In an age before jets, air-conditioning, and superhighways, Lake Hopatcong was a major northeast resort. It lay within easy reach of large cities to the east, and its size and setting at over nine hundred feet above sea level made it a perfect holiday destination. From the late nineteenth century through World War II, more than forty lake hotels and rooming houses welcomed thousands of vacationers each year. After the war, the lake continued to be a popular spot for renting a bungalow or buying a summer cottage. But for many, Lake Hopatcong will always be remembered as the home of Bertrand Island Park. Although Bertrand Island Park closed in 1983, there is no place in northwestern New Jersey that is more fondly remembered. For some seventy years, the park thrilled youngsters and adults alike. The park opened during the peak of Lake Hopatcong's resort years, and its popularity continued as the lake evolved from a hotel resort to a community of second homes and finally into a year-round locale. Generations of school groups, church outings, company picnics, and residents from throughout the region delighted in the wooden roller coaster, the magical carousel, and the scores of other rides and games.
This comprehensive guide profiles 17 major amusement parks in the Garden State. Complete information on rides and attractions is accompanied by dozens of vintage photographs and postcard scenes. Featured parks: Steel Pier, Atlantic City; Keansburg Amusement Park, Keansburg; Clementon Amusement Park, Clementon; Jenkinson's Boardwalk, Point Pleasant Beach; Casino Pier, Seaside Heights; Playland, Ocean City; Bowcraft Amusement Park, Scotch Plains; Land of Make Believe, Hope; Storybookland, Cardiff; Funtown Pier, Seaside Park; Wild West City, Netcong; Gillian's Wonderland Pier, Ocean City; Morey's Piers, Wildwood; Six Flags Great Adventure, Jackson; Fantasy Island, Beach Haven; Blackbeards Cave, Bayville.
New Jersey is even WEIRDER than we thought! From the authors of Weird N.J.—with more than 125,000 copies sold—comes a second amazing collection of the wonderful weirdness that fills every inch of the Garden State. One of the bestselling books ever to hit New Jersey was Mark Sceurman and Mark Moran’s Weird N.J. The book was such a phenomenon that it began a whole series of Weird state books, each one a bestseller. But the Marks, as they are called, always knew that there were more, bizarre stories lurking in their own home state. So back they went, camera and notebook in hand, to travel the highways and byways of New Jersey to chronicle more weirdly bizarre stories. And what did they find? How about the pathway of a doctor’s office paved with tombstones? Or a pumpkin-shaped house? Then there’s the Hub Cap Tree, the Birdsville Church (yes, a church for birds), and the bowling ball pyramid that graces one proud resident’s front lawn. Fun too are the haunted houses to visit, the ghosts to chat with, and the cursed roads to travel down. It’s all part of the long, strange trip known as Weird N.J.
Coney Island: the name still resonates with a sense of racy Brooklyn excitement, the echo of beach-front popular entertainment before World War I. Amusing the Million examines the historical context in which Coney Island made its reputation as an amusement park and shows how America's changing social and economic conditions formed the basis of a new mass culture. Exploring it afresh in this way, John Kasson shows Coney Island no longer as the object of nostalgia but as a harbinger of modernity--and the many photographs, lithographs, engravings, and other reproductions with which he amplifies his text support this lively thesis.
A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.
