The Town and the City
Author : Jack Kerouac
Publisher :
Page : 499 pages
File Size : 14,82 MB
Release : 1973
Category : Beat generation
ISBN : 9780704320239
The City & The City
Author : China Miéville
Publisher : Del Rey
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 48,17 MB
Release : 2009-05-26
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0345515668
Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE SEATTLE TIMES, AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY. When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities. BONUS: This edition contains a The City & The City discussion guide and excerpts from China Miéville's Kraken and Embassytown.
Boom Town
Author : Sam Anderson
Publisher : Crown
Page : 455 pages
File Size : 35,52 MB
Release : 2018-08-21
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0804137323
Book Description
A brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City—a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny, from award-winning journalist Sam Anderson NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • NPR • Chicago Tribune • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • Deadspin Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous “Land Run” in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsized ambitions, and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress. Nowhere was this dynamic better realized than in the drama of the Oklahoma City Thunder basketball team’s 2012-13 season, when the Thunder’s brilliant general manager, Sam Presti, ignited a firestorm by trading future superstar James Harden just days before the first game. Presti’s all-in gamble on “the Process”—the patient, methodical management style that dictated the trade as the team’s best hope for long-term greatness—kicked off a pivotal year in the city’s history, one that would include pitched battles over urban planning, a series of cataclysmic tornadoes, and the frenzied hope that an NBA championship might finally deliver the glory of which the city had always dreamed. Boom Town announces the arrival of an exciting literary voice. Sam Anderson, former book critic for New York magazine and now a staff writer at the New York Times magazine, unfolds an idiosyncratic mix of American history, sports reporting, urban studies, gonzo memoir, and much more to tell the strange but compelling story of an American city whose unique mix of geography and history make it a fascinating microcosm of the democratic experiment. Filled with characters ranging from NBA superstars Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook; to Flaming Lips oddball frontman Wayne Coyne; to legendary Great Plains meteorologist Gary England; to Stanley Draper, Oklahoma City's would-be Robert Moses; to civil rights activist Clara Luper; to the citizens and public servants who survived the notorious 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building, Boom Town offers a remarkable look at the urban tapestry woven from control and chaos, sports and civics.
The Town
Author : Shaun Prescott
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 167 pages
File Size : 50,28 MB
Release : 2020-02-04
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0374719268
Book Description
"A powerfully doomy debut" (The Guardian), Shaun Prescott’s The Town is a novel of a rural Australian community besieged by modern day anxieties and threatened by a supernatural force seeking to consume the dying town. This is Australia, an unnamed, dead-end town in the heart of the outback—a desolate place of gas stations, fast-food franchises, and labyrinthine streets: flat and nearly abandoned. When a young writer arrives to research just such depressing middles-of-nowhere as they are choked into oblivion, he finds something more sinister than economic depression: the ghost towns of Australia appear to be literally disappearing. An epidemic of mysterious holes is threatening his new home’s very existence, and this discovery plunges the researcher into an abyss of weirdness from which he may never escape. Dark, slippery and unsettling, Shaun Prescott’s debut resurrects the existential novel for the age of sprawl and blight, excavates a nation’s buried history of colonial genocide, and tells a love story that asks if outsiders can ever truly belong anywhere. The result is a disquieting classic that vibrates with an occult power.
Hella Town
Author : Mitchell Schwarzer
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 424 pages
File Size : 21,93 MB
Release : 2022-08-16
Category : History
ISBN : 0520391535
Book Description
Hella Town reveals the profound impact of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland’s built environment. Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city’s postwar struggles. Toward the turn of the millennium, as immigration from Latin America and East Asia increased, Oakland became one of the most diverse cities in the country. The city still grapples with the consequences of uneven class- and race-based development-amid-disruption. How do past decisions about where to locate highways or public transit, urban renewal districts or civic venues, parks or shopping centers, influence how Oaklanders live today? A history of Oakland’s buildings and landscapes, its booms and its busts, provides insight into its current conditions: an influx of new residents and businesses, skyrocketing housing costs, and a lingering chasm between the haves and have-nots.
Doing the Town
Author : Catherine Cocks
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 302 pages
File Size : 46,73 MB
Release : 2001-09-19
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 0520227468
Book Description
This fascinating cultural history, studded with vivid details bringing the experience of Victorian-era travel alive, explores the beginnings of urban tourism, and sets the phenomenon within a larger cultural transformation that encompassed fundamental changes in urban life and national identity.".
