Traces the route, history, and geography of US 20, America’s longest road. “I know US 20, I live on it, grew up near it, commute to work on it, and have run on it most mornings for twenty-five years. It has become the Main Street of my life. I am fond of it, and want to tell its very American story.” ― from the Introduction Whether he’s on foot, in a car, or even in a canoe, Mac Nelson will delight readers with his rambling, westward depiction of America as seen from the shoulders of its longest road, US Route 20. As the “0” in its route number indicates, US 20 is a coast-to-coast road, crossing twelve states as it meanders 3,300 miles from Boston, Massachusetts, to Newport, Oregon. Nelson, an experienced “shunpiker,” travels west along the Great Road, ruminating on history, literature, scenery, geology, politics, wilderness, the Great Plains, and national parks―whatever the most interesting aspects of a particular region seem to be. Beginning with the great writers and founders of religion in the East who lived and wrote on or near US 20, including Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, and Sylvia Plath, then crossing the plains to the forests, mountains, and deserts of the West, Nelson’s journey on this beloved road is personal and idiosyncratic, serious and comic. More than a mile-by-mile guidebook, Twenty West offers a glimpse of a boyish and very American fascination with the road that will entice the traveler in all of us to take the long way home.

Twenty West: The Great Road Across America

Politics & Social Sciences

Mac Nelson

Social Sciences

Excelsior Editions

Traces the route, history, and geography of US 20, America’s longest road.“I know US 20, I live on it, grew up near it, commute to work on it, and have run on it most mornings for twenty-five years. It has become the Main Street of my life. I am fond of it, and want to tell its very American story.” — from the IntroductionWhether he’s on foot, in a car, or even in a canoe, Mac Nelson will delight readers with his rambling, westward depiction of America as seen from the shoulders of its longest road, US Route 20. As the “0” in its route number indicates, US 20 is a coast-to-coast road, crossing twelve states as it meanders 3,300 miles from Boston, Massachusetts, to Newport, Oregon. Nelson, an experienced “shunpiker,” travels west along the Great Road, ruminating on history, literature, scenery, geology, politics, wilderness, the Great Plains, and national parks—whatever the most interesting aspects of a particular region seem to be. Beginning with the great writers and founders of religion in the East who lived and wrote on or near US 20, including Anne Bradstreet, Phyllis Wheatley, and Sylvia Plath, then crossing the plains to the forests, mountains, and deserts of the West, Nelson’s journey on this beloved road is personal and idiosyncratic, serious and comic. More than a mile-by-mile guidebook, Twenty West offers a glimpse of a boyish and very American fascination with the road that will entice the traveler in all of us to take the long way home.“Nelson manages to pull off the not-so-easy feat of being quirky, erudite and entertaining.” — Chicago Tribune“Armchair travelers and devotees of American history are in for a treat.” — Ann La Farge, The Independent“A wonderful read for armchair travelers, and the next best thing to touring the length of US Route 20 in person.” — Midwest Book Review“From New York state to Yellowstone National Park, Nelson visits the ridiculous and the sublime … Twenty West shows plenty and according to Nelson, ‘There is room for all of us.’” — ForeWord Magazine“This book is a celebration and a cornucopia of American history and culture. Nelson’s curious and fertile mind runs in many directions as he delivers fascinating stories about such diverse Americans as Buffalo Bill, Joseph Smith, Satchel Paige, George Pullman, Ronald Reagan, and Rutherford B. Hayes, as well as stunning insights into writers from Henry David Thoreau to Emily Dickinson. After the road trip, this is a book to savor by the fire.” — Hedrick Smith, author of The Russians and Rethinking America “The author’s subject has innate importance; it is a story that until now has been waiting to be told, and it is to the author’s credit that he seized the opportunity.” — Warren Roberts, Distinguished Teaching Professor of History, University at Albany, State University of New York“I like Mac’s way of combining interesting travel narrative with a wide, free-ranging knowledge of literature, geography, history, and local color. I can hear his voice throughout, and his clear, unique angle of vision.” — Sidner Larson, author of Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing “Neslon’s got it right. He’s an American, along for the ride, from sea to shining sea.” — Diana Hume George, author of The Lonely Other: A Woman Watching America

