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The Girl Who Fought Back: Vladka Meed and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Scholastic Focus)
by Joshua M. GreeneA Junior Library Guild Selection!The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of history's most powerful acts of resistance. Here, author Joshua M. Greene (Signs of Survival) tells the true story of a young Jewish woman who was instrumental in the uprising as a smuggler of messages and weapons into and out of the Warsaw Ghetto.Scholastic Focus is the premier home of thoroughly researched, beautifully written, and thoughtfully designed works of narrative nonfiction aimed at middle-grade and young adult readers. These books help readers learn about the world in which they live and develop their critical thinking skills so that they may become dynamic citizens who are able to analyze and understand our past, participate in essential discussions about our present, and work to grow and build our future.Warsaw, Poland, 1940s: The Nazis are on the march, determined to wipe out the Jewish people of Europe. Teenage Vladka and her family are among the thousands of Jews forced to relocate behind the walls of the Warsaw Ghetto, a cramped, oppressive space full of starvation, suffering, and death.When Vladka's family is deported to concentration camps, Vladka joins up with other young people in the ghetto who are part of the Jewish underground: a group determined to fight back against the Nazis, no matter the cost.Vladka's role in the underground? To pass as a non-Jew, sneaking out of the ghetto to blend into Polish society while smuggling secret messages and weapons back over the ghetto wall. Every move she makes comes with the risk of being arrested or killed. But Vladka and her friends know that their missions are worth the danger-they are preparing for an uprising like no other, one that will challenge the Nazi war machine.This astonishing true story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, told through the lens of Holocaust survivor and educator Vladka Meed, introduces readers to a crucial piece of history while highlighting the persistence of bravery in the face of hate.
Swami in a Strange Land: How Krishna Came to the West
by Joshua M. GreeneDiscover the man behind the movement in this intimate biography of A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, founder of the International Society of Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON).In 1965, a seventy-year-old man--soon to be known as Prabhupada--set sail from India to America with a few books in his bag, pennies in his pockets, and a message of love in his heart. He landed in New York at the peak of the revolutionary counterculture movement of the '60s, and went on to spark a global spiritual renaissance that led to the creation of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, which has changed millions of lives. Through the depiction of Prabhupada as both an enlightened luminary and a personable, funny, and conscientious individual, Swami in a Strange Land shows why cultural icons such as George Harrison and Allen Ginsberg incorporated Prabhupada's teachings into their lives, and why millions more around the globe embarked upon the path of bhakti yoga in his footsteps. Carefully researched, skillfully crafted, and extraordinarily intimate, this narrative follows Prabhupada as he rises from an anonymous monk to a world-renowned spiritual leader. Set in locations as far ranging as remote Himalayan caves and the gilded corridors of Paris's City Hall, Swami in a Strange Land traces the rise of Eastern spirituality in the West--and in particular, the rise of yoga culture and vegetarianism and the concepts of karma and reincarnation. A remarkable journey into the deepest dimensions of the human experience, Swami in a Strange Land shows how one man with a dream can change the world.
Unstoppable: Siggi B. Wilzig's Astonishing Journey from Auschwitz Survivor and Penniless Immigrant to Wall Street Legend
by Joshua M. GreeneUnstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure. While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with his family to the darkest place the world has ever known: Auschwitz. Siggi used his wits to stay alive, pretending to have trade skills the Nazis could exploit to run the camp. After two death marches and near starvation, he was liberated from camp Mauthausen and went to work for the US Army hunting Nazis, a service that earned him a visa to America. On arrival, he made three vows: to never go hungry again, to support the Jewish people, and to speak out against injustice. He earned his first dollar shoveling snow after a fierce blizzard. His next job was laboring in toxic sweatshops. From these humble beginnings, he became President, Chairman and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed oil company and grew a full-service commercial bank to more than $4 billion in assets. Siggi&’s ascent from the darkest of yesterdays to the brightest of tomorrows holds sway over the imagination in this riveting narrative of grit, cunning, luck, and the determination to live life to the fullest.
