Carlo Rotella's Books

Good with Their Hands

Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt

By: Carlo Rotella

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Good with Their Hands

Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt

By: Carlo Rotella

This is a brilliant study, warm and frequently thrilling, of an inspired combination of subjects. Postindustrial American urban culture has found its great poet-theorist in Carlo Rotella."—William Finnegan, author of Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country "In the hands of others, we have learned much about the process of deindustrialization. Rotella powerfully brings the reader to the core of these socio-economic transitions in a manner that is almost palpable in its ability to connect the reader to any one of his subjects. Rotella held me, taught me, opened my eyes to an appreciation of new ways of seeing. The writing is electric, the broader conceptual framework is rich and complex, and his touch is deft throughout the book."—Nick Salvatore, coauthor of We All Got History: The Memory Books of Amos Webber

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Page Count

283

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520243358

ISBN 13

9780520243354

The World Is Always Coming to an End

Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood

By: Carlo Rotella

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The World Is Always Coming to an End

Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood

By: Carlo Rotella

An urban neighborhood remakes itself every day—and unmakes itself, too. Houses and stores and streets define it in one way. But it’s also people—the people who make it their home, some eagerly, others grudgingly. A neighborhood can thrive or it can decline, and neighbors move in and move out. Sometimes they stay but withdraw behind fences and burglar alarms. If a neighborhood becomes no longer a place of sociability and street life, but of privacy indoors and fearful distrust outdoors, is it still a neighborhood? In the late 1960s and 1970s Carlo Rotella grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood—a place of neat bungalow blocks and desolate commercial strips, and sharp, sometimes painful social contrasts. In the decades since, the hollowing out of the middle class has left residents confronting—or avoiding—each other across an expanding gap that makes it ever harder for them to recognize each other as neighbors. Rotella tells the stories that reveal how that happened—stories of deindustrialization and street life; stories of gorgeous apartments with vistas onto Lake Michigan and of Section 8 housing vouchers held by the poor. At every turn, South Shore is a study in contrasts, shaped and reshaped over the past half-century by individual stories and larger waves of change that make it an exemplar of many American urban neighborhoods. Talking with current and former residents and looking carefully at the interactions of race and class, persistence and change, Rotella explores the tension between residents’ deep investment of feeling and resources in the physical landscape of South Shore and their hesitation to make a similar commitment to the community of neighbors living there. Blending journalism, memoir, and archival research, The World Is Always Coming to an End uses the story of one American neighborhood to challenge our assumptions about what neighborhoods are, and to think anew about what they might be if we can bridge gaps and commit anew to the people who share them with us. Tomorrow is another ending.

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Page Count

297

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022662403X

ISBN 13

9780226624037

Good with Their Hands

Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt

By: Carlo Rotella

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Good with Their Hands

Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt

By: Carlo Rotella

A native of the Rust Belt whose own life resonates with these stories, Rotella has gone to the home turf of his characters, hanging out in boxing gyms and blues clubs, riding along with cops and moviemakers, discussing the future of Brockton with a visionary artist and a pitbull-fancying janitor who both plan to save the city's soul. These people make culture with their hands, and hands become an expressive metaphor for Rotella as he traces the links between their individual talents and the urban scenes in which they flourish. His writing connects what happens on the street to the larger story of urban transformation, especially the shift from a way of life that demanded individuals be "good with their hands" to one that depends on the intellectual and social skills fostered by formal education and service work.

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Page Count

280

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520225627

ISBN 13

9780520225626

October Cities

The Redevelopment of Urban Literature

By: Carlo Rotella

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October Cities

The Redevelopment of Urban Literature

By: Carlo Rotella

Returning to his native Chicago after World War II, Nelson Algren found a city transformed. The flourishing industry, culture, and literature that had placed prewar Chicago at center stage in American life were entering a time of crisis. The middle class and economic opportunity were leaving the inner city, and Black Southerners arriving in Chicago found themselves increasingly estranged from the nation's economic and cultural resources. For Algren, Chicago was becoming "an October sort of city even in the spring," and as Carlo Rotella demonstrates, this metaphorical landscape of fall led Algren and others to forge a literary form that traced the American city's transformation. Narratives of decline, like the complementary narratives of black migration and inner-city life written by Claude Brown and Gwendolyn Brooks, became building blocks of the postindustrial urban literature. October Cities examines these narratives as they played out in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Manhattan. Through the work of Algren, Brown, Brooks, and other urban writers, Rotella explores the relationship of this new literature to the cities it draws upon for inspiration. The stories told are of neighborhoods and families molded by dramatic urban transformation on a grand scale with vast movements of capital and people, racial succession, and an intensely changing urban landscape.

