"The mind is its own place and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." John Milton, Paradise LostNew York PARADISE LOST Bushwick Era Disco is an intimate photographic journey to the pandemonium and paradise of New York City during the 1970s through the early 1990s. Carrying her camera everywhere, Meryl documented a tumultuous time in the city's history; epidemics of arson, AIDS, crack, and crime intensified by a paralyzing blackout, political and fiscal crisis. Nevertheless, Meryl's effervescent images are a personal memoir - love letters filled with compassion and humor mixed with angst, kept secret for decades. The viewer explores a serpentine-like adventure. Split seconds of a flash expose hedonistic hangouts filled with overtly sexual and drug activity, celebrities, and people out to have a good time. Daylight reveals the beauty of those who loved and thrived in the destruction of Bushwick. Unique to New York PARADISE LOST, Meryl reveals an insider's point of view of Bushwick's school life - students, staff, and families working together to create a safer space to learn and grow despite societal ills of poverty and prejudice. Meryl's photos show the beginnings of the local community and government working together to rebuild Bushwick. From one small neighborhood and a larger city on the brink- new music, art, fashion, literature, creative thinking, and culture emerge and remain influential today. Flash forward four decades - many bemoan the gentrification of cities like New York City, the renaissance of small towns and neighborhoods like Bushwick. There is nostalgia for a "realness" and a sense of community lost in the process of change. New York PARADISE LOST Bushwick Era Disco is a story of discovery, tenacity, and the resilient human spirit that can inspire us today. Then and now, individuals and communities must work together locally and globally to recover from a crisis. From our losses, may we learn, preserve, create and appreciate with renewed strength.

"The author provides a book-by-book examination of Paradise Lost for the first-time reader, highlighting the important features of Milton's epic style"--

Paradise Lost demonstrates the consequences to education, public services and political institutions in California of the increasing resort to the hyper-democracy of the ballot initiative process. WITH A NEW PREFACE.

The black and white photos in Mean Streets, collected here in print for the first time, offer a look at the infamously hardscrabble NYC in the 70s and 80s captured with the deliberate and elegant eye that propelled Grazda to further success. In the late 1970s and early 80s, the institutions of power in New York had failed. A bankrupt city government had sold its power over to the banks, and the financiers' severe austerity programs gutted the city's support systems. Most of the city's traditional industries had already left, and those power brokers in charge of the new system retreated to their high rises and left the streets to the hustlers, preachers, and bums; the workers struggling to get by; and a new generation of artists who were squatting in the empty industrial buildings downtown and bearing witness to the urban decay and institutional abandonment all around them. For the tough and determined, the quick and the gifted, the prescient and the prolific, a cheap living could be scratched out in the mean streets. Renowned photographer Edward Grazda began his career in that version of NYC. The black and white photos in Mean Streets, collected here in print for the first time, offer a look at that desolate era captured with the deliberate and elegant eye that propelled Grazda to further success. It's a version of New York that has been all but scrubbed clean in the financially solvent years that have followed, but the character of the city has been indelibly marked by the scars of those years.

PHOTO BOOK ABOUT SASSY'S 70 IN NY

Paradise Lost remains as challenging and relevant today as it was in the turbulent intellectual and political environment in which it was written. This edition aims to bring the poem as fully alive to a modern reader as it would have been to Milton's contemporaries. It provides a newly edited text of the 1674 edition of the poem-the last of Milton's lifetime-with carefully modernized spelling and punctuation.