Books about Greenwich from Amazon.com

A Freewheelin’ Time is Suze Rotolo’s firsthand, eyewitness, participant-observer account of the immensely creative and fertile years of the 1960s, just before the circus was in full swing and Bob Dylan became the anointed ringmaster. It chronicles the back-story of Greenwich Village in the early days of the folk music explosion, when Dylan was honing his skills and she was in the ring with him.

A shy girl from Queens, Suze Rotolo was the daughter of Italian working-class Communists. Growing up at the start of the Cold War and during McCarthyism, she inevitably became an outsider in her neighborhood and at school. Her childhood was turbulent, but Suze found solace in poetry, art, and music. In Washington Square Park, in Greenwich Village, she encountered like-minded friends who were also politically active. Then one hot day in July 1961, Suze met Bob Dylan, a rising young musician, at a folk concert at Riverside Church. She was seventeen, he was twenty; they were young, curious, and inseparable. During the years they were together, Dylan was transformed from an obscure folk singer into an uneasy spokesperson for a generation.

Suze Rotolo’s story is rich in character and setting, filled with vivid memories of those tumultuous years of dramatic change and poignantly rising expectations when art, culture, and politics all seemed to be conspiring to bring our country a better, freer, richer, and more equitable life. She writes of her involvement with the civil rights movement and describes the sometimes frustrating experience of being a woman in a male-dominated culture, before women’s liberation changed the rules for the better. And she tells the wonderfully romantic story of her sweet but sometimes wrenching love affair and its eventual collapse under the pressures of growing fame.

A Freewheelin’ Time is a vibrant, moving memoir of a hopeful time and place and of a vital subculture at its most creative. It communicates the excitement of youth, the heartbreak of young love, and the struggles for a brighter future.

.
Price: $12.27 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From nonsense to lessons learned, these 45 rhymes include the very well known (Itsy Bitsy Spider) and the somewhat familiar (Hickety, Pickety, My Black Hen). The truly fantastic pictures speak more than a thousand words as artist Scott Gustafson riffs in paint on themes present and imagined in each verse.

Nursery rhymes are classic, and so are some of the artist's interpretations. But other paintings are surprises, like an anthropomorphic baking bear, a pelican sea captain, and Peter Piper as a pug on two legs. Welcome to a world where "There Was a Crooked Man" is not about a hunchbacked senior but rather a madcap, double-jointed dandy who might be "crooked" in more ways than one. Jack (Be Nimble) is a leaping cricket and Yankee Doodle a fun-loving chipmunk on a fullsize horse.

Scott Gustafson's unique style, influenced by legendary book illustrators Arthur Rackham and N. C. Wyeth, makes this a volume to be treasured by children and illustrated-book lovers of all ages..
Price: $12.38 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This exquisitely illustrated, large format gift book features ten of the most enduring fairy tales of all time. The stories, chosen and edited by the artist, are a balance of 'princess' classics and frolicking adventure tales.

Artist Scott Gustafson spent more than four years creating the seventy-five rich oil paintings, reproduced here in full color. His style is reminiscent of N.C. Wyeth and Wyeth;s gifted student Jessie Wilcox Smith (plus a touch of Arthur Rackham in the fairies). The rounded-face, glowing children and charming interiors contribute to Gustafson?s unique and contemporary style, which will capture the hearts of even the most hard-boiled media-savvy child..
Price: $12.45 [Notify me when price goes down.]

America’s #1 bestselling travel series

Written by more than 175 outspoken travelers around the globe, Frommer’s Complete Guides help travelers experience places the way locals do.

• More annually updated guides than any other series
• 16-page color section and foldout map in all annual guides
• Outspoken opinions, exact prices, and suggested itineraries
• Dozens of detailed maps in an easy-to-read, two-color design

Explore the city with a real New Yorker, who gives you inside tips on hotels, restaurants, attractions, and nightlife.

• The best places to eat, from vintage delis to pizza joints to power palaces.
• Off-the-beaten-path experiences and undiscovered gems, plus new takes on top attractions, and the latest news on the newest hotels, restaurants and hotspots in the City that Never Sleeps.
• The most frequently updated travel series on the market. Plus, online updates are available at Frommers.com so travelers don't have to worry about out-of-date information.
• Opinionated write-ups. No bland descriptions and lukewarm recommendations. Our expert writers are passionate about their destinations--tell it like it is in an engaging and helpful way.
• Exact prices listed for every establishment and activity--no other guides offer such detailed, candid reviews of hotels and restaurants. We include the very best, but also emphasize moderately priced choices for real people.
• All Complete guides offer user-friendly features including star ratings and special icons to point readers to great finds, excellent values, insider tips, best bets for kids, special moments, and overrated experiences.

