It's 1952. Reporter Sydney Lockhart checks into the historic Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Before she even unpacks, she discovers the brutally murdered body of the hotel's bookkeeper. What had begun as a simple travel-writing assignment now turns into a murder investigation. The bad news is that Sydney is a suspect. Determined to clear her name and prove herself a reporter deserving more than just travel assignments, Sydney becomes embroiled in the underworld of gangsters and gamblers. In her fight for the truth, she soon faces a more urgent battle: saving her own skin.
Arlington Park, a modern-day English suburb, is a place devoted to the profitable ordinariness of life. Amidst its leafy avenues and comfortable houses, its residents live out the dubious accomplishments of civilisation: material prosperity, personal freedom, and moral indifference. For all that, Arlington Park is strikingly conventional. Men work, women look after children, and people generally do what's expected of them. Theirs is a world awash with contentment but empty of belief, and riven with strange anxieties. Set over the course of a single rainy day, the novel moves from one household to another, and through the passing hours conducts a deep examination of its characters' lives: of Juliet, enraged at the victory of men over women in family life; of Amanda, warding off thoughts of death with obsessive housework; of Solly, who confronts her own buried femininity in the person of her Italian lodger; of Maisie, despairing at the inevitability with which beauty is destroyed; and of Christine, whose troubled, hilarious spirit presides over Arlington Park and the way of life it represents. Rachel Cusk's sixth novel is her best yet. Full of compassion and wit, each page laden with truth, she writes about her characters' domestic lives, their private thoughts and fears with an intelligence and insight that will leave readers reeling.
The best of Edwin Arlington Robinson's poetry rings with a lyrical and emotional purity and singularity that should assure his place as one of the treasured poets of his generation ... Scott Donaldson's book should help to revive appreciation for this solitary figure and the unique resonance of his work. --W.S. Merwin.
Mary Custis Lee, granddaughter of Martha Washington and wife of Robert E. Lee, exercised an intense faith that won her husband to Christ, overcame chronic illness, and survived the confiscation of her home.
Arlington: Twentieth-Century Reflections celebrates the new millennium with a unique reflection of the last one hundred years in this dynamic town. As the century opens, the prizes awarded to local farm products are still making frequent newspaper headlines. But by 1910, Arlington has already reached major crossroads and with astonishing speed, starts down the path towards its ultimate destiny as a residential suburb. Over two hundred evocative images have been selected to show the evolution of Arlington from 1900 through the late 1990s. Through these photographs we witness boom times and wartimes, celebrations and struggles, the vanished past and the past preserved. Most of these photographs have not been seen for decades, and many have been acquired from previously untapped sources.
Arlington County, for two centuries a center for government institutions, is a vibrant part of the Washington, D.C., community. Many notable figures made their home in the area, like Supreme Court chief justice Warren Burger, General George "Blood 'n' Guts" Patton and a beauty queen who almost married crooner Dean Martin. The drama of Virginia's first school integration unfolded in Arlington beginning in the late 1950s. In the 1960s, two motorcycle gangs clashed in public at a suburban shopping center. Local author, historian and "Our Man in Arlington" Charlie Clark uncovers the vivid, and hidden, history of a capital community.
The neighborhood of Arlington, located about five miles southwest of downtown Riverside, was first settled in the 1870s and was later developed as a town site in 1877 by philanthropist Samuel C. Evans and William Sayward. Citrus groves flourished in the area, providing the community with a newfound wealth. Large and gracious homes were built on wide streets lined with beautiful shade trees. Arlingtons commercial district at Van Buren Boulevard and Magnolia Avenue expanded to include a bank, chamber of commerce, newspaper, store, church, boardinghouse, and post office with its own Arlington postmark, in use since 1888. In the early 1900s, an electric railway was built down the center of Magnolia Avenue ending at beautiful Chemewa Park with its large trees, dance pavilion, zoo, and polo field. Today Arlington retains much of its neighborhood feeling while undergoing a large-scale redevelopment project for a future retail and commercial district.
