Cafe Life New York: An Insider’s Guide to the City’s Neighborhood Cafes by SANDY MILLER

New In Paperback $20.00     *Local Author

Discover the cafés of New York City, the neighborhood hangouts that even street-smart New Yorkers often miss. Organized according to neighborhood, this book, the newest addition to the popular Café Life series, features those cafés that anchor neighborhoods and make life in the city richer and less daunting. The highly personal and richly anecdotal text, supplemented by color photographs that beautifully evoke both the city and its cafés, portrays the magic and allure of New York’s café culture from the perspective of both café owners and patrons. Learn about New York’s neighborhoods through its cafés; learn about New York’s cafés through its neighborhoods. Each reflects and reveals the other.

Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills by DAVID STRADLING

New In Hardcover $35.00 - 10%

For over two hundred years, the Catskill Mountains have been repeatedly and dramatically transformed by New York City. In Making Mountains, David Stradling shows the transformation of the Catskills landscape as a collaborative process, one in which local and urban hands, capital, and ideas have come together to reshape the mountains and the communities therein, with environmental, economic, and cultural consequences.

Early on, the Catskills were an important source of natural resources. Later, when New York City needed to expand its water supply, engineers helped direct the city toward the Catskills, claiming that the mountains offered the purest and most cost-effective waters. By the 1960s, New York had created a great reservoir and aqueduct system in the mountains that now supplies the city with 90 percent of its water.

The Catskills also served as a critical space in which the nation’s ideas about nature evolved. Stradling describes the great influence of writers and artists - especially the painters of the Hudson River School, whose ideal landscapes created expectations about how rural America should appear. By the mid-1800s, urban residents had turned the Catskills into an important vacation ground, and by the late 1800s, the Catskills had become one of the premiere resort regions in the nation.

In the mid-twentieth century, the older Catskill resort region was in steep decline, but the Jewish “Borscht Belt” in the southern Catskills was thriving. The automobile revitalized mountain tourism and residence, and increased the threat of suburbanization of the historic landscape. Throughout each of these significant incarnations, urban and rural residents worked in a rough collaboration, though not without conflict, to reshape the mountains and American ideas about rural landscapes and nature.

David Stradling is associate professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. His focus is the intersection of urban and environmental history. He is author of Smokestacks and Progressives: Environmentalists, Engineers, and Air Quality in America, 1881-1951 and editor of Conservation in the Progressive Era: Classic Texts.

The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History by LINDA COLLEY 

New In Hardcover $27.50

There were many ordeals—and adventures—in the tumultuous life of this emblematic 18th-century Englishwoman. At age 20 Marsh was captured by Barbary pirates and narrowly fended off the