Special Topics: New York City

97 Orchard is a richly detailed investigation of the lives and culinary habits--shopping, cooking, and eating--of five families of various ethnicities living at the turn of the twentieth century in one tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. With 40 recipes included, 97 Orchard is perfect for fans of Rachel Ray's Hometown Eats; anyone interested in the history of how immigrant food became American food; and "foodies" of every stripe.

Webber's lyrical memoir of growing up white in East Harlem's public housing projects in the late 1950s and 1960s explores racial identity and community at the height of the civil rights movement.

Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers-- one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley's proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers: wars, political movements, technological advances. And even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house... and their housebound lives are fraught with peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves.