Urban Politics

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together". To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it". To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

Robert Finlay is looking forward to returning to uniform policing and a less stressful life. But fate has other plans. Finlay's traumatic past is about to return to haunt him. A policeman is killed by a bomb blast, and a second is gunned down; both were former army colleagues from Finlay's own SAS regiment. And so begins a game of cat and mouse, a wicked game in which Finlay is in embroiled in a fight against a determined and unidentified enemy.

In Four Lost Cities, acclaimed science journalist Annalee Newitz takes listeners on an entertaining and mind-bending adventure into the deep history of urban life. Investigating across the centuries and around the world, Newitz explores the rise and fall of four ancient cities, each the center of a sophisticated civilization: the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük in Central Turkey, the Roman vacation town of Pompeii in Italy, the medieval megacity of Angkor in Cambodia, and the indigenous metropolis Cahokia, which stood beside the Mississippi River where East St. Louis is today.

In the early 80s, Mark Fleischman reopened Studio 54, the world's most glamorous and notorious nightclub, after it was closed down by the State of New York. Ten thousand people showed up that night, ready to restart the party that abruptly ended after the raid in 1978 landed its former owners in jail. Inside Studio 54 invites you to revisit the happening scenes of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, the post-Pill, pre-AIDS era of free love, consequence-free sex, and seemingly endless partying. Following Fleischman as he built connections that lead him to Studio 54.

Once America's "arsenal of democracy," Detroit is now the symbol of the American urban crisis. In this reappraisal of America's racial and economic inequalities, Thomas Sugrue asks why Detroit and other industrial cities have become the sites of persistent racialized poverty. He challenges the conventional wisdom that urban decline is the product of the social programs and racial fissures of the 1960s.

From the author of the New York Times and international best seller Unfu*k Yourself, Gary John Bishop presents a no-holds-barred guide to breaking through our cycles of self-sabotage to get what we want out of life. In Unfu*k Yourself, Gary John Bishop told us it was time to stop making excuses - to recognise and take responsibility for the negative self-talk holding us back. In Stop Doing That Sh*t, he builds on that message, teaching us how to stop self-sabotaging behaviour. Bishop explains how our destructive cycles come down to the way we’re wired.

The Skripal Files is the definitive account of how Skripal’s story fits into the wider context of the new spy war between Russia and the West. The Skripal Files explores the time Skripal spent as a spy in the Russian Military Intelligence, how he was turned to work as an agent by MI6, his imprisonment in Russia and his eventual release as part of a spy swap that would bring him to Salisbury, where on that fateful day he and his daughter found themselves fighting for their lives.

In 1992, the deadliest year in Chicago’s history, seven-year-old Dantrell Davis was shot and killed in front of his elementary school inside the public housing complex Cabrini-Green. What happened to Dantrell led to a truce among Chicago’s gangs, but it also ignited a national panic about poverty and violence in America’s cities. Dantrell’s name would soon be used to demolish all of Chicago’s high-rise public housing, displacing tens of thousands of low-income families.

Report from Engine Co. 82 is the story of one company of New York firefighters battling unimaginable death and destruction every day. Dennis Smith worked as a firefighter in the South Bronx, New York City, and the graphic detail and gripping prose of this firefighting classic drives the most important, accomplished, terrifying audiobook ever published on firefighting.

You'd think that life would finally be dealing Mack Smith a kind hand. Living in London and with the opening of the new and improved city version of Clava Books mere days away, things appear to be settling down. Other than the terrible nightmares about dragons, that is. Or the fact that she's being constantly tailed by a string of mages, shifters, and faeries, all of whom are constantly demanding her attention. And that's without even bringing the temptation of Corrigan, Lord Alpha of the Brethren, into the equation.

Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.

Race for Profit uncovers how exploitative real estate practices continued well after housing discrimination was banned. The same racist structures and individuals remained intact after redlining's end, and close relationships between regulators and the industry created incentives to ignore improprieties. Meanwhile, new policies meant to encourage low-income homeownership created new methods to exploit Black homeowners.

Michael Gallatin is a British spy with a peculiar talent: the ability to transform himself into a wolf. Although his work in North Africa helped the Allies win the continent in the early days of World War II, he quit the service when a German spy shot his lover in her bed. Now, three years later, the army asks him to end his retirement and parachute into occupied Paris. A mysterious German plan called the Iron Fist threatens the D-Day invasion, and the Nazi in charge is the spy who betrayed Michael’s lover. The werewolf goes to France for king and country, hoping for a chance at bloody vengeance.

In The 15-Minute City: A Solution to Saving Our Time and Our Planet, Carlos Moreno delivers an exciting and insightful discussion of the deceptively simple and revolutionary idea that everyday destinations like schools, stores, and offices should only be a short walk or bike ride away from home. This book tells the story of an idea that spread from city to city, describing a new way of looking at living that addresses many of the most intractable challenges of our time.

A rich and unique collection of folktales and urban legends from around the world. Each story comes with an accompanying brief note to provide context. Including new tales reflecting new concerns; old tales repurposed for new audiences and new ways of telling. The collection illustrates that these stories are now alive across many new media. This is the first such popular book to bring together stories with both traditional and digital media origins and to examine how the phenomenon of social media has affected both the spread of urban legends and their very nature.

It was the street your mother warned you about - even if you lived in San Francisco. Long associated with skid row, saloons, freak shows, violence, and vice, the Bowery often showed the worst New York City had to offer. Yet there were times when it showed its best as well.

In elegant and often hilarious prose, Kunstler depicts our nation's evolution from the Pilgrim settlements to the modern auto suburb in all its ghastliness. The Geography of Nowhere tallies up the huge economic, social, and spiritual costs that America is paying for its car-crazed lifestyle. It is also a wake-up call for citizens to reinvent the places where we live and work, to build communities that are once again worthy of our affection. Kunstler proposes that by reviving civic art and civic life, we will rediscover public virtue and a new vision of the common good.

We may be living longer, but people are more socially isolated than ever before. As a result, we are hindered both mentally and physically, and many of us are looking for something concrete we can do to address problems like poverty, racism, and climate change. What if solutions could be found on your very doorstep or just two door knocks away? Cormac Russell and John McKnight offer a wealth of illustrative examples from around the world that will inspire you to explore your own community and discover its hidden treasures.

In this fierce and moving account, journalist Vicky Spratt traces decades of bad policy decisions to show how and why the British dream of homeownership has withered and the safety net of social housing has broken. Through the lives of those in the renting trap, she illuminates the ways this crisis is devastating our health, communities and political landscape. But, as the COVID epidemic showed, there are also real, radical steps we can take to give everyone the chance of a good home.

London can drain the life out of you.... Bob Howard is an intelligence agent working his way through the ranks of the top-secret government agency known as the Laundry. When occult powers threaten the realm, they'll be there to clean up the mess - and deal with the witnesses. There's one kind of threat that the Laundry has never come across in its many decades, and that's vampires. Mention them to a seasoned agent, and you'll be laughed out of the room.