George B. Nesbitt

Imani Perry

St. Clair Drake

A personal and forthright memoir of a highly educated Black lawyer’s constant struggles and eventual success in a racist Midcentury America.

The book has been handled with kid gloves so it’s in excellent 

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Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

California

An Untold Memoir of Midcentury Black Life

"Like many twentieth-century Black families, the Nesbitts achieved an incredible transformation over the course of a single generation: from performing manual labor on the rural farms of the deep south to holding advanced degrees and owning property in the urban midwest, their family's story was lived or dreamed of by many who moved north during the Great Migration. In Being Somebody and Black Besides, George B. Nesbitt recounts the extraordinary struggles he, his parents, and his five siblings faced in their upwardly mobile journey from the Great Migration through the Freedom Struggle. Born in Champaign, Illinois, Nesbitt earned a law degree at the University of Illinois, enduring racist lectures and administrators who sought to penalize him when he advocated for racial equality. After graduating, he served in World War II, facing discrimination and harassment like many Black soldiers. And when the war was over, despite his education he held many jobs, some quite lowly, before he became deputy assistant to the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Kennedy administration. A keen observer and narrator of race, Nesbitt recounts with righteous and justified anger his bitter struggles and incredible triumphs, shared by Black men and women in America. His beautifully written memoir is a rare example of a sustained first-person narrative about black life in this era. While many of his experiences will resonate with today's readers, others will provide a crucial glimpse into a chapter of Black life and its place in the unfinished struggle for racial justice in our country"--

Being Somebody and Black Besides

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Kathryn J. McGarr

Interesting read on how the press and U.S. Government officials interacted with each other during the 1940s and 50s with an intense balancing act between the truth and the message the government wanted to convey to the public.  The tightrope eventually gave out and this book reveals why.

The book was read through in a few sittings so it’s in excellent condition.  The book jacket has some wrinkling at the top back cover (photo #3) - very minor but still wanted to disclose it.

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Public Lies and Professional Secrets in Cold War Washington

"Kathryn McGarr reveals how the Cold War consensus was deliberately created, shaped, maintained, and protected by a coterie of influential journalists in Washington, DC, who calculated what they would do (or not do) for sustained access to information. The compact among journalists, elected officials, and other government operatives constrained knowledge for everyone in a time when political insight was centrally controlled and defined. Yet these reporters, many of them outsiders from the Midwest, did this not out of malfeasance but for social and political benefit, ever conscious of the need to cultivate, placate, and blend with their sources"--

City of Newsmen

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Lawrence Tabak

Sad modern tale of how a small Wisconsin community was literally bulldozed by political con men from the local politicians, the Governor and all the way up to the White House.

The book was read in a couple of sittings so it’s in excellent condition. 

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Imaginary Jobs, Bulldozed Homes, and the Sacking of Local Government

Powerful and resonant, Foxconned is both the definitive autopsy of the Foxconn fiasco and a dire warning to communities and states nationwide. When Wisconsin governor Scott Walker stood shoulder to shoulder with President Trump and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan at the White House in July 2017, they painted a glorious picture of his state’s future. Foxconn, the enormous China-based electronics firm, was promising to bring TV manufacturing back to the United States with a $10 billion investment and 13,000 well-paying jobs. They actually were making America great again, they crowed. Two years later, the project was in shambles. Ten thousand construction workers were supposed to have been building what Trump had promised would be “the eighth wonder of the world.” Instead, land had been seized, homes had been destroyed, and hundreds of millions of municipal dollars had been committed for just a few hundred jobs—nowhere near enough for Foxconn to earn the incentives Walker had shoveled at them. In Foxconned, journalist Lawrence Tabak details the full story of this utter collapse, which was disturbingly inevitable. As Tabak shows, everything about Foxconn was a disaster. But worse, he reveals how the economic incentive infrastructure across the country is broken, leading to waste, cronyism, and the steady transfer of tax revenue to corporations. Tabak details every kind of financial chicanery, from eminent domain abuse to good old-fashioned looting—all to benefit a coterie of consultants, politicians, and contractors. With compassion and care, he also reports the distressing stories of the many individuals whose lives were upended by Foxconn.

Foxconned

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Heather Hendershot

Compelling, in-depth analysis of the media coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, both inside and outside the convention hall.  Loads of detail presented in a highly readable fashion.  Well worth reading especially considering the light it shines on Chicago Mayor Daley’s attempts at manipulating the news media and its profound effect on how future Presidents like Nixon and Trump would treat the media.

