Algonquin by Master Landscaping

Ex-Bears Fullback Pleads Guilty In Minority-Contractor Scam

Former Bears fullback Roland Harper pleaded guilty Tuesday to fraud for allowing his trucking company to be used by a white-owned firm to obtain contracts set aside for minority-owned businesses.

Harper, 55, of Algonquin, pleaded guilty in federal court to one count of mail fraud and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. In return, prosecutors agreed to recommend he serve about 16 months in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 14.

Harper, who is African-American and was president of Rohar Construction, admitted he obtained contracts from Chicago Public Schools on behalf of Monahan Landscape Co., which got more than $1.5 million in payment.

The landscaping business, based in Arlington Heights, is headed by Aidan Monahan, 58, of Bensenville, who pleaded guilty last week to mail fraud. Monahan faces up to almost 5 years in prison when he is sentenced in September.

According to records, Rohar in 2003 was awarded a contract from the schools to oversee landscaping on some of its property, even though trucking, not landscaping, was Rohar’s specialty.

CPS spokesman Mike Vaughn said that when Rohar was awarded the contract, Rohar was believed to be “a general contractor with landscaping capabilities.”

“But when our Office of Business Diversity got involved, they questioned whether Rohar had landscaping capability,” Vaughn said. That office then notified the CPS’ inspector general’s office, which investigated and notified authorities.

Once Rohar was hired, Assistant U.S. Atty. Nancy Miller said, Monahan used his equipment for landscaping and controlled Rohar’s bank accounts.

Tags: aidan, algonquin, arlington heights, bensenville, business diversity, chicago public schools, cps, fullback, general contractor, inspector general, landscape, landscape co, Landscaping, mail fraud, mike vaughn, minority contractor, minority owned businesses, monahan, nancy miller, prosecutors, trucking company
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Friday, June 20th, 2008

Landscaping Design No Comments

Tom Thomson Mystery Reviewed

The black flies and mosquitoes were so thick he gave up on sketching and set out to go fishing alone one Sunday in Algonquin Park.

Tom Thomson’s canoe was found floating upside down a few hours later Equipment Landscaping.

His bloated body surfaced in Canoe Lake the next week â€“ shrouded in a mystery still not laid to rest more than 90 years later.

How did the famous Toronto painter die on July 8, 1917: was it by accident, Equipment Landscaping suicide or murder?

Who found his body?

Where are his remains buried?

These questions are explored in one of three new sections of Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History, an educational website launched by the University of Victoria in 1997.

“It, for me, was just a compelling story,” said project research director Gregory Klages, a graduate student in the joint communication and culture program at York and Ryerson Universities.

“It had all the great makings of a great mystery: a suspicious death, accusations of murder, suicide, accidental death, a question about where Thomson’s body was buried.

“There just seemed to be so many questions.”

Visitors to the siteÂ Equipment Landscaping â€“ called Death on a Painted Lake: the Tom Thomson Tragedy â€“ are encouraged to tackle these questions themselves by combing through primary sources such as letters, journal entries and newspaper reports and draw their own conclusions about his life and death.

They will explore a young country grappling with its first great war and a landscape marred by the logging industry.

They will meet a cast of characters including his family, park residents turned murder suspects long after the fact, fellow artists like Group of Seven founder A.Y. Jackson and the various people â€“ including journalist Roy MacGregor â€“ who have investigated the story of his death.

“Growing up in a rural high school, we didn’t have the opportunity to go to museums, to go to art galleries, to handle these primary documents,” said Klages.

“Something like this site would have been tremendously useful.

“It’s to allow students, on the one hand, to get access to the primary documents, to learn how to handle them [by] themselves responsibly as historians, as critical thinkers, Equipment Landscaping and also by handling these primary documents, to make some decisions for themselves about what might have happened,” he said, adding they will be learning about Canadian history and art as they go along.

The site also offers contemporary interpretations of the evidence, including a report by Chief Forensic Pathologist of Ontario Michael Pollanen.

Pollanen concluded the coroner at the time â€“ who never examined the body â€“ was wrong to agree with a doctor’s opinion that the cause of Thomson’s death was accidental drowning.

