George Michelsen Foy ist ein gefeierter Autor, bekannt für seine Auseinandersetzung mit tiefgründigen Themen und seine unverwechselbare Erzählstimme. Sein umfangreiches Werk umfasst kritisch gelobte Romane, die Leser und Kritiker gleichermaßen fesselten. Foys literarisches Schaffen erstreckt sich auch auf aufschlussreiche Essays und journalistische Arbeiten, die eine scharfe Beobachtungsgabe und eine vielseitige Sprachbeherrschung beweisen. Zudem widmet er sich der Förderung der nächsten Schriftstellergeneration durch seine Lehrtätigkeit.
"On October 1, 2015, the SS El Faro, a massive American cargo ship that made regular runs between Jacksonville, Florida and Puerto Rico, disappeared in Hurricane Joaquin, a category 4 storm. The ship, its hundreds of shipping containers, and its entire crew plummeted to the bottom of the ocean, three miles down. The sinking was the greatest seagoing US merchant marine shipping disaster since World War II. The ship had a seasoned crew, state-of-the-art navigation equipment, and advance warning of the storm. How, in this day and age, could something like this happen?"--Back cover.
The narrative centers on the 2015 disappearance of the SS El Faro, an enormous American cargo ship that tragically sank in the Bermuda Triangle, resulting in the loss of thirty-three lives. The book combines dramatic storytelling with meticulous research, offering a gripping account of the events leading up to the disaster. It explores themes of human courage and the unpredictability of nature, while providing an in-depth look at the maritime industry and the challenges faced by those at sea.
Alex, a burned out television soap opera writer gets more than he bargained for after a serial-killer character of his creation, escapes from a period drama set in 1850s New York and follows him into the present, turning his world into a virtual nightmare.
Have our noise-soaked lives driven us mad? And is absolute silence an impossible goal or the one thing that can save us? A lively tale of one man's quest to find the grail of total quiet.-- " I don't know at what point noise became intolerable for me," George Michelsen Foy writes as he recalls standing on a subway platform in Manhattan, hands clamped firmly over his ears, face contorted in pain. But only then does Foy realize how overwhelmed he is by the city's noise and vow to seek out absolute silence, if such an absence of sound can be discovered. Foy begins his quest by carrying a pocket-sized decibel meter to measure sound levels in the areas he frequents most'the subway, the local cafe, different rooms of his apartment, as well as the places he visits that inform his search, including the Parisian catacombs, Joseph Pulitzer's "silent vault," the snowy expanses of the Berkshires, and a giant nickel mine in Canada, where he travels more than a mile underground to escape all human-made sound. Along the way, Foy experiments with noise-canceling headphones, floatation tanks, and silent meditation before he finally tackles a Minnesota laboratory's anechoic chamber that the Guinness Book of World Records calls "the quietest place on earth," and where no one has ever endured even forty-five minutes alone in its pitch-black interior before finding the silence intolerable. Drawing on history, science, journalistic reportage, philosophy, religion, and personal memory, as well as conversations with experts in various fields whom he meets during his odyssey, Foy finds answers to his questions: How does one define silence' Did human beings ever experience silence in their early history' What is the relationship between noise and space' What are the implications of silence and our need for it'physically, mentally, emotionally, politically. Does absolute silence actually exist? If so, do we really want to hear it? And if we do hear it, what does it mean to us? According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 30 million Americans suffer from environment-related deafness in today's digital age of pervasive sound and sensory overload. Roughly the same number suffer from tinnitus, a condition, also environmentally related, that makes silence impossible in even the quietest places. Inthis respect, Foy's quest for silence represents more than a simple psychological inquiry; both his queries and his findings help to answer the question "How can we live saner, healthier lives today'" Innovative, perceptive, and delightfully written, Zero Decibels will surely change how we perceive and appreciate the soundscape of our lives
The Great Gatsby is known for the glitz and glamour of Gilded Age plutocrats; in The Last Green Light, the working people of Fitzgerald's novel get to tell their own, beautifully textured tale. Meet Jon Laine, a Midwesterner who captains one of the rumrunning boats that are the source of Gatsby's great wealth; enter a colorful netherworld of diner cooks, dump scavengers, secretaries, deckhands and car mechanics caught in the increasingly deadly conflict between organized crime syndicates, amid the murderous passions of caste-busting love. From movie stars to dark freighters, Wobblies to Harlem nightclubs The Last Green Light, like a jazz improvisation, riffs on a great American novel, creating its own, unique world in the process.
