Cherry

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Bruce Edward Hall

Bruce Edward Hall may have an English name and a Connecticut upbringing, but for him a trip to Chinatown, New York, is a visit to the ghosts of his Chinese ancestors - ancestors who helped create the neighborhood that is really as much a transplanted Cantonese village as it is a part of a great American city. Among these Ancestors are missionaries and reprobates, businessmen and scholars. In Tea That Burns, Bruce Edward Hall uses the stories of these and others to tell the history of Chinatown, starting with the tumultuous journey from an ancient empire ruled by the nine dragons of the universe to a bewildering land of elevated trains, solitary labor, and violent discrimination. The world they constructed was built of backbreaking labor and poetry contests; gambling dens and Cantonese opera; Tong Wars, festivals, firecrackers, incense, and food - always food, to celebrate every conceivable occasion and to confound the ever-meddlesome "White Devils" as they attempt to master the mysteries of chop sticks and stir-fry.

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Frank McCourt

"When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was, of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood." So begins the luminous memoir of Frank McCourt, born in Depression-era Brooklyn to recent Irish immigrants and raised in the slums of Limerick, Ireland. in the 1930s and 40s. Frank's mother, Angela, has no money to feed the children since Frank's father, Malachy, rarely works, and when he does he drinks his wages. Yet Malachy -- exasperating, irresponsible and beguiling -- does nurture in Frank an appetite for the one thing he can provide: a story. Frank lives for his father's tales of Cuchulain, who saved Ireland, and of the Angel on the Seventh Step, who brings his mother babies. Perhaps it is story that accounts for Frank's survival. Wearing rags for diapers, begging a pig's head for Christmas dinner and gathering coal from the roadside to light a fire, Frank endures poverty, near-starvation and the casual cruelty of relatives and neighbors -- yet lives to tell his tale with eloquence, exuberance and remarkable forgiveness. - Jacket flap.

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Mary Cantwell

With Manhattan, When I Was Young, Mary Gantwell, a former writer and editor at Mademoiselle and Vogue and now a writer at the New York Times, gives us an elegant and lyrical autobiographical account of a time and place that for some exists only in imagination. But this is a life as it was actually lived, with romance, passion, and no little share of pain. Set in five different apartments in Manhattan, each one with its own character and charm, Cantwell's story winds through its phases, from single working girl to young wife and mother, from career choices and divorce to rediscovery. The world Cantwell inhabits - that of magazine and book publishing and fashion and the middle-class bohemia of downtown New York at a golden moment in time - is brought beautifully to life in a memoir that is sure to bring her new readers and renewed acclaim.

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Robert Drewe

"When he was six years old, Robert Drewe moved with his family from Melbourne to the west Australian coast, to grow up by the sea and sand dunes around Perth, said to be the world's most isolated city - and proud of it. This sun-baked coast was innocently proud, too, of its tranquility and friendliness.". "Then a man he knew murdered a boy he also knew. The murderer randomly killed eight strangers - variously shooting, strangling, stabbing, bludgeoning, and hacking his victims and running them down with cars - and innocent Perth was changed forever.". "In the middle-class waterside suburbs that were the killer's main stalking grounds, the mysterious murders created widespread anxiety and instant local myth. Many people were deeply affected, not least the young Robert Drewe. "The murders and their aftermath have both intrigued me and weighed heavily on me for three decades. They were the pivotal events of my youth for the reason that they were inextricably entwined with events in my own family. To try to make sense of this time and place, and of my own childhood and adolescence, I had, finally, to write about it.""--BOOK JACKET.