Metropolis

Author: Ben Wilson
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385543476
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Book Description
In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations. “A towering achievement.... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling.” —The Wall Street Journal During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. From their very beginnings, cities created such a flourishing of human endeavor—new professions, new forms of art, worship and trade—that they kick-started civilization. Guiding us through the centuries, Wilson reveals the innovations nurtured by the inimitable energy of human beings together: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Époque Paris. In the modern age, the skyscrapers of New York City inspired utopian visions of community design, while the trees of twenty-first-century Seattle and Shanghai point to a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Page-turning, irresistible, and rich with engrossing detail, Metropolis is a brilliant demonstration that the story of human civilization is the story of cities.

Metropolis

Author: Thea von Harbou
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN: 0486795675
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
This Weimar-era novel of a futuristic society, written by the screenwriter for the iconic 1927 film, was hailed by noted science-fiction authority Forrest J. Ackerman as "a work of genius."

Imperial Metropolis

Author: Jessica M. Kim
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469651351
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 299

Book Description
In this compelling narrative of capitalist development and revolutionary response, Jessica M. Kim reexamines the rise of Los Angeles from a small town to a global city against the backdrop of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, Gilded Age economics, and American empire. It is a far-reaching transnational history, chronicling how Los Angeles boosters transformed the borderlands through urban and imperial capitalism at the end of the nineteenth century and how the Mexican Revolution redefined those same capitalist networks into the twentieth. Kim draws on archives in the United States and Mexico to argue that financial networks emerging from Los Angeles drove economic transformations in the borderlands, reshaped social relations across wide swaths of territory, and deployed racial hierarchies to advance investment projects across the border. However, the Mexican Revolution, with its implicit critique of imperialism, disrupted the networks of investment and exploitation that had structured the borderlands for sixty years, and reconfigured transnational systems of infrastructure and trade. Kim provides the first history to connect Los Angeles's urban expansionism with more continental and global currents, and what results is a rich account of real and imagined geographies of city, race, and empire.

Metropolis

Author: B. A. Shapiro
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616209585
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Book Description
This masterful novel of psychological suspense from the New York Times bestselling author of The Art Forger follows a cast of unforgettable characters whose lives intersect when a harrowing accident occurs at the Metropolis Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But was it really an accident? Was it suicide? A murder? Six mysterious characters, who rent units in, or are connected to, the self-storage facility, must now reevaluate their lives. We meet Serge, an unstable but brilliant street photographer who lives in his unit, which overflows with thousands of undeveloped pictures; Zach, the building's owner, who develops Serge's photos as he searches for clues to the accident; Marta, an undocumented immigrant who is finishing her dissertation and hiding from ICE; Liddy, an abused wife and mother, who recreates her children's bedroom in her unit; Jason, who has left his corporate firm and now practices law from his storage unit; and Rose, the office manager, who takes kickbacks to let renters live in the building and has her own complicated family history. The characters have a variety of backgrounds: they are different races; they practice different religions; they're young and they're not so young; they are rich, poor, and somewhere in the middle. As they dip in and out of one another's lives, fight circumstances that are within and also beyond their control, and try to discover the details of the accident, Shapiro both dismantles the myth of the American dream and builds tension to an exciting climax. For readers of Janelle Brown, Lucy Foley, Megan Abbott, and Laura Lippman, Metropolis is an original, spellbinding, and moving story of what we hang on to, what we might need to let go, and how unexpected events can lead us to discover our truest selves.

