After her husband dies, Angie Russo makes an unexpected move: to an old house on historic Benefit Street in Providence, Rhode Island. Angie's house is haunted. But by whom? The spirit of a little boy lost? Or the ghosts of Angie's past? As Angie tries to move on with her life, things keep going bump in the night. She hears voices. She sees her dead husband at the bedroom door. Stairs creak; windows rattle in the still of the night. The house on Benefit Street is filled with secrets...from attic to cellar. Angie wants to stay and build a new life...but the house on Benefit Street has other ideas...
Dave Brussat has made a significant contribution to the history of Providence. For those interested in that history, Lost Providence is a real find. Providence Journal Providence has one of the nation's most intact historic downtowns and is one of America's most beautiful cities. The history of architectural change in the city is one of lost buildings, urban renewal plans and challenges to preservation. The Narragansett Hotel, a lost city icon, hosted many famous guests and was demolished in 1960. The American classical renaissance expressed itself in the Providence National Bank, tragically demolished in 2005. Urban renewal plans such as the Downtown Providence plan and the College Hill plan threatened the city in the mid-twentieth century. Providence eventually embraced its heritage through plans like the River Relocation Project that revitalized the city's waterfront and the Downcity Plan that revitalized its downtown. Author David Brussat chronicles the trials and triumphs of Providence's urban development.
When he moves from Los Angeles to Providence, Rhode Island, Kenny discovers that his new house is haunted by the spirit of a black slave boy who asks Kenny to return with him to the early nineteenth century and prevent his murder by slave traders.
Providence's Benefit Street showcases the rich history of Rhode Island's capital, a tangible history that can be experienced firsthand by walking one mile through the heart of the city. Officially established by 1772 for "the benefit of all," Benefit Street is arguably the most historic thoroughfare in Rhode Island. Some of Providence's most prominent families, including the Browns (the namesake of Brown University), built stately homes on Benefit Street's hillside, many of which still stand today. Threatened by years of neglect, the Providence Preservation Society intervened in the 1950s to save the buildings that line the street. Benefit Street has survived the dangers of demolition and now bears witness to disparate time periods and communities. It is the site of important educational and community institutions, including the Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, the First Baptist Church, and the Providence Athenaeum, the fourth oldest library in the United States.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.
In 1840s Rhode Island, the state’s seventeenth-century colonial charter remained in force and restricted suffrage to property owners, effectively disenfranchising 60 percent of potential voters. Thomas Wilson Dorr’s failed attempt to rectify that situation through constitutional reform ultimately led to an armed insurrection that was quickly quashed—and to a stiff sentence for Dorr himself. Nevertheless, as Erik Chaput shows, the Dorr Rebellion stands as a critical moment of American history during the two decades of fractious sectional politics leading up to the Civil War. This uprising was the only revolutionary republican movement in the antebellum period that claimed the people’s sovereignty as the basis for the right to alter or abolish a form of government. Equally important, it influenced the outcomes of important elections throughout northern states in the early 1840s and foreshadowed the breakup of the national Democratic Party in 1860. Through his spellbinding and engaging narrative, Chaput sets the rebellion in the context of national affairs—especially the abolitionist movement. While Dorr supported the rights of African Americans, a majority of delegates to the “People’s Convention” favored a whites-only clause to ensure the proposed constitution’s passage, which brought abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass, Parker Pillsbury, and Abby Kelley to Rhode Island to protest. Meanwhile, Dorr’s ideology of the people’s sovereignty sparked profound fears among Southern politicians regarding its potential to trigger slave insurrections. Drawing upon years of extensive archival research, Chaput’s book provides the first scholarly biography of Dorr, as well as the most detailed account of the rebellion yet published. In it, Chaput tackles issues of race and gender and carries the story forward into the 1850s to examine the transformation of Dorr’s ideology into the more familiar refrain of popular sovereignty. Chaput demonstrates how the rebellion’s real aims and significance were far broader than have been supposed, encompassing seemingly conflicting issues including popular sovereignty, antislavery, land reform, and states’ rights. The People’s Martyr is a definitive look at a key event in our history that further defined the nature of American democracy and the form of constitutionalism we now hold as inviolable.
In Making Dystopia, distinguished architectural historian James Stevens Curl tells the story of the advent of architectural Modernism in the aftermath of the First World War, its protagonists, and its astonishing, almost global acceptance after 1945. He argues forcefully that the triumph of architectural Modernism in the second half of the twentieth century led to massive destruction, the creation of alien urban landscapes, and a huge waste of resources. Moreover, the coming of Modernism was not an inevitable, seamless evolution, as many have insisted, but a massive, unparalled disruption that demanded a clean slate and the elimination of all ornament, decoration, and choice. Tracing the effects of the Modernist revolution in architecture to the present, Stevens Curl argues that, with each passing year, so-called 'iconic' architecture by supposed 'star' architects has become more and more bizarre, unsettling, and expensive, ignoring established contexts and proving to be stratospherically remote from the aspirations and needs of humanity. In the elite world of contemporary architecture, form increasingly follows finance, and in a society in which the 'haves' have more and more, and the 'have-nots' are ever more marginalized, he warns that contemporary architecture continues to stack up huge potential problems for the future, as housing costs spiral out of control, resources are squandered on architectural bling, and society fractures. This courageous, passionate, deeply researched, and profoundly argued book should be read by everyone concerned with what is around us. Its combative critique of the entire Modernist architectural project and its apologists will be highly controversial to many. But it contains salutary warnings that we ignore at our peril. And it asks awkward questions to which answers are long overdue.
Edutopia's "25 Essential Middle School Reads from the Last Decade," NPR Best Book of 2018, Bank Street List for Best Children's Books of 2019, Named to the Vermont Dorothy Canfield Fisher List, Maine's Student Book Award List, Louisiana Young Reader's Choice Award List, Rhode Island Middle School Book Award 2020 List, 2020 Oklahoma Sequoyah Book Award Nominee, 2021 South Carolina Junior Book Award Nominee, 2020-2021 Truman Award (Missouri) Nominee, Middle School Virginia Readers’ Choice Titles for 2020–2021, Charlie May Simon Award 2020–2021 List, South Carolina Book Awards Nominee, 2020–2021, and 2023 Rebecca Caudill Young Readers Book Award nominee. Some people can do their homework. Some people get to have crushes on boys. Some people have other things they've got to do. Seventh-grader Zoey has her hands full as she takes care of her much younger siblings after school every day while her mom works her shift at the pizza parlor. Not that her mom seems to appreciate it. At least there's Lenny, her mom's boyfriend—they all get to live in his nice, clean trailer. At school, Zoey tries to stay under the radar. Her only friend Fuchsia has her own issues, and since they're in an entirely different world than the rich kids, it's best if no one notices them. Zoey thinks how much easier everything would be if she were an octopus: eight arms to do eight things at once. Incredible camouflage ability and steady, unblinking vision. Powerful protective defenses. Unfortunately, she's not totally invisible, and one of her teachers forces her to join the debate club. Even though Zoey resists participating, debate ultimately leads her to see things in a new way: her mom’s relationship with Lenny, Fuchsia's situation, and her own place in this town of people who think they're better than her. Can Zoey find the courage to speak up, even if it means risking the most stable home she's ever had? This moving debut novel explores the cultural divides around class and the gun debate through the eyes of one girl, living on the edges of society, trying to find her way forward.
A St. Louis Magazine Must-Read for 2021! WELCOME TO THE “ornate but rickety” Villadiva, whose stained glass windows and uneven floors house more than a century of St. Louis’s queer culture and drama. In a city where “ambition and history and activism and machinations mix with scandal and sex and ghosts and murder,” it’s beneath Villadiva’s crystal chandeliers that secrets are revealed and stories come to life. You’ll feel you’re in the room with provocateur Andoe and his riotous, multigenerational tribe of eccentrics, socialites, drag queens, card-reading witches, psychic mediums, addicts, and promiscuous extroverts--as well as the stalkers, liars, and felonious, headline-grabbing sociopaths who are determined to destroy them. House of Villadiva reveals the heart and heartlessness of urban queer life in the 21st century—and the secret to living through it. Book Review 1: "Chris Andoe writes like he talks, which is a very good thing, because he's one of our city’s best talkers. And the object of his fascination—whether he’s three martinis into a happy hour or three thousand words into a written chapter—is the ensemble cast that is LGBTQ St. Louis, in all its pettiness and pageantry, glory, and weirdness. Sometimes he only records the drama; other times he spritzes gasoline on the flames. But all of it captivates him. Readers of this book can count on feeling the same way." -- Nicholas Phillips, St. Louis Magazine
