Bøker av Cecelia Tichi

Newport Summer 1899-yachts, balls, and famed artists eager to paint portraits of Society's "Queens."Western silver heiress Val Mackle DeVere (Mrs. Roderick W.) agrees to "sit" for a portrait for her beloved Roddy, only to stumble on a scene of bloody, grisly homicide at an art gallery.Like a figure from Pompeii, the dead Newport gallery manager screams in silence, his hands like claws clutching at a gilt frame pulled down over his head and shoulders while blood darkens his cream-colored suit. Impulsive, Val reaches for the murder weapon and will find herself suspected, shamed, and shunned as she seeks the killer while learning yet again a lesson taught by Cornelius Vanderbilt IV: "No city on earth is as hostile to outsiders as Newport."

As a girl in the West, Valentine Mackle dodged quicksand along the rivers of the mining camps, but as Mrs. Roderick W. DeVere of New York's Fifth Avenue, Val is sucked into Society's own quicksand in Spring, 1899, when a weekend at a country estate in the Hudson Valley turns deadly. Val's "soul sister" drowns on family property, and the host's best "practical jokes" double as death traps.A Gilded Drowning Pool snarls Val and husband Roddy in a bogus adult health camp, a brothel, a town-and-country pocked with probable killers-and an ambitious police chief convinced that Val and Roddy DeVere played a part in the death that is ruled a homicide.

New York''s "Diamond Horseshoe" balcony in the Metropolitan Opera House glittered with ladies'' jewels in January 1899, and Society seated in private boxes heard Mozart''s murder victim sing his song of death-unaware that the sudden death of a "Coal King" in Box 18 will be ruled a homicide.When opera-goers Val and Roddy DeVere are asked to investigate ("on the q.t."), Val finds herself suspected of complicity in the murder.The police have "material evidence" against her. Before a jury, Val''s lawyer husband reminds her, "''material'' evidence can be the bright, shiny object that overrides all reason and fact."

How the Prohibition law of 1920 made alcohol, savored in secret, all the more delectable when the cocktail shaker was forced to go ¿underground¿¿Roaring Twenties¿ America boasted famous firsts: women¿s right to vote, jazz music, talking motion pictures, flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum cleaner. The privations of the Great War were over, and Wall Street boomed. The decade opened, nonetheless, with a shock when Prohibition became the law of the land on Friday, January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment banned ¿intoxicating liquors.¿ Decades-long campaigns to demonize alcoholic beverages finally became law, and America officially went ¿dry.¿American ingenuity promptly rose to its newest challenge. The law, riddled with loopholes, let the 1920s write a new chapter in the nation¿s saga of spirits. Men and women spoke knowingly of the speakeasy, the bootlegger, rum-running, black ships, blind pigs, gin mills, and gallon stills. Passwords (¿Oscar sent me¿) gave entrée to night spots and supper clubs where cocktails abounded, and bartenders became alchemists of timely new drinks like the Making Whoopee, the Petting Party, the Dance the Charleston. A new social event¿the cocktail party staged in a private home¿smashed the gender barrier that had long forbidden ¿ladies¿ from entering into the gentlemen-only barrooms and cafés. From the author of Gilded Age Cocktails, this book takes a delightful new romp through the cocktail creations of the early twentieth century, transporting readers into the glitz and (illicit) glamour of the 1920s. Spirited and richly illustrated, Jazz Age Cocktails dazzles with tales of temptation and temperance, and features charming cocktail recipes from the time to be recreated and enjoyed.

