Books by Robert Sullivan
How Not to Get Rich: Or Why Being Bad Off Isn't So Bad
In the tradition of James Thurber and E.B. White, How Not to Get Rich is a timely spoof filled with witty instructions on how to avoid the perilous path toward millionaire-dom.
"Large numbers of Americans are becoming rich every day, and by rich I mean loaded, as in loaded to the gills. You could soon be one of them. On the other hand, you might not be one of them, for a number of reasons, including the odds, which are weighted heavily against you. Because while large numbers of Americans are becoming rich every day, even larger numbers of Americans are not. How does not getting rich happen? At what point in your life do you become rich or not rich? Is it fate or hard work that decides whether you go onto a life with several homes and a yacht or several credit cards and a second mortgage?"
In this book, Robert Sullivan, an expert in the art of not getting rich and staying that way, shows us some simple, quick ways to cultivate a basic day-to-day attitude that will lead to not getting rich, as well as a few long-term strategies that will help you stay that way. For instance, a good well-rounded education is a must if you are planning on working your entire life and ending up with little or nothing. Choose a field of study that will be personally rewarding but has no apparent application in the real world, such as medieval literature or traditional music. And by all means choose an investment strategy that will definitely not get you rich, such as following the herd. Along the way, spend your money unwisely, read novels and books, marry for love, and waste otherwise money-making hours throwing a Frisbee in the park and playing with your kids, becoming the kind of role model that will never be featured on Forbes's list of the wealthiest people in the world. Sharp, funny, and ultimately comforting, How Not to Get Rich is a guide to happiness without wealth―probably not worth the price, but what is?
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The Thoreau You Don't Know: The Father of Nature Writers on the Importance of Cities, Finance, and Fooling Around
Robert Sullivan, the New York Times bestselling author of Rats and Cross Country, delivers a revolutionary reconsideration of Henry David Thoreau for modern readers of the seminal transcendentalist. Dispelling common notions of Thoreau as a lonely eccentric cloistered at Walden Pond, Sullivan (whom the New York Times Book Review calls “an urban Thoreau”) paints a dynamic picture of Thoreau as the naturalist who founded our American ideal of “the Great Outdoors;” the rugged individual who honed friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other writers; and the political activist who inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and other influential leaders of progressive change. You know Thoreau is one of America’s legendary writers…but the Thoreau you don’t know may be one of America’s greatest heroes.
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Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer
"Singular . . . Virtuosic . . . Double Exposure is the best book I’ve read about America [. . .] in many, many years." ―Corey Seymour, Vogue
"Extraordinary . . . A transformative experience for the reader." ―Lucy Sante
"A large-hearted, wide-angled book . . . I couldn't put it down." ―Ian Frazier
A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America’s greatest photographers.
Timothy O’Sullivan is America’s most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don’t know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work “surrealistic and disturbing.”
At the same time, we know very little about O’Sullivan himself. Nor do we know―really know―much more about the landscapes he captured. Robert Sullivan’s Double Exposure sets off in pursuit of these two enigmas. This book documents the author’s own road trip across the West in search of the places, many long forgotten or paved over, that O’Sullivan pictured. It also stages a reckoning with how the changes wrought on the land were already under way in the 1860s and '70s, and how these changes were a continuation of the Civil War by other means. Sullivan, known for his probing investigations of place in the pages of The New Yorker and books like Rats and My American Revolution, has produced a work that, like O’Sullivan’s magisterial photos of geysers and hot springs, exposes a fissure in the American landscape itself.
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$32.00
My American Revolution: Crossing the Delaware and I-78
Americans tend to think of the Revolution as a Massachusetts-based event orchestrated by Virginians, but in fact the war took place mostly in the Middle Colonies―in New York and New Jersey and the parts of Pennsylvania that on a clear day you can almost see from the Empire State Building. In My American Revolution, Robert Sullivan delves into this first Middle America, digging for a glorious, heroic part of the past in the urban, suburban, and sometimes even rural landscape of today. And there are great adventures along the way: Sullivan investigates the true history of the crossing of the Delaware, its down-home reenactment each year for the past half a century, and―toward the end of a personal odyssey that involves camping in New Jersey backyards, hiking through lost "mountains," and eventually some physical therapy―he evacuates illegally from Brooklyn to Manhattan by handmade boat. He recounts a Brooklyn historian's failed attempt to memorialize a colonial Maryland regiment; a tattoo artist's more successful use of a colonial submarine, which resulted in his 2007 arrest by the New York City police and the FBI; and the life of Philip Freneau, the first (and not great) poet of American independence, who died in a swamp in the snow. Last but not least, along New York harbor, Sullivan re-creates an ancient signal beacon.
Like an almanac, My American Revolution moves through the calendar of American independence, considering the weather and the tides, the harbor and the estuary and the yearly return of the stars as salient factors in the war for independence. In this fiercely individual and often hilarious journey to make our revolution his, he shows us how alive our own history is, right under our noses.
