Urban Books

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)

Amazon Price: $14.93 List Price: $21.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Modern Library Amazon Marketplace: 34 new & used starting at $12.00

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Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Architecture -> General
Subjects -> Professional & Technical -> Architecture -> Urban & Land Use Planning
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> History & Criticism -> Criticism & Theory -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 64 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context.  It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."  Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners.  Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities.  It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable.  The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.

Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools

Jonathan Kozol

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harper Perennial Amazon Marketplace: 311 new & used starting at $0.66

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Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Current Events -> Poverty -> Social Services & Welfare
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Education -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Education -> Special Education -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 147 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Eye opening 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

I needed this book for a class I was taking. WOW!, it was a real eye-opener. As it was really hard to read because it is sad. How amazing that there are schools here in the United States that are in dire need. I would reccomend it, but be prepared to cry.

Must Read 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Kozol's Savage Inequalities paints a frightening picture of urban schools in the United States. He describes schools that are overcrowded, dilapidated, and flooded with sewage. He asks why we allow our children to go to schools in conditions where none of us would choose to work. He deeply explores the issue of inequality in funding. While he does suggest equalizing funding, he is careful to mention that the problems facing schools are complex and require innovative solutions. I know many teachers have read this book, but we need policymakers and elected officials to read it as well.

Editorial Review:

National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Kozol presents his shocking account of the American educational system in this stunning New York Times bestseller, which has sold more than 250,000 hardcover copies.

Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life

Richard Florida

Amazon Price: $17.79 List Price: $26.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Basic Books Amazon Marketplace: 49 new & used starting at $6.74

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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> Economics -> Economic Conditions
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Subjects -> Business & Investing -> International -> Economic Conditions

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

It’s a mantra of the age of globalization that where we live doesn’t matter. We can innovate just as easily from a ski chalet in Aspen or a beachhouse in Provence as in the office of a Silicon Valley startup.

According to Richard Florida, this is wrong. Globalization is not flattening the world; in fact, place is increasingly relevant to the global economy and our individual lives. Where we live determines the jobs and careers we have access to, the people we meet, and the “mating markets” in which we participate. And everything we think we know about cities and their economic roles is up for grabs.

Who’s Your City? offers the first available city rankings by life-stage, rating the best places for singles, families, and empty-nesters to reside. Florida’s insights and data provide an essential guide for the more than 40 million Americans who move each year, illuminating everything from what those choices mean for our everyday lives to how we should go about making them.

Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

David Simon

Amazon Price: $12.24 List Price: $18.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Holt Paperbacks Amazon Marketplace: 44 new & used starting at $7.74

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Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Crime & Criminals -> Criminology
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Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> Urban

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From the creator of HBO’s The Wire, the classic book about homicide investigation that became the basis for the hit television show

The scene is Baltimore. Twice every three days another citizen is shot, stabbed, or bludgeoned to death. At the center of this hurricane of crime is the city’s homicide unit, a small brotherhood of hard men who fight for whatever justice is possible in a deadly world.

David Simon was the first reporter ever to gain unlimited access to a homicide unit, and this electrifying book tells the true story of a year on the violent streets of an American city. The narrative follows Donald Worden, a veteran investigator; Harry Edgerton, a black detective in a mostly white unit; and Tom Pellegrini, an earnest rookie who takes on the year’s most difficult case, the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl.

Originally published fifteen years ago, Homicide became the basis for the acclaimed television show of the same name. This new edition—which includes a new introduction, an afterword, and photographs—revives this classic, riveting tale about the men who work on the dark side of the American experience.

Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets

Sudhir Venkatesh

Amazon Price: $17.13 List Price: $25.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Penguin Press HC, The Amazon Marketplace: 61 new & used starting at $12.99

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Ethnic & National -> African-American & Black
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Professionals & Academics -> Social Scientists & Psychologists

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 52 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

First introduced in Freakonomics, here is the full story of Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociology grad student who infiltrated one of Chicago's most notorious gangs

The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrŽe into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment.

When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A first-year grad student hoping to impress his professors with his boldness, he never imagined that as a result of the assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there.

Over the next seven years, Venkatesh got to know the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. From his privileged position of unprecedented access, he observed JT and the rest of the gang as they operated their crack-selling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang's complex organizational structure.

In Hollywood-speak, Gang Leader for a Day is The Wire meets Harvard University. It's a brazen, page turning, and fundamentally honest view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in what is tantamount to an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between Sudhir and JT-two young and ambitious men a universe apart.

A Hope in the Unseen: An American Odyssey from the Inner City to the Ivy League

Ron Suskind

Amazon Price: $10.85 List Price: $15.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Broadway Amazon Marketplace: 181 new & used starting at $2.39

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Ethnic & National -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Specific Groups -> General
Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 119 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

It is 1993, and Cedric Jennings is a bright and ferociously determined honor student at Ballou, a high school in one of Washington D.C.’s most dangerous neighborhoods, where the dropout rate is well into double digits and just 80 students out of more than 1,350 boast an average of B or better. At Ballou, Cedric has almost no friends. He eats lunch in a classroom most days, plowing through the extra work he has asked for, knowing that he’s really competing with kids from other, harder schools. Cedric Jennings’s driving ambition–which is fully supported by his forceful mother–is to attend a top-flight college.

