In a deeply layered psychological narrative, T. Byram Karasu, one of AmericaOs leading professors of psychiatry, illustrates that the age of narcissism has metamorphosed into the more virulent age of sociopathy, where selfishness, greed, and the violation of the rights of others have become fixtures of daily life. Gotham Chronicles tells the gritty story of Mallory, a young woman who offers Rolfing massage therapy to the elite of Manhattan. Gradually drawn into a world of prostitution and illicit drugs, she struggles to write a novel about her life. Her clients include an assistant district attorney, a hedge fund manager, a semiretired real estate tycoon, and a drug-addled college professor. Corruption, disloyalty, deception, arrogance, and treacherous cynicism rule the world of these intertwined lives, where sex, drugs, and excessive money lead to consequences both permanent and tragic. In a deeply psychological story, Karasu shows the age of narcissism has been replaced with a more malignant age of sociopathy. Selfishness, greed, and obsession have become part of everyday life and empathy seems to be a dying emotion. Mental health professionals and anyone interested in our own destructive psychology will find Mallory's story both interesting and revealing.

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.

Volume two of the world famous trilogy on the history of New York