Urban Memoirs

A beloved folk singer presents an impassioned account of the fall and rise of the small American towns she cherishes. Dubbed by the New Yorker as "one of America's very best singer-songwriters", Dar Williams has made her career not in stadiums, but touring America's small towns. She has played their venues, composed in their coffee shops, and drunk in their bars. She has seen these communities struggle, but also seen them thrive in the face of postindustrial identity crises.

Eyes on the Street is a revelation of the phenomenal woman who raised three children, wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged at home and on the streets in thousands of debates - all of which she won. Here is the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the journalist who honed her writing skills at Iron Age, Architectural Forum, Fortune, and other outlets.

The Parachute Regiment is Britain's elite airborne infantry. On the 80th anniversary of their first crucial campaign, in Operation Torch in North Africa, historian and broadcaster Mark Urban combines perspectives from German and British sources to tell the gripping stories of the men who had the resilience, fitness and self-reliance to be "Red Devils"—the name they were given by their German enemies.

Six months ago, Charlotte almost lost everything. Now, she’s determined to keep her daughter, Elle, safe. So when local girls close to Elle in age and appearance begin to go missing, it’s her worst nightmare. Charlotte’s fears are confirmed when a frantic search becomes a shocking murder investigation. The girls’ bodies have been found - half-buried, and with traces of mud and wildflowers under their fingernails. As Charlotte’s obsession with keeping her daughter close pushes her marriage to the brink, local DI Madeleine Wood embarks on a gruelling search for the killer.

One moment, I was a normal (if somewhat germaphobic) math teacher getting ready for summer vacation. Then my sister died, leaving me with a sword...and her destiny as dragon hunter. It turns out there's a whole other world out there filled with demons, dragons, and spirits. Now my job is to protect mortals - and I haven't got a clue what I'm doing. Then there's tattooed hotness Ian Iskander. Part dragon hunter and part demon, Ian's got some seriously creepy business associates and keeps trying to steal my sword. So why do we keep getting lost in hungry, crazy-hot kisses?

Chris Bathum was a respected therapist, addiction specialist, and founder of one of the fastest-growing rehabilitation chains in America. But Bathum was a total fraud: he was a homicidal meth-head with a history of sexually abusing his patients, scamming insurance companies, and eliminating whistle-blowers. Like Rose Stahl. But this intended victim would be his last. Stahl would risk her life to bring down the monster she and so many other people in need had once trusted for their salvation.

Long accused of racism and “white flight”, the ethnic Americans driven from their homes and neighborhoods—the author included—finally get the chance to tell their side of the story.

Too dark for science and too evil for theology, but some secrets refuse to stay hidden. Postgraduate student Harry Chesterton uncovers a trail of dark science that leads to the old monastery above the Welsh town of Aberystwyth. With bodies beneath the cafe, residents oozing puss from puncture marks on their necks, and the disappearance of the University Chaplain, Chesterton's research into post-mortem consciousness is about to leap off the page.

A birder strolling in Central Park. A college student lounging on a university quad. Two men sitting in a coffee shop. Perfectly ordinary actions in ordinary settings—and yet, they sparked jarring and inflammatory responses that involved the police and attracted national media coverage. Why? In essence, Elijah Anderson would argue, because these were Black people existing in white spaces. In this book, Anderson brings his immense knowledge and ethnography to bear in this timely study of the racial barriers that are still firmly entrenched in our society at every class level.

On March 13, 1964, Kitty Genovese was brutally beaten and murdered in the street near her apartment, in full view of more than three dozen friends and neighbors - and no one did a thing to stop it. More than thirty-five years after its first publication, Thirty-Eight Witnesses, the true account of what transpired that night in Queens, New York, continues to disturb us. We would like to think that we would step in and do what we could to stop the carnage.

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas - one of America's poorest cities - John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already run down, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.

Burned-out after years of doing development work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina, as recounted in his award-winning memoir Twelve by Twelve. Could he live a similarly minimalist life in the heart of New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot "micro-apartment" in Greenwich Village.

The Skripal Files is a remarkable and definitive account of Sergei Skripal’s story, which lays bare the new spy war between Russia and the West. Mark Urban, the diplomatic and defense editor for the BBC, met with Skripal in the months before his poisoning, learning about his career in Russian military intelligence, how he became a British agent, his imprisonment in Russia, and the events that led to his release. Skripal’s first-hand accounts and experiences reveal the high stakes of a new spy game that harks back to the chilliest days of the Cold War.

From Season 3 of VH1’s hit reality television show Love & Hip Hop - New York, Winter Ramos delivers a brazen and unabashed memoir of her life in the world of hip hop. In Game Over, Winter puts all of her emotions on the page, leaving no experience, emotional abuse, secret, or former lover uncovered. Winter was privy to the cray beyond the videos, private flights, and limos that the cameras caught for us. Her reality and theirs was no game.

Nate Ebner and his father were inseparable. From an early age, they worked side-by-side in the family junkyard. Even though Nate was a great peewee football player in football-mad Ohio, he followed his father's passion for rugby and started playing for the same club as his father when he was only 13 years old. But Nate had to face the fact that there was no way to make a living as a professional rugby player in this country. So Nate gave his dad the news that he planned to quit rugby and go out for the football team at Ohio State University, with an eye toward making the NFL.

In the fugue of deep meditation, Jaya Devi tumbles outdoors into a muggy south Florida dawn. Sliding on a pair of orange flip-flops, she cuts across a dirt path skirting the ashram lawn. She glances down as a fat black snake slithers up her bare leg, wrapping itself tight. Astonished, she pauses, exemplifying the yogi’s art of non-reaction, breathing and assessing. Here, we enter into the wild wisdom-experience of a modern yogi who uses each moment as fuel for personal transformation.

For Cody Alan, one of country music’s most famous on-air radio and TV personalities, listening to other people has always been a crucial part of his role. It was by fostering his ability to hear others that he discovered the person he most needed to listen to was himself. Listening ultimately led him on a journey of self-discovery where he found the courage to come out as gay, the openness to question spiritually, and the strength to explore a new definition of parenting and family.

Baseball in the 1920s is most known for Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees, but there was another great Yankee player in that era whose compelling story remains untold. Urban Shocker was a fiercely competitive and colorful pitcher, a spitballer. In the Yankees’ storied 1927 season, Shocker finished with a record of 18-6 even while his fastball and physical skills were deserting him. Hardly anyone knew Shocker was suffering from an incurable heart disease that left him able to sleep only while sitting up and that would take his life in less than a year.

Patrick thought he knew what awaited him in the afterlife. He's learning the hard way that he was dead wrong. He is hunted by a race of giant beasts, the likes of which have never been seen by living eyes, and he is surrounded by the newly-dead from worlds beyond knowing. In this Realm, nothing and no one can be trusted.

A young African American millennial filmmaker's funny, sometimes painful, true-life coming-of-age story of trying to make it in New York City - a chronicle of poverty and wealth, creativity and commerce, struggle and insecurity, and the economic and cultural forces intertwined with "the serious, life-threatening process" of gentrification.