Shows vividly how the Great Fire of 1835, which nearly leveled Manhattan also created the ashes from which the city was reborn.\nOn a freezing December night almost two centuries ago, a fire erupted in lower Manhattan. The city's inhabitants, though accustomed to blazes in a town with so many wooden structures, a spotty water supply, and a decentralized fire department, looked on in horror at the scale of this one. Philip Hone, a former mayor of New York, wrote in his diary how "the progress of the flames, like flashes of lightning, communicated in every direction, and a few minutes sufficed to level the lofty edifices on every side." By the time the fire was extinguished, a huge swath of land had been transformed from a thriving business center into the "Burnt District," an area roughly the same size as was devastated during the September 11th attack. In the end, nearly 700 buildings were destroyed. So vast was the conflagration that it was immediately and henceforth known as the Great Fire of 1835.\nManhattan Phoenix reveals how New York emerged from the disaster to become a global powerhouse merely a quarter of a century later. Daniel S. Levy's book charts the city's almost miraculous growth during the early 19th century by focusing on the topics that shaped its destiny, starting with fire but including water, land, disease, culture, and politics, interweaving the lives of New Yorkers who took part in its transformation. Some are well-known, including the land baron John Jacob Astor. Others less so, as with the Bowery Theatre impresario Thomas Hamblin and the African-American restaurateur Thomas Downing. The book celebrates Fire Chief James Gulick, who battled the Great Fire, examines the designs of the architect Alexander Jackson Davis who built marble palaces for the rich, follows the abolitionist Arthur Tappan, chronicles the career of the merchant Alexander Stewart, and reveals how the engineer John Bloomfield Jervis succeeded in bringing clean water into homes. The city's 
resurrection likewise owed much to such visionaries as Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who designed Central Park, creating the refuge that it remains to this day.\nManhattan Phoenix offers the story of a city rising from the ashes to fulfill its destiny to grow into one of the world's greatest metropolises―and in no small part due to catastrophe. It is, in other words, a New York story.

Manhattan Phoenix: The Great Fire of 1835 and the Emergence of Modern New York

History

Levy, Daniel S.

Americas

Oxford University Press

Presents a portrait of the British petty thief and con artist who became a general in Nationalist China

Two-Gun Cohen: A Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press

A chunky Jewish battler from the East End of London, a con man, cardsharp, and charlatan-with-a-heart who became a bodyguard to Sun Yat-sen and a general in the Chinese Army, Morris "Two-Gun" Cohen was one of the most unusual adventurers of the twentieth century. He earned the name "Two-Gun" because wherever he went he always packed two pistols, which he wasn't afraid to use. Born into devout piety and dire poverty, Cohen did not appear to have a promising future. The eldest son of Orthodox Jewish parents, he nevertheless quickly developed into an incorrigible juvenile delinquent. Arrested in 1900 for picking pockets, Cohen was sent to reform school and then shipped off to western Canada. There he spent years wandering from Manitoba to British Columbia, picking pockets and hustling as he went. He regularly played poker at a Chinese gambling den in Saskatoon and one evening stumbled into the middle of an armed robbery. He did what came naturally to him, but what was unheard of at the time - he came to the defense of a Chinese man and knocked the robber out. That selfless act gained him the respect of the Chinese community; and a career in the Chinese revolution. After sailing to China in 1922, Cohen became an aide to President Sun Yat-sen and an influential man in Nationalist China, ending up as a general despite the fact that he never learned Chinese.

Two-Gun Cohen

Historical

St Martins Pr

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