Fresh Kills—a monumental 2,200-acre site on Staten Island—was once the world’s largest landfill. From 1948 to 2001, it was the main receptacle for New York City’s refuse. After the 9/11 attacks, it reopened briefly to receive human remains and rubble from the destroyed Twin Towers, turning a notorious disposal site into a cemetery. Today, a mammoth reclamation project is transforming the landfill site, constructing an expansive park three times the size of Central Park. Martin V. Melosi provides a comprehensive chronicle of Fresh Kills that offers new insights into the growth and development of New York City and the relationship among consumption, waste, and disposal. He traces the metamorphoses of the landscape, following it from salt marsh to landfill to cemetery and looks ahead to the future park. By centering the problem of solid-waste disposal, Melosi highlights the unwanted consequences of mass consumption. He presents the Fresh Kills space as an embodiment of massive waste, linking consumption to the continuing presence of its discards. Melosi also uses the landfill as a lens for understanding Staten Island’s history and its relationship with greater New York City. The first book on the history of the iconic landfill, Fresh Kills unites environmental, political, and cultural history to offer a reflection on material culture, consumer practices, and perceptions of value and worthlessness.

"Formerly a symbol of immense urban waste, the Fresh Kills Landfill is being transformed into an enormous parkland destined to exemplify the values of ecological restoration and environmental sustainability. In partnership with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, the Land Art Generator Initiative held an ideas competition for a site-specific public artwork designed to operate as a source of clean energy for the city utility grid, using Freshkills Park as the design site. This volume features many of the top submissions to that open call, each with the capacity to power hundred of homes. The Land Art Generator Initiative creates sustainable design solutions that integrate art and technology into renewable energy infrastructure around the world. Regenerative Infrastructures draws a much needed connection between the two critical issues of sustainable development--energy generation and waste management--highlighting solutions that address both problems at once, thereby creating economically beneficial hybrid utility installations." -- Publisher's description.

Joseph Lani grew up on the south shore of Staten Island (NY), where a happy childhood was shattered by a tragedy that tears his family apart forever. After trying to start a new life in Florida, Lani returned to New York and soon found himself a member of New York's Finest. Then his life and the lives of so many others were changed forever on September 11, 2001. After the initial horrors ended, Lani was assigned to the command center at the Fresh Kills Landfill, whose mission was to sift through the debris of the entire World Trade Center. Under the stress of the job, Lani suffers a massive heart attack and subsequent near death experience. He miraculously recovers to a new life fully enveloped in the spirit world. In this fast-paced memoir in which we get to "run with the bulls," Joseph Lani recounts his many harrowing and humorous experiences on the job. Lani entertains his readers with an insider's account of a very real world most of us only think we know from television.

Arborist William Bryant Logan recovers the lost tradition that sustained human life and culture for ten millennia. Once, farmers knew how to make a living hedge and fed their flocks on tree-branch hay. Rural people knew how to prune hazel to foster abundance: both of edible nuts, and of straight, strong, flexible rods for bridges, walls, and baskets. Townspeople cut their beeches to make charcoal to fuel ironworks. Shipwrights shaped oaks to make hulls. No place could prosper without its inhabitants knowing how to cut their trees so they would sprout again. Pruning the trees didn’t destroy them. Rather, it created the healthiest, most sustainable and most diverse woodlands that we have ever known. In this journey from the English fens to Spain, Japan, and California, William Bryant Logan rediscovers what was once an everyday ecology. He offers us both practical knowledge about how to live with trees to mutual benefit and hope that humans may again learn what the persistence and generosity of trees can teach.

At first, John Sanders, Jr., couldn't care less that his father is dead, let alone murdered. The only thing he regrets is that he didn't pull the trigger, or so he thinks. When he reunites with his sister, Julia, at their childhood home, the siblings' reactions could not be more different. While Julia sees to funeral arrangements and plans a memorial, Junior rages out of control, his anger at his father for a lifetime of violence and abuse matched only by his need to seek vengeance for the man's death.

With the publication in English in 1930 of Civilization and its Discontents and its thesis that instinct – and, ultimately: nature – had been and must be forever subordinated in order that civilization might thrive and endure, Freud contributed what some contemporaries saw to the central debate of his era – a debate which had long preoccupied both official American pundits and the American populace at large. At the beginning of the new Millennium, evidence abounds that an American debate still rages over the meaning of “nature,” the rightful weight of instinct, and the status of civilization. The Millennium itself has appeared in popular and official discourses as an appropriate marker of an age in which nature is close to the edge of radical extinction and has also become more and more unreliable as a paradigm for representation and debate. At the same time, the contemporary tailoring of nature to postmodern needs and expectations inevitably reveals the conceptual difficulty of any possible, simple opposition between nature and culture as if they were clearly distinguishable domains. If nature, then, can clearly be seen as a discursive concept, it may also be a timeless concept insofar that it has been shaped, created, and used at all times. Every epoch, age and era had “its own nature,” with myth, history and ideology as its dominant shaping forces. From the Frontier to Cyberia, nature has been suffering the “agony of the real,” resurfacing in discursive strategies and demonstrating a powerful impact on American society, culture and self-definition. The essays in this collection “speak critically of the natural” and examine the American debate in the many guises it has assumed over the last century within the context of major critical approaches, psychoanalytical concepts, and postmodern theorizing.

Poetry. "The work of David Breskin is political, lyrical and funny. In poems like 'Smart Money, ' a denunciation of money's arrogance, his intelligence has the power to sing. A classic of its kind, 'Da Hood' contains all the virtues of his writing: compression, conceptual energy, humor; 'Town Crier' displays his edgy lyricism. A poet of concentrated language, Breskin is also an astute cultural critic. At his best, he is among the finest younger poets now writing" Paul Hoover."