The Sixth Borough

The Sixth Borough

Author: Myron S. Lubell

Publisher: Author House

Published: 2013-04-03

Total Pages: 541

ISBN-13: 1481730010

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In 1951 Miami Beach, Florida was one of the most popular resort cities in America; the warm weather and tranquil beaches of this tropical paradise attracted thousands of winter visitors, mostly Jewish tourists who made the two day drive from New York. In addition, the resident population of this small island was primarily from New York. Thus, the city of Miami Beach was sometimes referred to as the SIXTH BOROUGH of New York. However, if you ventured off the island and crossed the beautiful expanse of Biscayne Bay you were in another world; you were in the deep south, where Jews were often envisioned as demons with horns, colored people were second class citizens, and racial laws were reminiscent of Nuremberg and Berlin. Myron Lindell was twelve when he moved from Chicago, where he was a secular Jew, barely aware of his religious or ethnic heritage. But, In Miami Beach, on a Jewish Island, he had an odd feeling he was different. He survived the move by blending fantasy with reality, and if reality was more than he could handle, he escaped by writing adolescent observations in a journal, creating imaginative short stories and essays, which he rarely shared with anyone except his father, a few teachers, and a street smart female classmate. This compilation of memoirs is not a documentary; it is just a testimony to the value of simple memories. Too often, historians have forgotten the individual view, the poetic view, which might be closer to reality than the consensus.


Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

Author: Jonathan Safran Foer

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 372

ISBN-13: 9780618329700

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Jonathan Safran Foer emerged as one of the most original writers of his generation with his best-selling debut novel, Everything Is Illuminated. Now, with humor, tenderness, and awe, he confronts the traumas of our recent history. What he discovers is solace in that most human quality, imagination. Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, pacifist, correspondent with Stephen Hawking and Ringo Starr. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New York. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. An inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens from Central Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone's heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who've lost loved ones before. As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father's grave. But now he is accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother's apartment. They are there to dig up his father's empty coffin.


Tales of Two Cities

Tales of Two Cities

Author: John Freeman

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-09-08

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0698408306

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Thirty major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided New York In a city where the top one percent earns more than a half-million dollars per year while twenty-five thousand children are homeless, public discourse about our entrenched and worsening wealth gap has never been more sorely needed. This remarkable anthology is the literary world’s response, with leading lights including Zadie Smith, Junot Díaz, and Lydia Davis bearing witness to the experience of ordinary New Yorkers in extraordinarily unequal circumstances. Through fiction and reportage, these writers convey the indignities and heartbreak, the callousness and solidarities, of living side by side with people of starkly different means. They shed light on the subterranean lives of homeless people who must find a bed in the city’s tunnels; the stresses that gentrification can bring to neighbors in a Brooklyn apartment block; the shenanigans of seriously alienated night-shift paralegals; the trials of a housing defendant standing up for tenants’ rights; and the humanity that survives in the midst of a deeply divided city. Tales of Two Cities is a brilliant, moving, and ultimately galvanizing clarion call for a city—and a nation—in crisis.


Some of My Best Friends

Some of My Best Friends

Author: Emily Bernard

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2004-08-03

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0060082763

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A collection of essays in which notable and lesser-known figures examine the complexities and importance of interracial friendships.


A Study Guide for Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close"

A Study Guide for Jonathan Safran Foer's

Author: Gale, Cengage Learning

Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning

Published: 2016-06-29

Total Pages: 33

ISBN-13: 1410345513

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A Study Guide for Jonathan Safran Foer's "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.