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Page Count

384

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520920104

ISBN 13

9780520920101

Playing in Time

Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

By: Carlo Rotella

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Playing in Time

Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories

By: Carlo Rotella

From jazz fantasy camp to running a movie studio; from a fight between an old guy and a fat guy to a fear of clowns—Carlo Rotella’s Playing in Time delivers good stories full of vivid characters, all told with the unique voice and humor that have garnered Rotella many devoted readers in the New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, and Washington Post Magazine, among others. The two dozen essays in Playing in Time, some of which have never before been published, revolve around the themes and obsessions that have characterized Rotella’s writing from the start: boxing, music, writers, and cities. What holds them together is Rotella’s unique focus on people, craft, and what floats outside the mainstream. “Playing in time” refers to how people make beauty and meaning while working within the constraints and limits forced on them by life, and in his writing Rotella transforms the craft and beauty he so admires in others into an art of his own. Rotella is best known for his writings on boxing, and his essays here do not disappoint. It’s a topic that he turns to for its colorful characters, compelling settings, and formidable life lessons both in and out of the ring. He gives us tales of an older boxer who keeps unretiring and a welterweight who is “about as rich and famous as a 147-pound fighter can get these days,” and a hilarious rumination on why Muhammad Ali’s phrase “I am the greatest” began appearing (in the mouth of Epeus) in translations of The Iliad around 1987. His essays on blues, crime and science fiction writers, and urban spaces are equally and deftly engaging, combining an artist’s eye for detail with a scholar’s sense of research, whether taking us to visit detective writer George Pelecanos or to dance with the proprietress of the Baby Doll Polka Club next to Midway Airport in Chicago. Rotella’s essays are always smart, frequently funny, and consistently surprising. This collection will be welcomed by his many fans and will bring his inimitable style and approach to an even wider audience.

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Page Count

284

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226729117

ISBN 13

9780226729114

Christ Stopped at Eboli

The Story of a Year

By: Carlo Levi

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Christ Stopped at Eboli

The Story of a Year

By: Carlo Levi

It was to Lucania, a desolate land in southern Italy, that Carlo Levi—a doctor, painter, philosopher, and man of letters—was confined as a political prisoner because of his opposition to Italy's Fascist government at the start of the Ethiopian war in 1935. While there, Levi reflected on the harsh landscape and its inhabitants, peasants who lived the same lives their ancestors had, constantly fearing black magic and the near presence of death. In so doing, Levi offered a starkly beautiful and moving account of a place and a people living outside the boundaries of progress and time.

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Page Count

306

Publisher

Macmillan

Published Date

ISBN 10

0374530092

ISBN 13

9780374530099

October Cities

The Redevelopment of Urban Literature

By: Carlo Rotella

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October Cities

The Redevelopment of Urban Literature

By: Carlo Rotella

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Page Count

388

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520920104

ISBN 13

9780520920101

Put Your Dreams Away

A Frank Sinatra Discography

By: Luiz Carlo Nascimento Silva

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Put Your Dreams Away

A Frank Sinatra Discography

By: Luiz Carlo Nascimento Silva

Focusing on Sinatra's presence in the recording studio, this discography catalogues Frank Sinatra's commercial records, V-Discs, and soundtrack film recordings. The first chapter covers Sinatra's early years as a vocalist with the big bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. Entries then proceed chronologically with separate chapters for each decade. Data was collected from session reports in the files of record companies and from some union contracts. Commercial record and film soundtrack entries include band personnel and composer credits. Frank Sinatra fans, music historians, and discographers will appreciate this comprehensive catalogue of session recordings in which Sinatra either sang or conducted. The sessions span Sinatra's entire career, from his early days through the nineties. Two indexes, of song titles and of artists, complete the book.

