Another City
Author: David L. Ulin
Publisher: City Lights Books
Published: 2001-09
Total Pages: 308
ISBN-13: 9780872863910
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThirty-seven Los Angeles authors contribute stories, poems and essays about contemporary LA.
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Without a Map
Author: Andrei Shleifer
Publisher: Mit Press
Published: 2001
Total Pages: 223
ISBN-13: 9780262692694
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA balanced look at Russia's attempts to build capitalism on the ruins of Soviet central planning. Recent commentators on Russia's economic reforms have almost uniformly declared them a disappointing and avoidable--failure. In this book, two American scholars take a new and more balanced look at the country's attempts to build capitalism on the ruins of Soviet central planning. They show how and why the Russian reforms achieved remarkable breakthroughs in some areas but came undone in others. Unlike Eastern European countries such as Poland or the Czech Republic, to which it is often compared, Russia is a federal, ethnically diverse, industrial giant with an economy heavily oriented toward raw materials extraction. The political obstacles it faced in designing reforms were incomparably greater. Shleifer and Treisman tell how Russia's leaders, navigating in uncharted economic terrain, managed to find a path around some of these obstacles. In successful episodes, central reformers devised a strategy to win over some key opponents, while dividing and marginalizing others. Such political tactics made possible the rapid privatization of 14,000 state enterprises in 1992-1994 and the defeat of inflation in 1995. But failure to outmaneuver the new oligarchs and regional governors after 1996 undermined reformers' attempts to collect taxes and clean up the bureaucracy that has stifled business growth.Renewing a strain of analysis that runs from Machiavelli to Hirschman, the authors reach conclusions about political strategies that have important implications for other reformers. They draw on their extensive knowledge of the country and recent experience as advisors to Russian policymakers. Written in an accessible style, the book should appeal to economists, political scientists, policymakers, businesspeople, and all those interested in Russian politics or economics.
Journey Without a Map
Author: Gardner McKay
Publisher:
Published: 2013-05
Total Pages: 488
ISBN-13: 9780615779256
DOWNLOAD EBOOKGardner McKay's Journey Without a Map, with introduction by Jimmy Buffett, is a memoir extraordinaire one of those rare books that just keeps getting better and better as you read along, its last half transfixing. McKay was a maverick who went into the South American forest alone for nearly two years; starred in, and walked away from, the starring role in an expensive hour-long TV series after four years; raised lions and cheetah in the wilds of Beverly Hills; was the theatre critic for the LA Herald; wrote successful plays, novels, poetry and stories; walked across Venezuela; was a world-class sailor; a sculptor, with pieces in the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum; wrote and kept over 200 journals (the basis for this memoir); turned down nearly 50 starring movie roles; served as a film critic; taught university courses; rode with the Egyptian camel corps; and finished this memoir as he was dying of cancer, giving him what he called "a real deadline." He was, above all, an adventurist. Of his quitting television, after he had acquired international fame: "Fame is so cheap that I wanted to go someplace where someone, some stranger, might be able to make up his own mind about me without already having formed an opinion based on drivel that needed to be overcome or ignored."
A People's Guide to Los Angeles
Author: Laura Pulido
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2012-04-23
Total Pages: 322
ISBN-13: 0520953347
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA People’s Guide to Los Angeles offers an assortment of eye-opening alternatives to L.A.’s usual tourist destinations. It documents 115 little-known sites in the City of Angels where struggles related to race, class, gender, and sexuality have occurred. They introduce us to people and events usually ignored by mainstream media and, in the process, create a fresh history of Los Angeles. Roughly dividing the city into six regions—North Los Angeles, the Eastside and San Gabriel Valley, South Los Angeles, Long Beach and the Harbor, the Westside, and the San Fernando Valley—this illuminating guide shows how power operates in the shaping of places, and how it remains embedded in the landscape.
Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles
Author: Alain Silver
Publisher: Harry N. Abrams
Published: 1989-03-02
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780879513511
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRe-issued for the 50th anniversary of the film of Chandler's novel 'The Big Sleep', this homage to film noir is a visionary journey across a landscape of darkened bungalows, decaying office blocks and sinister nightspots - an atmospheric tribute to both the writer and his city. Contains over 150 photographs and extracts from Chandler's classic detective fiction.
