New York Calling
Title | New York Calling PDF eBook |
Author | Marshall Berman |
Publisher | Reaktion Books |
Pages | 474 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | Business & Economics |
ISBN | 9781861893383 |
Acclaimed historian Berman and journalist Berger gather a stellar group of writers and photographers who combine their energies to weave a rich tale of New York Citys struggle, excitement, and wonder.
Bad Call
Title | Bad Call PDF eBook |
Author | Mike Scardino |
Publisher | Little, Brown |
Pages | 221 |
Release | 2018-07-17 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0316469602 |
An adrenaline-fueled read that will stay with you long after you turn the final page, Bad Call is a "compulsively readable, totally unforgettable" memoir about working on a New York City ambulance in the 1960s (James Patterson). Bad Call is Mike Scardino's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late-1960s New York. Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, young Mike spends his days speeding from one chaotic emergency to another. His adventures take him into the middle of incipient race riots, to the scene of a plane crash at JFK airport and into private lives all over Queens, where New Yorkers are suffering, and dying, in unimaginable ways. Learning on the job, Mike encounters all manner of freakish accidents (the man who drank Drano, the woman attacked by rats, the man who inflated like a balloon), meets countless unforgettable New York characters, falls in love, is nearly murdered, and gets an early and indelible education in the impermanence of life and the cruelty of chance. Action-packed, poignant, and rich with details that bring Mike's world to technicolor life, Bad Call is a gritty portrait of a bygone era as well as a bracing reminder that, though "life itself is a fatal condition," it's worth pausing to notice the moments of beauty, hope, and everyday heroism along the way.
Calling Bullshit
Title | Calling Bullshit PDF eBook |
Author | Carl T. Bergstrom |
Publisher | Random House Trade Paperbacks |
Pages | 338 |
Release | 2021-04-20 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0525509208 |
Bullshit isn’t what it used to be. Now, two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data. “A modern classic . . . a straight-talking survival guide to the mean streets of a dying democracy and a global pandemic.”—Wired Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound and it’s increasingly difficult to know what’s true. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. We are fairly well equipped to spot the sort of old-school bullshit that is based in fancy rhetoric and weasel words, but most of us don’t feel qualified to challenge the avalanche of new-school bullshit presented in the language of math, science, or statistics. In Calling Bullshit, Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West give us a set of powerful tools to cut through the most intimidating data. You don’t need a lot of technical expertise to call out problems with data. Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true? Is the claim comparing like with like? Is it confirming your personal bias? Drawing on a deep well of expertise in statistics and computational biology, Bergstrom and West exuberantly unpack examples of selection bias and muddled data visualization, distinguish between correlation and causation, and examine the susceptibility of science to modern bullshit. We have always needed people who call bullshit when necessary, whether within a circle of friends, a community of scholars, or the citizenry of a nation. Now that bullshit has evolved, we need to relearn the art of skepticism.
Last Call
Title | Last Call PDF eBook |
Author | Elon Green |
Publisher | |
Pages | 0 |
Release | 2022-06-07 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 1250833027 |
"In this work of nonfiction, Elon Green reports on a series of baffling and brutal crimes. The victims of the serial murderer dubbed the 'Last Call Killer' were all gay men, and Green tries to shine a light onto their complicated lives and the queer community in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s as well. Peter Stickney Anderson was the first of the known victims"-- Adapted from the publisher's description.
Black Buck
Title | Black Buck PDF eBook |
Author | Mateo Askaripour |
Publisher | Houghton Mifflin |
Pages | 405 |
Release | 2021 |
Genre | Fiction |
ISBN | 035838088X |
For fans of Sorry to Bother You and The Wolf of Wall Street comes a blazing, satirical debut novel about a young man given a shot at stardom as the lone black salesman at a mysterious, cult-like, and wildly successful startup where nothing is as it seems.
There Are No Accidents
Title | There Are No Accidents PDF eBook |
Author | Jessie Singer |
Publisher | Simon and Schuster |
Pages | 352 |
Release | 2023-02-28 |
Genre | Medical |
ISBN | 1982129689 |
A journalist recounts the surprising history of accidents and reveals how they’ve come to define all that’s wrong with America. We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term “accident” itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators. As the rate of accidental death skyrockets in America, the poor and people of color end up bearing the brunt of the violence and blame, while the powerful use the excuse of the “accident” to avoid consequences for their actions. Born of the death of her best friend, and the killer who insisted it was an accident, this book is a moving investigation of the sort of tragedies that are all too common, and all too commonly ignored. In this revelatory book, Singer tracks accidental death in America from turn of the century factories and coal mines to today’s urban highways, rural hospitals, and Superfund sites. Drawing connections between traffic accidents, accidental opioid overdoses, and accidental oil spills, Singer proves that what we call accidents are hardly random. Rather, who lives and dies by an accident in America is defined by money and power. She also presents a variety of actions we can take as individuals and as a society to stem the tide of “accidents”—saving lives and holding the guilty to account.
Gotham
Title | Gotham PDF eBook |
Author | Edwin G. Burrows |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 1412 |
Release | 1998-11-19 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0199729107 |
To European explorers, it was Eden, a paradise of waist-high grasses, towering stands of walnut, maple, chestnut, and oak, and forests that teemed with bears, wolves, raccoons, beavers, otters, and foxes. Today, it is the site of Broadway and Wall Street, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty, and the home of millions of people, who have come from every corner of the nation and the globe. In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. Readers will relive the tumultuous early years of New Amsterdam under the Dutch West India Company, Peter Stuyvesant's despotic regime, Indian wars, slave resistance and revolt, the Revolutionary War and the defeat of Washington's army on Brooklyn Heights, the destructive seven years of British occupation, New York as the nation's first capital, the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, the Erie Canal and the coming of the railroads, the growth of the city as a port and financial center, the infamous draft riots of the Civil War, the great flood of immigrants, the rise of mass entertainment such as vaudeville and Coney Island, the building of the Brooklyn Bridge and the birth of the skyscraper. Here too is a cast of thousands--the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Clement Moore, who saved Greenwich Village from the city's street-grid plan; Herman Melville, who painted disillusioned portraits of city life; and Walt Whitman, who happily celebrated that same life. We meet the rebel Jacob Leisler and the reformer Joanna Bethune; Boss Tweed and his nemesis, cartoonist Thomas Nast; Emma Goldman and Nellie Bly; Jacob Riis and Horace Greeley; police commissioner Theodore Roosevelt; Colonel Waring and his "white angels" (who revolutionized the sanitation department); millionaires John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, August Belmont, and William Randolph Hearst; and hundreds more who left their mark on this great city. The events and people who crowd these pages guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America, and a book that will mesmerize everyone interested in the peaks and valleys of American life as found in the greatest city on earth. Gotham is a dazzling read, a fast-paced, brilliant narrative that carries the reader along as it threads hundreds of stories into one great blockbuster of a book.