Urban Politics

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.

Karachi. Pakistan’s largest city is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people, twice the size of New York City. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force. It takes an insider to know where is safe, whom to trust, and what makes Karachi tick. In this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother’s birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites.

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working-class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child. But the threats - poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world - were real. All Souls is heartbreaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be "the best place in the world".

In the fall of 1871, Chicagoans knew they were due for the “big one”—a massive, uncontrollable fire that would decimate the city. It had been bone-dry for months, and a recent string of blazes had nearly outstripped the fire department’s already scant resources. Then, on October 8, a minor fire broke out in the barn of Irishwoman Kate Leary. A series of unfortunate mishaps and misunderstandings along with insufficient preparation and a high south-westerly wind combined to set the stage for an unmitigated catastrophe.

The testimony that the author has gleaned for this audiobook from the 30-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC's treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly readable and absorbing collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe.

This is the story of New York City, told through the prism of one block, bordered by 23rd Street to the south, 24th Street to the north, Fifth Avenue and Broadway to the east and Sixth Avenue to the west. It’s a story of forest and cement, bird cries and taxi horns, theatres and factories, gambling dens and gourmet foods. It’s also the story of high life and low life, immigrants and tourists, farmers and aristocrats, crooked cops and moral reformers, toy stores and social climbers

This entertaining volume provides a concise history of one of the world's premiere cities. Acclaimed author A.N. Wilson starts at the beginning, when London was founded by the Romans, and continues to contemporary times, hitting all the historical highlights along the way. London is the perfect starter book for anyone wishing to understand this great city a little better, and even seasoned London fans will find new information here.

A pioneering exploration of four cities where East meets West and past becomes future: St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Mumbai, and Dubai. Every month, five million people move from the past to the future. Pouring into developing-world “instant cities” like Dubai and Shenzhen, these urban newcomers confront a modern world cobbled together from fragments of a West they have never seen. Do these fantastical boomtowns, where blueprints spring to life overnight on virgin land, represent the dawning of a brave new world? Or is their vaunted newness a mirage?

In the last 50 years, folklorists have amassed an extraordinary corpus of contemporary legends including "the Choking Doberman," "the Eaten Ticket," and "the Vanishing Hitchhiker." But what about the urban legends of the past? These legends and tales have rarely been collected, and when they occasionally appear, they do so as ancestors or precursors of the urban legends of today, rather than as stories in their own right. In The Nail in the Skull and Other Victorian Urban Legends, Simon Young fills this gap for British folklore (and for the wider English-speaking world) of the 1800s.

Las Vegas, Nevada. For some, a neon drenched playground. For Harmony Black, a graveyard of bad memories. But when your job is protecting humanity from the horrors of the occult underworld, you go where the mission sends you. The annual TechTopia conference draws Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, big thinkers, startup investors - and the Basilisk, a former German military intelligence officer turned freelance assassin. He’s in town to make a killing, and his target could be any of a thousand potential victims.

Imagine a workplace where workers enjoyed a well-paid job for life, one where they could start their day with a pint of stout and a smoke, and enjoy free meals in silver service canteens and restaurants. During their breaks they could explore acres of parkland planted with hundreds of trees and thousands of shrubs. This is no fantasy or utopian vision of work but a description of the working conditions enjoyed by employees at the Guinness brewery established at Park Royal in West London in the mid-1930s.

America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades - celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities.

Ben Judah is an acclaimed foreign correspondent, but here he turns his reporter's gaze on home, immersing himself in the hidden world of London's immigrants to reveal the city in the eyes of its beggars, bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers and witch-doctors. From the backrooms of its mosques, Tube tunnels and nightclubs to the frontlines of its streets, Judah has supped with oligarchs and spent nights sleeping rough, worked on building sites and talked business with prostitutes; he's heard stories of heartbreaking failure, but also witnessed extraordinary acts of compassion.

After his wife’s death, retired cop Walter "Pops" Washington has made a home for his ex-felon son in his sprawling, rent-controlled, Riverside Drive apartment. Will a long-simmering feud with the NYPD cause him to lose his home and the family he’s built there?

A lauded expert on European history paints a vivid picture of Paris, London, and New York during the Age of Revolutions, exploring how each city fostered or suppressed political uprisings within its boundaries. In The Unruly City, historian Mike Rapport offers a vivid history of three intertwined cities toward the end of the 18th century - Paris, London, and New York - all in the midst of political chaos and revolution.

Jonathan Kozol traveled from the most blighted neighborhoods of Chicago to the urban wreckage of Camden, New Jersey; from the ghetto suburbs of Detroit to inner-city San Antonio; East St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. Everywhere, he discovered separate systems of public schools, with the children of America's poor condemned to schools that are underfunded, understaffed, physically crumbling, and imbued with despair.

A rebellious boy's journey through the wilds of urban America and the shrapnel of a self-destructing family - this is the riveting story of a generation told through one dazzlingly poetic new voice. MK Asante was born in Zimbabwe to American parents: a mother who led the new nation's dance company and a father who would soon become a revered pioneer in Black studies. But things fell apart, and a decade later MK was in America, a teenager lost in a fog of drugs, sex, and violence on the streets of North Philadelphia.

Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, withdraws from the comforts of life on a university campus in search of a place to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime - a complicated source of national fascination, often stereotyped and little understood. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp is naïvely determined to fix the huge, broken city with his own hands and on his own terms.

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.

Since cities emerged 10,000 years ago, they have become one of the most impressive artifacts of humanity. But their evolution has been anything but linear - cities have gone through moments of radical change, turning points that redefine their very essence. In this book a renowned architect and urban planner who studies the intersection of cities and technology argues that we are in such a moment. The authors explain some of the forces behind urban change and offer new visions.