Eve's Hollywood
Author: Eve Babitz
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2015-10-06
Total Pages: 353
ISBN-13: 1590178912
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA legendary love letter to Los Angeles by the city's most charming daughter, complete with portraits of rock stars at Chateau Marmont, surfers in Santa Monica, prostitutes on sunset, and Eve's own beloved cat, Rosie. Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she’d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha’s Five 1965 Girlfriends, Babitz’s first book showed her to be a razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. Eve’s Hollywood is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California’s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz’s prose might appear careening, she’s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This “daughter of the wasteland” is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds—and every bit as seductive as she is.
Policing Los Angeles
Author: Max Felker-Kantor
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2018-09-25
Total Pages: 393
ISBN-13: 1469646846
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts erupted in violent protest in August 1965, the uprising drew strength from decades of pent-up frustration with employment discrimination, residential segregation, and poverty. But the more immediate grievance was anger at the racist and abusive practices of the Los Angeles Police Department. Yet in the decades after Watts, the LAPD resisted all but the most limited demands for reform made by activists and residents of color, instead intensifying its power. In Policing Los Angeles, Max Felker-Kantor narrates the dynamic history of policing, anti–police abuse movements, race, and politics in Los Angeles from the 1965 Watts uprising to the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion. Using the explosions of two large-scale uprisings in Los Angeles as bookends, Felker-Kantor highlights the racism at the heart of the city's expansive police power through a range of previously unused and rare archival sources. His book is a gripping and timely account of the transformation in police power, the convergence of interests in support of law and order policies, and African American and Mexican American resistance to police violence after the Watts uprising.
Wild LA
Author: Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County
Publisher: Timber Press
Published: 2019-03-19
Total Pages: 333
ISBN-13: 1604697105
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLos Angeles may have a reputation as a concrete jungle, but in reality, it’s incredibly biodiverse, teeming with an amazing array of animals and plants. You just need to know where to find them. Wild LA—from the experts at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County—is the guidebook you’ve been waiting for. Equal parts natural history book, field guide, and trip planner, Wild LA has something for everyone. You’ll learn about the factors shaping LA nature—including flood, fire, and climate change—and find profiles of over one hundred local species, from sea turtles to rare plants to Hollywood's famous mountain lion, P-22. Also included are day trips that detail which natural wonders you can experience on hiking trails, in public parks, and in your own backyard.
No Map to This Country
Author: Jennifer Noonan
Publisher: Da Capo Lifelong Books
Published: 2016-04-05
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 0738219045
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA heartbreaking yet also funny and ultimately empowering memoir revealing the a multi-year journey into the latest science and treatments in order to rescue her kids and her family from autism.
Freewaytopia: How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles
Author: Paul Haddad
Publisher: Santa Monica Press
Published: 2021-10-05
Total Pages: 484
ISBN-13: 1595807861
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFreewaytopia: How Freeways Shaped Los Angeles explores how social, economic, political, and cultural demands created the web of expressways whose very form—futuristic, majestic, and progressive—perfectly exemplifies the City of Angels. From the Arroyo Seco, which began construction during the Great Depression, to the Simi Valley and Century Freeways, which were completed in 1993, author Paul Haddad provides an entertaining and engaging history of the 527 miles of road that comprise the Los Angeles freeway system. Each of Los Angeles’s twelve freeways receives its own chapter, and these are supplemented by “Off-Ramps”—sidebars that dish out pithy factoids about Botts’ Dots, SigAlerts, and all matter of freeway lexicon, such as why Southern Californians are the only people in the country who place the word “the” in front of their interstates, as in “the 5,” or “the 101.” Freewaytopia also explores those routes that never saw the light of day. Imagine superhighways burrowing through Laurel Canyon, tunneling under the Hollywood Sign, or spanning the waters of Santa Monica Bay. With a few more legislative strokes of the pen, you wouldn’t have to imagine them—they’d already exist. Haddad notably gives voice to those individuals whose lives were inextricably connected—for better or worse—to the city’s freeways: The hundreds of thousands of mostly minority and lower-class residents who protested against their displacement as a result of eminent domain. Women engineers who excelled in a man’s field. Elected officials who helped further freeways . . . or stop them dead in their tracks. And he pays tribute to the corps of civic and state highway employees whose collective vision, expertise, and dedication created not just the most famous freeway network in the world, but feats of engineering that, at their best, achieve architectural poetry. Finally, let’s not forget the beauty queens—no freeway in Los Angeles ever opened without their royal presence.
