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General non-fiction, Travel and geography, United States history
Human-narrated audio
"A casually wondrous experience; it made me feel like the city was unfolding beneath my feet.&” —Jia Tolentino, author of…
Trick Mirror In place-names lie stories. That&’s the truth that animates this fascinating journey through the names of New York City&’s streets and parks, boroughs and bridges, playgrounds and neighborhoods. Exploring the power of naming to shape experience and our sense of place, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on the city&’s map. He excavates the roots of many names, from Brooklyn to Harlem, that have gained iconic meaning worldwide. He interviews the last living speakers of Lenape, visits the harbor&’s forgotten islands, lingers on street corners named for ballplayers and saints, and meets linguists who study the estimated eight hundred languages now spoken in New York. As recent arrivals continue to find new ways to make New York&’s neighborhoods their own, the names that stick to the city&’s streets function not only as portals to explore the past but also as a means to reimagine what is possible now
DAISY audio (Direct to player), DAISY audio (Zip)
European travel and geography, Criticism
Human-narrated audio
An in-depth and personal exploration of Scandinavian crime fiction as a way into Scandinavian culture at large For nearly four…
decades, Wendy Lesser's primary source of information about three Scandinavian countries-Sweden, Norway, and Denmark-was mystery and crime novels, and the murders committed and solved in their pages. Having never visited the region, Lesser constructed a fictional Scandinavia of her own making, something between a map, a portrait, and a cultural history of a place that both exists and does not exist. Lesser's Scandinavia is disproportionately populated with police officers, but also with the stuff of everyday life, the likes of which are relayed in great detail in the novels she read: a fully realized world complete with its own traditions, customs, and, of course, people. Over the course of many years, Lesser's fictional Scandinavia grew more and more solidly visible to her, yet she never had a strong desire to visit the real countries that corresponded to the made-up ones. Until, she writes, "between one day and the next, that no longer seemed sufficient." It was time to travel to Scandinavia