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Chicago 1968 and the Polarizing of America

Introduction Breaking the News, Chicago Style -- The Storm before the Storm -- Day One: "If the Democratic Party can't be democratic, what hope is there for democracy?" -- Day Two: "We filibustered with Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum matters until the American people had gone to bed." -- Day Three: "You do what's right, you don't have to give a worry about the television medium." -- Day Four: "Maybe this is a kiss-and-make-up session, but it's not really intended quite that way, Mayor Daley." -- The Storm after the Storm -- Conclusion From Biased News to Fake News.

When the News Broke

9325d705-5c28-49a8-a698-c0b2ae7f0778-0

Antonio Di Benedetto

Esther Allen

Almost like-new with very slight signs of handling.  Check out my shop for other classics from NYRB and stock up for free shipping! 

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

An NYRB Classics Original First published in 1956, Zama is now universally recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern Argentine and Spanish-language literature. Written in a style that is both precise and sumptuous, weirdly archaic and powerfully novel, Zama takes place in the last decade of the eighteenth century and describes the solitary, suspended existence of Don Diego de Zama, a highly placed servant of the Spanish crown who has been posted to Asunción, the capital of remote Paraguay. There, eaten up by pride, lust, petty grudges, and paranoid fantasies, he does as little as he possibly can while plotting his eventual transfer to Buenos Aires, where everything about his hopeless existence will, he is confident, be miraculously transformed and made good. Don Diego’s slow, nightmarish slide into the abyss is not just a tale of one man’s perdition but an exploration of existential, and very American, loneliness. Zama, with its stark dreamlike prose and spare imagery, is at once dense and unforeseen, terse and fateful, marked throughout by a haunting movement between sentences, paragraphs, and sections, so that every word seems to emerge from an ocean of things left unsaid. The philosophical depths of this great book spring directly from its dazzling prose.

Zama

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Multatuli

Ina Rilke

David McKay

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Read through once but handled with kid gloves.

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Or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company

A fierce indictment of colonialism, Max Havelaar is a masterpiece of Dutch literature based on the author's own experience as an adminstrator in the Dutch East Indies in the 1850s.

The Dutch East Indies, January 1856. The new Assistant Resident, Max Havelaar, arrives in the remote regency of Lebak, preceded by his reputation as a quixotic idealist. Some think him a fool, others a genius, but "one thing is certain- he was an unusual man, and worthy of observation." As Havelaar crusades against corruption, he makes a few unsettling observations of his own. Why don't the financial statements add up? Was the previous Assistant Resident's death really an accident? And why are his superiors obstructing his efforts to learn the truth?

A few years later in Amsterdam, the stolid Dutch coffee broker Batavus Drystubble obtains Havelaar's papers from the threadbare Scarfman, who wanders the streets in search of work. Drystubble pores over the documents in the hopes of lucrative revelations about the coffee trade. But his spirited young son Frits and romantic-souled German assistant Ernest Stern discover something much more astonishing- a scandal that strikes at the heart of the whole Dutch colonial enterprise...

Based on the author's true experiences as an administrator in Java, Max Havelaar is a fiery indictment of colonial misrule and one of the masterpieces of Dutch literature. This is the first new English translation of Multatuli's furious and funny masterpiece in more than fifty years.

Max Havelaar

389707af-d7fc-42ba-8971-154be39dc332-1

Suzanne Boorsch

Douglas Cushing

Alexa A. Greist

Elisabeth Hodermarsky

Sinclaire Marber

John Moore

Heather Nolin

Janet Ross

Brand New/Sealed

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Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

The Arthur Ross Collection of European Prints

Published on the occasion of the exhibition "Meant to Be Shared: Selections from the Arthur Ross Collection of European Prints at the Yale University Art Gallery" held at the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, December 18, 2015-April 24, 2016, the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, January 29-May 8, 2017 and at the Syracuse University Art Galleries, New York, August 17-November 19, 2017.

Meant to Be Shared

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Driss Chraibi

Hugh A. Harter

Adam Shatz

Brand New - has not been read.

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The Simple Past came out in 1954, and both in France and its author’s native Morocco the book caused an explosion of fury. The protagonist, who shares the author’s name, Driss, comes from a Moroccan family of means, his father a self-made tea merchant, the most devout of Muslims, quick to be provoked and ready to lash out verbally or physically, continually bent on subduing his timid wife and many children to his iron and ever-righteous will. He is known, simply, as the Lord, and Driss, who is in high school, is in full revolt against both him and the French colonial authorities, for whom, as much as for his father, he is no one. Driss Chraïbi’s classic coming-of-age story is about colonialism, Islam, the subjection of women, and finding, as his novel does, a voice that is as cutting and coruscating as it is original and free.

The Simple Past

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Extremely Rare - Brand New and Sealed in its Original Shrinkwrap

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Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic 

Roberto M. Dainotto

A Cultural History

What makes Tony Soprano so likeable? Why would we rather leave the cannoli and take the gun? Do we truly want Scarface's Tony Montana to succeed? Is Michael Corleone a misunderstood hero or a despicable villain? Roberto Dainotto traces the complex and fascinating development of the Mafia: its rural beginnings in Western Sicily; its growth into what has been aptly described as a global multinational of crime; and its parallel evolution in music, print and on the big screen. The book probes the tension between the real Mafia - its brutal and often violent reality - and how we imagine it to be: a mythical assembly of codes of honour, family values and chivalric masochism. Rather than dismissing such Mafia stereotypes as untrue, Dainotto sets out to understand what needs and desires, material and psychic longings, are satisfied by our Mafia fantasies. Exploring the rich array of films, books, television, music and even video games portraying and inspired by the Mafia, this book offers not only a social, economic and political history of the Mafia but a new way of understanding our enduring fascination with what lurks behind the sinister omerta of the family business.

The Mafia

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L. Douglas Keeney

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

The Untold Story of the Daring Plan That Saved D-Day

Where was the Luftwaffe on D-Day? Historians have debated that question for six decades, but in 2010 a formerly classified World War II D-Day history was restored, and in it were a new set of answers. Pointblank is the result of extensive new research using that newly restored history to create a richly textured portrait of air power and leadership, and perhaps the last untold story of D-Day: Three uniquely talented men and why, on the single most important day to the survival of the Third Reich, the German Air Force was unable to mount a single effective combat mission against the invasion forces. After a year of unremarkable bombing against Germany aircraft industry, and with just five months to go until D-Day, General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold, commander of the United States Army Air Forces placed his lifelong friend General Carl A. "Tooey" Spaatz in command of the strategic bombing forces in Europe and gave his protégé, General James "Jimmy" Doolittle command of the Eighth Air Force in England. For these fellow aviation pioneers and air war strategists, he had but one set of orders: Sweep the skies clean of the Luftwaffe by June 1944. Spaatz and Doolittle couldn't do that, but they could do what Arnold really wanted: Clear the skies sufficiently to gain air superiority over the D-Day beaches. The plan was called Pointblank. In Pointblank, L. Douglass Keeney carefully reconstructs the events in the air war that led up to D-Day while painting an in-depth portrait of the lives and times of these aviation pioneers.

Jim Diaz

@jim694381

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George B. Nesbitt; Imani Perry; St. Clair Drake

Being Somebody and Black Besides

Kathryn J. McGarr

City of Newsmen

Lawrence Tabak

Foxconned

Heather Hendershot

When the News Broke

Antonio Di Benedetto; Esther Allen

Zama

Multatuli; Ina Rilke; David McKay; Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Max Havelaar

Suzanne Boorsch; Douglas Cushing; Alexa A. Greist; Elisabeth Hodermarsky; Sinclaire Marber; John Moore; Heather Nolin; Janet Ross

Meant to Be Shared

Driss Chraibi; Hugh A. Harter; Adam Shatz

The Simple Past

Ingrid Pfeiffer

Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic

Roberto M. Dainotto

The Mafia

L. Douglas Keeney

The Pointblank Directive

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George B. Nesbitt; Imani Perry; St. Clair Drake

Being Somebody and Black Besides

Kathryn J. McGarr

City of Newsmen

Lawrence Tabak

Foxconned

Heather Hendershot

When the News Broke

Antonio Di Benedetto; Esther Allen

Zama

Multatuli; Ina Rilke; David McKay; Pramoedya Ananta Toer

Max Havelaar

Suzanne Boorsch; Douglas Cushing; Alexa A. Greist; Elisabeth Hodermarsky; Sinclaire Marber; John Moore; Heather Nolin; Janet Ross

Meant to Be Shared

Driss Chraibi; Hugh A. Harter; Adam Shatz

The Simple Past

Ingrid Pfeiffer

Splendor and Misery in the Weimar Republic

Roberto M. Dainotto

The Mafia

L. Douglas Keeney

The Pointblank Directive

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