Tags: algonquin, Equipment Landscaping, landscape, Landscaping, logging industry, michael pollan
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Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Equipment Landscaping No Comments

This week’s best-sellers from Publishers Weekly

Here are the best-sellers for the week that ended Saturday, March 1, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide.

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. The Appeal. John Grisham. Doubleday, $27.95

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 5

2. Remember Me? Sophie Kinsella. Dial, $25

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

3. 7th Heaven. James Patterson %26 Maxine Paetro. Little, Brown, $27.99

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 4

4. Strangers in Death. J.D. Robb. Putnam, $25.95

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 2

5. The Outlaw Demon Wails. Kim Harrison. Eos, $24.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

6. Honor Thyself. Danielle Steel. Delacorte, $27

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

7. Lady Killer. Lisa Scottoline. Harper, $25.95

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 2

8. Duma Key. Stephen King. Scribner, $28

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 6

9. Betrayal. John Lescroart. Dutton, $26.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

10. A Thousand Splendid Suns.
Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead, $25.95

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 41

11. World Without End. Ken Follett. Dutton, $35

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 21

12. The Killing Ground. Jack Higgins. Putnam, $25.95

Last Week: 11; Weeks on List: 3

13. Deep Dish. Mary Kay Andrews. Harper, $24.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

14. Stranger in Paradise. Robert B. Parker. Putnam, $25.95

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 4

15. People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks. Viking, $25.95

Last Week: 12; Weeks on List: 9

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. Losing It. Valerie Bertinelli. Free Press, $26

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

2. The Secret. Rhonda Byrne. Atria/Beyond Words, $23.95

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 61

3. Beautiful Boy. David Sheff. Houghton Mifflin, $24

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

4. The Age of Miracles. Marianne Williamson. Hay House, $22.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

5. Liberal Fascism. Jonah Goldberg. Doubleday, $27.95

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 5

6. Women %26 Money. Suze Orman. Spiegel %26 Grau, $24.95

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 12

7. In Defense of Food. Michael Pollan. Penguin Press, $21.95

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 9

8. Become a Better You. Joel Osteen.
Free Press, $25

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 20

9. The Third Jesus. Deepak Chopra. Harmony, $24

Last Week: 10; Weeks on List: 2

10. You: Staying Young. Michael F. Roizen, M.D., %26 Mehmet C. Oz, M.D. Free Press,$26

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 18

11. I Am America (and So Can You!). Stephen Colbert. Grand Central, $26.99

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 21

12. How Not to Look Old. Charla Krupp. Springboard Press, $25.99

Last Week: 11; Weeks on List: 8

13. An Inconvenient Book. Glenn Beck. Threshold Editions, $26

Last Week: 12; Weeks on List: 15

14. Real Change. Newt Gingrich. Regnery, $27.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 6

15. Predictably Irrational. Dan Ariely. HarperCollins, $25.95

Last Week: 14; Weeks on List: 2

MASS MARKET

1. Revelation (Star Wars: Legacy of the Force). Karen Traviss. Del Rey, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

2. Predatory Game. Christine Feehan. Jove, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

3. Naughty Neighbor. Janet Evanovich. Harper, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

4. I Heard That Song Before. Mary Higgins Clark. Pocket, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

5. Vampire, Interrupted. Lynsay Sands. Avon, $6.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

6. The Innocent Man. John Grisham. Dell, $7.99

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 15

7. Obsession. Jonathan Kellerman. Ballantine, $9.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

8. Deep Storm. Lincoln Child. Anchor, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

9. Tom Clancy’s EndWar. David Michaels. Berkley, $9.99

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 4

10. To Bed a Beauty. Nicole Jordan. Ballantine, $6.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

11. The Faithful Spy. Alex Berenson. Jove, $9.99

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 5

12. Sisters. Danielle Steel. Pocket, $7.99

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 5

13. The 5th Horseman. James Patterson %26 Maxine Paetro. Vision, $9.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

