Andrew Furman

Glideology, an invented word, is meant to evoke memories of gliding downhill on your bicycle as a child or sledding down a hill in the winter. Glideology represents an optimistic outlook for traffic for the near future. It anticipates that common-sense will take hold and urban public space will be improved to focus on the many different reasons that one travels; short local trips, medium-distance trips of 15 minutes or less, multi-modal options to travel offer an antidote to simply defaulting to taking the car to get some milk at the corner store because this is a learned behaviour that can be altered for a more sustainable and obvious options. This book explores in a comic format the many shared experiences and feelings that go into commuting in urban areas and it looks to how the street can accommodate a multi-modal approach to sharing the laneways so that real options exist for the pedestrian.

In 1837, a young Henry David Thoreau sets out to lead an extraordinary life in Concord, Massachusetts, combating formidable obstacles. He struggles to find work as a teacher, to discover his voice as a writer, and to realize true friendship and romantic love, battling all the while against the " family disease" that threatens his health. When a captivating young woman arrives in town, she ignites a tumultuous love triangle with Thoreau's brother, forcing matters to a crisis. Meanwhile, David Hertzog, a Thoreau scholar in present-day Maine, embarks on a reflective journey in the autumn of his life upon the unexpected return of his estranged daughter. Her reappearance in town forces him to grapple with their painful shared history and seek a new path forward. Alternating between these two timelines, The World That We Are delves into enduring themes of love, family, the quest for meaningful work, and the search for a true home in the spinning cosmos.

Through stories of nature near at hand, a South Florida writer offers a unique view of humans and the environment amid development and change Wings and talons clatter against a windowpane. Foxes den under a deck. Pines stand in quarter-acre lots, recalling a vanished forest. In this book, Andrew Furman explores touchpoints between his everyday suburban life and the environment in South Florida, contemplating his place in a subtropical landscape stretching from the Everglades to the warm Atlantic coast. Transportive vignettes of encounters in the natural world blend with ordinary, all-too-relatable stories of home and family life in these chapters. Puzzled and fascinated by the plants and animals he meets while continually preoccupied by busy domestic routines, Furman illustrates the beauty of his “suburban wilderness.” He also reckons with changes and threats to the surrounding landscape. How, he asks, should humans go about living in what is simultaneously one of the most overdeveloped and most naturally beautiful states in the country?Furman’s meditations give rise to an environmental ethic that challenges distinctions between nature and culture, wilderness and civilization, solitude and family life. Rather, with humor and hope, he encourages readers to engage in life with the mindset that the human and non-human are inextricably connected—and to ask how they can better belong together.Of Slash Pines and Manatees is a creative and memorable example for anyone seeking to live responsibly and richly in a world impacted by human activity. Furman inspires readers to focus fiercely on the local, to conduct their own adventures in the ecosystem outside their front doors, and to see that even in the most overdeveloped areas, what is wild persists. Funding for this publication was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication do not necessarily represent those of Florida Humanities or the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Nathan Pray's life is a mess. A rare cold snap in the subtropics has nearly obliterated his beloved snook population, as if rising seas, urbanization, and toxic red tide blooms weren't trouble enough. What's more, his domestic life has unraveled. Nathan's father suffers through the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, his wife has left him for a more upstanding (and normal) Jewish husband, his adolescent son seems to have retreated into a dubious hip-hop identity, and his mother has her own problems. He's a good man who just can't catch a break. But Nathan's luck just might be about to change. A lucrative sponsorship and a television role on a popular fishing program can be his for the taking if he will only compromise on some of his stubborn piscatorial principles. Inspired in equal parts by Ernest Hemingway, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow, Jewfish chronicles the day-to-day life of a middle-aged fisherman, lovable in spite of his shortcomings, and shines a light on the environmental issues facing south Florida and the planet.

