76. Salsa!:

Havana Heat : Bronx Beat

Hernando Calvo Ospina / Paperback / Monthly Review Press / September 1997

77. Signers of the Constitution of the United States

C. Edward Quinn,Bronx County Historical Society,Thomas Ruhf (Illustrator) / Hardcover / Bronx Coun / April 2000

ABOUT THE BOOK

Annotation
Presents brief biographies of the men who signed the Constitution and the nonsigning delegates and describes the membership of the Convention's committees.

79. The Snow Walker

Margaret K. Wetterer,Margaret K. Wetterer,Mary O'Keefe Young (Illustrator) / Hardcover / Lerner Publishing Group, The / December 1995

ABOUT THE BOOK

Synopsis
This book presents the "story of 12-year-old Good Samaritan Milton Daub, who braved the . . . blizzard that hit the Northeast in March 1888 to bringsupplies to his needy neighbors. . . . Grades two to four." (Booklist)
From The Horn Book, Inc.
During the East Coast blizzard of 1888, most of New York City was shut down by the powerful winds and snow. The authors tell the true story of twelve-year-old Milton Daub, who spent an entire day taking food and medicine to people in his Bronx neighborhood. Using realistic watercolors and a beginning reader format, the book effectively offers readers an opportunity to meet a young hero.

80. The Snow Walker

Margaret K. Wetterer,Mary O. Young (Illustrator) / Paperback / Lerner Publishing Group, The / October 1995

ABOUT THE BOOK - above

From Toni Buzzeo - AudioFile
Heat up a mug of hot chocolate and throw a log on the fire before listening to this true story from the famous Blizzard of '88. As 12-year-old Milton Daub braves the 1888 snowstorm in the Bronx, the sound of icy, howling winds and cracking trees enhances the experience. The narrator maintains the tension throughout with a tight, slightly hushed reading that seems to slip free from the simplicity of the accompanying easy-reader text. The pacing, slow and resolute as Milton moves determinedly on his mission, rushes forward when the situation becomes dire. The excitement, danger and heroism of Milton's day of rescue and delivery in the storm will cause young listeners to wish for their own blizzards. T.B. cAudioFile, Portland, Maine

84. Spidertown

Abraham Rodriguez,Ramon Albino (Translator) / Paperback / Random House, Incorporated / December 1998

ABOUT THE BOOK

Annotation
Tense, gritty, and moving, this tale of life in the South Bronx is both a love story and a street's-eye view of life as a drug runner. When he meets the beautiful Cristalena, Miguel dreams of escaping the ghetto with her. But crack kingpin Spider has other plans. "Powerful."--The New York Times Book Review.

Reviews
From Library Journal
This first novel tells the story of Miguel, a 16-year-old Puerto Rican American crack runner in the South Bronx. He falls in love with Cristalena, whose disapproval of what crack has done to her neighborhood forces him to look at his life from a different perspective. His struggle to hang onto Cristalena puts him in conflict with the world of the streets. Rodriguez ( The Boy Without a Flag, LJ 10/15/92) writes with the authority of an insider, clearly taking his work seriously, placing himself in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Richard Wright as an author who will look at and bring into the open a side of society that might otherwise remain hidden. This highly recommended work is mandatory for any library serving an urban or Hispanic community. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/93.-- David Dodd, Benicia P.L., Cal.

85. Spidertown:

A Novel
Abraham Rodriguez / Hardcover / Hyperion / April 1993

ABOUT THE BOOK - above

87. Surviving the Fall:

The Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor
Peter A. Selwyn,Peter A. Selwyn / Hardcover / Yale University Press / January 1998

ABOUT THE BOOK - below

Annotation
"...a first-hand account by a physician who treated AIDS/HIV patients at a Bronx medical center during the first decade of the epidemic, a time when the author had to deal with and accept his own father's suicide." Appropriate for: Healthcare Professionals, Lay Public.