14. The Alibi Man. Tami Hoag. Bantam, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

15. Let Sleeping Rogues Lie. Sabrina Jeffries. Pocket, $7.50

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 2

TRADE

1. A New Earth. Eckhart Tolle. Plume, $14

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 5

2. Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin, $15

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 57

3. The Audacity of Hope. Barack Obama. Three Rivers, $14.95

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 6

4. Three Cups of Tea. Greg Mortenson %26 David Oliver Relin. Penguin, $15

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 27

5. The Other Boleyn Girl. Philippa Gregory. Touchstone, $16

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 4

6. The Friday Night Knitting Club. Kate Jacobs. Berkley, $14

Last Week: 9; Weeks on List: 8

7. Nineteen Minutes. Jodi Picoult. Washington Square Press, $15

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 4

8. Dreams from My Father. Barack Obama. Three Rivers Press, $14.95

Last Week: 11; Weeks on List: 24

9. The Pillars of the Earth. Ken Follett. NAL, $24.95

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 16

10. The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead, $14

Last Week: 10; Weeks on List: 177

11. Atonement. Ian McEwan. Anchor, $14.95

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 14

12. Water for Elephants. Sara Gruen. Algonquin, $13. 95

Last Week: 12; Weeks on List: 46

13. Skinny Bitch. Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin. Running Press, $13.95

Last Week: 14; Weeks on List: 31

14. The Power of Now. Eckhart Tolle. New World Library, $14

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 2

15. 90 Minutes in Heaven. Don Piper with Cecil Murphey. Revell, $12.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 42

Tags: algonquin, amp, michael pollan, money
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Saturday, March 8th, 2008

Landscaping Stone No Comments

Deals for New York this winter

NEW YORK Several deals sponsored by NYC %26 Company, the city’s official tourism and marketing organization, are making wintertime visits to New York City a little less chilly.

“NYC Sunday Stays” offers 20 percent off a Sunday-to-Monday overnight stay at 44 hotels. Besides the discounted rate, many hotels are offering room upgrades, complimentary breakfast and other amenities. Participating hotels include The Algonquin, the Grand Hyatt, the Hilton and others. Details at www.nycvisit.com/NYCSundayStays.

“NYC Open:Book,” through Feb. 29, is offering two-for-one admission and discounts on tickets and shopping at a variety of museums, theaters and other attractions around the city, plus other offers. Open:Book also offers discounts of 15-25 percent off the best available rate at several hotels. The program includes Manhattan as well as other boroughs of the city. Details at www.nycvisit.com/openbook/.

And finally, 10 luxury hotels, part of the Signature Collection group, are offering a “Third Night” promotion, in which you get the third night free after purchase of two nights, through Feb. 29. Participating hotels include the Hotel Plaza Athenee; Jumeirah Essex House; Loews Regency Hotel; Mandarin Oriental New York; The London NYC; The New York Palace Hotel; The Sherry-Netherland; The St. Regis Hotel, New York; The Waldorf Towers; and Trump International Hotel and Towers.
Story continues below

Tags: algonquin, amenities
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Friday, March 7th, 2008

Backyard Landscaping No Comments

This week’s best-sellers from Publishers Weekly

Here are the best-sellers for the week that ended Saturday, Feb. 16, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide.

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. The Appeal. John Grisham. Doubleday, $27.95

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 3

2. 7th Heaven. James Patterson %26 Maxine Paetro. Little, Brown, $27.99

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 2

3. Duma Key. Stephen King. Scribner, $28

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 4

4. A Thousand Splendid Suns.
Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead, $25.95

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 39

5. World Without End. Ken Follett. Dutton, $35

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 19

6. Stranger in Paradise. Robert B. Parker. Putnam, $25.95

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 2

7. Plum Lucky. Janet Evanovich. St. Martin’s, $17.95

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 6

8. The Killing Ground. Jack Higgins. Putnam, $25.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

9. People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks. Viking, $25.95

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 7

10. The Senator’s Wife. Sue Miller. Knopf, $24.95

Last Week: 10; Weeks on List: 6

11. Sizzle and Burn. Jayne Ann Krentz. Putnam, $24.95

Last Week: 9; Weeks on List: 3

12. The Ghost War. Alex Berenson. Putnam, $24.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

13. Charm! Kendall Hart. Hyperion, $21.95

Last Week: 13; Weeks on List: 2

14. Celebutantes. Amanda Goldberg %26 Ruthanna Khalighi Hopper. St. Martin’s, $23.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