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The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adventures at the Edge of a City
Imagine a grungy north Jersey version of John McPhee's classic The Pine Barrens and you'll get some idea of the idiosyncratic, fact-filled, and highly original work that is Robert Sullivan's The Meadowlands. Just five miles west of New York City, this vilified, half-developed, half-untamed, much dumped-on, and sometimes odiferous tract of swampland is home to rare birds and missing bodies, tranquil marshes and a major sports arena, burning garbage dumps and corporate headquarters, the remains of the original Penn Station--and maybe, just ,maybe, of the late Jimmy Hoffa. Robert Sullivan proves himself to be this fragile yet amazingly resilient region's perfect expolorer, historian, archaeologist, and comic bard.
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A Whale Hunt: How a Native-American Village Did What No One Thought It Could
The critically acclaimed New York Times Notable Book about a Native American tribe's quest to regain the lost art of whale hunting, from the author of The Meadowlands.
For centuries the hunting of the whale was what defined the Makah, a Native American tribe in Neah Bay, but when commercial whaling drove the gray whale to near extinction in the 1920s, the Makah voluntarily discontinued their tradition and hung up their harpoons. In 1994, after the gray whale was taken off the endangered species list, the Makah decided to hunt again. The problem was that all the old whalers were dead—no one knew how to go about hunting a whale.
A Whale Hunt chronicles the two years Robert Sullivan spends with the Makah as they prepare for and stage the first hunt. Combating tribal infighting and inexperience, they must also face passionate, furious animal rights activists and swarming reporters. Before the ragtag group of hunters even pursues a whale, there are clashes, disappointments, and defeats, small triumphs and unexpected heroes.
A book of many layers and revelations, A Whale Hunt is the story of the demise and attempted resurrection of a Native American nation and of the individuals on the reservation whose lives are forever changed.
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Tony Bennett in the Studio: A Life of Art & Music
by Mitch Albom, Robert Sullivan, Tony Bennett, Mario Cuomo
Every one of Tony’s millions of devoted fans will treasure this definitive volume.Tony Bennett, the world’s most beloved living legend, has a talent that’s simply timeless. He’s the smooth and subtle singer of the classic American songbook, the recipient of countless Grammy® awards and nominations, an Emmy Award®, and a Kennedy Center Honoree. The Library of Congress bestowed a Living Legend Award on him in 2000, the National Endowment for the Arts named him a Jazz Master in January of 2006, and he just received Billboard magazine’s prestigious Century Award for his outstanding contributions to music. Contemporary singers such as Bono, Sting, Diana Krall, John Legend, and the Dixie Chicks idolize him. Recently, Bennett turned 80 and he has celebrated this milestone with the same joie de vivre with which he celebrates life in general; he’s at the height of his popularity, thanks to the bestselling album Duets and a brilliantly conceived TV special directed by Rob Marshall, director of the Academy Award®-winning Chicago. When performing as Tony Bennett, he connects to people everywhere through the magic of his music. What many of his admirers may not know, however, is that Bennett, under the name of Anthony Benedetto, is also a successful painter whose works hang in major museums and galleries, including the Smithsonian.
In this beautiful new book, richly illustrated with his own artwork, Tony takes the time to reflect on his career, and the inspiration that continues to infuse both his music and his art. Along with journalist Robert Sullivan, he explores recurring themes in his life, including jazz, individualism, the creative zone, love, truth and beauty, chiaroscuro (the balance of light and shadow, both in painting and life), and the lifelong adventure that has taken him around the world and back again. His own personal memorabilia will be on display, along with album covers and notes. And for everyone who loves Bennett’s gorgeous voice and elegant song stylings: an exclusive CD featuring his favorite tunes, including some rare choices.
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Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
Thoreau went to Walden Pond to live simply in the wild and contemplate his own place in the world by observing nature. Robert Sullivan went to a disused, garbage-filled little alley in lower Manhattan to contemplate the city and its lesser-known inhabitants-by observing the rat.
Rats live in the world precisely where humans do; they survive on the effluvia of human society; they eat our garbage. While dispensing gruesomely fascinating rat facts and strangely entertaining rat-stories-everyone has one, it turns out-Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat. With a notebook and night-vision gear, he sits nightly in the streamlike flow of garbage and searches for fabled rat-kings, sets out to trap a rat, and eventually travels to the Midwest to learn about rats in Chicago, Milwaukee, and other cities of America. With tales of rat fights in the Gangs of New York era and stories of Harlem rent strike leaders who used rats to win tenants basic rights, Sullivan looks deeper and deeper into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses-its herd-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.
Did you know?
- 26% of all electric cable breaks and 18% of all phone cable disruptions are caused by rats, 25% of all fires of unknown origin are rat-caused, and rats destroy an estimated 1/3 of the world's food supply each year. The rat has been called the world's most destructive mammal-other than man.
- Male and female rats may have sex twenty times a day. A female can produce up to twelve litters of twenty rats a year: one pair of rats has the potential for 15,000 descendants in a year.
