Behind the Beautiful Forevers (Enhanced Edition) by Random House $27.00
This enhanced eBook features exclusive video footage shot over the course of three years by the author and several children of the Annawadi slum. From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities. In this...
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America by Scott Brick $34.95
Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington,...
An Invisible Thread: The True Story of an 11-Year-Old Panhandler, a Busy Sales Executive, and an Unlikely Meeting with Destiny by Valerie Salembier $25.00
“Excuse me lady, do you have any spare change? I am hungry.”When I heard him, I didn’t really hear him. His words were part of the clatter, like a car horn or someone yelling for a cab. They were, you could say, just noise—the kind of nuisance New Yorkers learn to tune out. So I walked right by him, as if he wasn’t there. But then, just a few yards past him, I stopped. And then—and...
Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion by Gregory Boyle $29.95
As a pastor working in a neighborhood with the highest concentration of murderous gang activity in Los Angeles, Gregory Boyle created an organization to provide jobs, job training, and encouragement so that young people could work together and learn the mutual respect that comes from collaboration. Tattoos on the Heart is a breathtaking series of parables distilled from his twenty years in the...
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier by Penguin Press HC, The $29.95
A pioneering urban economist offers fascinating, even inspiring proof that the city is humanity's greatest invention and our best hope for the future. America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the 3 percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly... Or are they? As Edward...
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Vintage $16.00
A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes...
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets by Penguin $16.00
In this "riveting"(The New York Times) work of nonfiction, a sociologist infiltrates the world of Chicago's crack-dealing gangs First presented in Freakonomics, the story of a young sociologist who embedded himself in Chicago's most notorious gang and captured the world's attention. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh gained entrance into the lives of a...
Passing by Wilder Publications $2.99
The heroine of Passing takes an elevator from the infernal August Chicago streets to the breezy rooftop of the heavenly Drayton Hotel, "wafted upward on a magic carpet to another world, pleasant, quiet, and strangely remote from the sizzling one that she had left below." Irene is black, but like her author, the Danish-African American Nella Larsen (a star of the 1920s to mid-1930s Harlem...
Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools by Crown $20.00
A searing, eye-opening exposé of the inequality built into America's public education system, written by Jonathan Kozol, the National Book Award-winning author of Death at an Early Age. Traveling the most blighted neighborhoods of our country, Kozol discovers a separate and unequal school system for America's less fortunate.
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by Holt Paperbacks $20.00
From the creator of HBO's The Wire, the classic book about homicide investigation that became the basis for the hit television showThe 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....