15. Where the Heart Leads. Stephanie Laurens. Morrow, $24.95

Last Week:
11; Weeks on List: 2

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. The Secret. Rhonda Byrne. Atria/Beyond Words, $23.95

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 59

2. Women %26 Money. Suze Orman. Spiegel %26 Grau, $24.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 10

3. In Defense of Food. Michael Pollan. Penguin Press, $21.95

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 7

4. You: Staying Young. Michael F. Roizen, M.D., %26 Mehmet C. Oz, M.D. Free Press,$26

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 16

5. Become a Better You. Joel Osteen.
Free Press, $25

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 18

6. Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? Peter Walsh. Free Press, $25

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 2

7. I Am America (and So Can You!). Stephen Colbert. Grand Central, $26.99

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 19

8. Reconciliation. Benazir Bhutto. Harper, $27.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

9. Real Change. Newt Gingrich. Regnery, $27.95

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 5

10. How Not to Look Old. Charla Krupp. Springboard Press, $25.99

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 6

11. An Inconvenient Book. Glenn Beck. Threshold Editions, $26

Last Week: 9; Weeks on List: 13

12. The Dangerous Book for Boys. Conn %26 Hal Iggulden. Collins, $24.95

Last Week: 11; Weeks on List: 39

13. The Age of American Unreason. Susan Jacoby. Pantheon, $26

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

14. The Daring Book for Girls. Andrea J. Buchanan %26 Miriam Peskowitz. Collins,$24.95

Last Week: 15; Weeks on List: 16

15. Deceptively Delicious. Jessica Seinfeld. Collins, $24.95

Last Week: 10; Weeks on List: 19

MASS MARKET

1. The Faithful Spy. Alex Berenson. Jove, $9.99

Last Week: 11; Weeks on List: 3

2. Tom Clancy’s EndWar. David Michaels. Berkley, $9.99

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 2

3. Sisters. Danielle Steel. Pocket, $7.99

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 3

4. The Innocent Man. John Grisham. Dell, $7.99

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 13

5. Dream Chaser. Sherrilyn Kenyon. St. Martin’s, $7.99

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 2

6. Snowfall at Willow Lake. Susan Wiggs. Mira, $7.99

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 3

7. White Lies. Jayne Ann Krentz. Jove, $9.99

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 2

8. The Quest. Wilbur Smith. St. Martin’s, $9.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

9. Hard to Handle. Lori Foster. Berkley, $7.99

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 2

10. White Night. Jim Butcher. Roc, $7.99

Last Week: 14; Weeks on List: 2

11. The Pillars of the Earth. Ken Follett. Signet, $7.99

Last Week: 9; Weeks on List: 12

12. Three in Death. J.D. Robb. Berkley, $7.99

Last Week: 12; Weeks on List: 3

13. Atonement. Ian McEwan. Anchor, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 8

14. Whitethorn Woods. Maeve Binchy. Anchor, $7.99

Last Week: 13; Weeks on List: 3

15. Dawn’s Awakening. Lora Leigh. Berkley, $7.99

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 2

TRADE

1. A New Earth. Eckhart Tolle. Plume, $14

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 3

2. Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin, $15

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 55

3. Three Cups of Tea. Greg Mortenson %26 David Oliver Relin. Penguin, $15

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 25

4. The Audacity of Hope. Barack Obama. Three Rivers, $14.95

Last Week: 10; Weeks on List: 4

5. The Pillars of the Earth. Ken Follett. NAL, $24.95

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 14

6. Atonement. Ian McEwan. Anchor, $14.95

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 12

7. Nineteen Minutes. Jodi Picoult. Washington Square Press, $15

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 2

8. The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead, $14

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 175

9. Eat This, Not That. David Zinczenko with Matt Goulding. Rodale, $19.95

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 6

10. Skinny Bitch. Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin. Running Press, $13.95

Last Week: 9; Weeks on List: 29

11. Dreams from My Father. Barack Obama. Three Rivers Press, $14.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 22

