Winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, this is one of the defining books of the 1970s, an experimental novel about a young journalist trying to navigate life in America. When Speedboat burst on the scene in the late ’70s it was like nothing readers had encountered before. It seemed to disregard the rules of the novel, but it wore its unconventionality with ease. Reading it was a pleasure of a new, unexpected kind. Above all, there was its voice, ambivalent, curious, wry, the voice of Jen Fain, a journalist negotiating the fraught landscape of contemporary urban America. Party guests, taxi drivers, brownstone dwellers, professors, journalists, presidents, and debutantes fill these dispatches from the world as Jen finds it. A touchstone over the years for writers as different as David Foster Wallace and Elizabeth Hardwick, Speedboat returns to enthrall a new generation of readers.
A speedboat racer needs to overcome last-minute adversity before a competitive speedboat race. Will his hard work, skill, and dedication allow him to overcome those setbacks and get the championship win. "What happens next, ...good." "I liked the drawings - Drake B. "I love this little boat story and would read this story many more times." - Aiyana D. "I like this book and how he started in fourth place. I would recommend this book for other 2nd graders or older" - Marley P. "Buy this book for me, I really like the pictures and the ending part." - Jagger K.
Now on Netflix, #5 most watched movie on the site in its first week: Speed Kills, the movie adaptation, screen-credited as based on the book Speed Kills, by Arthur J. Harris John Travolta plays Ben Aronoff, a fictionalized Don Aronow. Everybody liked and loved Don Aronow. He was powerboating's favorite, best-known, and most flamboyant racer and boat builder, the brilliant creator and designer of the famous Cigarette go-fast boats that broke speed records on the water. In everything he did, he consistently pushed the limits, always at full throttle, testing himself. In ocean races, in the worst of conditions, he was at his best. A competitor described him: "We'd be taking a terrible pounding and I'd be almost beaten down to my knees when Don would come alongside and grin from ear to ear, then take off. God, he was so demoralizing." That was what won him two world championships. It also carried over to his reputation of being not only a ladies' man, but whose girlfriends were often married. Don was the living sales pitch for his boats - he sold magic. For the price, you could be more than you could ever imagine yourself as. You could be Don Aronow. Who bought from him? Well-off businessmen in middle age crisis - and the CIA and the Israeli Mossad - kings, presidents-for-life - and George Bush. If you're thinking James Bond, so was he - he named one of his winning boats 007. He was also Miami incarnate - everything great and dark and impenetrable and fascinating about the place. He was Bond - except he played on both sides of the law. You probably never would have known about Cigarettes had dope smugglers not preferred them. Nobody could catch them in them. Then came the Reagan-era Drug War, and Bush got Don a high-publicity federal contract to build patrol boats that were faster than those he'd sold to the smugglers. They were named Blue Thunder. The Miami Herald wrote: The man who designed the roaring Cigarette speedboats, favorite vehicle of oceangoing drug smugglers, has built a better boat, one that will snuff the Cigarettes. Watch out dopers. A crack of Blue Thunder, faster than a shiver, stable as a platform, is about to become the state of the salt-watery art on the side of the law. What did the smugglers think? Because then Don quietly and bizarrely sold his company with the contract to the biggest pot smuggler on the East Coast, Ben Kramer. It was a quintessential Miami moment - maybe the Miami moment of all time. Why did he do that? At the time, the public didn't know what he did. Years later, NBC News broke the story. Said Tom Brokaw: By the time drug agents on the trail put it all together, the Kramers and the government were already partners. That's right, the boats the Customs Service uses to catch drug smugglers were built for Customs by convicted drug dealers who used laundered drug money to buy the boat company. And you thought you'd heard everything. Actually, the feds had found out and made Aronow undo the sale. But a year later a grand jury was poised to indict Kramer, and subpoenaed Don to testify. The day before he would have, he was murdered in broad daylight. Nobody saw the shots - but they heard them, and then the high-pitched whine of his shiny white Mercedes sports coupe, the gas pedal floored by his dead foot - full throttle. And they saw the shooter's black Lincoln Town Car get away. Somebody was afraid of what he was going to say. The cops concluded it was Kramer - and everyone who thought that was right. But actually, Kramer seemed the least affected by what Don probably would have testified to - and his absence didn't stop two grand juries from indicting Kramer, and two trial juries from convicting him. Were the waters deeper than that?