This book provides an ethnographic contribution to research on children’s consumption, family life and happiness. Various and shifting notions of happiness are explored, as well as conditions for and challenges to happiness, through an analysis of video-recorded interviews and mobile ethnography conducted in two of the most popular theme parks in Sweden. Initially, the study outlines how previous research has conceptualized happiness in association with time and place in a rather static way. Based on a treatise of notions of happiness in philosophy and the social sciences, there is a turn in this thesis towards practice. It generates fundamental knowledge about the complexity of happiness. By employing this approach, it is possible to highlight how happiness is enacted as part of and in relation to ideals of family life, time, childhood, money, consumption, experiences and material things. As we explore the practices of children and their families, we discover that shifting meanings of happiness are located in contemporary culture, where emotions and consumption are of central importance. The approach is interdisciplinary, and draws on theoretical and methodological contributions in sociology, anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS). Notions of meshwork and enactment become important for the exploration of happiness as a complex and changing matter, which productively involves social relations and material things. Throughout the thesis there is a dialogue with previous research on happiness, consumption and childhood which highlights the importance of exploring messy practices, in movement. It is argued that explorations of practice contribute to a critical understanding of how happiness and contemporary ideals of childhood can be approached – through consumption and as part of citizenship in a consumer society where happiness is of central importance. Abstract [sv] Denna avhandling utgör ett etnografiskt bidrag till forskning om barns konsumtion, familjeliv och lycka. Genom en analys av videoinspelade intervjuer samt familjebesök till två av Sveriges mest välbesökta temaparker utforskas skiftande betydelser av lycka, liksom dess förutsättningar och utmaningar. Tidigare temaparks-forskning har generellt tagit lyckans existens för given. Utifrån en inledande diskussion om bland annat olika filosofiska och samhällsvetenskapliga lyckoteorier argumenterar avhandlingen för att studier av praktik tillför ny och grundläggande kunskap om lyckans komplexa sammansättningar. Avhandlingen visar därigenom att lycka iscensätts som en del av – och i förhållande till – ideal om familjeliv, tid, barndom, pengar, konsumtion, upplevelser och materiella ting. Genom att fokusera på barn och deras familjers praktiker lokaliseras lyckans skiftande betydelser i en samtidskultur där emotioner och konsumtion är centrala. Avhandlingens ansats är tvärvetenskaplig och hämtar teoretisk och metodologisk inspiration från sociologi, antropologi samt teknik- och vetenskapsstudier (STS). Genom denna ansats synliggörs sammanflätningar av sociala relationer och materiella ting som produktiva i iscensättandet av lycka. Genom en dialog mellan empiriska beskrivningar och forskning om lycka, konsumtion och barndom belyser avhandlingen nödvändigheten av att synliggöra och utforska röriga och rörliga praktiker. Det bidrar till en kritisk förståelse av praktik som kan förändra hur vi närmar oss lycka och samtida barndomsideal – som konsumenter och medborgare i ett lyckosträvande konsumtionssamhälle.
***NPR Books We Love selection*** “If you’re only going to read one Everest book this decade, make it The Third Pole. . . . A riveting adventure.”—Outside Shivering, exhausted, gasping for oxygen, beyond doubt . . . A hundred-year mystery lured veteran climber Mark Synnott into an unlikely expedition up Mount Everest during the spring 2019 season that came to be known as “the Year Everest Broke.” What he found was a gripping human story of impassioned characters from around the globe and a mountain that will consume your soul—and your life—if you let it. The mystery? On June 8, 1924, George Mallory and Sandy Irvine set out to stand on the roof of the world, where no one had stood before. They were last seen eight hundred feet shy of Everest’s summit still “going strong” for the top. Could they have succeeded decades before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay? Irvine is believed to have carried a Kodak camera with him to record their attempt, but it, along with his body, had never been found. Did the frozen film in that camera have a photograph of Mallory and Irvine on the summit before they disappeared into the clouds, never to be seen again? Kodak says the film might still be viable. . . . Mark Synnott made his own ascent up the infamous North Face along with his friend Renan Ozturk, a filmmaker using drones higher than any had previously flown. Readers witness first-hand how Synnott’s quest led him from oxygen-deprivation training to archives and museums in England, to Kathmandu, the Tibetan high plateau, and up the North Face into a massive storm. The infamous traffic jams of climbers at the very summit immediately resulted in tragic deaths. Sherpas revolted. Chinese officials turned on Synnott’s team. An Indian woman miraculously crawled her way to frostbitten survival. Synnott himself went off the safety rope—one slip and no one would have been able to save him—committed to solving the mystery. Eleven climbers died on Everest that season, all of them mesmerized by an irresistible magic. The Third Pole is a rapidly accelerating ride to the limitless joy and horror of human obsession.
The clock is relentlessly ticking! Our world teeters on a knife-edge between a peaceful and prosperous future for all, and a dark winter of death and destruction that threatens to smother the light of civilization. Within 30 years, in the 2030 decade, six powerful 'drivers' will converge with unprecedented force in a statistical spike that could tear humanity apart and plunge the world into a new Dark Age. Depleted fuel supplies, massive population growth, poverty, global climate change, famine, growing water shortages and international lawlessness are on a crash course with potentially catastrophic consequences. In the face of both doomsaying and denial over the state of our world, Colin Mason cuts through the rhetoric and reams of conflicting data to muster the evidence to illustrate a broad picture of the world as it is, and our possible futures. Ultimately his message is clear; we must act decisively, collectively and immediately to alter the trajectory of humanity away from catastrophe. Offering over 100 priorities for immediate action, The 2030 Spike serves as a guidebook for humanity through the treacherous minefields and wastelands ahead to a bright, peaceful and prosperous future in which all humans have the opportunity to thrive and build a better civilization. This book is powerful and essential reading for all people concerned with the future of humanity and planet earth.