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Rats: Observations on the History & Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
New York Public Library Book for the Teenager
New York Public Library Book to Remember
PSLA Young Adult Top 40 Nonfiction Titles of the Year
"Engaging...a lively, informative compendium of facts, theories, and musings."-Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Behold the rat, dirty and disgusting! Robert Sullivan turns the lowly rat into the star of this most perversely intriguing, remarkable, and unexpectedly elegant New York Times bestseller.
Love them or loathe them, rats are here to stay-they are city dwellers as much as (or more than) we are, surviving on the effluvia of our society. In Rats, the critically acclaimed bestseller, Robert Sullivan spends a year investigating a rat-infested alley just a few blocks away from Wall Street. Sullivan gets to know not just the beast but its friends and foes: the exterminators, the sanitation workers, the agitators and activists who have played their part in the centuries-old war between human city dweller and wild city rat.
Sullivan looks deep into the largely unrecorded history of the city and its masses-its herds-of-rats-like mob. Funny, wise, sometimes disgusting but always compulsively readable, Rats earns its unlikely place alongside the great classics of nature writing.
With an all-new Afterword by the author
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North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City
by Robert Sullivan, Randall Mason
Few people today have ever heard of North Brother Island, though a hundred years ago it was place known to―and often feared by―nearly everyone in New York City. The island, a small dot in the East River, twenty acres slotted between today’s gritty industrial shores of the Bronx and Queens, was a minor piece of the New York archipelago until the late 19th century, when calls for social and sanitary reform―and the massive expansion of the city’s population―combined to remake NBI as a hospital island, a place to contain infectious disease and, later, other societal ills.
Abandoned since 1963, North Brother Island is a ruin and a wildlife sanctuary (it is the protected nesting ground of the Black-crowned Night Heron), closed to the public and virtually invisible to it. But one cannot mistake its abandoned state as a sign of its irrelevance to the city’s history and culture. Traces of the extensive hospital campus remain, as do sites linked to notorious people (it was the final home of “Typhoid Mary”) and events (the steamship General Slocum sank by its shores). It has stories to tell.
Photographer Christopher Payne (Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals) was granted permission by New York City’s Parks & Recreation Department to photograph the island over a period of years. The results are both beautiful and startling. On North Brother Island, devoid of human habitation for fifty years, buildings great and small are being consumed by the unchecked growth of vegetation. In just a few decades, a forest has sprung up where once there were the streets and manicured lawns of a hospital campus.
North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City includes a history by University of Pennsylvania preservationist Randall Mason, who has studied the island extensively, and an essay by the writer Robert Sullivan (Rats, The Meadowlands), who came along on one of the rare expeditions.
Copies
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The Story of Mankind (Liveright Classics)
by Robert Sullivan, John Merriman Ph.D., Hendrik Willem Van Loon
The winner of the first John Newbery Medal, now updated by Robert Sullivan, remains a timeless classic for all ages. Originally written in 1921 for the author’s grandchildren, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind has charmed generations with its warmth, simplicity, and wisdom. Rather than the dry recitation of events so common in school textbooks, van Loon’s witty, amiable tone animates the story of human history as a grand and perpetually unfolding adventure. Beginning with the origins of human life and sweeping forward to illuminate all of history, van Loon’s incomparable prose and original illustrations present a lively rendering of the people and events that have shaped the world we live in today. This new version has been brought up to date by best-selling historian Robert Sullivan, who continues van Loon’s personable style, incorporating the most important developments of the early twenty-first century, including the war on terrorism, global warming, and the election of Barack Obama. Engagingly written, delightfully informative, and always entertaining, this is the necessary classic of all ages, for all ages. 177 illustrations
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Double Exposure Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer
One of The New Yorker's best books of the year so far | A Kirkus Reviews Best Nature Book of 2024
“Singular . . . Virtuosic . . . Double Exposure is the best book I’ve read about America . . . in many, many years.” —Corey Seymour, Vogue (a best book of 2024)
“Extraordinary . . . A transformative experience for the reader.” —Lucy Sante
“A large-hearted, wide-angled book . . . I couldn't put it down.” —Ian Frazier
A personal exploration of the American West and the work of one of America’s greatest photographers.
Timothy O’Sullivan is America’s most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don’t know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work “surrealistic and disturbing.”
At the same time, we know very little about O’Sullivan himself. Nor do we know—really know—much more about the landscapes he captured. Robert Sullivan’s Double Exposure sets off in pursuit of these two enigmas. This book documents the author’s own road trip across the West in search of the places, many long forgotten or paved over, that O’Sullivan pictured. It also stages a reckoning with how the changes wrought on the land were already under way in the 1860s and ’70s, and how these changes were a continuation of the Civil War by other means. Sullivan, known for his probing investigations of place in the pages of The New Yorker and books like Rats and My American Revolution, has produced a work that, like O’Sullivan’s magisterial photos of geysers and hot springs, exposes a fissure in the American landscape itself.
Copies
No copies available.