George Baker and Harry don't seem the likeliest of friends. But sitting together waiting for the school bus in the morning, the hundred-year-old musician and the young schoolboy have plenty in common. They're both learning to read, and it's hard. What's easy is the warm friendship they share. In an inspired pairing, a best-selling author and illustrator pay quiet tribute to the power of language and intergenerational bonds.
For use in schools and libraries only. While waiting on the porch for the school bus with an elderly musician named George, Harry is surprised to discover that he has many things in common with the 100 year-old man. Harry is happy when their daily meetings turn into a friendship.
Harry sits on the porch with Mr. George Baker, an African American who is one hundred years old but can still dance and play the drums, waiting for the school bus that will take them both to the class where they are learning to read.
In Days of Fire, Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent for The New York Times, takes us on a gripping and intimate journey through the eight years of the Bush and Cheney administration in a tour-de-force narrative of a dramatic and controversial presidency. Theirs was the most captivating American political partnership since Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger: a bold and untested president and his seasoned, relentless vice president. Confronted by one crisis after another, they struggled to protect the country, remake the world, and define their own relationship along the way. In Days of Fire, Peter Baker chronicles the history of the most consequential presidency in modern times through the prism of its two most compelling characters, capturing the elusive and shifting alliance of George Walker Bush and Richard Bruce Cheney as no historian has done before. He brings to life with in-the-room immediacy all the drama of an era marked by devastating terror attacks, the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina, and financial collapse. The real story of Bush and Cheney is a far more fascinating tale than the familiar suspicion that Cheney was the power behind the throne. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with key players, and thousands of pages of never-released notes, memos, and other internal documents, Baker paints a riveting portrait of a partnership that evolved dramatically over time, from the early days when Bush leaned on Cheney, making him the most influential vice president in history, to their final hours, when the two had grown so far apart they were clashing in the West Wing. Together and separately, they were tested as no other president and vice president have been, first on a bright September morning, an unforgettable “day of fire” just months into the presidency, and on countless days of fire over the course of eight tumultuous years. Days of Fire is a monumental and definitive work that will rank with the best of presidential histories. As absorbing as a thriller, it is eye-opening and essential reading.
DIV“A fresh, revelatory, golden eagle’s eye-view of western literature.” —Financial Times/divDIV Early in Grammars of Creation, George Steiner references Plato’s maxim that in “all things natural and human, the origin is the most excellent.” Creation, he argues, is linguistically fundamental in theology, philosophy, art, music, literature—central, in fact, to our very humanity. Since the Holocaust, however, art has shown a tendency to linger on endings—on sundown instead of sunrise. Asserting that every use of the future tense of the verb “to be” is a negation of mortality, Steiner draws on everything from world wars and the Nazis to religion and the word of God to demonstrate how our grammar reveals our perceptions, reflections, and experiences. His study shows the twentieth century to be largely a failed one, but also offers a glimpse of hope for Western civilization, a new light peeking just over the horizon./div
BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • The Washington Post • Fortune • Bloomberg From two of America's most revered political journalists comes the definitive biography of legendary White House chief of staff and secretary of state James A. Baker III: the man who ran Washington when Washington ran the world. For a quarter-century, from the end of Watergate to the aftermath of the Cold War, no Republican won the presidency without his help or ran the White House without his advice. James Addison Baker III was the indispensable man for four presidents because he understood better than anyone how to make Washington work at a time when America was shaping events around the world. The Man Who Ran Washington is a page-turning portrait of a power broker who influenced America's destiny for generations. A scion of Texas aristocracy who became George H. W. Bush's best friend on the tennis courts of the Houston Country Club, Baker had never even worked in Washington until a devastating family tragedy struck when he was thirty-nine. Within a few years, he was leading Gerald Ford's campaign and would go on to manage a total of five presidential races and win a sixth for George W. Bush in a Florida recount. He ran Ronald Reagan's White House and became the most consequential secretary of state since Henry Kissinger. He negotiated with Democrats at home and Soviets abroad, rewrote the tax code, assembled the coalition that won the Gulf War, brokered the reunification of Germany and helped bring a decades-long nuclear superpower standoff to an end. Ruthlessly partisan during campaign season, Baker governed as the avatar of pragmatism over purity and deal-making over division, a lost art in today's fractured nation. His story is a case study in the acquisition, exercise, and preservation of power in late twentieth-century America and the story of Washington and the world in the modern era--how it once worked and how it has transformed into an era of gridlock and polarization. This masterly biography by two brilliant observers of the American political scene is destined to become a classic.
The president of public television's flagship station and a longtime senior CBS executive reveals the surprising reasons today's television programs are so bad. Written by insiders who have played on both sides of the programming game, DOWN THE TUBE is a sweeping examination of the history of television and an important indictment of the mercenary mentality that taints the most powerful medium in the world.
In this James Beard Award-winning cookbook, George Greenstein reveals 125 recipes for the yeasted and quick breads that have been handed down through his family by three generations of bakers—the breads that made his bakery so well-loved for so many years. For more than twenty years, Greenstein owned and operated a Long Island bakery that produced a wide variety of baked goods, from many different ethnic traditions—focaccia and Irish soda bread, Bavarian pumpernickel and naan—including many from his own culture, such as Jewish corn bread, challah, and bagels. Now that most neighborhood bakeries like Greenstein's are long since closed, this classic collection not only teaches bakers everywhere how to make those delicious, classic breads, but it also preserves authentic versions of the recipes for all to enjoy. With the same helpful features that made this a cherished cookbook upon its original publication—separate instructions for mixing each recipe by hand, food processor, and stand mixer; tips for baking a week's worth of bread in as few as two hours; invaluable baker's secrets; and a very approachable style throughout—this revised edition also includes twelve new recipes to satisfy both old fans and new. So bring the spirit of that great old bakery back to life right in your very own kitchen, filling every room of your house with the wonderful aroma of freshly baked bread. And rest assured you'll bake with ease and success every time, thanks to George and his long-learned, very happily shared SECRETS OF A JEWISH BAKER.