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Author: William Cronon
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393072452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 590

Book Description
A Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and Winner of the Bancroft Prize. "No one has written a better book about a city…Nature's Metropolis is elegant testimony to the proposition that economic, urban, environmental, and business history can be as graceful, powerful, and fascinating as a novel." —Kenneth T. Jackson, Boston Globe

Metropolis

Author: Philip Kerr
Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons
ISBN: 0735218897
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 386

Book Description
"A portrait of Bernie Gunther in his twenties: He's young, but he's seen four bloody years of trench warfare. And he's not stupid. So when he receives a promotion and a ticket out of Vice squad, he knows he's not really leaving behind the criminal gangs, the perverse sex clubs, and the laundry list of human corruption. It's 1928 and Berlin is a city on the edge of chaos, where nothing is truly verboten. But soon a new wave of shockingly violent murders sweeps up society's most vulnerable, prostitutes and wounded ex-soldiers begging on the streets. As Bernie Gunther sets out to make sense of multiple murders with different MOs in a city that knows no limits, he must face the fact that his own police HQ is not immune. The Nazi party has begun to inflitrate the Alex, Berlin's central office, just as the shakey Weimar government makes a last, desperate attempt to control a nation edging toward to the Third Reich. It seems like the only escape for most Berliners is the theater and Bernie's no exception. As he gets deeper into the city's sordid underground network, he seeks comfort with a make-up artist who is every bit a match for his quick wit and increasingly sardonic view of the world. But even this space can't remain untouched, not with this pervasive feeling that everything is for sale in Berlin if you're man enough to kill for it"--

Blue Sky Metropolis

Author: Peter J. Westwick
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
"Like citrus, oil, movies, radio, and television, aerospace helped create Southern California and embody its values. Blue Sky Metropolis launches an entirely fresh consideration of an iconic industry that answered the immemorial hunger of the human race for flight and the future."--Kevin Starr, University of Southern California "Blue Sky Metropolis presents an intriguing survey of a unique time in Southern California history, when cheap land and benign weather lured massive aerospace enterprises to the region—eventually serving as home to nearly half of the nation’s defense and space fabricators. Before there was a Silicon Valley, high-tech dreamers were on the loose in the Southland, creating inventions as diverse as the Voyager planetary spacecraft and the Stealth bomber. These highly readable essays help us understand how it happened—how Southern California shaped aerospace, and vice versa."—Charles Elachi, Director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory "Peter Westwick has assembled a rich collection of essays that tell a wonderful story about the importance of the aerospace industry to Southern California and the importance of Southern California to the aerospace industry. There's technology, sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and much more woven through the chapters. It's an ambitious project, but it succeeds in being interesting, informative, and entertaining."—Michael Rich, President and CEO, The RAND Corporation

Dark Metropolis

Author: Jaclyn Dolamore
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
ISBN: 142318100X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
Sixteen-year-old Thea Holder's mother is cursed with a spell that's driving her mad, and whenever they touch, Thea is chilled by the magic, too. With no one else to contribute, Thea must make a living for both of them in a sinister city, where danger lurks and greed rules. Thea spends her nights waitressing at the decadent Telephone Club attending to the glitzy clientele. But when her best friend, Nan, vanishes, Thea is compelled to find her. She meets Freddy, a young, magnetic patron at the club, and he agrees to help her uncover the city's secrets???even while he hides secrets of his own. Together, they find a whole new side of the city. Unrest is brewing behind closed doors as whispers of a gruesome magic spread. And if they're not careful, the heartless masterminds behind the growing disappearances will be after them, too. Perfect for fans of Cassandra Clare, this is a chilling thriller with a touch of magic where the dead don't always seem to stay that way.

Metropolis

Author: Benoit Tardif
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781787418547
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 69

Book Description

Repairing the American Metropolis

Author: Douglas S. Kelbaugh
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295997516
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
Repairing the American Metropolis is based on Douglas Kelbaugh’s Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, first published in 1997. It is more timely and significant than ever, with new text, charts, and images on architecture, sprawl, and New Urbanism, a movement that he helped pioneer. Theory and policies have been revised, refined, updated, and developed as compelling ways to plan and design the built environment. This is an indispensable book for architects, urban designers and planners, landscape architects, architecture and urban planning students and scholars, government officials, developers, environmentalists, and citizens interested in understanding and shaping the American metropolis.