Washita: The U.S. Army and the Southern Cheyennes, 1867-1869
by Jerome A. GreeneOn November 27, 1868, the U.S. Seventh Cavalry under Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer attacked a Southern Cheyenne village along the Washita River in present-day western Oklahoma. In this remarkably balanced history, Greene describes the event's causes, conduct, and consequences and the multiple controversies surrounding the conflict.
Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir
by Jayson Greene<P><P>For readers of The Bright Hour and When Breath Becomes Air, a moving, transcendent memoir of loss and a stunning exploration of marriage in the wake of unimaginable grief. <P><P>As the book opens: two-year-old Greta Greene is sitting with her grandmother on a park bench on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead, striking her unconscious, and she is immediately rushed to the hospital. <P><P>But although it begins with this event and with the anguish Jayson and his wife, Stacy, confront in the wake of their daughter's trauma and the hours leading up to her death, Once More We Saw Stars quickly becomes a narrative that is as much about hope and healing as it is about grief and loss. <P><P>Jayson recognizes, even in the midst of his ordeal, that there will be a life for him beyond it--that if only he can continue moving forward, from one moment to the next, he will survive what seems unsurvivable. <P><P>With raw honesty, deep emotion, and exquisite tenderness, he captures both the fragility of life and absoluteness of death, and most important of all, the unconquerable power of love. This is an unforgettable memoir of courage and transformation--and a book that will change the way you look at the world.
Once More We Saw Stars: A Memoir of Life and Love After Unimaginable Loss - as listed in Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2019
by Jayson GreeneListed in Time's 100 Must-Read Books of 2019'A gripping and beautiful book about the power of love in the face of unimaginable loss' Cheryl Strayed'Extraordinary . . . both heartbreaking and life-affirming . . . you will find your heart magically expanded'Mail on Sunday'Greene's account of his loss is remarkably uplifting. It's hard-won proof that love can survive our worst fears and our darkest, most desperate emotions.'Daily Mail'This minutely observed memoir will surely be helpful to people whose world changes in an instant . . . a hopeful book in many ways'The Times'Wonderful writing, brave, unbearably sad'Adam KayTwo-year-old Greta Greene is sitting chatting with her grandmother on a park bench in New York when a brick crumbles from a windowsill overhead and strikes her unconscious. As she is rushed to hospital in the hours before her death Once More We Stars leads us into the unimaginable.Her father Jayson and mother Stacy begin a painful journey that is as much about hope and healing as it is grief and loss. Even in the midst of his ordeal, Jayson recognises that there will be a life for him beyond it - if he can only continue moving forward, from one moment to the next, he will survive what seems un-survivable. With raw honesty, deep emotion, and exquisite tenderness, he captures the fragility of life and the absoluteness of death, and most important of all, the unconquerable power of love. This is an unforgettable memoir of courage and transformation - and a book that will change the way you look at the world.
A-Okay
by Jarad GreeneA-Okay by Jarad Greene is a vulnerable and heartfelt semi-autobiographical middle grade graphic novel about acne, identity, and finding your place. When Jay starts eighth grade with a few pimples he doesn’t think much of it at first…except to wonder if the embarrassing acne will disappear as quickly as it arrived. But when his acne goes from bad to worse, Jay’s prescribed a powerful medication that comes with some serious side effects. Regardless, he’s convinced it’ll all be worth it if clear skin is on the horizon!Meanwhile, school isn’t going exactly as planned. All of Jay’s friends are in different classes; he has no one to sit with at lunch; his best friend, Brace, is avoiding him; and—to top it off—Jay doesn’t understand why he doesn’t share the same feelings two of his fellow classmates, a boy named Mark and a girl named Amy, have for him. Eighth grade can be tough, but Jay has to believe everything’s going to be a-okay…right?
Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1892-1910
by Jane Bannard Greene Rainer Maria Rilke M. D. NortonThis representative selection from Rilke's large and extraordinary correspondence provides a kind of spiritual autobiography of the poet. The period here covered reflects all the great experiences of Rilke's early adult life: his difficult beginnings, his relationships with Lou Andreas-Salome and with his wife Clara, his two journeys to Russia, his contact with the Worpswede artists, the influence of Paris, the revelation of Cezanne. Many of the letters are psychologically revealing; many touch upon characteristic themes, or freshly transcribe experience that sooner or later passes into the poetry.
