The police and the community

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Diana Delmore

The Daughter of an Actress Brought up in a respectable country village, Dorinda Hale was as beautiful a gentlewoman as anyone could wish. But her actress mother had married a rakish nobleman for love--and his sudden death left them without a feather with which to fly. An ignominious career on the stage seemed like the only way for Dorinda to earn their keep--until the Dowager Lady Torrington whisked Dorinda off to serve as the sober chaperone to her irrepressible high-spirited granddaughter. But at the dazzling round of London routs, balls and operas, two men haunted Dorinda: the arrogant Duke of Shalford, and the rakehell Sir Fabian Mordaunt. Both men knew her past--and one held the key lo her future happiness.

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Richard Polsky

In early 2005, Richard Polsky decided to put his much-loved, hard-won Warhol Fright Wig, up for auction at Christie's. The market for contemporary art was robust and he was hoping to turn a profit. His instinct seemed to be on target: his picture sold for $375,000. But if only Polsky had waited . . . Over the next two years, prices soared to unimaginable heights with multimillion-dollar deals that became the norm and not the exception. Buyers and sellers were baffled, art dealers were bypassed for auction houses, and benchmark prices proved that trees really do grow to the sky. Had the market lost all reason?In I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon), Polsky leads the way through this explosive, short-lived period when the "art world" became the "art market." He delves into the behind-the-scenes politics of auctions, the shift in power away from galleries, and the search for affordable art in a rich man's playing field. Unlike most in the art world, Polsky is not afraid to tell it like it is as he negotiates deals for clients in New York, London, and San Francisco and seeks out a replacement for his lost Fright Wig in a market that has galloped beyond his means. A compelling backdoor tell-all about the strange and fickle world of art collecting, I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon) takes an unvarnished look at how the industry shifted from art appreciation to monetary appreciation.From the Hardcover edition.

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Tracy K. Smith

"A memoir about the author's coming of age as she grapples with her identity as an artist, her family's racial history, and her mother's death from cancer"-- "From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel, to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights movement. These dizzying juxtapositions--between her family's past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future--will eventually compel her to act on her passions for love and 'ecstatic possibility,' and her desire to become a writer. But when her mother is diagnosed with cancer, which she says is part of God's plan, Tracy must learn a new way to love and look after someone whose beliefs she has outgrown. Written with a poet's precision and economy, this gorgeous, probing kaleidoscope of self and family offers us a universal story of belonging and becoming, and the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home"--

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Libby Lester

"Conflict over issues such as climate change, toxic waste and wilderness provides a key site for examining the shaping and negotiation of public debate. This book offers a new understanding of the relationship between media roles and environmental futures, and of the ways in which news works to influence environmental decision-making across boundaries and over time. Drawing on a range of international examples, Dr Libby Lester invites readers to develop a nuanced understanding of changing media practices and dynamics by connecting local, national and global environmental issues, journalistic practices and news sources, public relations and protests, and the symbolic and strategic circulation of meanings in the public sphere. Media and Environment argues that news maintains a central role in environmental politics. As such, it asks about our understandings of place and community, of local responsibility and global citizenship, and how communication as a society on these crucial issues affects our lives, now and into the future."--Cover.