12. The Friday Night Knitting Club. Kate Jacobs. Berkley, $14

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 6

13. Water for Elephants. Sara Gruen. Algonquin, $13. 95

Last Week: 12; Weeks on List: 44

14. FairTax: The Truth. Neal Boortz and John Linder. Harper, $14.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

15. You Can Heal Your Life. Louise Hay. Hay House, $14.95

Last Week: 11; Weeks on List: 2

Tags: algonquin, michael pollan, money, rta
0

Friday, February 22nd, 2008

Landscaping Stone No Comments

Tour civil rights sites with book as your guide

Many of the sites included in the book are well-known %26mdash; like the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, now the National Civil Rights Museum. But Charles E. Cobb Jr., who wrote “On the Road to Freedom,” says he also wanted to include little-known places %26mdash; like the road near Anniston %26mdash; “for the person who has a real interest in the civil rights movement and is not necessarily your ordinary tourist.”

While “On the Road to Freedom” is a travel guide, organized by destination, with street addresses for historic sites, it is also full of stories. Some are known to every schoolchild %26mdash; like Rosa Parks’ refusal to give her seat on the bus to a white passenger %26mdash; but others will be new to many readers, like a 1944 incident in which a black woman named Irene Morgan was jailed for refusing to yield her seat on a Greyhound bus headed from Virginia to Maryland. The conflict led the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down segregated seating on interstate travel.

“I wanted to write a book people could actually use, and a travel book seemed to be the way to do it,” said Cobb, who was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s. “But while this is a travel book, I also consciously wrote it as a story … I was trying to put things into the mix of the historical discussion, both in terms of place and in terms of people %26mdash; especially women %26mdash; who simply are virtually unknown.”

Cobb also notes that many familiar places have layers of connections to black history. “The U.S. Capitol and the White House were both built by slave labor,” Cobb said in an interview. “It gets to the founding contradictions of our country %26mdash; all those eloquent expressions of freedom in the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, you have slavery.”

He added that Parks was the first woman to lie in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol after her death in 2005; and that opera star Marian Anderson gave a concert in 1939 at the Lincoln Memorial because the Daughters of the American Revolution would not allow black performers in a Washington auditorium they owned.

Cobb is on a nationwide tour to promote the book; details at www.algonquin.com/ or tinyurl.com/ywdtt3.

In addition to a chapter on Washington, Cobb has sections on Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. In an epilogue, he mentions the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., along with protests and historic sites in Tallahassee and Jacksonville, Fla.

Cobb’s recommendations for attractions that can help engage older children and teenagers on the subject of civil rights include the Nashville Public Library’s Civil Rights Room, “one of the few places where you can see actual films of nonviolent workshops”; and the Cleveland Avenue Time Machine at the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Ala., where you get on a bus that takes you back in time to the start of Jim Crow.

Here are a few other sites mentioned in “On the Road to Freedom.”

MARYLAND: The Kunta Kinte-Alex Haley Memorial at City Dock, Annapolis, was the arrival point for “Roots” author Haley’s enslaved African ancestor. The National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore features a replica of a slave ship.

NORTH CAROLINA: The Woolworth’s where the famed Greensboro sit-in took place no longer exists, but the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University campus has a statue of the four student protesters. Four seats from the original Woolworth’s can be seen at the Greensboro Historical Museum. Part of the Woolworth’s counter is on display at the Smithsonian in Washington.

SOUTH CAROLINA: The first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in 1861. Important places in Charleston include the Old Slave Mart; Liberty Square, with its fountain memorializing an early civil rights activist, Septima Clark; and the home of Denmark Vesey, who planned an aborted slave insurrection in 1822.

GEORGIA: Mulberry Grove Plantation, near Savannah, is where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which made it easy to produce clean cotton but created a need for slave labor to pick cotton. In Atlanta, at the Sam Nunn Atlanta Federal Center, you’ll find a mural and tiles depicting civil rights events. Also in Atlanta, the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site and Preservation District includes his birthplace, church and gravesite.