What is really going on here? For decades Renata Adler has been asking and answering this question with unmatched urgency. In her essays and long-form journalism, she has captured the cultural zeitgeist, distrusted the accepted wisdom, and written stories that would otherwise go untold. As a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1963 to 2001, Adler reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama; on the war in Biafra, the Six-Day War, and the Vietnam War; on the Nixon impeachment inquiry and Congress; on cultural life in Cuba. She has also written about cultural matters in the United States, films (as chief film critic for The New York Times), books, politics, television, and pop music. Like many journalists, she has put herself in harm’s way in order to give us the news, not the “news” we have become accustomed to—celebrity journalism, conventional wisdom, received ideas—but the actual story, an account unfettered by ideology or consensus. She has been unafraid to speak up when too many other writers have joined the pack. In this sense, Adler is one of the few independent journalists writing in America today. This collection of Adler’s nonfiction draws on Toward a Radical Middle (a selection of her earliest New Yorker pieces), A Year in the Dark (her film reviews), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (a selection of essays on politics and media), and also includes uncollected work from the past two decades. The more recent pieces are concerned with, in her words, “misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and, to a degree, the journalist’s role in it.” With a brilliant literary and legal mind, Adler parses power by analyzing language: the language of courts, of journalists, of political figures, of the man on the street. In doing so, she unravels the tangled narratives that pass for the resolution of scandal and finds the threads that others miss, the ones that explain what really is going on here—from the Watergate scandal, to the “preposterous” Kenneth Starr report submitted to the House during the Clinton impeachment inquiry, to the plagiarism and fabrication scandal of the former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. And she writes extensively about the Supreme Court and the power of its rulings, including its fateful decision in Bush v. Gore.
Most Americans today are aware that jobs are being outsourced to China, India, and other nations at an alarming rate. From factory jobs to white-collar, high-tech positions, the exporting of labor is one of the most controversial issues in America.Yet few people know much about the other end — about the people who are actually working these jobs and how their own lives have been throw into tumult by these new economic forces. Andrew Ross spent a year in China, interviewing local employees and their managers in Taiwan, Shanghai, and the far western provinces. In this engaging and informative book, he shows how the Chinese workforce has inherited many of the same worries as American workers, such as job instability, long hours, and awareness of their own expendability. He reports on the daily reality of corporate free trade and explores the growing competition between China and India. This is an eye-opening exploration of an unseen side of our globalized world.
There's more than one way to power a toy boat. Electric motors, balloons, gears, water jets, belt drives, chemical reactions, steam, and even gravity can be used to propel a small ship across a pool. Also, the boats' propellers and paddles can be side-mounted or at the stern, or even sit above the waterline, like a fan-powered swamp boat. The Motorboat Book will show children how to build more than 20 different models through step-by-step instructions with clear photos. And if they'd rather travel under the water than over it, the book has 6 different submarine projects. In addition to the boatbuilding activities, author Ed Sobey includes instructions on how to build an &“ocean&” to test the boats, as well as accessories such as four different water pumps, waterproof battery and motor cases, and a working foghorn. Most of the boats are built from recycled and easy-to-find materials, but an appendix lists local and online sources for wire, plastic propellers, small motors, and more. Educators will appreciate the Meeting Science Standards summary at the end of the book.
A strange, thrilling novel about desperate love, paranoia, and heartbreak by one of America's most singular writers. “What’s new. What else. What next. What’s happened here.” Pitch Dark is a book about love. Kate Ennis is poised at a critical moment in an affair with a married man. The complications and contradictions pursue her from a house in rural Connecticut to a brownstone apartment in New York City, to a small island off the coast of Washington, to a pitch black night in backcountry Ireland. Composed in the style of Renata Adler’s celebrated novel Speedboat and displaying her keen journalist’s eye and mastery of language, both simple and sublime, Pitch Dark is a bold and astonishing work of art.
The epic story of the fastest boat ride in history, on a hand-built dory named the "Emerald Mile," through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river.
Sung throughout the world, the Skye Boat Song evocatively brings alive the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie's famous journey from the Outer Hebrides to Skye, off Scotland's west coast, after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden.
