Title: Death in the Haymarket_ A Story of Chica Author: James R. Green File Type: Mobi Subject:History Description:From Publishers WeeklyAs Green thoroughly documents, the bloody Haymarket riot of May 4, 1886, changed the history of American labor and created a panic among Americans about (often foreign-born) radicals and reformers and union activists. The Haymarket demonstration, to protest police brutality during labor unrest in Chicago, remained peaceful until police moved in, whereupon a bomb was thrown by an individual never positively identified, killing seven policemen and wounding 60 others. Shortly after, labor leaders August Spies and Albert Parsons, along with six more alleged anarchists, stood convicted of murder on sparse evidence. Four of them went to the gallows in 1887; another committed suicide. The surviving three received pardons in 1893. The Knights of Labor, at that time America's largest and most energetic union, received the blame for the riot, despite a lack of conclusive evidence , and many Knights locals migrated to the less radical American Federation of Labor. Labor historian Green (_Taking History to Heart_) eloquently chronicles all this, producing what will surely be the definitive word on the Haymarket affair for this generation. Green is particularly strong in documenting the episode's long aftermath, especially the decades-long efforts of the white Parsons's black wife to exonerate her husband. B&w illus. (Mar. 7) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. FromGreen, an academic, offers a narrative history of Chicago's Haymarket bombing in 1886, the infamous trial that followed, and the hanging of subsequently determined innocent men. Chicago was then at the heart of the labor struggle for the eight-hour day, and we learn that workers' struggles had often been met with shocking repression, and that when violence bred violence, when powerless laboring people struck back in anger, they often paid with their lives. The Haymarket episode became a seminal moment for the American labor movement, and Green takes us inside the personal, social, and cultural elements of this tragic event. Evaluation of Haymarket includes the contention that a conservative bias against radicals, labor organizers, immigrants, and minorities was fundamental to the conflict as well as the view that execution of the anarchists saved the country from anarchy and was a moral and political victory for law and order. The author notes that after Haymarket, social peace among the various classes in Chicago was impossible, and grudges continued for decades. Mary Whaley American Library Association. lt;

Title: Year's Best SF 15 Author: David G. Hartwell File Type: Mobi Subject:Science-Fiction Description: Who knows what awaits us tomorrow? Much of the most innovative and exhilarating work performed in the boundary-less arena of SF is being done in the short form. This year's magnificent harvest--gathered, as always, by acclaimed award-winning editors and anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer--offers glimpses of worlds and tomorrows that would have been inconceivable just a few years ago. Brilliant, bold, unusual, and soaring flights into the hitherto unforeseen yet increasingly possible future, Year's Best SF 15 offers truly breathtaking stories by some of speculative fiction's brightest lights, including: Stephen Baxter - Nancy Kress - Alastair Reynolds - Geoff Ryman - Bruce Sterling - Peter Watts - Robert Charles Wilson - Gene Wolfe - and others