ALABAMA: A national historic trail on U.S. Highway 80 marks the route of a voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Marchers were beaten by state troopers on their first attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, but they completed the 54-mile trek on a second march. Today you can visit the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma and a memorial beneath the bridge. Montgomery sites include the Civil Rights Memorial Center and the Rosa Parks Museum. In Birmingham, a civil rights district includes the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four little girls were killed in a bombing; Kelly Ingram Park, where protesters gathered, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

MISSISSIPPI: Cobb notes that there is no marker at the spot in Philadelphia, Miss., where the bodies of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were found in 1964, other than a “No Trespassing” sign on Highway 21 south near the Neshoba County Fairgrounds. But Cobb provides details that allow visitors to retrace the path of the three young civil rights activists. In Jackson, Miss., the house where Medgar Evers lived, and in front of which he was assassinated, is a museum.

Tags: algonquin, amp, greens, rta, spas, tiles
0

Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Landscaping Stone No Comments

Travel guide marks places on the road to civil rights

NEW YORK If you drive six miles southwest of Anniston, Ala., you’ll pass the spot where a bus was bombed in 1961 and the passengers civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders were beaten by a mob.

There’s no marker there, but it’s one of 400 places in a new book called “On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail” (Algonquin Books, $18.95).

Many of the sites included in the book are well-known like the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, now the National Civil Rights Museum. But Charles E. Cobb Jr., who wrote “On the Road to Freedom,” says he also wanted to include little-known places like the road near Anniston “for the person who has a real interest in the civil-rights movement and is not necessarily your ordinary tourist.”

While “On the Road to Freedom” is a travel guide, organized by destination, with street addresses for historic sites, it is also full of stories. Some are known to every schoolchild like Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger but others will be new to many readers, like a 1944 incident in which a black woman named Irene Morgan was jailed for refusing to yield her seat on a Greyhound bus headed from Virginia to Maryland. The conflict led the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down segregated seating on interstate travel.

“I wanted to write a book people could actually use, and a travel book seemed to be the way to do it,” said Cobb, who was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s. “But while this is a travel book, I also consciously wrote it as a story … I was trying to put things into the mix of the historical discussion, both in terms of place and in terms of people especially women who simply are virtually unknown.”

Cobb also notes that many familiar places have layers of connections to black history. “The U.S. Capitol and the White House were both built by slave labor,” Cobb said in an interview. “It gets to the founding contradictions of our country all those eloquent expressions of freedom in the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, you have slavery.”

In addition to a chapter on Washington, D.C., Cobb has sections on Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. In an epilogue, he mentions the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., along with protests and historic sites in Tallahassee and Jacksonville, Fla.

Here are a few other sites mentioned in “On the Road to Freedom”:

North Carolina: The Woolworth’s where the famed Greensboro sit-in took place no longer exists, but the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University campus has a statue of the four student protesters. Four seats from the original Woolworth’s can be seen at the Greensboro Historical Museum. Part of the Woolworth’s counter is on display at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

South Carolina: The first shots of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in 1861. Important places in Charleston include the Old Slave Mart; Liberty Square, with its fountain memorializing an early civil-rights activist, Septima Clark; and the home of Denmark Vesey, who planned an aborted slave insurrection in 1822.

Georgia: Mulberry Grove Plantation, near Savannah, is where Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which made it easy to produce clean cotton but created a need for slave labor to pick it.

In Atlanta, the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site and Preservation District includes his birthplace, church and grave site.

Alabama: A national historic trail on U.S. Highway 80 marks the route of a voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery. Marchers were beaten by state troopers on their first attempt to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, but they completed the 54-mile trek on a second march. Today you can visit the National Voting Rights Museum in Selma and a memorial beneath the bridge. Montgomery sites include the Civil Rights Memorial Center and the Rosa Parks Museum. In Birmingham, a civil-rights district includes the 16th Street Baptist Church, where four girls were killed in a bombing; Kelly Ingram Park, where protesters gathered; and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

Tags: algonquin, amp, greens, rta, s south
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Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Landscaping Rock No Comments

This week’s best-sellers from Publishers Weekly

Here are the best-sellers for the week that ended Saturday, Feb. 9, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide.