Challenges readers to rethink the way we view the nation’s past and race relations in the present.Blending historical narrative with ideas for engaging young people as historians and thinkers, Alan J. Singer introduces readers to the truth about the history of slavery in New York State, and, by extension, about race in American society. Singer’s perspective as a historian and a former secondary school social studies teacher offers a wealth of new information about the past and introduces people and events that have been erased from history.New York, both the city and the state, were centers of the abolitionist struggle to finally end human bondage; however, at the same time, enslaved Africans built the infrastructure of the colonial city. The author shows teachers how to develop ways to teach about this very difficult topic. He shows them how to deal with racial preconceptions and tensions in the classroom and calls upon teachers and students to become historical activists, conduct research, write reports, and present their findings to the public.

New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth

History

Singer, Alan J.

Americas

Fascinating stories based on the author’s exploration of eight rivers in New York and Québec.In Living Waters, Margaret Wooster canoes, portages, camps beside, and wades into eight Great Lakes watersheds across New York and Québec, returning with her pockets full of original stories from these beautiful, boggy, and prehistoric waterways. From the history of hydropower development on the Niagara River to the search for a wizard’s cave in the Zoar Valley, from a portrait of an urban creek in Buffalo, to the origins and demise of New France on the St. Lawrence, Living Waters offers a fascinating, first-person exploration of the rivers that impact our world’s largest freshwater ecosystem.

Living Waters: Reading the Rivers of the Lower Great Lakes

Business & Money

Wooster, Margaret

Economics

Latino Voices in New England (Excelsior Editions)

Compelling stories and striking photographs illustrate the challenges and highlights of Latino/a life in Portland, Maine.Latinos―those born in the United States as well as those who immigrated later in life―are not only transforming the country and cities, they are also transforming themselves in a difficult process of community making. This book tells the story of how a diverse group of immigrants have adapted to dramatic changes in the largely Anglo setting of Portland, Maine, building bridges instead of walls. The Latino storytellers included here address multiple challenges of discrimination, language barriers, cultural retention and adaptation, and speak of their strengths―strong family ties, a connection to the environment, and an expanding sense of home―to illustrate how they have emerged not only with hopes and dreams intact, but also with a resilience built upon fluid and flexible identities.

Compelling stories and striking photographs illustrate the challenges and highlights of Latino/a life in Portland, Maine. Latinos―those born in the United States as well as those who immigrated later in life―are not only transforming the country and cities, they are also transforming themselves in a difficult process of community making. This book tells the story of how a diverse group of immigrants have adapted to dramatic changes in the largely Anglo setting of Portland, Maine, building bridges instead of walls. The Latino storytellers included here address multiple challenges of discrimination, language barriers, cultural retention and adaptation, and speak of their strengths―strong family ties, a connection to the environment, and an expanding sense of home―to illustrate how they have emerged not only with hopes and dreams intact, but also with a resilience built upon fluid and flexible identities.

Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India: Hala's Sattasai (S U N Y Series in Hindu Studies)

The oldest surviving anthology of lyric poems from India, the Sattasai presents the many aspects of love and provides a realistic counterpart to the Kāmasūtra.An elegant translation of the Sattasaī (or Seven Hundred), India’s earliest collection of lyric poetry, Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India deals with love in its many aspects. Mostly narrated by women, the poems reveal the world of local Indian village life sometime between the third and fifth centuries. The Sattasaī offers a more realistic counterpart to that notorious theoretical treatise on love the Kāmasūtra, which presents a cosmopolitan and calculating milieu. Translators Peter Khoroche and Herman Tieken introduce the main features of the work in its own language and time. For modern readers, these short, self-contained poems are a treat: the sentiments they depict remain affecting and contemporary while providing a window into a world long past.

Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India: Hala's Sattasai (SUNY series in Hindu Studies)

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

An inside story of privilege, inherited wealth, and the bizarre values and customs of the American upper crust. We Used to Own the Bronx tells the story of a woman born into the proprieties of an East Coast dynasty who nevertheless leaves her world of privilege for a career as an investigative reporter. Recounting her upbringing, Eve Pell offers an inside look at the bizarre values and customs of the American aristocracy, from debutante balls and the belowstairs hierarchy of the servant class to the fanatical pursuit of blood sports and private men’s clubs whose members were cared for like sultans. In the patriarchal world of the upper crust, girls were expected to flatter and defer to boys and men: her scholar-athlete sister was offered a racehorse if she would refuse to attend college. A parade of eccentrics populates the book, from the cockfighting stepfather who ran away from boarding school with a false beard and a stolen motorcycle to the Brahmin great-uncle who secretly organized the servants in Tuxedo Park to vote for Teddy Roosevelt. But as she moved beyond the narrow world she was expected to inhabit, Pell encountered people and ideas that brought her into conflict with her past. Equally unconventional are the muckrakers and revolutionaries she met in the 1960s and 1970s, and her subsequent adventures and misadventures while working with radical activists to reform the California prison system. As Pell traces her absorbing journey from debutante to working mother, from the upper crust of the East Coast to the radical activists of the West, from a life of wealth and privilege to one of trying to make ends meet, she provides exceptional insight into the prickly and complex issues of social class in America. “We all know what poverty can do—to individuals, to families, to societies that look the other way … But what about wealth? What can the possession of immense fortune, over time, do to us? Eve Pell knows. Eve Pell, in this riveting new memoir, tells. We should listen.” — Too Much “[Pell] tells [her] before-and-after story, briskly and with considerable flair … If you’ve ever pressed your nose to the chintz-covered window of Old Money and wished you were born into a great American family, this is the book you need—Pell will take you inside the mansion and share every glorious and terrible secret of the aristocracy.” — HeadButler.com “In We Used to Own the Bronx, her revealing and riveting memoir, Eve Pell defies the dictates of her social class—to be charming but not to say what she felt—and bares all. She detonates bombshells and unmasks betrayals on almost every page.” — San Francisco Chronicle “…refreshingly direct … Pell … uses her lively memoir of growing up in aristocratic style to ask a series of provocative questions: Is it possible to choke on a silver spoon? What good is a sense of entitlement? Are riches wasted on the rich? Her candid account of bristling at her birthright transcends the stereotype suggested by the subtitle to divulge the psychic pressures of living with inherited privilege in a meritocracy-mad country … To her lasting credit, We Used to Own the Bronx is a graceful object lesson in how perspective is gained not all at once but by accretion, the reward of years of methodical observation.” — truthdig.com “…first-rate … absolutely fascinating … We Used to Own the Bronx is written from a rare combination of inside and outside. Both are essential.” — New York Social Diary

We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante (Excelsior Editions)

Biographies & Memoirs

Pell, Eve

Community & Culture

Where We Find Ourselves: Jewish Women Around the World Write About Home (Suny Series in Modern Jewish Literature & Culture)

