Robert Sullivan

Reprint of the original, first published in 1861.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Tunui | Comet is the first collection in more than a decade by one of our most important living Maori poets. Rolling easily between korero Maori and the canonical traditions of English-language poetry, through karakia and powhiri, treaty training and decolonisation wikis, Robert Sullivan takes readers on a marvellous poetic hikoi. Guided by Maui and Tawhirimatea, Moana Jackson and Freddie Mercury, we walk from K'Rd council flats to Kaka Point, finding ourselves and our ancestors along the way.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1869.

Originally written in 1921 for the author’s grandchildren, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind has charmed generations with its warmth, simplicity and wisdom. Van Loon’s witty, amiable tone animates the story of human history as a grand unfolding adventure. Beginning with the origins of human life and sweeping forward to illuminate all of history, his incomparable prose and original illustrations present a lively rendering of the people and events that have shaped the world we live in today. This new version has been brought up to date by Robert Sullivan, incorporating the most important developments of the early twenty-first century, including the war on terrorism and global warming. Engagingly written, delightfully informative and always entertaining, this is the classic of all ages, for all ages.

UNTAPPED NEW YORK: THE BEST NYC BOOKS OF ALL TIME Few people today have ever heard of North Brother Island, though a hundred years ago it was place known to—and often feared by—nearly everyone in New York City. The island, a small dot in the East River, twenty acres slotted between today's gritty industrial shores of the Bronx and Queens, was a minor piece of the New York archipelago until the late 19th century, when calls for social and sanitary reform—and the massive expansion of the city's population—combined to remake NBI as a hospital island, a place to contain infectious disease and, later, other societal ills. Abandoned since 1963, North Brother Island is a ruin and a wildlife sanctuary (it is the protected nesting ground of the Black-crowned Night Heron), closed to the public and virtually invisible to it. But one cannot mistake its abandoned state as a sign of its irrelevance to the city's history and culture. Traces of the extensive hospital campus remain, as do sites linked to notorious people (it was the final home of "Typhoid Mary") and events (the steamship General Slocum sank by its shores). It has stories to tell. Photographer Christopher Payne (Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals) was granted permission by New York City's Parks & Recreation Department to photograph the island over a period of years. The results are both beautiful and startling. On North Brother Island, devoid of human habitation for fifty years, buildings great and small are being consumed by the unchecked growth of vegetation. In just a few decades, a forest has sprung up where once there were the streets and manicured lawns of a hospital campus. North Brother Island: The Last Unknown Place in New York City includes a history by University of Pennsylvania preservationist Randall Mason, who has studied the island extensively, and an essay by the writer Robert Sullivan (Rats, The Meadowlands), who came along on one of the rare expeditions.

Originally written in 1921 for the author’s grandchildren, Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind has charmed generations with its warmth, simplicity, and wisdom. Rather than the dry recitation of events so common in school textbooks, van Loon’s witty, amiable tone animates the story of human history as a grand and perpetually unfolding adventure. Beginning with the origins of human life and sweeping forward to illuminate all of history, van Loon’s incomparable prose and original illustrations present a lively rendering of the people and events that have shaped the world we live in today. This new version has been brought up to date by best-selling historian Robert Sullivan, who continues van Loon’s personable style, incorporating the most important developments of the early twenty-first century, including the war on terrorism, global warming, and the election of Barack Obama. Engagingly written, delightfully informative, and always entertaining, this is the necessary classic of all ages, for all ages.

Named a Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal Americans tend to think of the Revolution as a Massachusetts-based event orchestrated by Virginians, but in fact the war took place mostly in the Middle Colonies--in New York and New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. In My American Revolution, Robert Sullivan delves into this first Middle America, digging for a glorious, heroic past in the urban, suburban, and sometimes even rural landscape of today. Sullivan's history is personal, anecdotal, experiential. He visits the down-home reenactment of the crossing of the Delaware, which has taken place each year for the past half century, and uncovers the fact behind the myth. He camps in New Jersey backyards, hikes through lost "mountains," and wrecks his back--then evacuates illegally from Brooklyn to Manhattan by handmade boat. He recounts a Brooklyn historian's failed attempt to memorialize a colonial Maryland regiment; a tattoo artist's more successful use of a colonial submarine, which resulted in his 2007 arrest by the New York City police and the FBI; and the life of Philip Freneau, the first (and not great) poet of American independence, who died in a swamp in the snow. Like an almanac, My American Revolution moves through the calendar of American independence with the eternally charming Robert Sullivan as our guide. This is a fiercely individual and often hilarious journey; in the process of making our revolution his, Sullivan shows us how alive our own history is, right under our noses.

Robert Sullivan, the New York Times bestselling author of Rats and Cross Country, delivers a revolutionary reconsideration of Henry David Thoreau for modern readers of the seminal transcendentalist. Dispelling common notions of Thoreau as a lonely eccentric cloistered at Walden Pond, Sullivan (whom the New York Times Book Review calls "an urban Thoreau") paints a dynamic picture of Thoreau as the naturalist who founded our American ideal of "the Great Outdoors;" the rugged individual who honed friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other writers; and the political activist who inspired Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and other influential leaders of progressive change. You know Thoreau is one of America's legendary writers...but the Thoreau you don't know may be one of America's greatest heroes.

Shout Ha! to the Sky explores history and contemporary life from a Maori person’s perspective, and seeks to restore possibilities removed through the forces of colonialism. The poetry is intimate, wry, funny, angry and always loving. It weaves into and dialogues with multi-genre work by a range of Pacific authors such as Anne Salmond, Albert Wendt, Haunani-Kay Trask, Witi Ihimaera, and the late Hone Tuwhare, as well as writing from outside the Pacific by Anna Seward, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Keats, Vijay Seshadri, Dante Alighieri.