From The Publisher
This poignant and eloquent book is a memoir of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic in the Bronx, a physician's firsthand account of the emergence of an epidemic and the lives that it touched. It is also an exploration of how the physician was himself transformed by his experience with these patients. Dr. Peter Selwyn, now a well-known researcher and clinician in the area of HIV and drug abuse, came to Monteflore Medical Center in the Bronx as a medical intern in June 1981. He remained there for ten years, caring for patients with AIDS. During that same decade he got married and became a father. Absorbed in the pain and losses of his patients and their families, Dr. Selwyn finally acknowledged the grief he had carried for decades following the sudden death (and apparent suicide) of his father when the author was an infant. He realized that, like AIDS, suicide stigmatizes both those who die and those who survive -- an insight that helped him to see the connections between his patients' lives and his own. Surrounded by dying young parents, he understood what it meant to have a father and to be one. The insight began a process of personal healing in the midst of the epidemic. His story can help us see AIDS (and any life-threatening illness) as an opportunity to go through our own fear, pain, and darkness and to come out on the other side.

88. Surviving the Fall:

The Personal Journey of an AIDS Doctor

Peter A. Selwyn,Foreword by Sherwin B. Nuland / Paperback / Yale University Press / February 2000

ABOUT THE BOOK - above

Reviews
From Journal of the American Medical Association
I did find many points of resonance and would recommend this modest and perceptive book to anyone interested in the AIDS epidemic and one physician's response, but, more particularly, to anyone in a helping profession seeking to understand the complex relationships between loss and compassion.

From Lisa Michaels
The twin themes. . .the progression of a devastating disease and the unresolved grief of the son of a suicide -- are full of power, but Selwyn's narrative fails to exprss it. -- The New York Times Book Review

From Booknews
In this memoir, Selwyn explains how his experiences with the first wave of the AIDS epidemic in the Bronx brought to the surface his subconscious grief over his father's apparent suicide. He then shows how his awareness of a relation between the stigma of AIDS and the stigma of suicide led him to overidentify with his patients and become excessively dedicated to his work, and how his eventual understanding of this situation caused him to resume his proper roles in his family and as a father.

From Library Journal
This is not so much a book about AIDS as it is the story of a physician's coming to self-understanding by means of his work with AIDS patients. Selwyn, associate director of the AIDS program at Yale, began working with the disease as a new resident. Increasingly consumed by his work and concerned about his patients, he began to recognize that he was becoming less emotionally available to his own family. Selwyn attributes this and other problems to the death of his father, who died suddenly, probably a suicide, when the author was an infant. While Selwyn's profiles of AIDS patients are lovingly and beautifully written, and he paints an involving and realistic picture of the devastating impact of AIDS, readers might wonder at his tendency to attribute virtually every emotion to his father's death. Not an essential purchase, this book will nevertheless appeal to readers interested in AIDS or stories of self-discovery. -- Linda Gleason, University of Medicine & Dentistry of New Jersey Library, Newark

From Kirkus
A moving personal account of a doctor's discoveries about himself as he struggled to care for his dying AIDS patients. In 1981, when the AIDS epidemic was just beginning, Selwyn, newly graduated from Harvard Medical School, joined the Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx as an intern in family medicine, later becoming medical director of its drug-abuse treatment program. For nearly 10 years, his only patients were the HIV-infected, mostly intravenous drug users and their sexual partners and children. Surrounded by dying young men, widows, and orphaned children with whom he found himself making deep connections, Selwyn began to explore his own history and eventually to come to terms with it. His father had died in a mysterious fall from a window when Selwyn was an infant, his apparent suicide a family secret. Selwyn came to see parallels between the stigma of AIDS and the stigma of suicide, between the drug addiction of his patients and his own addiction to work. The stories of five patients had special resonance for him: Nelson, with his idealized family; pregnant Milagro, bent on a path of unalterable self-destruction; Delia, whose infant child would soon be orphaned; Javon, determined to leave his son a legacy; and Betty, with her irrepressible zest for life. Selwyn is led to explore his grief and sense of loss in Kubler-Ross workshops, press his family for information about his father, recover his father's ashes, and finally to visit the site of his death. Going through fear, pain, and darkness, says Selwyn, is a prerequisite to becoming an effective caregiver, as he comes to see the physician's primary role not as an all-powerful conqueror of illness but as a companion to those going though an illness and as a witness to their suffering. Poignant revelations from the heart of a physician.