Explores the universal longing for home, illuminated through the essays, poetry, and fiction of forty Jewish women writers from around the world. In this remarkable collection of essays, stories, and poems, Jewish women writers from around the world offer diverse perspectives on the idea of home. The longing for home is as ancient as the exile from Eden, and for the thirty-nine writers showcased in this anthology, the struggle to find and redefine home has been intensified by history, the Holocaust, and the diverse cultural, political, and religious contexts in which they live and write. Together, they explore the many natures and meanings of home: home as a place one is born to and sometimes forced to leave; home as a place one can journey toward or create; home as an abstract composite of memories, emotions, and rituals. Some of these writers contend with exile and anti-Semitism, others examine the mixed blessings of sheltered childhoods, and all confront memories in which the historical and personal are intertwined. Their range of perspectives and their personal approaches to a universal concern make Where We Find Ourselves a compelling read for students, scholars, and all who seek to understand what it means to be home. “…this thoughtful, humbling and undeniably spirited collection makes a comforting touchstone.” — Publishers Weekly “Where We Find Ourselves is a moving tapestry of Jewish women’s search for home in places as diverse as Chile, Romania, Australia, Israel, and the United States. But what is home? We learn from this book that it is many things. It is memory, loss, poetry, language, an illusion, a sand castle to be consumed by time. But it is also the prosaic comforts that make it possible for women to think and dream—it is books, a laptop, a washing machine, and watercolor landscapes on the wall. Sad and hopeful by turns, the stories and essays in this book will illuminate women’s yearning to make their home in a place where the heart can speak.” — Ruth Behar, author of An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba Contributors include Marjorie Agosin, Edith Altman, Diana Anhalt, Miriam Ben-Yoseph, Ellen Cassedy, Helen Degen Cohen, Dina Elenbogen, Jyl Lynn Felman, Dorothy Field, S. E. Gilman, Farideh Dayanim Goldin, Viva Hammer, Arlene Hisiger, Rachel Goldin Jinich, Cha Johnston, Dalia Kaveh, Tracy Koretsky, Else Lasker-Schüler, Barbara F. Lefcowitz, Marcelle Levy, Rochelle Mass, Ada Molinoff, Angelina Muñiz-Huberman, Erusha Newman, Sara Paretsky, Julie Parson-Nesbitt, Eve Perkal, Deborah Nodler Rosen, Maria Roth, Dina Rubina, Sara Schwarzbaum, Nava Semel, Caroline Smadja, Judith Ilson Taylor, Madeline Tiger, Davi Walders, Gerda Weissmann Klein, Arlene Zide, and Linda Stern Zisquit.

Where We Find Ourselves: Jewish Women around the World Write about Home (SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture)

Parenting & Relationships

Overturns traditional views of the origins of fairy tales and documents their actual origins and transmission. Where did Cinderella come from? Puss in Boots? Rapunzel? The origins of fairy tales are looked at in a new way in these highly engaging pages. Conventional wisdom holds that fairy tales originated in the oral traditions of peasants and were recorded for posterity by the Brothers Grimm during the nineteenth century. Ruth B. Bottigheimer overturns this view in a lively account of the origins of these well-loved stories. Charles Perrault created Cinderella and her fairy godmother, but no countrywoman whispered this tale into Perrault’s ear. Instead, his Cinderella appeared only after he had edited it from the book of often amoral tales published by Giambattista Basile in Naples. Distinguishing fairy tales from folktales and showing the influence of the medieval romance on them, Bottigheimer documents how fairy tales originated as urban writing for urban readers and listeners. Working backward from the Grimms to the earliest known sixteenth-century fairy tales of the Italian Renaissance, Bottigheimer argues for a book-based history of fairy tales. The first new approach to fairy tale history in decades, this book answers questions about where fairy tales came from and how they spread, illuminating a narrative process long veiled by surmise and assumption.

Fairy Tales: A New History

Bottigheimer, Ruth B.

Teen & Young Adult

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Excelsior Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Excelsior Editions

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Excelsior Editions publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Twenty West: The Great Road Across America

Twenty West: The Great Road Across America

New York and Slavery: Time to Teach the Truth

Living Waters: Reading the Rivers of the Lower Great Lakes

Latino Voices in New England (Excelsior Editions)

Latino Voices in New England (Excelsior Editions)

Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India: Hala's Sattasai (SUNY series in Hindu Studies)

We Used to Own the Bronx: Memoirs of a Former Debutante (Excelsior Editions)

Where We Find Ourselves: Jewish Women around the World Write about Home (SUNY series in Modern Jewish Literature and Culture)

Fairy Tales: A New History