The Black Prince and the Sea Devils: The Story of Prince Valerio Borghese and the Elite Commandos of the Decima
by Jack Greene Alessandro MassignaniThe only biography of Prince Valerio Borghese-the legendary Italian World War II naval commando whose covert activities shocked the Allies and became a model for today's special forces
Graham Greene: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series)
by Graham GreeneA master of twentieth century fiction, Graham Greene looks back on his life. This volume also includes several key interviews from throughout his long, fruitful career.Graham Greene led one of the most extraordinary lives of the twentieth century. The son of a Hertfordshire headmaster, he quickly discovered a love for writing, beginning a career that would last a lifetime. Greene's fascination with global politics took him around the world, to places that would become the settings for many of his most famous novels: Mexico (The Power and the Glory), Sierra Leone (The Heart of the Matter), and Haiti (The Comedians) - among dozens of other far-flung locations. He produced masterpieces throughout his life, many of which now stand as indisputably canonical: Brighton Rock, The End of the Affair, and The Quiet American to name but a few.
The Lost Childhood: And Other Essays
by Graham GreeneFrom Dickens to Wilde—literary criticism and personal reflections by a master “unmatched . . . in his uncanny psychological insights” (The New York Times). Graham Greene shares his love affair with reading in this collection of essays, memories, and critical considerations, both affectionate and tart, “[that] could have come from no other source than the author of Brighton Rock and The Power and the Glory” (The Scotsman). Whether following the obsessions of Henry James, marveling at the “indispensible” Beatrix Potter, or exploring the Manichean world of Oliver Twist, Graham Greene revisits the books and authors of his lifetime. Here is Greene on Fielding, Doyle, Kipling, and Conrad; on The Prisoner of Zenda and the “revolutionary . . . colossal egoism” of Laurence Stern’s epic comic novel, Tristram Shandy; on the adventures of both Allan Quatermain and Moll Flanders; and more. Greene strolls among the musty oddities and folios sold on the cheap at an outdoor book mart, tells of a bizarre literary hoax perpetrated on a hapless printseller in eighteenth-century Pall Mall, and in the titular essay, reveals the book that unlocked his imagination so thoroughly that he decided to write forever. For Greene, “all the other possible futures slid away.” In this prismatic gallery of profound influences and guiltless pleasures, Greene proves himself “so intensely alive that the reader cannot but respond to the dazzling combination of intelligence and strong feeling” (Edward Sackville West).
A World of My Own: A Dream Diary
by Graham GreeneGraham Greene was always deeply interested in the role played by the subconscious in his writing, and the private world of his dreams was one that he nurtured carefully, recording it almost daily in his dream diaries. Selecting from these dream diaries, he prepared this small treasure for publication just before his death in 1991--a last gift from a great writer to delight and entertain his readers.
A World of My Own: A Dream Diary
by Graham GreeneThe British author shares the “strange . . . inner layers of his playful, guilty imagination” in this glimpse into a brilliant novelist’s subconscious (The New York Times). Culled from nearly eight hundred pages of the author’s “dream diaries” kept between 1965 and 1989, this singular journal reveals “the feverish inner life of an intensely private man, providing an uncanny mirror-image of [his] novelistic obsessions, insecurities, and moral preoccupations” (Publishers Weekly). In what Greene calls My Own World—as opposed to the Common World of shared reality—he accompanies Henry James on a disagreeable riverboat trip to Bogota, is caught in a guerilla crossfire with Evelyn Waugh and W. H. Auden, strolls in the Vatican garden with Pope John Paul II who’s doling out Perugina chocolates like hosts, offers refuge to a suicidal Charlie Chaplin, and stages a disastrous play in blank verse for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. He also shares his headspace with Goebbels, Castro, Cocteau, Queen Elizabeth, D. H. Lawrence, and talking kittens. And the landscape is just as wide: from Nazi Germany to Haiti to West Africa to Bethlehem 1 AD and to Sweden where he seeks treatment for leprosy. Greene is a criminal, spy, lover, assassin, witness, and writer. Encompassing life, death, war, feuds, and career, and alternately absurdist, frightening, funny, and revealing, these fertile imaginings—many of which found their way into Greene’s fiction—comprise nothing less than “an alternate autobiography . . . a uniquely candid self-portrait” of one of the giants of English literature (Kirkus Reviews).
Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess
by Gael Greene"I love Le Cirque, but can I be trusted?" writes Gael Greene, the revered restaurant critic for New York magazine, whose fierce wit and sensuous prose changed the way Americans think about food. Now in this audacious memoir, Greene blends love and food, haute cuisine and social history to capture an era of erotic excess and a life lived to its fullest. Detailing her trysts with Elvis Presley, Hollywood icons, and celebrity chefs, Greene takes you inside renowned restaurants such as Le Pavillon, Le Bernardin, and Lutece, while offering intimate portraits of culinary legends Andre Soltner, James Beard, and Julia Child, among others. Filled with adventure, humor, and lovingly described meals, this tale of pleasure and heartbreak will make you laugh, cry-and undeniably hungry... Book jacket.
Remember the Sweet Things: One List, Two Lives, and Twenty Years of Marriage
by Ellen GreeneFor twenty years, Ellen Greene kept a running list of the thoughtful, funny, touching things that her husband, Marsh, said and did. She wrote them down secretly, then shared them with him every Valentine’s Day when he would find pages from her “Sweet Things List” tucked inside a card. A lovely and poignant tribute to a man and a marriage, written with grace and candor, Remember the Sweet Things captures the kindness, sharing, humor, and affection that defined the Greenes’ union and encourages us to acknowledge the goodness in our own lives and relationships.
Midnight in Siberia: A Train Journey Into the Heart of Russia
by David GreeneFar away from the trendy cafés, designer boutiques, and political protests and crackdowns in Moscow, the real Russia exists. Midnight in Siberia chronicles David Greene's journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway, a 6,000-mile cross-country trip from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. In quadruple-bunked cabins and stopover towns sprinkled across the country's snowy landscape, Greene speaks with ordinary Russians about how their lives have changed in the post-Soviet years. These travels offer a glimpse of the new Russia--a nation that boasts open elections and newfound prosperity but continues to endure oppression, corruption, a dwindling population, and stark inequality. We follow Greene as he finds opportunity and hardship embodied in his fellow train travelers and in conversations with residents of towns throughout Siberia. We meet Nadezhda, an entrepreneur who runs a small hotel in Ishim, fighting through corrupt layers of bureaucracy every day. Greene spends a joyous evening with a group of babushkas who made international headlines as runners-up at the Eurovision singing competition. They sing Beatles covers, alongside their traditional songs, finding that music and companionship can heal wounds from the past. In Novosibirsk, Greene has tea with Alexei, who runs the carpet company his mother began after the Soviet collapse and has mixed feelings about a government in which his family has done quite well. And in Chelyabinsk, a hunt for space debris after a meteorite landing leads Greene to a young man orphaned as a teenager, forced into military service, and now figuring out if any of his dreams are possible. Midnight in Siberia is a lively travel narrative filled with humor, adventure, and insight. It opens a window onto that country's complicated relationship with democracy and offers a rare look into the soul of twenty-first-century Russia.
Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life
by Dana GreeneKenneth Rexroth called Denise Levertov (1923-1997) "the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, . . . and the most moving." Author of twenty-four volumes of poetry, four books of essays, and several translations, Levertov became a lauded and honored poet. Born in England, she published her first book of poems at age twenty-three, but it was not until she married and came to the United States in 1948 that she found her poetic voice, helped by the likes of William Carlos Williams, Robert Duncan, and Robert Creeley. Shortly before her death in 1997, the woman who claimed no country as home was nominated to be America's poet laureate. Levertov was the quintessential romantic. She wanted to live vividly, intensely, passionately, and on a grand scale. She wanted the persistence of Cézanne and the depth and generosity of Rilke. Once she acclimated herself to America, the dreamy lyric poetry of her early years gave way to the joy and wonder of ordinary life. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, her poems began to engage the issues of her times. Vehement and strident, her poetry of protest was both acclaimed and criticized. The end of both the Vietnam War and her marriage left her mentally fatigued and emotionally fragile, but gradually, over the span of a decade, she emerged with new energy. The crystalline and luminous poetry of her last years stands as final witness to a lifetime of searching for the mystery embedded in life itself. Through all the vagaries of life and art, her response was that of a "primary wonder." In this illuminating biography, Dana Greene examines Levertov's interviews, essays, and self-revelatory poetry to discern the conflict and torment she both endured and created in her attempts to deal with her own psyche, her relationships with family, friends, lovers, colleagues, and the times in which she lived. Denise Levertov: A Poet's Life is the first complete biography of Levertov, a woman who claimed she did not want a biography, insisting that it was her work that she hoped would endure. And yet she confessed that her poetry in its various forms--lyric, political, natural, and religious--derived from her life experience. Although a substantial body of criticism has established Levertov as a major poet of the later twentieth century, this volume represents the first attempt to set her poetry within the framework of her often tumultuous life.
Jane Kenyon: The Making of a Poet
by Dana GreeneDemystifying the “Poet Laureate of Depression” Pleasure-loving, sarcastic, stubborn, determined, erotic, deeply sad--Jane Kenyon’s complexity and contradictions found expression in luminous poems that continue to attract a passionate following. Dana Greene draws on a wealth of personal correspondence and other newly available materials to delve into the origins, achievement, and legacy of Kenyon’s poetry and separate the artist’s life story from that of her husband, the award-winning poet Donald Hall. Impacted by relatives’ depression during her isolated childhood, Kenyon found poetry at college, where writers like Robert Bly encouraged her development. Her graduate school marriage to the middle-aged Hall and subsequent move to New Hampshire had an enormous impact on her life, moods, and creativity. Immersed in poetry, Kenyon wrote about women’s lives, nature, death, mystical experiences, and melancholy--becoming, in her own words, an “advocate of the inner life.” Her breakthrough in the 1980s brought acclaim as “a born poet” and appearances in the New Yorker and elsewhere. Yet her ongoing success and artistic growth exacerbated strains in her marriage and failed to stave off depressive episodes that sometimes left her non-functional. Refusing to live out the stereotype of the mad woman poet, Kenyon sought treatment and confronted her illness in her work and in public while redoubling her personal dedication to finding pleasure in every fleeting moment. Prestigious fellowships, high-profile events, residencies, and media interviews had propelled her career to new heights when leukemia cut her life short and left her husband the loving but flawed curator of her memory and legacy. Revelatory and insightful, Jane Kenyon offers the first full-length biography of the elusive poet and the unquiet life that shaped her art.
Through a Night of Horrors: Voices from the 1900 Galveston Storm
by Casey Edward Greene Shelly Henley KellyIt had no name and gave no warning, but crept stealthily into the Gulf and then roared ashore, killing six thousand people. Nearly one hundred years after its landfall, the hurricane that struck Galveston Island on September 8, 1900, remains the worst natural disaster in U.S. history. In this work witnesses to this deadly disaster describe, in many never-before-published accounts, their encounters with this monstrous storm. <p><p>Casey Edward Greene and Shelly Henley Kelly’s work with these primary sources represents several years of labor in culling the Rosenberg Library in Galveston’s unparalleled collection on the 1900 storm. Some of the survivor accounts included were recorded in the days and months immediately following the disaster; others were put down after many years had passed. Oral history recordings made in the 1960s and 1970s provided further accounts given by survivors as they approached the end of their lives. More than seventy dramatic photographs underscore the catastrophe.