In September 1995, after years of near superhuman dedication, he realizes that ambition when he begins as a freshman at Brown University. In this updated edition, A Hope in the Unseen chronicles Cedric’s odyssey during his last two years of high school, follows him through his difficult first year at Brown, and now tells the story of his subsequent successes in college and the world of work.

There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in The Other America

Alex Kotlowitz

Amazon Price: $10.17 List Price: $14.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Anchor Amazon Marketplace: 266 new & used starting at $0.37

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Subjects -> Literature & Fiction -> Contemporary
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> Marriage & Family

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 92 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The other America indeed 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Nice mix of anecdote and historical background on life in inner city America. Excellent insight into the everyday difficulties faced by families and some of the root causes. This book, though almost 20 years old, still has a message that needs to be heard.

Riveting look at poverty 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Kotlowitz has given us a striking example of the power of journalism.

This book is able to show the reader the plight of the urban poor without overly moralizing. Kotlowitz gives a straight ahead account of the lives of Lafeyette and Pharoah, the two brothers this book centers. Their struggles to retain their innocence while living in an environment that strips it away is mesmerizing.

I could not help but empathize with the families in this book. A lot of pundits will say that poor people are lazy, but this book brings a lot of their challenges to light. When survival is a day to day struggle, how can people be expected to get ahead? Kotlowitz details the struggles the boys and their families have in trying to improve their situation.

This book is a modern classic about poverty and its effects, in the vein of 'Down and Out in Paris and London' by George Orwell. Anyone wanting to understand 'welfare moms' and why they don't improve their situations should read this.

Editorial Review:

This is the moving and powerful account of two  remarkable boys struggling to survive in Chicago's  Henry Horner Homes, a public housing complex  disfigured by crime and neglect.

Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc

Amazon Price: $10.88 List Price: $16.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Scribner Amazon Marketplace: 174 new & used starting at $0.01

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 142 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

In her extraordinary bestseller, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc immerses readers in the intricacies of the ghetto, revealing the true sagas lurking behind the headlines of gangsta glamour, gold-drenched drug dealers, and street-corner society. Focusing on two romances -- Jessica's dizzying infatuation with a hugely successful young heroin dealer, Boy George, and Coco's first love with Jessica's little brother, Cesar -- Random Family is the story of young people trying to outrun their destinies. Jessica and Boy George ride the wild adventure between riches and ruin, while Coco and Cesar stick closer to the street, all four caught in a precarious dance between survival and death. Friends get murdered; the DEA and FBI investigate Boy George; Cesar becomes a fugitive; Jessica and Coco endure homelessness, betrayal, the heartbreaking separation of prison, and, throughout it all, the insidious damage of poverty.

Charting the tumultuous cycle of the generations -- as girls become mothers, boys become criminals, and hope struggles against deprivation -- LeBlanc slips behind the cold statistics and sensationalism and comes back with a riveting, haunting, and true story.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York

Robert A. Caro

Amazon Price: $16.32 List Price: $24.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Vintage Amazon Marketplace: 124 new & used starting at $3.04

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Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> General
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Political
Subjects -> Biographies & Memoirs -> Leaders & Notable People -> Presidents & Heads of State

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 107 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

One of the most acclaimed books of our time, winner of both the Pulitzer and the Francis Parkman prizes, The Power Broker tells the hidden story behind the shaping (and mis-shaping) of twentieth-century New York (city and state) and makes public what few have known: that Robert Moses was, for almost half a century, the single most powerful man of our time in New York, the shaper not only of the city's politics but of its physical structure and the problems of urban decline that plague us today.

In revealing how Moses did it--how he developed his public authorities into a political machine that was virtually a fourth branch of government, one that could bring to their knees Governors and Mayors (from La Guardia to Lindsay) by mobilizing banks, contractors, labor unions, insurance firms, even the press and the Church, into an irresistible economic force--Robert Caro reveals how power works in all the cities of the United States. Moses built an empire and lived like an emperor. He personally conceived and completed public works costing 27 billion dollars--the greatest builder America (and probably the world) has ever known. Without ever having been elected to office, he dominated the men who were--even his most bitter enemy, Franklin D. Roosevelt, could not control him--until he finally encountered, in Nelson Rockefeller, the only man whose power (and ruthlessness in wielding it) equalled his own.

Mo' Urban Dictionary: Ridonkulous Street Slang Defined

urbandictionary.com

Amazon Price: $10.39 List Price: $12.99 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Andrews McMeel Publishing Amazon Marketplace: 40 new & used starting at $7.46

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Subjects -> Entertainment -> Humor -> General
Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Social Sciences -> Sociology -> Rural
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Satisfactory ... 3 out of 5 stars.
40 of 40 people found this review helpful.

While I enjoyed the previous edition of this idea, this book left me feeling a little cheated and a bit let down. It seems as if this publisher is now stretching thin a once good idea.

Sure, there are more than enough unusual and interesting entries to give you a few nights worth of guffaws, but overall, you can get more from just visiting the website or signing up for their 'word of the day'.

I usually purchase a lot of pop-culture dictionaries and reference books, but this isn't one of the better ones by a long shot.

Try these if you're so inclined:

1. McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions

2. Knickers in a Twist: A Dictionary of British Slang

3. From Grill to Dome: A Dictionary of African American Slang Words and Phrases

4. The Oxford Dictionary of Idioms

5. Talk the Talk: The Slang of 65 American Subcultures

6. The Devil's Dictionary

7. The Devil's Dictionaries: The Best of the Devil's Dictionary and the American Heretic's Dictionary