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A Force For Nature: The Story of NRDC and its Fight to Save Our Planet
The world's preeminent environmental organization began with a layer of soot on the windowsill of a Greenwich Village apartment. Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) founder John H. Adams, a pioneer of environmental action, was working as a lawyer for the U.S. Attorney's office when he and fellow lawyers teamed up to form a grassroots environmental advocacy group. Since 1970, NRDC has grown into an international powerhouse with 1.2 million members and a staff of scientists and lawyers whose mission is to safeguard the planet. This inspiring memoir tells the story of the NRDC and the environmental movement it sparked.
Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America's Gilded Age
"A Rich, Fascinating Saga of the most influential, far-reaching architectural firm of their time and of the dazzling triumvirate---Charles McKim, William Mead, and Stanford White---who came together, bound by the notion that architecture could help shape a nation in transition. They helped to refine America's idea of beauty, elevated its architectural practice, and set the standard on the world's stage." "Their world and times were those of Edith Wharton and Henry James, though both writers and their society shunned the architects as being too much about new money. They brought together the titans of their age with a vibrant and new American artistic community and helped to forge the arts of America's Gilded Age, informed by the heritage of European culture." "McKim, Mead & White built houses for America's greatest financiers and magnates: the Astors, Joseph Pulitzer, the Vanderbilts, Henry Villard, and J. P. Morgan, among others...They designed and built churches---Trinity Church in Boston, Judson Memorial Baptist Church in New York, and the Lovely Lane Methodist Church in Baltimore..." "They built libraries---the Boston Public Library---and social clubs for gentlemen, among them, the Freundschaft, the Algonquin of Boston, the Players club of New York, the Century Association, the University and Metropolitan clubs..." "They built railroad terminals---the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City---and the first Roman arch in America for Washington Square (it put the world on notice that New York was now a major city on a par with Rome, Paris, and Berlin). They designed and built Columbia University, with Low Memorial Library as the centerpiece of its four-block campus, and New York University, and they built as well the old Madison Square Garden, whose landmark tower marked its presence on the city's skyline..." "Mosette Broderick's Triumvirate is a book about America in its industrial transition; about money and power, about the education of an unsophisticated young country, and about the coming of artists as an accepted class in American society." Broderick, a renowned architectural and social historian, brilliantly weaves together the strands of biography, architecture, and history to tell the story of the houses and buildings Charles McKim, William Mead, and Stanford White designed. She writes of the firm's clients, many of whom were establishing their names and places in upperclass society as they built and grabbed railroads, headed law firms and brokerage houses, owned newspapers, developed iron empires, and carved out a new direction for America's modern age.