Hardcover Bestsellers/

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. 7th Heaven. James Patterson %26 Maxine Paetro. Little, Brown, $27.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

2. The Appeal. John Grisham. Doubleday, $27.95

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 2

3. Duma Key. Stephen King. Scribner, $28

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 3

4. A Thousand Splendid Suns. Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead, $25.95

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 38

5. Stranger in Paradise. Robert B. Parker. Putnam, $25.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

6. Plum Lucky. Janet Evanovich. St. Martin’s, $17.95

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 5

7. People of the Book. Geraldine Brooks. Viking, $25.95

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 6

8. World Without End. Ken Follett. Dutton, $35

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 18

9. Sizzle and Burn. Jayne Ann Krentz. Putnam, $24.95

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 2

10. The Senator’s Wife. Sue Miller. Knopf, $24.95

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 5

11. Where the Heart Leads. Stephanie Laurens. Morrow, $24.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

12. Beverly Hills Dead. Stuart Woods. Putnam, $25.95

Last Week: 9; Weeks on List: 4

13. Charm! Kendall Hart. Hyperion, $21.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

14. Firefly Lane. Kristin Hannah. St. Martin’s, $23.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

15. The Secret Between Us. Barbara Delinsky. Doubleday, $25.95

Last Week: 14; Weeks on List: 3

HARDCOVER NONFICTION

1. The Secret. Rhonda Byrne. Atria/Beyond Words, $23.95

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 58

2. You: Staying Young. Michael F. Roizen, M.D., %26 Mehmet C. Oz, M.D. Free Press,$26

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 15

3. In Defense of Food. Michael Pollan. Penguin Press, $21.95

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 6

4. Become a Better You. Joel Osteen. Free Press, $25

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 17

5. How Not to Look Old. Charla Krupp. Springboard Press, $25.99

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 5

6. Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? Peter Walsh. Free Press, $25

