Urban City

Viennese ideas saturate the modern world. From California architecture to Hollywood Westerns, modern advertising to shopping malls, orgasms to gender confirmation surgery, nuclear fission to fitted kitchens—every aspect of our history, science, and culture is in some way shaped by Vienna. Richard Cockett gives us the entirety of an extraordinary story of how one city made the modern world—and how we all remain inescapably Viennese.

Why is it so much easier for the Democratic Party to win the national popular vote than to build and maintain a majority in Congress? Why can Democrats sweep statewide offices in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan yet fail to take control of the same states' legislatures? Many place exclusive blame on partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression. But as political scientist Jonathan A. Rodden demonstrates in Why Cities Lose, the left's electoral challenges have deeper roots in economic and political geography.

Alexander Cold es un muchacho americano de quince años que parte al Amazonas con su abuela Kate, periodista especializada en viajes. La expedición se interna en la selva en busca de una extraña bestia gigantesca. Junto a su compañera de viaje, Nadia Santos, y un centenario chamán indígena, Alex conocerá un mundo sorprendente. El universo ya conocido de Isabel Allende se amplía en La Ciudad de las bestias con nuevos elementos de realismo mágico, aventura y naturaleza.

In a world of fae, vampires and shifters, where magic is real and wishes can be bought and bargained for, Elle is on society's bottommost rung: She's human. To make matters worse, she's also a slave, bound to her stepmother by magic. Her only hope at freedom is to wish for it. But the Godmother rules the illegal wish trade, and the price she demands is steep. Elle has never been desperate enough to summon her. Until now.

Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity - and the home of 80 percent of the world's population by 2050. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations, and education and health disparities, among many others.

I'm not supposed to push through the boundaries of reality without supervision. I'm definitely not meant to drag a cop Between with me. But stuff happens, you know? Hi. I'm Pet. Well, not Pet, exactly. I am a pet. Nothing too hard; I just cook and clean for the Behindkind who took over my house. Easy. But now one of my owners has gone missing. He's fae, so it shouldn't worry me, but if there's something out there that can kidnap fae, I don't wanna meet it. Good thing I've got another two owners and a spare cop up my sleeve....

In this book, Jane Jacobs, building on the work of her debut, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, investigates the delicate way cities balance the interplay between the domestic production of goods and the ever-changing tide of imports. Using case studies of developing cities in the ancient, pre-agricultural world, and contemporary cities on the decline, like the financially irresponsible New York City of the mid-sixties, Jacobs identifies the main drivers of urban prosperity and growth, often via counterintuitive and revelatory lessons.

If you've never read a Repairman Jack novel, this is the place to begin. It's 1990. A twenty-one-year-old named Jack has dropped out of college, leaving his old life behind to build a new one in New York City. Manhattan's rough edges are jagged enough to shred any unwary newcomer, but perhaps not one who is determined to stay off the grid, at any cost, in the busiest metropolis on earth. And to do so, he'll have to take jobs of a less than legal nature.

It's been a long time since Tobias spread his wings. The exiled dragon prince has worked hard to blend into the human world and practice his love for healing as a pediatric cardiologist. She awakens the dragon within. As a vampire-human hybrid, Sabrina is used to being different from the rest of her community. But all vampires need to feed. The night she chooses Tobias as her next meal, everything changes. He's far more than he seems, and if she doesn't protect his secret, it could cost him his life.

The unforgettable narrator of this compelling, thought-provoking debut goes by two names in his two worlds. At the university he attends, he’s Gabriel, a seemingly ordinary, partying student learning about morality at a distance. But in his life outside the classroom, he’s Snoopz, a hard-living member of London’s gangs, well-acquainted with drugs, guns, stabbings, and robbery. Navigating these sides of himself, dealing with loving parents at the same time as treacherous, endangering friends and the looming threat of prison, he is forced to come to terms with who he really is.

In Saving America's Cities, Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal.

The promise of the so-called smart city has been at the forefront of urban planning and development since the early 2010s, and the tech industry that supplies smart city software and hardware is now worth hundreds of billions a year. But the ideas and approaches underpinning smart city tech raise tough and important questions about the future of urban communities, surveillance, automation, and public participation. The smart city era, moreover, belongs firmly in a longer historical narrative about cities.

Cities define the lives of all those who call them home: where we go, how we get there, how we spend our time. But what if we rethink the ways we plan, live in, and move around our cities? What if we didn't need a car to reach the grocery store? What if we could get back the time we would have spent commuting and put it to other uses?

John Taylor is the name. I work the Nightside. Only in that dark heart of London where it's always three A.M., where human and inhuman can feed their darkest desires, do I feel at home. Probably because I was born there. What I do is find things - people, objects - and in this case, the truth about the origins of the Nightside. That's what Lady Luck has hired me to investigate. But the more I dig, the more I discover, not about the Nightside but about the great question in my life: exactly who - and what - was my long-vanished mother.

One of the most celebrated and controversial authors in America delivers his first novel - a sweeping chronicle of contemporary Los Angeles that is bold, exhilarating, and utterly original. Dozens of characters pass across the reader's sight lines - some never to be seen again - but James Frey lingers on a handful of LA's lost souls and captures the dramatic narrative of their lives.

Jess and Hannah Ballard's determination to protect the Gateways brings them to Edinburgh's Old Town, where a strange phenomenon threatens to disturb the delicate balance between the worlds of the living and the dead. Spirits who wish to cross over are vanishing, and it is up to the Ballard sisters to discover why.

How did the preaching of a peasant carpenter from Galilee spark a movement that would grow to include over two billion followers? Who listened to this "good news," and who ignored it? Where did Christianity spread, and how? Based on quantitative data and the latest scholarship, preeminent scholar and journalist Rodney Stark presents new and startling information about the rise of the early church, overturning many prevailing views of how Christianity grew through time to become the largest religion in the world.

In this eye-opening work of economic theory, Jane Jacobs argues that it is cities—not nations—that are the drivers of wealth. Challenging centuries of economic orthodoxy, in Cities and the Wealth of Nations the beloved author contends that healthy cities are constantly evolving to replace imported goods with locally produced alternatives, spurring a cycle of vibrant economic growth. Intelligently argued and drawing on examples from around the world and across the ages, here Jacobs radically changes the way we view our cities—and our entire economy.

After serving a 10-year bid in prison, Taye "City" Savage was finally freed. However, once he was released, there was no time to chill and enjoy the riches that his brothers had acquired at his left and right hand at the king’s throne of the Savage empire. No sooner than City was released, complete mayhem ensued. His brother, Shon, and his greed causes the Savage empire to be in debt with the Columbian cartel of over a million dollars.

Jason Blum invited 16 cutting-edge collaborators, filmmakers, and writers to envision a city of their choosing, and let their demons run wild. The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares: The Haunted City brings together all-new, boundary-breaking stories from such artists as Ethan Hawke (Boyhood), Eli Roth (Hostel), Scott Derrickson (Sinister), C. Robert Cargill (Sinister), James DeMonaco (The Purge), and many others.