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Author: Shirley Tallman
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-10-16
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 1250010438
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Tallman offers an entertaining mystery . . . will appeal to fans of Anne Perry and Rhys Bowen"--"Library Journal." San Francisco, 1882. When her brother is hit by a bullet, a crusading young lawyer discovers more murder and mayhem on Telegraph Hill.
Author: Mark Bittner
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2007-12-18
Total Pages: 306
ISBN-13: 030742247X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill is the inspiring story of how one man found his life’s work—and true love—among a gang of wild parrots roosting in one of America’s most picturesque urban settings. Mark Bittner was down on his luck. He’d gone to San Francisco at the age of twenty-one to take a stab at a music career, but he hadn’t had much success. After many years as an odd-jobber in the area, he accepted work as a housekeeper for an elderly woman. The gig came with a rent-free studio apartment on the city’s famed Telegraph Hill, which had somehow become home to a flock of brilliantly colored wild parrots. In this unforgettable story, Bittner recounts how he became fascinated by the birds and made up his mind to get to know them and gain their trust. He succeeds to such a degree that he becomes the local wild parrot expert and a tourist attraction. People can’t help gawking at the man who, during daily feedings, stands with parrots perched along both arms and atop his head. When a documentary filmmaker comes along to capture the phenomenon on film, the story takes a surprising turn, and Bittner’s life truly takes flight.
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Harper Collins
Published: 2012-09-25
Total Pages: 528
ISBN-13: 1443420654
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →New York Times Bestseller “A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage. . . Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time." — Benjamin Percy, Esquire New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union); to discover The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us to Telegraph Avenue in a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. In Telegraph Avenue, Chabon lovingly creates a world grounded in pop culture—Kung Fu, ’70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music—and delivers a bravura epic of friendship, race, and secret histories. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland. When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complications to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.
Author: Michael Castleman
Publisher: Last Gasp
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 246
ISBN-13: 9780867196757
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The second title in the Ed Rosenberg mystery series. At the gala launch party for porn publisher Ted Calderone's new erotic magazine, sexy models serve delicious appetizers but a murderer has spiked one tray with poison mushrooms, death caps. A controversial investigative reporter eats them and dies. Local newspaperman Ed Rosenberg was standing next to the victim when he swallowed the poison, and gets wrapped into the vortex of the murder investigation. Ed follows leads from a dark basement in Chinatown to a fabulous mansion atop Russian Hill, and to the heart of America's porn industry. He meets gorgeous nude models, a famous feminist who hated Calderone but now works for him, and a genius computer hacker. More bodies drop, and Ed wonders if Calderone is the murderer or the killer's ultimate target. Then Ed finds himself looking down the wrong end of a gun.
Author: Catherine Prendergast
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2022-10-11
Total Pages: 361
ISBN-13: 0593182936
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“The Gilded Edge is a compelling read from start to finish. Gripping, suspenseful, cinematic. This is narrative nonfiction at its best.”—Lindsey Fitzharris, bestselling author of The Butchering Art Astonishingly well written, painstakingly researched, and set in the evocative locations of earthquake-ravaged San Francisco and the Monterey Peninsula, the true story of two women—a wife and a poet—who learn the high price of sexual and artistic freedom in a vivid depiction of the debauchery of the late Gilded Age Nora May French and Carrie Sterling arrive at Carmel-by-the-Sea at the turn of the twentieth century with dramatically different ambitions. Nora, a stunning, brilliant, impulsive writer in her early twenties, seeks artistic recognition and Bohemian refuge among the most celebrated counterculturalists of the era. Carrie, long-suffering wife of real estate developer George Sterling, wants the opposite: a semblance of the stability she thought her advantageous marriage would offer, threatened now that her philandering husband has taken to writing poetry. After her second abortion, Nora finds herself in a desperate situation but is rescued by an invitation to stay with the Sterlings. To Carrie's dismay, George and the arrestingly beautiful poetess fall instantly into an affair. The ensuing love triangle, which ultimately ends with the deaths of all three, is more than just a wild love story and a fascinating forgotten chapter. It questions why Nora May—in her day a revered poet whose nationally reported suicide gruesomely inspired youths across the country to take their own lives, with her verses in their pockets no less—has been rendered obscure by literary history. It depicts America at a turning point, as the Gilded Age groans in its death throes and young people, particularly women, look toward a brighter, more egalitarian future. In an unfortunately familiar development, this vision proves to be a mirage. But women's rage at the scam redefines American progressivism forever. For readers of Nathalia Holt, Denise Kiernan, and Sonia Purnell, this shocking history with a feminist bite is not to be missed.
