Social Cities

Twelve-year-old Alice Mayfair has a secret. She's not human. But who - or what - is she? While Alice goes in search of her past, her best friend, Millie Maximus, a tiny Bigfoot with a big voice, prepares for her future. Together, they plan to sneak off to New York City, where Millie hopes to audition for The Next Stage, the TV show she's sure will rocket her to stardom and free her from the suffocating expectations of her tribe.

A few years ago, Mark Adams made a strange discovery: Everything we know about the lost city of Atlantis comes from the work of one man, the Greek philosopher Plato. Then he made a second, stranger discovery: Amateur explorers are still actively searching for this sunken city all around the world, based entirely on the clues Plato left behind.

Turkey's greatest living novelist guides us through the monuments and lost paradises, dilapidated Ottoman villas, back streets, and waterways of Istanbul - the city of his birth and the home of his imagination.

Hasidic Williamsburg is famous as one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy communities. Less known is how the community survived in one of New York City's toughest neighborhoods during an era of steep decline, only to later oppose and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a community of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely resisted the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood.

Over the course of less than 24 hours in the spring of 1921, Tulsa’s infamous “Black Wall Street” was wiped off the map - and erased from the history books. Official records were disappeared, researchers were threatened, and the worst single incident of racial violence in American history was kept hidden for more than 50 years. But there were some secrets that would not die. A riveting and essential new book, The Ground Breaking not only tells the long-suppressed story of the notorious Tulsa race massacre.

Test your knowledge of 197 capital cities around the world. This book will help you improve your knowledge of geography. With audio quizzes, this book challenges you to associate the capital cities with almost 200 countries around the world. It is grouped by continents, so it helps you to identify which continent every country is located in.

In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion's share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world's megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are adequately prepared for the floods that will increasingly menace their shores. Instead, most continue to develop luxury waterfront condos for the elite and industrial facilities for corporations. These not only intensify carbon emissions, but also place coastal residents at greater risk.

When former New York Times journalist Dan Koeppel texted his cousin Robert Meyer, a 20-year veteran of the emergency room at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx, at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States, he expected to hear that things were hectic. On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being overwhelmed, where do you think you are? Koeppel asked. Meyer’s grave reply - 100 - was merely the cusp of the crisis that would soon touch every part of the globe.

Do you wish you had more friends? Are you finding it difficult to meet new people? Tired of feeling lonely? Discover practical ways to meet new people, learn the art of small talk, and find out how to nurture lifelong friendships. Rebecca Collins, the author of the groundbreaking Love Yourself Deeply, is back, this time, with a powerful guide for those who feel lonely, isolated, and lacking friends. This self-help guide is full of empowering tools and strategies to help you overcome shyness and learn the social skills needed to connect with others.

Over 30 years, Burning Man has gone from two families on a San Francisco beach to a global movement in which hundreds of thousands of people around the world create events on every continent. It has been the subject of fawning media profiles, an exhibit in the Smithsonian, and is beloved by tech billionaires and boho counterculturalists alike. But why does it matter? What does it actually have to offer us? The answer, Caveat Magister writes, is simple: Burning Man's philosophy can help us build better communities.

In recent years the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world's superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality.

Founded as a tiny, temporary settlement, Chicago became a crux of the American fur trade before growing into one of the powerhouses of the Industrial Revolution. From procuring drinking water to implementing racial equality, nothing has ever been simple for the people who have called Chicago home - and yet there is immense pride among Chicagoans for what they and their fellow people have achieved. The city has been home to some of America’s most influential people, be they talk show hosts or US Presidents.

If you really want to understand Jim Crow - what it was and how African Americans rose up to defeat it - you should start by visiting Mobile Street in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the heart of the historic black downtown. William Sturkey introduces us to both old-timers and newcomers who arrived in search of economic opportunities promised by the railroads, sawmills, and factories of the New South. He also takes us across town and inside the homes of white Hattiesburgers to show how their lives were shaped by the changing fortunes of the Jim Crow South.

The Greek philosopher Socrates famously said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” Taking this as a starting point, Eric Metaxas founded a speaking series that encouraged busy and successful professionals to attend forums and think actively about the bigger questions in life; thus Socrates in the City: Conversations on “Life, God, and Other Small Topics” was born.

In January of 2012, Megan Kimble was a 26-year-old living in a small apartment without even a garden plot to her name. But she cared about where food came from, how it was made, and what it did to her body: so she decided to go an entire year without eating processed foods. Unprocessed is the narrative of Megan's extraordinary year, in which she milled wheat, extracted salt from the sea, milked a goat, slaughtered a sheep, and more - all while earning an income that fell well below the federal poverty line.

On March 11, 2003, in Brownsville, Texas - one of America's poorest cities - John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho murdered their three young children. The apartment building in which the brutal crimes took place was already run down, and in their aftermath a consensus developed in the community that it should be destroyed. It was a place, neighbors felt, that was plagued by spiritual cancer.

Istanbul has always been a place where stories and histories collide and crackle, where the idea is as potent as the historical fact. From the Qu'ran to Shakespeare, this city with three names - Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul - resonates as an idea and a place and overspills its boundaries - real and imagined. Standing as the gateway between the East and West, it has served as the capital of the Roman, Byzantine, Latin and Ottoman Empires.

As a kid growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father they called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line and ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood there. Decades later, Helmreich teaches university courses about New York, and his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever. Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs - an astonishing 6,000 miles.

With over-the-top fun and humor, this scrumptious story features Tom Watson’s trademark laughs, adventure, and hilarious stick-figure drawings, perfect for fans of the Stick Dog, Big Nate, Timmy Failure, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. Stick Cat is going somewhere he’s never been before—his best friend Edith’s apartment. It’s got everything: donut crumbs in the sink, a fire escape, and a window with a great view of the big city. While admiring the view, Stick Cat sees trouble. Hazel, the bagel maker, is in serious danger in the building across the alley. Stick Cat will use his smarts—and Edith’s appetite—to devise a rescue plan. But can Hazel hang on long enough for this dynamic duo to save her? Even reluctant readers gobble up the Stick Cat and Stick Dog books!

For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: His mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the patrol for civilian life.