And You Know You Should Be Glad: A True Story of Lifelong Friendship
by Bob GreeneA highly personal and moving true story of friend-ship and remembrance from the New York Times bestselling author of Duty and Be True to Your SchoolGrowing up in Bexley, Ohio, population 13,000, Bob Greene and his four best friends -- Allen, Chuck, Dan, and Jack -- were inseparable. Of the four, Jack was Bob's very best friend, a bond forged from the moment they met on the first day of kindergarten. They grew up together, got into trouble together, learned about life together -- and were ultimately separated by time and distance, as all adults are. But through the years Bob and Jack stayed close, holding on to the friendship that had formed years before.Then the fateful call came: Jack was dying. And in this hour of need, as the closest of friends will do, Bob, Allen, Chuck, and Dan put aside the demands of their own lives, came together, and saw Jack through to the end of his journey.Tremendously moving, funny, heart-stirring, and honest, And You Know You Should Be Glad is an uplifting exploration of the power of friendship to uphold us, sustain us, and ultimately set us free.
Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War
by Bob GreeneWhen Bob Greene went home to central Ohio to be with his dying father, it set off a chain of events that led him to knowing his dad in a way he never had before—thanks to a quiet man who lived just a few miles away, a man who had changed the history of the world.Greene's father—a soldier with an infantry division in World War II—often spoke of seeing the man around town. All but anonymous even in his own city, carefully maintaining his privacy, this man, Greene's father would point out to him, had "won the war." He was Paul Tibbets. At the age of twenty-nine, at the request of his country, Tibbets assembled a secret team of 1,800 American soldiers to carry out the single most violent act in the history of mankind. In 1945 Tibbets piloted a plane—which he called Enola Gay, after his mother—to the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where he dropped the atomic bomb.On the morning after the last meal he ever ate with his father, Greene went to meet Tibbets. What developed was an unlikely friendship that allowed Greene to discover things about his father, and his father's generation of soldiers, that he never fully understood before. Duty is the story of three lives connected by history, proximity, and blood; indeed, it is many stories, intimate and achingly personal as well as deeply historic. In one soldier's memory of a mission that transformed the world—and in a son's last attempt to grasp his father's ingrained sense of honor and duty—lies a powerful tribute to the ordinary heroes of an extraordinary time in American life.What Greene came away with is found history and found poetry—a profoundly moving work that offers a vividly new perspective on responsibility, empathy, and love. It is an exploration of and response to the concept of duty as it once was and always should be: quiet and from the heart. On every page you can hear the whisper of a generation and its children bidding each other farewell.
Fraternity: A Journey in Search of Five Presidents
by Bob Greene"What if you set off on a vacation trip in search of history--and your destination was the men who had been president?" Asking himself that tantalizing question, bestselling author and award-winning journalist Bob Greene embarked on a long journey across the breadth of the nation, hoping to spend time with Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George Bush and Ronald Reagan. The result of his odyssey is Fraternity. Rich with the sounds of the presidents' own voices, Fraternity is dramatic, surprising, funny, revealing, inspiring, tragic, touching and unforgettable: a story destined to be read and enjoyed not just now, but far into the future as Americans think about who we are as a people.Here is Nixon, in an unmarked office high above Manhattan, explaining the reason for his solitary walks through New York streets at 5:30 every morning. Here is Carter, riding in a Secret Service van, recalling the sting of his family's being mocked for their rural Southern heritage, even after he had won the White House. Here is Ford, beside a golf course fairway, laughing at his startled discovery that of all his presidential papers, the one worth the most on the open market was a letter from a woman who tried to kill him. Here is Bush, on the road with his son, remembering his despair and anger at encountering a swastika carved into the sand behind an elegant resort on American soil. And here is Nancy Reagan, in a Beverly Hills hotel, on the haunting first night she must stand in for her husband after the announcement of his illness.A travelogue of the national spirit that chronicles a quest stretching over fifteen years and starring the biggest names in the modern American saga, this is living history of the most human kind, and Bob Greene at his very best.
