Pete Hamill

A collection of World War II accounts by the influential journalist and author includes "The Road Back to Paris," "Mollie and Other War Pieces," and "Normandy Revisited," in a volume that also features twenty-nine previously uncollected New Yorker articles.

Frank Sinatra is considered, with Bing Crosby, the most important popular singer of the post-world-war-2 world, at least in the English language. Both singers credit their informal styles to the influence of Louis Armstrong. Sinatra himself, though, typified a relaxed version of the bel canto ("beautiful song") style transposed to modern times (his family had emigrated from Sicily not long before his birth). Later singers like Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Perry Como and Matt Monro would owe him a great debt for this. Beyond even style and talent would be Sinatra's contribution to the modern "sense of life", as he personally made his own negotiations and judgements, famously pursued the most attractive women (winning and losing in public) regardless of cost to him, and even inspiring Paul Anka to write "My Way". He was a 20th century One Of A Kind.

In a new volume of journalistic essays, the eclectic author of A Drinking Life offers sharp commentary on diverse subjects, such as American immigration policy toward Mexico, Mike Tyson, television, crack, Northern Ireland and Octavio Paz.

Tools as Art presents more than two hundred works in full color from the Hechinger Collection - an impressive collection celebrating the amazing variety of twentieth-century art that represents or incorporates tools and hardware. There are elegant and witty sculptures of tools - from common hammers, saws, screwdrivers, pliers, and wrenches to machine tools such as the lathe and the drill press - in wood, glass, metal, paper, and stone; constructions of found objects and building materials that use familiar forms to make works of imaginative power; and paintings, prints, and photographs depicting tools of all sorts. The artists range from well-known figures such as Jim Dine, Arman, Jean Tinguely, Lucas Samaras, Richard Estes, Claes Oldenburg, and Walker Evans to younger men and women, some of whom are published here for the first time. They all share the strong attachment to everyday things that undergirds much modern art, and it is this quality that makes their work so evocative.

Set on the cusp of the country's great social movements - youth, women's, peace, and civil rights - in the year before the love turned to anger and the peace to militancy, Downtown is the story of Smoky O'Donnell, her career and her heart. When Smoky arrives in Atlanta in 1966, after an airless lifetime back in Savannah, she is at once thrilled and chastened by this dazzling, hectic young city on the move. Atlanta is one of the first cities to have its own magazine, called Downtown, for which Smoky has been specially chosen to work as a writer. In her heart she knows it is a job that will change her life. With breathtaking quickness it introduces her to many unforgettable people - not least among them the magazine's flamboyant and utterly charismatic editor, Matthew Comfort, who helps shape many careers, including hers. Smoky soon meets Bradley Hunt III, the charming and substantial scion of an aristocratic Southern family who invites her into a world more polished and remote than any she has known. As spring comes to Atlanta, she finds herself in the company of Lucas Geary, a gifted young photographer with a rebel's heart. Through the summer, their work takes them deep into the hot, restless streets, and he shows her another world she's never seen - a world populated by shuffling hopelessness, where she meets John Howard, an enigmatic young black man who is a lawyer, freedom fighter, and hero in the civil rights movement, standing at a great moral crossroads. The choices Smoky must face, and her ultimate decisions, create a tender, joyous, and powerful story of the end of innocence - both Smoky's and America's - at a time when traditional values are in question and the air is full of possibility. Full of the masterful characterizations, probing insight, and lyrical prose for which Anne Rivers Siddons is justly acclaimed, Downtown is another stunning achievement from an extraordinary writer.

In 1953, Michael heads south to become a man in the U.S. Navy. He is naive about the sadistic terrors of the service, the bigotry of the south, and thrashes through with frustration and despair until he meets Eden Santana.

Never before collected in one volume, here are Pete Hamill's stories about Brooklyn, the borough in which he was born and grew up, and the one closest to his heart. A young boy with a mysterious past forever transforms the lives of the neighborhood toughs. A man returns to his old haunts to avenge the death of his brother. A couple chooses to embrace their memories of a bygone era rather than live in a diminished future. These are stories of a New York almost lost but not forgotten. They read like messages from a vanished age, brimming over with nostalgia (which Hamill has called the most common New York emotion), for the world after the war, the city before heroin and crack, the days of the Dodgers and Giants, even, for some, the world of the Depression. Full of pieces that have been unavailable for years, this collection is classic Hamill -- a must-read for his fans, for those who love New York, and for anyone who seeks to understand the world today through the lens of the world that once was.

Emili Rossell, the young owner of one of Barcelona's top galleries, receives an old manuscript written by an Italian architect about the "Invisible City"--An ambitious project dreamt up by King Charles III to build an alternative capital city in the Ebro delta. The manuscript contains hints about a lost masterpiece by the Venetian painter Tiepolo, and the site of the Invisible City is where Emili used to play as a child; spurred on by these reasons, he is plunged into a fascinating extinct world.

Ten-year-old Jody carefully grooms and trains the red pony colt his father has given him, only to face the possibility of losing him to sickness.

One of the most illustrious native sons of Guanajuato is Diego Rivera, who was born in the state capital in 1886. Though he only lived in this city for a short time during his childhood, there are parts of it that unavoidably seep into his paintings. The same happens with figures such as miners, which the painter always depicted as heroic laborers. This volume also details certain historic events, like the dawn of Independence, which were immortalized in Riveraœs works, especially in his murals. "How it was that his legendary figure was built? Here the best authors of Mexico help us decipher the strokes that created the myth called Diego Rivera" (Our translation)--Verso cover.