89. Tales from the Yankee Dugout:

Quips, Quotes & Anecdotes about the Bronx Bombers

Ken McMillan,George Castle,Jim Rygelski / Hardcover / Sports Publishing, Incorporated / May 1999

ABOUT THE BOOK

Synopsis
Sit on the bench with Yogi and Casey, in the locker room with Mickey and the Babe, and in the bullpen with Whitey and Sparky. Tales from the Yankees Dugout is a compilation of the funniest, strangest and most unique stories, anecdotes and tall tales that have been attributed to former personalities from baseball's legendary New York Yankees. Sit on the bench with Yogi and Casey, in the locker room with Mickey and the Babe, and in the bullpen with Whitey and Sparky. Includes more than two dozen illustrations by noted sports illustrator Robert Jackson.

92. Underworld
Don DeLillo / Hardcover / Simon & Schuster Trade / October 1997

ABOUT THE BOOK

Synopsis
This "novel begins on October 3, 1951, at New York's Polo Grounds, where the decisive game in the race for the pennant between the . . . Giants and Dodgers is taking place, the same day the Soviet Union detonates an atom bomb." --Booklist

Underworld is a story of men and women together and apart, seen in deep, clear detail and in stadium-sized panoramas, shadowed throughout by the overarching conflict of the Cold War. It is a novel that accepts every challenge of these extraordinary times -- Don DeLillo's greatest and most powerful work of fiction.

93. Underworld

Don DeLillo / Paperback / Simon & Schuster Trade / June 1998

ABOUT THE BOOK - above

Reviews
From Malcolm Jones - Newsweek
Underworld is a book that, once you've finished it, demands to be reread. There's pleasure on every page of this pitch-perfect evocation of a sour, anxious half century. The pleasure comes from incident and insight, but more than anything else it comes from language. DeLillo has heard America singing, talking, weeping, kvetching, and he hasn't missed a syllable. This novel is a symphony of sound. 'I'm always happier getting beyond politics and history and into language,' DeLillo says. 'This is what I do as a writer. I try to create clear and compelling sentences.' Underworld proves that nobody does it better.

96. Unfinished People:

Eastern European Jews Encounter America
Ruth Gay / Hardcover / Norton,Ww / September 1996

ABOUT THE BOOK

Synopsis
This is an "account of the East European Jewish immigrant encounter with America, focusing on the interwar years." (Choice) Annotated bibliography.

From The Publisher
Nearly three million Jews came to America from Eastern Europe between 1880 and the outbreak of World War I. For the most part, they were young, single, unskilled, uneducated, and yet filled with hope of a new life in a new land. In Unfinished People, Ruth Gay fills in the rarely told story of the newcomers in New York in the 1920s and 1930s. Once past the first shock of entry, the young immigrants moved to their dream neighborhoods - in this case the Bronx - where they invented their own version of America. Reveling in the luxuries of steam heat and indoor plumbing, they rebuilt a familiar world of synagogues, schools, and stores, but with a difference. Using homely detail, Gay describes how they dared to become "up-to-date" Americans.

97. Urban Mythologies:

The Bronx Represented since the 1960s

Foreword by Marysol Nieves / Paperback / The Bronx Museum of the Arts / August 1999

ABOUT THE BOOK

Synopsis
Exploring how the Bronx has been represented by artists over the last 3 decades, this exhibition catalogue includes work by over 40 artists including Gordon Matta-Clark, Maya Lin, Sophie Calle, Crash, Daze, Ahearn and Torres, Aldo Rossi, and Tats Cru

98. The Wanderers

Richard Price,R. Price / Paperback / Houghton Mifflin Company / March 1999

ABOUT THE BOOK

Description from The Reader's Catalog
Coming of age in the Bronx during the 1960s

99. Where You Belong

Mary Ann McGuigan / Hardcover / Simon & Schuster Children's / March 1997

ABOUT THE BOOK - below

Annotation
In 1963, when thirteen-year-old Fiona runs away from home and ends up reunited with her former classmate Yolanda in an all-black neighborhood of the Bronx, their interracial friendship gives rise to both comfort and controversy.

100. Where You Belong

Mary Ann McGuigan / Paperback / Simon & Schuster Children's / August 1998

ABOUT THE BOOK - above

From Mary Sue Preissner - Children's Literature
In 1963, two young girls living in totally different worlds within New York City, one black and the other white, find friendship and support with each other. Fiona is desperate to escape poverty brought about primarily by her father's addiction to alcohol and disposition to violence. Yolanda is trying to survive the streets of her neighborhood, filled with drugs and random violence. The relationship between the girls provides both comfort and controversy.