Q&A with Robert Jackson, Author of Highway Under the Hudson
Q&A with Robert Jackson, Author of Highway Under the Hudson
Texas native Robert Jackson spent three and a half years compiling a complete history on a structure far from his home, something 33 million East Coasters pass through every year: the Holland Tunnel. Built in 1927, this daily part of New Yorkers’ lives was at the time the longest and largest of the vehicular tunnels in the entire world, and the first to utilize a ventilation system. Read more
Illustrator’s Book Captures Horrors of WWII
By Ashley Welch
The award-winning illustrator Ed Young will celebrate his 80th birthday this fall with the release of two new books and the launch of a one-man show about his work on countless children’s books over the years.
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The Death and Life of New York City
By Mark Peikert
Roberta Brandes Gratz’ new book The Battle for Gotham examines how Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs impacted the look of Downtown Manhattan
No rivalry will ever serve as a better representation of New York City itself than that of the ruthlessly ambitious Robert Moses and the community-minded Jane Jacobs. Moses, the mercurial, all-powerful “master builder” responsible for everything from the Cross Bronx Expressway to Jones Beach, found his near-absolute power overthrown by urban activist Jacobs, whose book The Death and Life of Great American Cities and successful protest of Moses’ planned elevated thruway in Soho almost single-handedly destroyed the vision of cities as characterless, efficiency-driven monoliths that Moses had successfully propagated.
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Of Golightly and Mazursky
By Mark Peikert
Film writer Sam Wasson has made a name for himself with books that shed new light on familiar subjects. After chronicling the films of director Blake Edwards in A Splurch in the Kisser, Wasson narrowed his sights to a single Edwards film: Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The result was last summer’s buzziest book, the New York Times bestselling Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman.
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The Summer of Cash
By Mark Peikert
Any discussion of Rosanne Cash these days must include some reference to her lively, busy Twitter page, which details everything from the new shoes she bought to the things she worries about at three in the morning. This being Cash, however, her 3 a.m. fears aren’t the usual insomniac’s. Instead of mortality, she wondered on Twitter “What if there’s a sprinkler & it goes off when I’m sleeping & my red hair color gets on the pillow & someone thinks it’s blood.” Cash saves her dark nights of the soul for her music.
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Upper West Side as Muse
Even though Laurie Graff has lived on the Upper East Side and Los Angeles, the only place she has ever called home is the Upper West Side.
That is where she began her acting career, and where she authored and set parts of her three novels, The Shiksa Syndrome, Looking for Mr. Goodfrog and You Have to Kiss a Lot of Frogs, which will be reissued next year.
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Upper West Side Scribblers on the Roof
The name of the new literary series came to him in his sleep.
Melvin Jules Bukiet woke up near midnight more than a decade ago with the concept and name “Scribblers on the Roof” in his head.
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Reading Upper West Side
For the sidebars, please go to:
Upper West Side as Muse
Upper West Side Scribblers on the Roof
Why the neighborhood continues to inspire authors, and some of the great reads (old and new) that are set just outside your door
By Beth Mellow
The Green family as portrayed in Katharine Weber’s The Little Women are a creative and intellectual bunch living in a sprawling and somewhat messy Upper West Side apartment. Mom is a professor and dad is an inventor. All three sisters engage in artistic pursuits including music, art and writing. When the family is shaken by infidelity, the two younger sisters decide to leave home and follow their oldest sibling to New Haven, where she’s beginning her junior year at Yale University.
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West Sider’s “End Game”
Chess champ pens book about Bobby Fischer
Not many writers get the chance to revisit their most famous work.
Upper West Side author and professor Frank Brady, 76, has been given that chance. His latest book, Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall – From America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness, was released Feb. 2.
Photo by Andrew Schwartz
The Happy Hunter
Sports journalist hopes newest book will reveal what’s underneath camo
By James Lobo
Pete Bodo has man-paws. One of them wraps around a Guinness and the other lies flat on a table, in the back room of Dublin House on West 79th street, just blocks from his apartment on Riverside Drive. The outdoorsman is talking about his new hunting memoir.
“One of the great things about this country is that any knucklehead can go out there and get a hunting license and have the opportunity to engage nature,” said the author and senior editor at Tennis magazine, who periodically escapes to his 150-acre property in the Catskills to get his wildlife fix. Read more