Christmas Memories
by A. C. GreeneOne of Texas's most recognized folk lore writers presents this little book with two of his fondest Christmas reminiscences from a childhood during the Depression. "In the town where I was born and raised, everyone drove a few miles south to cut a tree.... In that dry, windy country few of the cedars grew straight and full, so the major problem was to find the one least lopsided and wind-whipped." Thus A. C. Greene, in "The Too-Big Christmas Tree," tells of a Christmas in the 1920s when his father cut a too-big tree and almost broke up the family. Long out-of-print and a collector's item, this story is now coupled with "Christmas Shopping," in which a small boy sets out with his grandmother on his first shopping trip to buy Christmas presents for the family. "My grandmother and I boarded the little four-wheel trolley on the Fair Park loop--the men who were waiting all tipping their hats and letting the women and children on first. Pretty soon we were bumping and swaying up Sayles Hill on our way to downtown." A.C. Greene, born in Abilene, Texas, wrote a column for the Dallas Morning News and more than twenty books, many on Texas history and lore. He was a memoirist, fiction writer, historian, poet, and book critic.
Risk Game: Self Portrait of an Entrepreneur
by Francis J. GreenburgerPrior to the real-estate boom of the 1980s, Francis J. Greenburger risked it all to buy three older loft buildings at 50 West Street near the current 9/11 Memorial. He ultimately dreamed of one day erecting a magnificent skyscraper in their place. But disaster struck in 2008, just as his plans were coming together, and development came to a screeching halt. The global financial crisis had made the land practically worthless and it would be years before he could get back on track, but he refused to give up on his dream.Today, 50 West is a striking 780-foot skyscraper with curved glass windows that has become an iconic feature on the city skyline-but it took much more than a financial investment to get there. It required Greenburger to do what he does best-take huge risks at every turn.During his parallel careers, Francis J. Greenburger has made publishing and real-estate history. Whether risking the reputation of his agency for the super -star authors of tomorrow, such as James Patterson to Dan Brown, or pioneering the New York co-op market by taking "hopeless" properties and turning them into prized homes, he has successfully navigated the worlds of business, politics, and social change to become the quintessential American entrepreneur.A math and business prodigy who started working for his father at the age of 12. After a stop-and-start academic career, he voluntarily left one of the most elite and academically distinguished New York City high schools and started his adult life at 15. Greenburger has made it his life's work to find value where others never thought to look, and his keen instincts and innovative strategies have taken him from a high-school "dropout" to a well-educated self-made billionaire.Francis has mastered the "risk game." Now, with Rebecca Paley's gripping prose, he takes us behind the scenes in Risk Game and reveals firsthand how he has become a self-made force in the competitive world of New York real estate-and a champion for nonprofit organizations in the fields of art, education, and, most recently, social and criminal justice.
3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, and Hip-Hop's Multibillion-Dollar Rise
by Zack O'Malley Greenburg<P> Tracing the careers of hip-hop's three most dynamic stars, this deeply reported history brilliantly examines the entrepreneurial genius of the first musician tycoons: Diddy, Dr. Dre, and Jay-ZBeing successful musicians was simply never enough for the three kings of hip-hop. Diddy, Dr. Dre, and Jay-Z lifted themselves from childhood adversity into tycoon territory, amassing levels of fame and wealth that not only outshone all other contemporary hip-hop artists, but with a combined net worth of well over $2 billion made them the three richest American musicians, period. <P>Yet their fortunes have little to do with selling their own albums: between Diddy's Ciroc vodka, Dre's $3 billion sale of his Beats headphones to Apple, and Jay-Z's Tidal streaming service and other assets, these artists have transcended pop music fame to become lifestyle icons and moguls.Hip-hop is no longer just a musical genre; it's become a way of life that encompasses fashion, film, food, drink, sports, electronics and more - one that has opened new paths to profit and to critical and commercial acclaim. Thanks in large part to the Three Kings-who all started their own record labels and released classic albums before moving on to become multifaceted businessmen-hip-hop has been transformed from a genre spawned in poverty into a truly global multibillion-dollar industry. <P>These men are the modern embodiment of the American Dream, but their stories as great thinkers and entrepreneurs have yet to be told in full. Based on a decade of reporting, and interviews with more than 100 sources including hip-hop pioneers Russell Simmons and Fab 5 Freddy; new-breed executives like former Def Jam chief Kevin Liles and venture capitalist Troy Carter; and stars from Swizz Beatz to Shaquille O'Neal, 3 Kings tells the fascinating story of the rise and rise of the three most influential musicians in America.