The Gold Coast

The Great Gatsby meets The Godfather in this #1 New York Times bestselling story of friendship and seduction, love and betrayal. "[Demille is] a true master." - Dan Brown, #1 bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code Welcome to the fabled Gold Coast, that stretch on the North Shore of Long Island that once held the greatest concentration of wealth and power in America. Here two men are destined for an explosive collision: John Sutter, Wall Street lawyer, holding fast to a fading aristocratic legacy; and Frank Bellarosa, the Mafia don who seizes his piece of the staid and unprepared Gold Coast like a latter-day barbarian chief and draws Sutter and his regally beautiful wife, Susan, into his violent world. Told from Sutter's sardonic and often hilarious point of view, The Gold Coast is Nelson DeMille's captivating story laced with sexual passion and suspense.

The Gold Coast is one of Australia's premier tourism destinations, a city cut out of coastal vegetation, including paperbark swamps, mangroves and rainforests of worldwide significance. The Gold Coast Transformed is a collection of integrated chapters identifying and assessing the environmental impacts of the building of Australia's sixth largest city. From the time of the first timber-getters through to the present, the book traces the cumulative impacts of humans on the now World Heritage-listed rainforest and surrounding ecosystems. The city's natural and engineered environments are both fascinating and vulnerable. The construction of massive high-rise apartment blocks, on what were frontal beach dunes, is one of the fundamental mistakes not to be repeated. The book illustrates how and why major environmentally destructive development took place and discusses the impacts of such development on the Gold Coast's beaches, wildlife, and terrestrial and marine environments, such as the destruction of riparian mangrove forest. The Gold Coast Transformed also shows the possibility of sustaining natural populations and reducing the city's ecological footprint. It will be of interest to ecologists, environmental scientists and managers, town planners, economists, policymakers and the general public.

"This is a book about Chicago. It is also, and for that very reason, a book about every other American city which has lived long enough and grown large enough to experience the transformation of neighborhoods and the contact of cultures and the tension between different types of individual and community behavior. . . . Here is a type of sociological investigation which is equally marked by human interest and scientific method."—Christian Century

"One of the nation's best known churches, Fourth Presbyterian is a thriving mainline church housed in an elegant Gothic building in Chicago's wealthy Gold Coast neighborhood. Less than a mile to the west is another world: the Cabrini-Green low- income housing projects. In this evenhanded account, James Wellman surveys the church's history of balancing its theological aims and its social boundaries and sheds light on the strengths and weaknesses of liberal Protestantism as a modern religious institution. Wellman shows how Fourth Presbyterian has moved from an establishment congregation to what he calls a lay liberal church working to overcome class and race inequality in its urban context while carving out its institutional identity in an increasingly pluralistic environment. By examining the church's four main leaders over the course of the century, Wellman tracks Fourth Presbyterian's gradual shift away from an evangelical role and toward the current focus on service, epitomized in the church's main outreach program, an extensive volunteer tutoring program that serves hundreds of Cabrini-Green residents each week. In documenting Fourth Presbyterian's struggle to meet the needs of its privileged congregants while challenging them to move beyond exclusive boundaries of race and class, The Gold Coast Church and the Ghetto opens a window into the past, present, and future of the Protestant mainline."

“Provocative and well written . . . a must-read for any scholar interested in African identity, the transatlantic slave trade, and resistance.” —American Historical Review Although they came from distinct polities and peoples who spoke different languages, slaves from the African Gold Coast were collectively identified by Europeans as “Coromantee” or “Mina.” Why these ethnic labels were embraced and how they were utilized by enslaved Africans to develop new group identities is the subject of Walter C. Rucker’s absorbing study. Rucker examines the social and political factors that contributed to the creation of New World ethnic identities and assesses the ways displaced Gold Coast Africans used familiar ideas about power as a means of understanding, defining, and resisting oppression. He explains how performing Coromantee and Mina identity involved a common set of concerns and the creation of the ideological weapons necessary to resist the slavocracy. These weapons included obeah powders, charms, and potions; the evolution of “peasant” consciousness and the ennoblement of common people; increasingly aggressive displays of masculinity; and the empowerment of women as leaders, spiritualists, and warriors, all of which marked sharp breaks or reformulations of patterns in their Gold Coast past. “One of the book’s greatest strengths is the ways in which Rucker painstakingly traces how ethnic labels were appropriated, recast, and ultimately employed as a means to establish community bonds and resist oppression . . . Chapters that focus on the creation of the Gold Coast diaspora, religion, and women make for a captivating text that will be of interest to graduate students and specialist readers. Recommended.” —Choice

Originally published in 1928, Troupers of the Gold Coast follows the startup and success of a theater company of the same name that started performing in 1837 at California’s First Theater. More than 2,000 actors and actresses performed and trained with the company between 1848 and 2005. Until their last show in 2005, they were the oldest continually performing theater company in the world. By the time the Troupers found their footing, though, a little girl named Charlotte (Lotta) Crabtree was achieving an early stardom. Since the age of six, she had been performing along the coast for men and women of the Gold Rush. Her mother managed her career, thus ensuring that Lotta was never taken advantage of. She was extremely popular and very successful in acting, singing, dancing, and banjo playing. Lotta, who was named “The Nation’s Darling,” was able to tour the United States and Europe before retiring in her forties. Troupers of the Gold Coast captures the rise of one America’s most beloved entertainers, as well as the formation and excitement surrounding one of the most popular and successful American theater troupes of all time. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.