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

7. Real Change. Newt Gingrich. Regnery, $27.95

Last Week: 12; Weeks on List: 4

8. I Am America (and So Can You!). Stephen Colbert. Grand Central, $26.99

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 18

9. An Inconvenient Book. Glenn Beck. Threshold Editions, $26

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 12

10. Deceptively Delicious. Jessica Seinfeld. Collins, $24.95

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 18

11. The Dangerous Book for Boys. Conn %26 Hal Iggulden. Collins, $24.95

Last Week: 10; Weeks on List: 38

12. Jim Cramer’s Stay Mad for Life. James J. Cramer with Cliff Mason. Simon %26 Schuster, $26

Last Week: 11; Weeks on List: 8

13. The Food You Crave. Ellie Krieger. Taunton, $28

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 3

14. Hope’s Boy. Andrew Bridge. Hyperion, $22.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

15. The Daring Book for Girls. Andrea J. Buchanan %26 Miriam Peskowitz. Collins,$24.95

Last Week: 13; Weeks on List: 15

MASS MARKET

1. Dream Chaser. Sherrilyn Kenyon. St. Martin’s, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

2. Hard to Handle. Lori Foster. Berkley, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

3. Sisters. Danielle Steel. Pocket, $7.99

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 2

4. Dawn’s Awakening. Lora Leigh. Berkley, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

5. Snowfall at Willow Lake. Susan Wiggs. Mira, $7.99

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 2

6. Tom Clancy’s EndWar. David Michaels. Berkley, $9.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

7. The Innocent Man. John Grisham. Dell, $7.99

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 12

8. White Lies. Jayne Ann Krentz. Jove, $9.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

9. The Pillars of the Earth. Ken Follett. Signet, $7.99

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 11

10. Vampires Are Forever. Lynsay Sands. Avon, $6.99

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 2

11. The Faithful Spy. Alex Berenson. Jove, $9.99

Last Week: 12; Weeks on List: 2

12. Three in Death. J.D. Robb. Berkley, $7.99

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 2

13. Whitethorn Woods. Maeve Binchy. Anchor, $7.99

Last Week: 11; Weeks on List: 2

14. White Night. Jim Butcher. Roc, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

15. Daddy’s Girl. Lisa Scottoline. Harper, $7.99

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

TRADE

1. A New Earth. Eckhart Tolle. Plume, $14

Last Week: 1; Weeks on List: 2

2. Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert. Penguin, $15

Last Week: 3; Weeks on List: 54

3. The Pillars of the Earth. Ken Follett. NAL, $24.95

Last Week: 2; Weeks on List: 13

4. Three Cups of Tea. Greg Mortenson %26 David Oliver Relin. Penguin, $15

Last Week: 5; Weeks on List: 24

5. Atonement. Ian McEwan. Anchor, $14.95

Last Week: 4; Weeks on List: 11

6. Eat This, Not That. David Zinczenko with Matt Goulding. Rodale, $19.95

Last Week: 6; Weeks on List: 5

7. 19 Minutes. Jodi Picoult. Washington Square Press, $15

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

8. The Kite Runner. Khaled Hosseini. Riverhead, $14

Last Week: 7; Weeks on List: 174

9. Skinny Bitch. Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin. Running Press, $13.95

Last Week: 8; Weeks on List: 28

10. The Audacity of Hope. Barack Obama. Three Rivers, $14.95

Last Week: 13; Weeks on List: 3

11. You Can Heal Your Life. Louise Hay. Hay House, $14.95

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

12. Water for Elephants. Sara Gruen. Algonquin, $13. 95

Last Week: 9; Weeks on List: 43

13. The Gift of Fear. Gavin De Becker. Dell, $15

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

14. The Power of Now. Eckhart Tolle. New World Library, $14

Last Week: -; Weeks on List: 1

15. The 6th Target. James Patterson and Maxine Paetro Grand Central, $14.99

.Last Week: 15; Weeks on List: 5

Tags: algonquin, amp, michael pollan, target
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Sunday, February 17th, 2008

Landscaping Stone No Comments

New book Tour of U.S. civil rights trail

NEW YORK — If you drive six miles southwest of Anniston, Ala., you’ll pass the spot where a bus was bombed in 1961 and the passengers - civil rights activists known as Freedom Riders - were beaten by a mob.

There’s no marker there, but it’s one of 400 places in a new book called “On the Road to Freedom: A Guided Tour of the Civil Rights Trail” (Algonquin Books, $18.95).

Many of the sites included in the book are well-known - like the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, now the National Civil Rights Museum. But Charles E. Cobb Jr., who wrote “On the Road to Freedom,” says he also wanted to include little-known places - like the road near Anniston - “for the person who has a real interest in the civil rights movement and is not necessarily your ordinary tourist.”

While “On the Road to Freedom” is a travel guide, organized by destination, with street addresses for historic sites, it is also full of stories. Some are known to every schoolchild - like Rosa Parks’ refusal to give her seat on the bus to a white passenger - but others will be new to many readers, like a 1944 incident in which a black woman named Irene Morgan was jailed for refusing to yield her seat on a Greyhound bus headed from Virginia to Maryland. The conflict led the U.S. Supreme Court to strike down segregated seating on interstate travel.

“I wanted to write a book people could actually use, and a travel book seemed to be the way to do it,” said Cobb, who was a field secretary for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the Mississippi Delta in the 1960s. “But while this is a travel book, I also consciously wrote it as a story … I was trying to put things into the mix of the historical discussion, both in terms of place and in terms of people - especially women - who simply are virtually unknown.”

Cobb also notes that many familiar places have layers of connections to black history. “The U.S. Capitol and the White House were both built by slave labor,” Cobb said in an interview. “It gets to the founding contradictions of our country - all those eloquent expressions of freedom in the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, you have slavery.”

He added that Parks was the first woman to lie in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol after her death in 2005; and that opera star Marian Anderson gave a concert in 1939 at the Lincoln Memorial because the Daughters of the American Revolution would not allow black perfomers in a Washington auditorium they owned.

Cobb is on a nationwide tour to promote the book; details at http://www.algonquin.com/ or http://tinyurl.com/ywdtt3.

In addition to a chapter on Washington, Cobb has sections on Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. In an epilogue, he mentions the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., along with protests and historic sites in Tallahassee and Jacksonville, Fla.