Powerful and important, My City Was Gone is the cautionary tale of how a hardworking small town was destroyed by the very forces that created it. Anniston, Alabama, was once a thriving industrial hub, home to a Monsanto chemical plant as well as a federal depot for chemical weapons. Now its notoriety comes from its exceptionally high cancer rate—some 25 percent above the state norm—and the town's determined citizens who joined together and struck back at the corporation. As provocative and timely as Erin Brockovich or A Civil Action, My City Was Gone is a magnificently told true story of ordinary citizens in a small Southern town who led a legendary fight against corporate pollution and wrongdoing.
"Smart and defiant. Rich with characters and anecdote and heart. A great success." --Anthony Swofford, New York Times Book Review Has the futureever more people with their houses, stores, roads, and sprawlbeen wrecking your past? Melissa Holbrook Pierson, with unalloyed insight, elucidates how it feels to lose that landscape of home. In the past twenty years, like countless towns it resembles, Akron, Ohio, has lost its singularity, and much of what native-daughter Pierson loves about it. She then moves to Hoboken, New Jersey, a forgotten appendage of New Yorkuntil stockbrokers discover it. Finally, she speaks of rural areas, telling of the thousands of upstate New Yorkers displaced by city reservoirs. A unique book uniquely of our moment: This is what it feels like to lose the place you love.
The metropolis is a site of endless making and unmaking. From the attempt to imagine a 'city-symphony' to the cinematic tradition that runs from Walter Ruttmann to Terence Davies, Restless Cities traces the idiosyncratic character of the metropolitan city from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first-century megalopolis. With explorations of phenomena including nightwalking, urbicide, property, commuting and recycling, this wide-ranging new book identifies and traces the patterns that have defined everyday life in the modern city and its effect on us as individuals. Bringing together some of the most significant cultural writers of our time, Restless Cities is an illuminating, revelatory journey to the heart of our metropolitan world.
Based off the popular podcast, this book collects one man’s conversations with an outspoken social critic on the negative effects of the suburbs. James Howard Kunstler has been described as “one of the most outrageous commentators on the American built environment.” An outspoken critic of suburban sprawl, Kunstler is often controversial and always provocative. The KunstlerCast is based on the popular weekly podcast of the same name, which features Kunstler in dialogue with author Duncan Crary, offering a personal window into Kunstler’s worldview. Presented as a long-form conversational interview, The KunstlerCast revisits and updates all the major ideas contained in Kunstler’s body of work, including: The need to rethink current sources of transportation and energy The failure of urban planning, architecture and industrial society America’s plastic, dysfunctional culture The reality of peak oil Whether sitting in the studio, strolling city streets, visiting a suburban mall or even “Happy Motoring,” the grim predictions Kunstler makes about America’s prospects are leavened by his signature sharp wit and humor. This book is rounded out by commentary, footnotes and supplemental vignettes told from the perspective of an “embedded” reporter on the Kunstler beat. Readers may or may not agree with the more dystopian of Kunstler’s visions. Regardless, The KunstlerCast is bound to inspire a great deal of thought, laughter, and hopefully, action. Praise for The KunstlerCast “A bracing dose of reality for an unreal world.” —Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics “Erudite, eloquent . . . with good humor about the hilariously grotesque North American nightmare of car-addicted suburban sprawl.” —Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse “Prepare to be enlightened, infuriated and amused.” —Gregory Greene, Director, The End of Suburbia “So enlightening yet casual that the reader feels like they’re eavesdropping into the den of Kunstler’s prodigious mind.” —Andrew D. Blechman, author of Leisureville
A Mind Full of Music contemplates and celebrates the mysterious, powerful, dynamic relationship between ourselves and the songs we love: the way in which songs work upon our minds and in which our minds, because of the inevitable creative force of our imaginations and memories, work upon them. The book does not propose or develop a unified argument, nor does it tell, chronologically, the story of the author's life of listening. Instead, in recognition of the varied, fluid, and ultimately mysterious ways in which our minds respond to songs, it is structured associatively, with one topic inspiring thoughts of another; the book begins with a song drifting into the author's mind, and it ends with that mind still in the midst of listening, waiting for a beat that will never come.
Duncan MacLeod, member of an age-old race of immortal beings, is in Paris helping a friend organize a museum exhibit of ancient cultures destroyed by the Romans. While unwrapping a priceless scroll of the Torah, Duncan remembers Avram Mordecai, a young Immortal who was determined to see the Romans defeated and the lands of Israel returned to the Hebrews. When Duncan meets Maral, a Palestinian delegate to the Arab-Israeli peace talks, he falls irrevocably in love. But as the tense negotiations unfold, Duncan realizes that Avram still lives--and he has not forgotten his holy war. Now Duncan is trapped between an old friend and the woman he loves.
A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished. From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why? The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating.
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Conveying Lived Experience through Rock and Pop Music Lyrics explores seven decades of lyrics to elucidate themes about the human experience. The opening chapters discuss romantic relationships and break ups. Subsequent chapters consider lyrics describing nostalgia, as well as those about leaving home, going on the road, and returning home. Then, successive chapters examine the outsider in society, those experiencing mental illness, and alcohol and drug use. Next, songs of social and political critique are surveyed, followed by an examination of utopian and dystopian lyrics. The final chapters analyze songs using prophetic voices and those about the afterlife. This survey shows how lyrics convey the lived experience of people in contemporary society.