The Hating Game
Author : Sally Thorne
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 389 pages
File Size : 11,23 MB
Release : 2016-08-09
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 006243960X
Book Description
Now a movie starring Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell, USA Today bestselling author Sally Thorne’s hilarious and sexy workplace comedy all about that thin, fine line between hate and love. Nemesis (n.) 1) An opponent or rival whom a person cannot best or overcome. 2) A person’s undoing 3) Joshua Templeman Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman hate each other. Not dislike. Not begrudgingly tolerate. Hate. And they have no problem displaying their feelings through a series of ritualistic passive aggressive maneuvers as they sit across from each other, executive assistants to co-CEOs of a publishing company. Lucy can’t understand Joshua’s joyless, uptight, meticulous approach to his job. Joshua is clearly baffled by Lucy’s overly bright clothes, quirkiness, and Pollyanna attitude. Now up for the same promotion, their battle of wills has come to a head and Lucy refuses to back down when their latest game could cost her her dream job…But the tension between Lucy and Joshua has also reached its boiling point, and Lucy is discovering that maybe she doesn’t hate Joshua. And maybe, he doesn’t hate her either. Or maybe this is just another game.
City on a Hill
Author : Alex Krieger
Publisher : Belknap Press
Page : 497 pages
File Size : 45,29 MB
Release : 2019-10-29
Category : History
ISBN : 0674987993
Book Description
A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian aspirations that shaped them, by one of America’s leading urban planners and scholars. The first European settlers saw America as a paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar, macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this uniquely American story from the Pilgrims to the “smart city,” Krieger delivers a striking new history of our built environment. The Puritans were the first utopians, seeking a New Jerusalem in the New England villages that still stand as models of small-town life. In the Age of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson dreamed of citizen farmers tending plots laid out across the continent in a grid of enlightened rationality. As industrialization brought urbanization, reformers answered emerging slums with a zealous crusade of grand civic architecture and designed the vast urban parks vital to so many cities today. The twentieth century brought cycles of suburban dreaming and urban renewal—one generation’s utopia forming the next one’s nightmare—and experiments as diverse as Walt Disney’s EPCOT, hippie communes, and Las Vegas. Krieger’s compelling and richly illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today, that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of dreams gone by.
The Divided City
Author : Alan Mallach
Publisher : Island Press
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 18,80 MB
Release : 2018-06-12
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 1610917812
Book Description
In The Divided City, urban practitioner and scholar Alan Mallach presents a detailed picture of what has happened over the past 15 to 20 years in industrial cities like Pittsburgh and Baltimore, as they have undergone unprecedented, unexpected revival. He spotlights these changes while placing them in their larger economic, social and political context. Most importantly, he explores the pervasive significance of race in American cities, and looks closely at the successes and failures of city governments, nonprofit entities, and citizens as they have tried to address the challenges of change. The Divided City concludes with strategies to foster greater equality and opportunity, firmly grounding them in the cities' economic and political realities.
Gully Town
Author : G. P. Schultz
Publisher : greg Schultz
Page : 263 pages
File Size : 39,90 MB
Release : 1990
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0962632406
Book Description
In settings ranging from Kansas City's West Bottoms to Quality Hill, you'll follow the lives and fortunes of five very different men, the women they love, and the families they create, in G.P. Schultz's historic saga about the settlement and growth of one of America's great cities. You'll follow the adventures of Jack and Kevin, two spunky Irish orphans just off the boat and determined to make their fortunes in America. They arrive in Kansas City when it is a rugged town built along mountainous gullies carved in the mud along the Missouri River--thus earning it the name "Gully Town." For Kevin, early Kansas City affords the opportunity to fulfill his ambitions to be a newspaper reporter and to pursue his avid interest in women--until the captivating Mary, herself and Irish immigrant, steals his heart. Jack settles into the business community and his life takes a completely different turn as he helps create the Boss System of politics that continues to dominate the city for half a century. Red is a young man who witnesses the horror of Quantrill's famous raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in the early days of the Civil War and later participates in the Battle of Westport. Red finds the woman of his dreams in the beautiful Melissa--only to lose her when she learns of his past and flees, taking with her the secret that could save Red from a life of crime. Adam, schoolteacher, historian, state senator and newspaper columnist, chronicles the lives of his friends and the growth of Kansas City in the journal he faithfully keeps through the years. Through him, we learn about the turbulent political system that puts Jack on top--and frequently threatens his life. We experience such history making events as the great Centennial celebration in 1900, and the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. As the next generation comes of age in a more civilized Kansas City it faces its own challenges. Michael, a product of Gully town's Little Italy, grows up in violence and becomes chief of the Kansas City underworld. Michael falls in love with the beautiful Beth, and must face the inevitability of his career in organized crime destroying the life they have built together.
