'City Boy' spins a hilarious and often touching tale of an urban kid's adventures and misadventures on the street, in school, in the countryside, always... in pursuit of Lucille, a heartless redhead personifying all the girls who torment and fascinate pubescent lads of eleven.

An irresistible literary treat: a memoir of the social and sexual lives of New York City’s cultural and intellectual in-crowd in the tumultuous 1970s,... from acclaimed author Edmund White. In the New Y ork of the 1970s, in the wake of Stonewall and in the midst of economic collapse, you might find the likes of Jasper Johns and William Burroughs at the next cocktail party, and you were as likely to be caught arguing Marx at the New York City Ballet as cruising for sex in the warehouses and parked trucks along the Hudson. This is the New York that Edmund White portrays in City Boy: a place of enormous intrigue and artistic tumult. Combining the no-holds-barred confession and yearning of A Boy’s Own Story with the easy erudition and sense of place of The Flaneur, this is the story of White’s years in 1970s New York, bouncing from intellectual encounters with Susan Sontag and Harold Brodkey to erotic entanglements downtown to the burgeoning gay scene of artists and writers. I t’s a moving, candid, brilliant portrait of a time and place, full of encounters with famous names and cultural icons.

Why do some cities grow and expand, while others dwindle and decline? Why is Milwaukee a town of the past, while Minneapolis–St. Paul seems reborn and... infused with future dynamism? And what do Milwaukee and the Twin Cities have to tell us about other cities’ prospects, the trials and destinies of industrial Cleveland and post-industrial Austin?Anthony Orum’s new book tells the story of these cities and, at the same time, of all cities. Here the urban past, present, and future are woven into one compelling tale. Orum traces the shift in the sources of urban growth from entrepreneurs to institutions and highlights the emergence of local government as a prominent force—indeed, as an institution—in shaping the trajectory of the urban industrial heartland. This complex trajectory includes all aspects of urban boom and bust: population trends, economic prosperity, politics and culture, as well as hard-to-pin-down qualities like a city’s collective hope and vision.Interspersing social theory, historical ethnography, and comparative analysis to help explain the fates of different cities, Orum lucidly portrays factory openings, labor strikes, elections, evictions, urban blight, white flight, recession, and rejuvenation to show the core histories—and future shape—of cities beyond the particulars presented in these pages. The reader will discover the key people and politics of cities along with the forces that direct them. With a rich variety of sources including newspapers, diaries, census materials, maps, photo essays, and, perhaps most captivating, original oral histories, City-Building in America is ideal for anyone interested in urban transformation and for courses in urban sociology, urban politics, industrial sociology, social change, and social mobility.

Good city building is not created by complex statistics, functional problem solving, or any particular decision-making process. Successful cities... instead come from people advocating easily understood human values and principles that take into account the sensory, tactile, and sustainable qualities of environment and design in relation to what is the best of human endeavor.—From the introduction to City BuildingCities are often viewed as the least-healthy environments for humans because they are centers of pollution, overcrowdedness, and waste. But the opposite can be true. A well-planned city can be a model of sustainable living. Good city building counters the sprawl of suburbia with concentrated land use, replaces globalized design with regionally appropriate building types, and allows for livable, desirable neighborhoods. John Lund Kriken and Philip Enquist, both longtime partners in the preeminent and award-winning planning firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill(SOM) have collaborated with writer Richard Rapaport to create City Building.This proactive, green-focused, user-friendly guide to city building is organized into three parts: Part one examines the past and defines the current practice of city building, addressing its shortcomings and proposing a comprehensive framework for rethinking the approach to cities in the future. Part two translates this framework into nine best-practice principles that are common to successful, livable, urban environments: sustainability, accessibility, diversity, open space, compatibility, incentives, adaptability, density, and identity. These principles are illustrated in a global portfolio of city building projects, designed by SOM, that show how best practices have been applied successfully. Part three makes the case that, far from being the problem, cities, properly organized, can be a mechanism for sensible, sustainable uses of increasingly scarce resources. The book concludes with a call for a national planning process and a comprehensive framework for settlement.

