantha Hunt and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2009 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hunt's novel is a wondrous imagining of an unlikely friendship between theeccentric inventor Nikola Tesla and a young chambermaid in the Hotel New Yorker, where Tesla lived out his last days.

Download or read book I Am Not Jackson Pollock written by John Haskell and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2015-06-09 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bewitching collection of short fiction-haunting and hypnotic meditations on art, movies, literature, and life A circus elephant named Topsy was executed at Coney Island in the year 1900 for killing a man. That's true. So is the life of Saartjie (Sar-key) Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, who was herself a circus act in the first half of the nineteenth century. What is myth is the Indian god Ganesha, whose head was lopped off by his father, Shiva, and replaced-with an elephant's head-by his disconsolate mother, Parvati. In John Haskell's expert hands, these three curious strands are ingeniously woven together in one story called "Elephant Feelings." And so it goes with the rest of these dreamy meditations on the lives of artists, actors, writers, and musicians who are at once painfully human and larger than life. In "Dream of a Clean Slate," Jackson Pollock the man struggles with the separation he feels from Jackson Pollock the artist; in "The Judgment of Psycho," Haskell probes the sexual dynamic of Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in Psycho, and then delves into a different relationship, the one between Hector and Paris in the Iliad; Orson Welles presides over the long story "Crimes at Midnight," a tense evocation of desire and its consequences. Haskell has written a series of myths for modern times, stories about the ways in which we are distant from ourselves and about the way art can sometimes help us imagine other worlds and other possibilities. It is an astonishing debut.

Download or read book The Book of Mychal written by Michael Daly and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2009-09 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Daly recounts the colorful, astonishing, and, at times, troubled life of the beloved New York Fire Department chaplain who had been among the first to be pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center.

Download or read book The Elephant written by Sławomir Mrożek and published by . This book was released on 1962 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Elephants in My Backyard written by Rajiv Surendra and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rajiv Surendra was filming Mean Girls, playing the beloved rapping mathlete Kevin Gnapoor, when a cameraman insisted he read Yann Martel's Life of Pi. So begins his "lovely and human" (Jenny Lawson, author of Furiously Happy) tale of obsessively pursuing a dream, overcoming failure, and finding meaning in life. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime chance. I found myself standing dangerously close to the edge of a cliff. Far below me was an incredible abyss with no end in sight. I could turn back and safely return to where I had come from, or I could throw caution to the wind, lift my arms up into the air . . . and jump.” —From The Elephants in My Backyard What happens when you spend ten years obsessively pursuing a dream, and then, in the blink of an eye, you learn that you have failed, that the dream will not come true? In 2003, Rajiv Surendra was filming Mean Girls, playing the beloved rapping mathlete Kevin Gnapoor, when a cameraman insisted he read Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. Mesmerized by all the similarities between Pi and himself—both are five-foot-five with coffee-colored complexions, both share a South Indian culture, both lived by a zoo—when Rajiv learns that Life of Pi will be made into a major motion picture he is convinced that playing the title role is his destiny. In a great leap of faith Rajiv embarks on a quest to embody the sixteen-year-old Tamil schoolboy. He quits university and buys a one-way ticket from Toronto to South India. He visits the sacred stone temples of Pondicherry, he travels to the frigid waters off the coast of rural Maine, and explores the cobbled streets of Munich. He befriends Yann Martel, a priest, a castaway, an eccentric old woman, and a pack of Tamil schoolboys. He learns how to swim, to spin wool, to keep bees, and to look a tiger in the eye. All the while he is really learning how to dream big, to fail, to survive, to love, and to become who he truly is. Rajiv Surendra captures the uncertainty, heartache, and joy of finding ones place in the world with sly humor and refreshing honesty. The Elephants in My Backyard is not a journey of goals and victories, but a story of process and determination. It is a spellbinding and profound book for anyone who has ever failed at something and had to find a new path through life.

Download or read book Animal Biography written by André Krebber and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While historiography is dominated by attempts that try to standardize and de-individualize the behavior of animals, history proves to be littered with records of the exceptional lives of unusual animals. This book introduces animal biography as an approach to the re-framing of animals as both objects of knowledge as well as subjects of individual lives. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective and bringing together scholars from, among others, literary, historical and cultural studies, the texts collected in this volume seek to refine animal biography as a research method and framework to studying, capturing, representing and acknowledging animal others as individuals. From Heini Hediger’s biting monitor, Hachikō and Murr to celluloid ape Caesar and the mourning of Topsy’s gruesome death, the authors discuss how animal biographies are discovered and explored through connections with humans that can be traced in archives, ethological fieldwork and novels, and probe the means of constructing animal biographies from taxidermy to film, literature and social media. Thus, they invite deeper conversations with socio-political and cultural contexts that allow animal biographies to provide narratives that reach beyond individual life stories, while experimenting with particular forms of animal biographies that might trigger animal activism and concerns for animal well-being, spur historical interest and enrich the literary imagination.

Download or read book The Circus Age written by Janet M. Davis and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-10-15 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A century ago, daily life ground to a halt when the circus rolled into town. Across America, banks closed, schools canceled classes, farmers left their fields, and factories shut down so that everyone could go to the show. In this entertaining and provocative book, Janet Davis links the flowering of the early-twentieth-century American railroad circus to such broader historical developments as the rise of big business, the breakdown of separate spheres for men and women, and the genesis of the United States' overseas empire. In the process, she casts the circus as a powerful force in consolidating the nation's identity as a modern industrial society and world power. Davis explores the multiple "shows" that took place under the big top, from scripted performances to exhibitions of laborers assembling and tearing down tents to impromptu spectacles of audiences brawling, acrobats falling, and animals rampaging. Turning Victorian notions of gender, race, and nationhood topsy-turvy, the circus brought its vision of a rapidly changing world to spectators--rural as well as urban--across the nation. Even today, Davis contends, the influence of the circus continues to resonate in popular representations of gender, race, and the wider world.