.
Price: $11.09 [Notify me when price goes down.]

A smoldering debut novel exploring the passion, hunger, and danger that can break loose in the moonlight

From the time she was a child, Mona Lisa knew she was different-but she never knew how different until a man of otherworldly beauty appeared during her night shift in the ER. Gryphon is hurting and hunted and he attracts her as no man ever has before. He is a Monère, one of the children of the moon-and what's more, so is she.

Long exiled from the moon, the men of the Monère serve-and mate with-imperious Queens who can channel the rays of their far-off homeland. Gryphon believes that Mona Lisa is a Queen- perhaps the first of Mixed Blood ever known. But her introduction to the nighttime court of the Monère, simmering with intrigue, casual lust, and calculated cruelty, is far from smooth..
Price: $7.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Steve Hanks is first and foremost a figure painter whose watercolor compositions are infused with emotion and a kind of poetry formed by light and shadow. Realistic figure painting in watercolor is technically demanding and Hanks is the premier artist working in this field today. His astonishing realism comes from his skillful control of washes, edges, and layers and from his knowledge of the properties of water and pigment.

Hanks paints what he refers to as "moments of introspective solitude" with the deepest respect for the privacy of the individual lost in reflection. The paintings in this ample volume represent the most extensive collection of the artist's work in more than ten years, and his subjects include infants, children and families, beautiful women, and nudes. Every painting holds a mystery, and each is also a personal story about the artist as he discovers the expression of his own emotional unfolding through his art..
Price: $47.01 [Notify me when price goes down.]

They all came to Taos: Georgia O'Keefe, D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and other expatriates of New York City. Fleeing urban ugliness, they moved west between 1917 and 1929 to join the community that art patron Mabel Dodge created in her Taos salon and to draw inspiration from New Mexico's mountain desert and "primitive" peoples. As they settled, their quest for the primitive forged a link between "authentic" places and those who called them home.

In this first book to consider Dodge and her visitors from a New Mexican perspective, Flannery Burke shows how these cultural mavens drew on modernist concepts of primitivism to construct their personal visions and cultural agendas. In each chapter she presents a place as it took shape for a different individual within Dodge's orbit. From this kaleidoscope of places emerges a vision of what place meant to modernist artists--as well as a narrative of what happened in the real place of New Mexico when visitors decided it was where they belonged. Expanding the picture of early American modernism beyond New York's dominance, she shows that these newcomers believed Taos was the place they had set out to find--and that when Taos failed to meet their expectations, they changed Taos.

Throughout, Burke examines the ways notions of primitivism unfolded as Dodge's salon attracted artists of varying ethnicities and the ways that patronage was perceived--by African American writers seeking publication, Anglos seeking "authentic" material, Native American artists seeking patronage, or Nuevomexicanos simply seeking respect. She considers the notion of "competitive primitivism," especially regarding Carl Van Vechten, and offers nuanced analyses of divisions within northern New Mexico's arts communities over land issues and of the ways in which Pueblo Indians spoke on their own behalf.

Burke's book offers a portrait of a place as it took shape both aesthetically in the imaginations of Dodge's visitors and materially in the lives of everyday New Mexicans. It clearly shows that no people or places stand outside the modern world--and that when we pretend otherwise, those people and places inevitably suffer.

This book is part of the CultureAmerica series..
Price: $25.16 [Notify me when price goes down.]

.
Price: $7.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]

On the night before Halloween in 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley was bludgeoned to death with a golf club in front of her home in the ultra-upper-class Belle Haven district of Greenwich, Connecticut Though many suspects were brought forth, to this day no one has ever been arrested for the crime and no trial has taken place. Notorious former detective-turned-author Mark Fuhrman attempts to shed light on the Moxley case in a book that summarizes the fruits of his new investigation.

Among Fuhrman's controversial opinions is his conclusion that the killer is Moxley's neighbor Michael Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy and at the time the same age as Martha Moxley. Some townspeople have long suspected Michael's older brother Thomas of performing the deed, but Fuhrman argues that only Michael had both the opportunity and the temperament to commit such a crime.

Readers familiar with Fuhrman's role in the O.J. Simpson trial, or his subsequent book about that case, Murder in Brentwood, will not be surprised to find him hitting his familiar themes: the abuse of wealth and power, the arrogance of the high and mighty, and the vanity of celebrity. Otherwise, this is very much a hard-hitting detective work. Fuhrman's spare prose drives the book toward an inevitable conclusion with a moral or two in tow. --Tjames Madison.
Price: $2.50 [Notify me when price goes down.]