A Chicago Firehouse: Stories of Wrigleyville's Engine 78 (Voices of America Series)
Author: Karen Krus
From its humble beginnings in 1884 as a one-story frame building with one bay to house Hose Company 4 and its team of horses, Engine Company 78 has been the firefighting sentinel at the end of Waveland Avenue, sitting in the shadow of Wrigley Field. Using vintage photographs and moving stories from firefighters themselves, Karen Kruse captures the spirit and heroism of this historic Chicago landmark.
Captain Robert F. Kruse served the Chicago Fire Department for 30 years, half of those at Wrigleyville's Engine 78. Growing up within the tight-knit firefighting community, Ms. Kruse records the dramatic and touching stories from her father's and his peers' experiences, and combines them in this volume exploring the unique history of Lakeview's firehouse, including a foreword by Mike Ditka and preface by Fire Commissioner James Joyce. With details about little known historic districts and a brief guide to Chicago's cemeteries and their relations to firefighters, A Chicago Firehouse: Stories of Wrigleyville's Engine 78 relays in first-hand accounts some of Chicago's most fiery tragedies, the brave men who battled them, and the diversity of the neighborhood that housed them.
New interesting textbook: Menu Solutions or Food Service Management by Checklist
To the Scaffold: The Life of Marie Antoinette
Author: Carolly Erickson
One of history's most misunderstood figures, Marie Antoinette represents the extravagance and the decadence of pre-Revolution France. Yet there was an innocence about Antoinette, thrust as a child into the chillingly formal French court.
Married to the maladroit, ill-mannered Dauphin, Antoinette found pleasure in costly entertainments and garments. She spent lavishly while her overtaxed and increasingly hostile subjects blamed her for France's plight. In time Antoinette matured into a courageous Queen, and when their enemies finally closed in, Antoinette followed her inept husband to the guillotine in one last act of bravery.
In To the Scaffold, Carolly Erickson provides an estimation of a lost Queen that is psychologically acute, richly detailed, and deeply moving.
Publishers Weekly
In this smoothly written biography, Erickson contends that Marie Antoinette had only one extramarital love, and depicts her as courageous and dignified at her execution. (June)
Library Journal
``In the cemetery of the Madeleine, gravediggers cursed the cold and prepared a hole in the earth to receive the frail remains of another prisoner, as a harsh autumn wind blew up around the gravestones and bent the branches of the leafless trees.'' With these words, popular biographer Erickson ( Bonnie Prince Charlie, LJ 12/88) brings to a close the story begun on a cold birthday almost 38 years earlier of the tragic French queen. Though this sympathetic account would appear to add little new to historical record or interpretation, Erickson's descriptive writing talents will insure a readership for this book. This is the author's first French subject. Perhaps her next biographical study should be of a person less studied than the tragic queen.-- William C. McCully, Park Ridge P.L., Ill.
School Library Journal
YA-- Much maligned in her lifetime, Marie Antoinette is likewise much misunderstood by history, which portrays her as a vain, selfish, and insensitive woman of limited intellect. Erickson attempts to right the wrongs and correct the image of this queen in an easily read biography that avoids both academic cant and ``psychohistorical'' pretension. Tracing Marie Antoinette from her childhood among her 13 brothers and sisters at the court of her legendary mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, the author portrays her not as the selfish queen of lore but as a reasonably intelligent, opinionated woman of decidedly conservative bent whose ultimate ``crime,'' for which she paid with her life, was having the wrong title in the wrong place at the wrong time. To the Scaffold will be enjoyed by students of European and French history. --Roberta Lisker, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA
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