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Page Count

640

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

0313096538

ISBN 13

9780313096532

Fear of Freedom

With the Essay, "Fear of Painting"

By: Carlo Levi

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Fear of Freedom

With the Essay, "Fear of Painting"

By: Carlo Levi

Carlo Levi was a painter, writer, and antifascist Italian from a Jewish family, and his political activisim forced him into exile for most of the Second World War. While in exile, he wrote Christ Stopped at Eboli, a memoir, and Fear of Freedom, a philosophical meditation on humanity's flight from moral and spiritual autonomy and our resulting loss of self and creativity. Brooding on what surely appeared to be the decline, if not the fall of Europe. Levi locates the human abdication of responsibility in organized religion and its ability to turn the sacred int othe sacrificial. In doing so, he references the entire intellecutal and cultural estate of Western civilization, from the Bible and Greek mythology to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. This edition features newly published pieces of Levi's artwork and publication of the work. It also include an introduction that discusses Levi's life and enduring legacy. Fear of Freedom not only addresses a specific moment in history and a universal, timeless condition, but it is also a powerful indictment of our contemporary moral and political failures.

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Page Count

180

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0231139977

ISBN 13

9780231139977

The World Is Always Coming to an End

Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood

By: Carlo Rotella

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The World Is Always Coming to an End

Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood

By: Carlo Rotella

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Page Count

297

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022662403X

ISBN 13

9780226624037

Cut Time

An Education at the Fights

By: Carlo Rotella

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Cut Time

An Education at the Fights

By: Carlo Rotella

Carlo Rotella, an award-winning writer and ringside veteran, unearths the hard wisdom in any kind of fight, from barroom dustup to HBO extravaganza. He vividly describes the tough choices and subtle pleasures that come the way of every fighter, from perennial underdogs on the tank-town circuit to the one-time heavyweight champion Larry Holmes, who still spars to retching exhaustion daily. Rotella uncovers the often startling light that boxing sheds on the world beyond the ring. A college student's brief fistic career pinpoints the moment when adulthood arrives. The serenity of a fellow fan shows Rotella how to process the trauma of a car crash. The persistence of a wizened ex-champion reminds him of his grandmother and helps him accept her death. Throughout, Rotella achieves moving resonances between the worlds inside and outside the ropes. He also tackles fascinating questions that have gone largely unexplored until now: How do boxers endure the brutal punishment that is the sport's essence? And why do they come back for more, again and again? As Rotella traces his immersion in the fight world, he achieves what few other writers in that world have: he makes it relevant to us, whether we're fans or not.

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Page Count

239

Publisher

HarperCollins

Published Date

ISBN 10

0547344961

ISBN 13

9780547344966

The Everyday Parenting Toolkit

The Kazdin Method for Easy, Step-by-Step, Lasting Change for You and Your Child

By: Alan E. Kazdin,Carlo Rotella

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The Everyday Parenting Toolkit

The Kazdin Method for Easy, Step-by-Step, Lasting Change for You and Your Child

By: Alan E. Kazdin,Carlo Rotella

From the director of the Yale Parenting Center, a practical guide to dealing with the routine challenges of raising a child. Alan Kazdin’s The Kazdin Method for Parenting the Defiant Child is the gold standard for research-backed advice on being a better parent for difficult children. But now in The Everyday Parenting Toolkit, Dr. Kazdin focuses on the children who aren’t defiant. Dr. Kazdin’s methods are based on the most up-to-date research and are implemented in real-world ways. These are the problems that plague parents on a day-to-day basis: from getting ready for school on time to expanding the palates of picky eaters to limiting computer time, no parenting book does a better job at helping parents understand and correct problematic behaviors. Dr. Kazdin’s methods foster lifelong positive character traits such as respectfulness, honesty, kindness, and altruism. With The Everyday Parenting Toolkit, Dr. Kazdin helps transform parenting and helps develop ideal child-parent relationships. “Kazdin delivers the evidence-based, gold-standard method for parents who want simple, effective responses to the everyday challenging behaviors of their children.”—Martin E. P. Seligman, author of Flourish and The Optimistic Child “Jam-packed with solid advice any parent can use.”—BookPage “A useful guide to eliminating stress, improving communication and providing a more nurturing family environment.” —Kirkus Reviews

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Age

Page Count

213

Publisher

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published Date

ISBN 10

0547985614

ISBN 13

9780547985619

Book's by Carlo Rotella

Good with Their Hands

Good with Their Hands

The World Is Always Coming to an End

The World Is Always Coming to an End

Good with Their Hands

Good with Their Hands

October Cities

October Cities

Playing in Time

Playing in Time

Christ Stopped at Eboli

Christ Stopped at Eboli

October Cities

October Cities

Put Your Dreams Away

Put Your Dreams Away

Fear of Freedom

Fear of Freedom

The World Is Always Coming to an End

The World Is Always Coming to an End

Cut Time

Cut Time

The Everyday Parenting Toolkit

The Everyday Parenting Toolkit

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