Be both hedgehog and fox.  Know thousands of little details.  Know three big rules. The book shows examples of small things city... comforts that make urban life pleasant: places where people can meet, methods to tame cars and to make buildings good neighbors, art that infuses personality into locations and makes them into places. Many of these small details are so obvious as to be invisible. The book also discusses what the author calls the Three Rules of Urban Design. You can download a sample chapter at David's blog citycomforts.com

In City Contented, City Discontented: A History of Modern Harrisburg, award-winning journalist Paul Beers (1931-2011) reveals how contemporary... Harrisburg came to be what it is. In a masterful series of essays, Beers charts the capital's development from a City Beautiful, with its celebrated public spaces and premier educational institutions, through the fractures of race riots and the catastrophic challenges of flood and near nuclear meltdown. Beers employs the well-honed skills of a veteran reporter to craft fascinating character sketches of prominent leaders and humble citizens alike - intertwining their dramatic personal stories with a compelling survey of the region's society, politics, and culture in the twentieth century.

Challenging previous accounts, Geoffrey Megargee shatters the myth that German generals would have prevailed in World War II if only Hitler had not ... meddled in their affairs. Indeed, Megargee argues, the German high command was much more flawed than many have suspected or acknowledged. Inside Hitler's High Command reveals that while Hitler was the central figure in many military decisions, his generals were equal partners in Germany's catastrophic defeat. Megargee exposes the structure, processes, and personalities that governed the Third Reich's military decision making and shows how Germany's presumed battlefield superiority was undermined by poor strategic and operational planning at the highest levels. His study tracks the evolution of German military leadership under the Nazis from 1933 to 1945 and expands our understanding of the balance of power within the high command, the role of personalities in its organizational development, and the influence of German military intellectuals on its structure and function. He also shows how the organization of the high command was plagued by ambition, stubbornness, political intrigue, and overworked staff officers. And his "a week in the life" chapter puts the high command under a magnifying glass to reveal its inner workings during the fierce fighting on the Russian Front in December 1941. Megargee also offers new insights into the high command crises of 1938 and shows how German general staff made fatal mistakes in their planning for Operation Barbarossa in 1941. Their arrogant dismissal of the Soviet military's ability to defend its homeland and virtual disregard for the extensive intelligence and sound logistics that undergird successful large-scale military campaigns ultimately came back to haunt them. In the final assessment, observes Megargee, the generals' strategic ideas were no better than Hitler's and often worse. Heinz Guderian, Franz Halder, and the rest were as guilty of self-deception as their Führer, believing that innate German superiority and strength of will were enough to overcome nearly any obstacle. Inside Hitler's High Command exposes these surprising flaws and illuminates the process of strategy and decision making in the Third Reich. This book is part of the Modern War Studies series.

Although a frequently discussed reform, campaigns to merge a major municipality and county to form a unified government fail to win voter approval... eighty per cent of the time. One cause for the low success rate may be that little systematic analysis of consolidated governments has been done. In City--County Consolidation, Suzanne Leland and Kurt Thurmaier compare nine city--county consolidations -- incorporating data from 10 years before and after each consolidation -- to similar cities and counties that did not consolidate. Their groundbreaking study offers valuable insight into whether consolidation meets those promises made to voters to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of these governments. The book will appeal to those with an interest in urban affairs, economic development, local government management, general public administration, and scholars of policy, political science, sociology, and geography.

The world is urbanizing faster than current city design practices can sustain, climate change has introduced a new dynamism into what once appeared to... be a stable environment, and – with effective city design more important than ever - there are controversies and uncertainties about the best way to manage unprecedented urban growth and change. City Design describes the history and current practice of the four most widely accepted approaches to city design: the Modernist city of towers and highways that, beginning in the 1920s, has come to dominate urban development worldwide but is criticized as mechanical and soul-less; the Traditional organization of cities as streets and public places, scorned by the modernists, but being revived today for its human scale; Green city design, whose history can be traced back thousands of years in Asia, but is becoming increasingly important everywhere as sustainability and the preservation of the planet are recognized as basic issues, and finally Systems city design, which includes infrastructure and development regulation but also includes computer aided techniques which give designers new tools for managing the complexity of cities. Jonathan Barnett is a well-known, widely-experienced city design practitioner who also teaches and writes about city design. He writes authoritatively but accessibly about complicated issues of theory and practice, and his approach is objective and inclusive. This is a comprehensive text on city design ideal for planners, landscape architects, urban designers and those who want to understand how to improve cities.