When Andrew Furman left the rolling hills of Pennsylvania behind for a new job in Florida, he feared the worst. While he’d heard much of the fabled “southern charm,” he wondered what could possibly be charming about fist-sized mosquitoes, oppressive humidity, and ever-lurking alligators. It wasn’t long before he began to notice that the real Florida right outside his office window was very different from the stereotypes portrayed in movies, television, and even state-sponsored tourism advertisements. In Bitten, Furman shares his amazement at the beautiful and the bizarre of his adopted state. Over seventeen years, he and his family have shed their Yankee sensibilities and awakened to the terra incognita of their new home.As he learns to catch snook a wily fish that inhabits, among other areas, the concrete-lined canals that crisscross the state and seeks out the state’s oldest live oak, a behemoth that pre-dates Columbus, Furman realises that falling in love with Florida is a fun and sometimes humbling process of discovery. Each chapter highlights a fascinating aspect of his journey into the natural environment he once avoided, from snail kites to lizards and cassia to coontie.Sharing his attempts at night fishing, growing native plants, birding, and hiking the Everglades, Furman will inspire you to explore the real Florida. And, if you aren’t lucky enough to reside in the Sunshine State, he’ll at least convince you to unplug for an hour or two and enjoy the natural beauty of wherever it is you call home.

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, roughly half of Furman’s high school basketball teammates lived in the largely Anglo, and increasingly Jewish, San Fernando Valley, while the other half were African Americans bused in from the inner city. Los Angeles was embroiled in efforts to desegregate its public school district, one of the largest and most segregated in the country. Tensions came to a head as the state implemented its forced busing plan, a radical desegregation program that was hotly contested among Los Angeles residents—particularly among Valley residents—and at all levels of the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. In My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White, the high school’s basketball team serves as the entry point for a trenchant exploration of the judicial, legislative, and neighborhood battles over school desegregation that gripped the city in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education and that continue to plague our ""post-racial"" nation. Furman accesses a diverse array of opinions on these years and on the current crisis of race and public education by examining landmark judicial decisions, public policy studies, and newspaper articles, and by interviewing key community leaders, including former U.S. Representative Bobbi Fiedler, the Jewish activist who led the campaign to stop forced busing in Los Angeles, and retired Superior Court Judge Paul Egly, with whom Fiedler and her allies wrangled. Furman also documents his recent visit to Los Angeles during which he met with several of his former teammates, coaches, and neighbors. At once critical and fair-minded, My Los Angeles in Black and (Almost) White cuts through the incendiary rhetoric over school desegregation to offer a lucid, engaging, and informed account of our long legacy and current challenges regarding race and public education.

While many Jews pick Florida as the perfect place to retire, Matt Glassman has chosen it as the place to begin his adulthood. Perhaps that's because the pressures of life have always reminded him of his grandfather, who mysteriously disappeared from the family twenty years ago. Now, while he tries to begin a family of his own, Glassman also builds a relationship with the one person, his grandmother, who might know the truth about his grandfather's disappearance. She's remained stubbornly reticent on the topic all these years, but when a familiar old man shows up at Glassman's office he thinks he may finally get some answers.

Exploring the ambivalent relationship between multiculturalists and contemporary Jewish American literature, this text advocates a more inclusive and intellectually valid form than is currently practiced. It includes an historical overview of Jewish American fiction.

Examines eight Jewish-American writers—Meyer Levin, Leon Uris, Saul Bellow, Hugh Nissenson, Chaim Potok, Philip Roth, Anne Roiphe, and Tova Reich—who have "imagined" Israel in their work.CHOICE 1997 Outstanding Academic BooksAnalyzing a wide array of Jewish-American fiction on Israel, Andrew Furman explores the evolving relationship between the Israeli and American Jew. He devotes individual chapters to eight Jewish-American writers who have "imagined" Israel substantially in one or more of their works. In doing so, he gauges the impact of the Jewish state in forging the identity of the American Jewish community and the vision of the Jewish-American writer.Furman devotes individual chapters to Meyer Levin, Leon Uris, Saul Bellow, Hugh Nissenson, Chaim Potok, Philip Roth, Anne Roiphe, and Tova Reich. To chart the evolution of the Jewish-American relationship with Israel from pre-statehood until the present, he considers works from 1928 to 1995, examining them in their historical and political contexts. The writers Furman examines address the central issues which have linked and divided the American and Israeli Jewish communities: the role of Israel as both safe haven and spiritual core for Jews everywhere pitted against its secularism, militarism, and entrenched sexism.While the writers Furman examines depict contrasting images of the Middle East, the very persistence of Israel in occupying that imagination reveals, above all, how prominent a role Israel played and continues to play in shaping the Jewish-American identity.