A St. Louis Post-Dispatch Favorite Book of 2011 The New York Times Book Review has praised Richard Burgin’s stories as “eerily funny . . . dexterous . . . too haunting to be easily forgotten,” while the Philadelphia Inquirer calls him “one of America’s most distinctive storytellers . . . no one of his generation reports the contemporary war between the sexes with more devastating wit and accuracy.” Now, in Shadow Traffic, his seventh collection of stories, five-time Pushcart Prize winner Richard Burgin gives us his most incisive, witty, and daring collection to date as he explores the mysteries of love and identity, ambition and crime, and our ceaseless, if ambivalent, quest for truth. In “Memorial Day,” an aging man at a public swimming pool recalls a brief but momentous affair he had with a young British woman in London thirty years ago and the paradoxical role his recently deceased father played in it. In the highly suspenseful “Memo and Oblivion,” set in the near future in New York, two rival drug organizations engage in a dangerous battle for supremacy—one promoting a pill that increases memory exponentially, the other a pill that dramatically eliminates memory. “The Interview” centers on a B-movie starlet married to a much older and more famous director and her tragic yet comic interview with an ambitious but conflicted young reporter. Shadow Traffic justifies the New York Times’ claim that Burgin offers “characters of such variety that no generalizations about them can apply” and why the Boston Globe concluded that “Burgin’s tales capture the strangeness of a world that is simultaneously frightening and reassuring, and in the contemporary American short story nothing quite resembles his singular voice.”

Identifies key bottlenecks to avoid, and includes advice on getting to airports, stadiums, or the shore

"Most Americans have surprisingly intimate relationships with their cars. Nearly everyone drives - at least 140 million of us do - and nearly everyone is frustrated to tears by traffic congestion, aware of the political repercussions of driving (didn't we recently fight a war to keep us mobile?), and increasingly concerned about the car's environmental hazards." ""Car biologist" K. T. Berger sets out on an investigative journey to explore just how this dominant life form - part human, part machine - is affecting its vast, complex ecosystem. In an age when ten percent of our arable land and fifty percent of our urban areas are paved over, will the car evolve, or will it continue on its present course of destruction, which can only lead to its extinction (and possibly our own)?" "Berger searches for answers as he interviews the nation's drivers in this offbeat, on-the-road adventure. He talks to an extraordinary range of car users - from South Dakota to Florida, from Los Angeles to New York - all with personal tales that illustrate just how deeply cars and driving are ingrained in American life." "In Los Angeles, Berger finds a former street racer who tells hilarious tales of racing around the city in his custom Porsche with a Corvette engine; in Dallas, a good ol' boy police detective talks about relentlessly chasing thieves whose crimes are, by God, "crimes against the great state of Texas!"; and in New York, Berger meets the classic New York cabbie with more one-liners than Rodney Dangerfield." "What are we going to do about the transportation mess? In search of answers to this urgent question, Berger journeys to Detroit to interview automotive executives and engineers. He puts current efforts to reduce gridlock and auto pollution into focus by interviewing urban and regional planners, transportation experts in government and academia, and environmental activists, creating a panoramic and fascinating portrait of America on wheels."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Number of Exhibits: 2

Called by "Entertainment Weekly" "The best book on Hendrix", "Crosstown Traffic" rode their A-list for over two months and won the prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. Roots-savvy British critic Charles Shaar Murray assesses the lifework of guitarist Jimi Hendrix in the context of black musical tradition, social history, and the upheaval of the 1960s.

“Reveals a political trend that threatens both our form of government and our species.” - Timothy Snyder, author of ON TYRANNY "Riveting.... Want to understand how so many Americans turned against truth? Read this book." Nancy Maclean, author of DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today. In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided. In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading.

Vols. for 1919- include an Annual statistical issue (title varies).