This introductory but innovative textbook on the economics of cities is aimed at students of urban and regional policy as well as of undergraduate... economics. It deals with standard topics, including automobiles, mass transit, pollution, housing, and education but it also discusses non-standard topics such as segregation, water supply, sewers, garbage, fire prevention, housing codes, homelessness, crime, illicit drugs, and economic development. Its methods of analysis are primarily verbal, geometric, and arithmetic. The author achieves coherence by showing how the analysis of various topics reinforces one another. Thus, buses can tell us something about schools and optimal tolls about land prices. Brendan O'Flaherty looks at almost everything through the lens of Pareto optimality and potential Pareto optimality--how policies affect people and their well-being, not abstract entities such as cities or the economy or growth or the environment. Such traditionalism leads to radical questions, however: Should cities have police and fire departments? Should tax preferences for home ownership be repealed? Should public schools charge for their services? O'Flaherty also gives serious consideration to such heterodox policies as pay-at-the-pump auto insurance, curb rights for buses, land taxes, marginal cost water pricing, and sidewalk zoning.

This collection, unique to the Modern Library, gathers seven of Dostoevsky's key works and shows him to be equally adept at the short story as with the... novel. Exploring many of the same themes as in his longer works, these small masterpieces move from the tender and romantic White Nights, an archetypal nineteenth-century morality tale of pathos and loss, to the famous Notes from the Underground, a story of guilt, ineffectiveness, and uncompromising cynicism, and the first major work of existential literature. Among Dostoevsky's prototypical characters is Yemelyan in The Honest Thief, whose tragedy turns on an inability to resist crime. Presented in chronological order, in David Magarshack's celebrated translation, this is the definitive edition of Dostoevsky's best stories.

City I Love sparkles like the lights in Times Square! Featuring eighteen poems that guide the reader on an international tour—from New York to San... Francisco, London to Tokyo, and beyond—this exuberant collection is the perfect read-aloud for city kids, aspiring world travelers, and adventurous spirits everywhere. Beloved children’s poet Lee Bennett Hopkins and New Yorker artist Marcellus Hall, an exciting children’s book newcomer, have crafted an extraordinary urban-themed collection that celebrates the beauty, diversity, energy, architecture, and excitement of city life.

This book brings together the pioneering work of scholars of urban Indians in colonial Latin America. An important but understudied segment of colonial... society, urban Indians composed a majority of the population of Spanish America's most important cities. The geographic range, chronological scope, and thematic content of urban native studies is addressed by examining such topics as the role of natives in settling frontier regions, inter-ethnic relations, notaries and chroniclers, and the continuation of indigenous governance. In spanning the entirety of the colonial period, the persistence and the creation of urban Indian identities and their contributions to society are brought to the fore. Scholarly contributions include Susan Schroeder's "Whither Tenochtitlan? Chimalpahin and Mexico City, 1593-1631" and David Cahill's "Urban Mosaic: Indigenous Ethnicities in Colonial Cuzco." The book opens with commentary by John K. Chance, a pioneer scholar of urban Indians in Latin America and author of the highly praised Race and Class in Colonial Oaxaca and is summed up with concluding remarks by Kevin Terraciano, author of the widely acclaimed The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Nudzahui History. The diverse themes, time periods, and geographic regions discussed make this illustrated book essential reading for all those engaged in colonial and indigenous studies. (Series: A Sussex Library of Study - First Nations and the Colonial Encounter)

A follow-up to the classic collection on the realities of teaching and learning in urban schools.Of the approximately 50 million public school students... in the United States, more than half are in urban schools. A contemporary companion to City Kids, City Teachers: Reports from the Front Row, this new and timely collection has been compiled by four of the country's most prominent urban educators. Contributors including Sandra Cisneros, Jonathan Kozol, Sapphire, and Patricia J. Williams provide some of the best writing on life in city schools and neighborhoods. Young people and practicing teachers, poets and scholars, social critics and journalists offer unique takes on topics ranging from culturally relevant teaching and scripted curricula to the criminalization of youth, gentrification, and the inequities of school funding.In the words of Sonia Nieto, City Kids, City Schools "challenge[s] the conventional wisdom of what it means to teach in urban schools."