Urban Politics

In 2010 former gang leader turned community activist Big Mike Cummings asked UCLA gang expert Jorja Leap to co-lead a group of men struggling to be better fathers in Watts, South Los Angeles. These men, black and brown, from late adolescence to middle age, come together each week to help one another answer the question "how can I be a good father when I've never had one?"

Pete Axthelm follows the 1969 - 70 season of the New York Knicks and provides a parallel focus on basketball as it was then played in the black neighborhoods of New York City. Throughout, he writes clearly, intelligently, and passionately about the game, bringing alive the players’ efforts, accomplishments, and failures.

The country's leading transport expert describes how the driverless-vehicle revolution will transform highways, cities, workplaces, and laws not just here, but across the globe. Right now, every major car maker here and abroad is working on bringing autonomous vehicles to consumers. The fleets are getting ready to roll, and nothing will ever be the same. This audiobook shows us what the future has in store.

How does it feel to receive a phone call from your 14-year-old son who is in the back of a squad car because he laughed at a police officer? How does a young person of color cope with being frisked several times a week since the age of 15? These are just some of the stories in No Place on the Corner, which draws on three years of intensive ethnographic fieldwork in the South Bronx before and after the landmark 2013 Floyd v. City of New York decision that ruled that the NYPD's controversial "stop and frisk" policing methods were a violation of rights.

The critically lauded author of The Beast Side and The Cook Up returns with an existential look at life in low-income Black communities, while also offering a new framework for how we can improve the conversations occurring about them.

How can the people of God develop churches in ways that help and don't hurt poor neighborhoods? Pastors and church planters interested in Christian community development will find here practical insights into the power of the local church, which is often underrated. Churches can serve their communities and improve the quality of life of every facet of the neighborhood.

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.

Survived physical abuse. Witnessed community violence. Conquered the streets. Saved by education. This is Dr. Maysa Akbar’s story. A story of overcoming urban trauma. It’s easy to look down at urban communities and wonder why economic and social disparities still exist when so many people of color, despite facing severe adversity, have done better.

The working homeless. In a country where hard work and determination are supposed to lead to success, there is something scandalous about this phrase. But skyrocketing rents, low wages, and a lack of tenant rights have produced a startling phenomenon: People with full-time jobs cannot keep a roof over their head, especially in America’s booming cities, where rapid growth is leading to catastrophic displacement. These families are being forced into homelessness not by a failing economy but a thriving one.

This is the story of how a crude French settlement along the Detroit River in 1701 became the birthplace of the automotive industry in 1900.

When Caylin Louis Moore was a young child, his mother gathered her three young children and fled an abusive husband, landing in poverty in a heavily policed, gang-ridden community. When Moore’s father was convicted of murder and his mother was sexually assaulted in the hospital while recovering from open-heart surgery, Moore was forced to enter adulthood prematurely.

Exploring the power of naming to shape experience and our sense of place, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro traces the ways in which native Lenape, Dutch settlers, British invaders, and successive waves of immigrants have left their marks on New York City’s map. He excavates the roots of many names, from Brooklyn to Harlem, that have gained iconic meaning worldwide. He interviews the last living speakers of Lenape, visits the harbor’s forgotten islands, lingers on street corners named for ballplayers and saints, and meets linguists who study the estimated 800 languages now spoken in New York.

Comedy writer and middle daughter of Al Gore, Kristin Gore has written a funny and moving debut novel about life on Capitol Hill as seen through the eyes of Samantha Joyce, a 26-year-old health care analyst to Ohio Junior Senator Robert Gary. Hard working, idealistic, extremely competent, as well as neurotic and prone to daydreaming, Sammy, as she's known to her friends, has little time for anything, much less a relationship.

Nelson Mandela is well known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world’s elder statesman - the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent 27 years in prison before becoming the first Black president of South Africa. But Nelson Mandela was not always elderly or benign....

At 15, Victor Rios found himself a human target - flat on his ass amid a hail of shotgun fire, desperate for money and a place on the street. Faced with the choice of escalating a drug turf war or eking out a living elsewhere, he turned to a teacher, who mentored him and helped him find a job at an auto shop. That job would alter the course of his whole life - putting him on the road to college and eventually a PhD.

Mark Falanga is a slick urban dweller, at the top of his game professionally, with a gorgeous corporate executive wife and a hip coterie in the coolest neighborhood in the city. But when baby makes three, Mark and his family enter the twilight zone called the suburbs, where public schools are good, many wives stay home, and children ride their tricycles in the driveway.

Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the twentieth century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for public restrooms, safe and accessible transportation, and public accommodations, through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces and extensive anti-violence efforts.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party frames the Great Migration as an important economic and social event that also had serious political consequences. Keneshia Grant created one of the first listings of Black elected officials that classifies them based on their status as participants in the Great Migration. She also describes some of the policy/political concerns of the migrants. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party lays the groundwork for ways of thinking about the contemporary impact of Black migration on American politics.

Amid increasing hardship and limited employment options, poor urban youth are developing creative online strategies to make ends meet. Using such social media platforms as YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram, they're capitalizing on the public's fascination with the ghetto and gang violence. But with what consequences? Ballad of the Bullet follows the Corner Boys, a group of 30 or so young men on Chicago's South Side who have hitched their dreams of success to the creation of "drill music" (slang for "shooting music").

"Vieles in seinem Leben hätte anders sein können, wenn er andere Entscheidungen getroffen hätte. Falls nicht ohnehin schon alles von vornherein feststand." So räsoniert der serbische Auftragskiller Vuk, der für den Balkankrieg zu einer hoch spezialisierten Kampfmaschine ausgebildet wurde. Vuk soll für die iranischen Mullahs eine ungeliebte und mit der Fatwa belegte Schriftstellerin während einer Pressekonferenz töten, nachdem der grausame Krieg auf dem Balkan sich dem Ende zuneigt.