Cecelia Tichi

In her Fifth Avenue mansion in autumn, 1898, silver heiress Val DeVere, learns a third young woman's strangled body has been found nearby in New York's Central Park. The victim could be someone like Val's late mother, or her, for the Valentine Mackle DeVere is one generation from the Irish immigrants who now risk their lives toiling in the city that promised a better life. Heartsick, Val joins her well-connected husband, Roddy (Roderick Windham DeVere),...

Newport Summer 1899—yachts, balls, and famed artists eager to paint portraits of Society's “Queens.” Western silver heiress Val Mackle DeVere (Mrs. Roderick W.) agrees to “sit” for a portrait for her beloved Roddy, only to stumble on a scene of bloody, grisly homicide at an art gallery. Like a figure from Pompeii, the dead Newport gallery manager screams in silence, his hands like claws clutching at a gilt frame pulled down over his head...

As a girl in the West, Valentine Mackle dodged quicksand along the rivers of the mining camps, but as Mrs. Roderick W. DeVere of New York's Fifth Avenue, Val is sucked into Society's own quicksand in spring, 1899, when a weekend at a country estate in the Hudson Valley turns deadly. Val's "soul sister" drowns on family property, and the host's best "practical jokes" double as death traps. A Gilded Drowning Pool snarls Val and husband Roddy in a bogus...

A gripping and inspiring book, Civic Passions examines innovative leadership in periods of crisis in American history. Starting from the late nineteenth century, when respected voices warned that America was on the brink of collapse, Cecelia Tichi explores the wisdom of practical visionaries who were confronted with a series of social, political, and financial upheavals that, in certain respects, seem eerily similar to modern times. The United States--then,...

This is the America to which Julian West, a young Bostonian, awakens after more than a century of sleep. West's initial sense of wonder, his gradual acceptance of the new order and a new love, and Bellamy's wonderful prophetic inventions-electric lighting, shopping malls, credit cards, electronic broadcasting-ensured the mass popularity of this 1888 novel. But however rich in fantasy and romance, Looking Backward is a passionate attack on the social...

"The decades following the American Civil War burst with invention-the telephone, the motor car, electric lights, the airplane-and none more welcome than the new and novel beverage heralded as the cocktail. Known as the Gilded Age, these years became the Golden Age of Cocktails, including the classic Manhattan and Martini that persist to this day. Scores of whiskey drinks, cooled with ice chips or cubes that chimed against the glass, proved doubly...

""Roaring Twenties" America boasted famous firsts: women's right to vote under the Constitution's Nineteenth Amendment, jazz music, talking motion pictures, Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, Flapper fashions, and wondrous new devices like the safety razor and the electric vacuum cleaner. The decade opened, nonetheless, with a shock when Prohibition became the law of the land on Friday, January 16, 1920. American ingenuity...