Author: Lynn Downey
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 2019-09-12
Total Pages: 303
ISBN-13: 0806165111
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →As San Francisco recovered from the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906, dust and ash filled the city’s stuffy factories, stores, and classrooms. Dr. Philip King Brown noticed rising tuberculosis rates among the women who worked there, and he knew there were few places where they could get affordable treatment. In 1911, with the help of wealthy society women and his wife, Helen, a protégé of philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Brown opened the Arequipa Sanatorium in Marin County. Together, Brown and his all-female staff gave new life to hundreds of working-class women suffering from tuberculosis in early-twentieth-century California. Until streptomycin was discovered in the 1940s, tubercular patients had few treatment options other than to take a rest cure at a sanatorium and endure its painful medical interventions. For the working class and minorities, especially women, the options were even fewer. Unlike most other medical facilities of the time, Arequipa treated primarily working-class women and provided the same treatment to all, including Asian American and African American women, despite the virulent racism of the time. Author Lynn Downey’s own grandmother was given a terminal tuberculosis diagnosis in 1927, but after treatment at Arequipa, she lived to be 102 years old. Arequipa gave female doctors a place to practice, female nurses and social workers a place to train, and white society women a noble philanthropic mission. Although Arequipa was founded by a male doctor and later administered by his son, the sanatorium’s mission was truly about the women who worked and recovered there, and it was they who kept it going. Based on sanatorium records Downey herself helped to preserve and interviews she conducted with former patients and others associated with Arequipa, Downey tells a vivid story of the sanatorium and its cure that Brown and his talented team of Progressive women made available and possible for hundreds of working-class patients.
Author: Derek Smith
Publisher: Stackpole Books
Published: 2005-04-21
Total Pages: 428
ISBN-13: 0811748723
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Covers the deaths of 124 generals, including Stonewall Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, Jeb Stuart, James B. McPherson, John Reynolds, and numerous others
Author: Jean Alice Rowcliffe
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Published: 2013-07
Total Pages: 330
ISBN-13: 1483664678
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"This book is a MUST READ for anyone who has lost a loved one or is seeking an honest story about what it is like to traverse the journey of grief. Jean's powerfully candid story is rich, insightful, and illuminates a truth in all our lives that is sadly unnoticed and often silenced." Juli Fraga, Psy.D., Licensed Psychologist A mother grasps her dying son's hand, struggling how to let go and aghast at what life will become after his death. The Last Tear is the harrowing true story of my only child James, a dynamic 17 year old who was diagnosed in 2008 with an extremely rare form of cancer, dying eleven months later on the eve of Mother's Day. Rather than allowing cancer to define his days James became even more focused on school, college applications and his future, inspiring not only his peers but the larger community including President Obama. My crippling sorrow that paralyzed for years is shared with candor and will touch anyone who has struggled with excruciating grief. Poignant and at times difficult, The Last Tear eventually uplifts as it transcends a tale of cancer and death to embrace the larger canvas of how to live authentically with sorrow as a new companion.
Author: Charles S. Wilson
Publisher: iUniverse
Published: 2007-09-11
Total Pages: 360
ISBN-13: 0595887449
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The doors of the house inhabited by the Jack Wilson family on Telegraph Hill lead to a terrible secret. Within those walls, Charles S. Wilson and his sisters suffered heartbreaking physical and mental abuse at the hands of their own parents. Mother Mame was a well-known caretaker in the community, but she also brought strangers into the house and force-fed them until they were sick. Their father Jack, better known as the town drunk, threw Wilson around like a rag doll for the amusement of his drunken friends. And then there were Annabelle and Abigail, Wilson's beloved sisters, whose neglected and tortured lives ended all too soon. A story of survival, The House on Telegraph Hill, details the abuse Wilson suffered and sheds light, not only on his own demoralizing experience, but also on the epidemic of child abuse. His brutally honest stories reveal all of the disguises, sugar-coatings, and lies that abusers heap on their victims. By recounting his dreadful upbringing along with his lifelong struggles, Wilson is finally pushing his story to the forefront to help educate others about the horrors and complexities of child abuse.
Author: Terry Hamburg
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2024-09-15
Total Pages: 237
ISBN-13: 1633889874
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The fabled nineteenth-century migration to the American West was filled with peril and despair. From sailing ship to covered wagon, ambitious young pioneers endured six months of unprecedented, largely unanticipated personal hardship – that is, if they survived the trip. Death was a constant companion and the promised land proved as lethal as it was fickle. The Land of the Dead explores how the demands of survival and adaptation during Westward Expansion changed the way we have buried and grieved for our dead in America. That custom was one of many transformations an outlier adolescent culture wrought upon the nation that spawned it. Nowhere did these changes play out more dynamically than in California, particularly in the quintessential American boom city - gold rush San Francisco, which banned burials at the turn of the twentieth century and then decreed the removal of 150,000 privately owned graves, the only major metropolis to execute a complete eviction of its dead. The epic cemetery battle began early, when San Francisco was still a remote, wannabe great city, and raged on for over half a century, replete with fiery polemics, political intrigue, nasty legal wrangling, and contested elections. Public cemeteries were dispatched quickly but – as time will reveal – hardly well. Private sanctuaries took longer to expunge, and many of its “residents” were overlooked in what has been called “the greatest mass removal of the dead in human history.” How could the unthinkable happen? And how did other early American cities reckon with the now-precious land once dedicated to their dead. In this well-researched and well-told history, Terry Hamburg explores how an “instant city” heritage bred that momentous decision. Providing a fresh overlay on traditional narratives and revealing a burgeoning nation’s trends and conflicts, Land of the Dead examines how we relate to our ‘living dead’ then and now.