A delightful romp through Americäs Golden Age of CocktailsThe decades following the American Civil War burst with invention¿they saw the dawn of the telephone, the motor car, electric lights, the airplane¿but no innovation was more welcome than the beverage heralded as the ¿cocktail.¿ The Gilded Age, as it came to be known, was the Golden Age of Cocktails, giving birth to the classic Manhattan and martini that can be ordered at any bar to this day. Scores of whiskey drinks, cooled with ice chips or cubes that chimed against the glass, proved doubly pleasing when mixed, shaken, or stirred with special flavorings, juices, and fruits. The dazzling new drinks flourished coast to coast at sporting events, luncheons, and balls, on ocean liners and yachts, in barrooms, summer resorts, hotels, railroad train club cars, and private homes.From New York to San Francisco, celebrity bartenders rose to fame, inventing drinks for exclusive universities and exotic locales. Bartenders poured their liquid secrets for dancing girls and such industry tycoons as the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst and the railroad king ¿Commodore¿ Cornelius Vanderbilt.Cecelia Tichi offers a tour of the cocktail hours of the Gilded Age, in which industry, innovation, and progress all take a break to enjoy the signature beverage of the age. Gilded Age Cocktails reveals the fascinating history behind each drink as well as bartenders¿ formerly secret recipes. Though the Gilded Age cocktail went ¿underground¿ during the Prohibition era, it launched the first of many generations whose palates thrilled to a panoply of artistically mixed drinks.

A richly illustrated romp with America's Gilded Age leisure class—and those angling to join it Mark Twain called it the Gilded Age. Between 1870 and 1900, the United States' population doubled, accompanied by an unparalleled industrial expansion, and an explosion of wealth unlike any the world had ever seen. America was the foremost nation of the world, and New York City was its beating heart. There, the richest and most influential—Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan, Edith Wharton, the Vanderbilts, Andrew Carnegie, and more—became icons, whose comings and goings were breathlessly reported in the papers of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. It was a time of abundance, but also bitter rivalries, in work and play. The Old Money titans found themselves besieged by a vanguard of New Money interlopers eager to gain entrée into their world of formal balls, debutante parties, opera boxes, sailing regattas, and summer gatherings at Newport. Into this morass of money and desire stepped Caroline Astor. Mrs. Astor, an Old Money heiress of the first order, became convinced that she was uniquely qualified to uphold the manners and mores of Gilded Age America. Wherever she went, Mrs. Astor made her judgments, dictating proper behavior and demeanor, men's and women's codes of dress, acceptable patterns of speech and movements of the body, and what and when to eat and drink. The ladies and gentlemen of high society took note. "What would Mrs. Astor do?” became the question every social climber sought to answer. And an invitation to her annual ball was a golden ticket into the ranks of New York's upper crust. This work serves as a guide to manners as well as an insight to Mrs. Astor's personal diary and address book, showing everything from the perfect table setting to the array of outfits the elite wore at the time. Channeling the queen of the Gilded Age herself, Cecelia Tichi paints a portrait of New York's social elite, from the schools to which they sent their children, to their lavish mansions and even their reactions to the political and personal scandals of the day. Ceceilia Tichi invites us on a beautifully illustrated tour of the Gilded Age, transporting readers to New York at its most fashionable. A colorful tapestry of fun facts and true tales, What Would Mrs. Astor Do? presents a vivid portrait of this remarkable time of social metamorphosis, starring Caroline Astor, the ultimate gatekeeper.

Offers a richly illustrated exploration of the American era of gear-and-girder technology. A major consequence of this technology was its effect on the arts, in particular the literary arts. Three prominent American writers of the time - Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and William Carlos Williams - became designer-engineers of the word.

From Harriet Beecher Stowe's image of the Mississippi's "bosom" to Thoreau's Cape Cod as "the bared and bended arm of Massachusetts," the American environment has been represented in terms of the human body. Exploring such instances of embodiment, Tichi exposes the historically varied and often contrary geomorphic expression of a national paradigm.

Jack London (1876-1916) found fame with his wolf-dog tales and sagas of the frozen North, but Cecelia Tichi challenges the long-standing view of London as merely a mass-market producer of potboilers. Thoroughly exploring London's importance as an artist and as a political and public figure, Tichi brings to life a man who merits recognition as one of America's foremost public intellectuals.

Collectively urging scholars and educators to pay attention to the material conditions out of which literature arises, this book inaugurates a critical realism in American literary studies. It provides a crucial link in the growing need to merge theory and practice with the goal of reconnecting the ivory tower elite to the activists on the street.

Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us)