Urban Politics

Meet Leroy O’Malley of Apalachicola, Florida: a naive and hopeful dreamer. All Leroy wanted was a shot at the good life—a steady job, maybe even a dental plan. This is the story of a man who made the mistake of believing the lies. Always down on his luck, a chance encounter with a foul-mouthed—though oddly charismatic—out-of-towner at a roadside oyster shack suddenly launches Leroy on the fast-track to the life he’s always wanted.

It’s easy to get lost in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the size of seventy-two football fields. For many released into the harsh elements beyond the walls, it can be impossible to find their way home. This haunting and powerful narrative reveals the intentionally disorienting tactics of the system and how the punishments meted out to prisoners, their families, and even innocent victims extend beyond the cages. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, the award-winning author of Crook Country, exposes the moral, spiritual, legal, and psychological wasteland - inside and out - of the nation’s largest jail.

Mark Falanga is a slick urban dweller, at the top of his game professionally, with a gorgeous corporate executive wife and a hip coterie in the coolest neighborhood in the city. But when baby makes three, Mark and his family enter the twilight zone called the suburbs, where public schools are good, many wives stay home, and children ride their tricycles in the driveway.

San Francisco’s reputation for accommodating progressive and unconventional identities can find its roots in the waves of transients and migrants that flocked to San Francisco between the gold rush and World War I. In the era of yellow journalism, San Francisco’s popular presses broadcast shocking stories about the waterfront, Chinatown, Barbary Coast, hobo Main Stem, Uptown Tenderloin, and Outside Lands. The women and men who lived in these districts did not passively internalize the shaming of their bodies or neighborhoods.

Historian Georgina Hickey investigates challenges to the code of urban gender segregation in the twentieth century, focusing on organized advocacy to make the public spaces of American cities accessible to women. She traces waves of activism from the Progressive Era, with its calls for public restrooms, safe and accessible transportation, and public accommodations, through and beyond second-wave feminism, and its focus on the creation of alternative, women-only spaces and extensive anti-violence efforts.

My own people, Anoza not humans, came in the night to kill me, to kill my unborn child, to finish an ancient evil. Only Dallas Blake, wounded and bleeding, stood against them, but he did. It was all that we could do to just fight for our very lives, but that was not the end of it. The evil ones had kidnapped my father. How much worse could this get? To rescue my father, the five moons would be pitted against unknown forces with technology a million years more advanced.

Robert Finlay seems to have finally left his SAS past behind him and is settled into his new career as a detective. But when the author of a book about secret operations goes missing, along with his agent and an explosive new manuscript, it’s clear that Finlay’s troubles are far from over. With his friend and former colleague, Kevin Jones, in trouble, and police complaints branch gunning for them both, Robert teams up with MI5 agent Toni Fellowes to find out who’s behind the growing conspiracy.

Robert Finlay is looking forward to returning to uniform policing and a less stressful life. But fate has other plans. Finlay's traumatic past is about to return to haunt him. A policeman is killed by a bomb blast, and a second is gunned down; both were former army colleagues from Finlay's own SAS regiment. And so begins a game of cat and mouse, a wicked game in which Finlay is in embroiled in a fight against a determined and unidentified enemy.

Mama Might Be Better Off Dead immerses listeners in the lives of four generations of a poor, African-American family in the neighborhood, who are beset with the devastating illnesses that are all too common in America's inner-cities. Headed by Jackie Banes, who oversees the care of a diabetic grandmother, a husband on kidney dialysis, an ailing father, and three children, the Banes family contends with countless medical crises.

It's the dead of night; you are fast asleep. Suddenly, you are wide awake but unable to move. Hunched over you in the shadows is an eight- or nine-foot-tall gaunt entity with spider-thin limbs, dressed in an old-style black suit, its pale face missing eyes, nose, ears, and mouth. You finally manage to cry out. The monstrous thing disappears as suddenly as it appeared. You just had a terrifying encounter with the Slenderman. Who - or what - is the Slenderman? His existence began on the Internet, but he didn't stay online.

Evil men conspired to have a starship destroyed to hide the evil they had done. They intended for its crew to disappear forever without a trace. They flew an unmarked ship into space docks and marked it for destruction. They thought that was the end of it, but in all of that chaos, the anoza found me. They chose me to save the Five Moons. I didn’t know any of that when I bought a ship that was never meant for sale. I didn’t know any of that when I first stepped foot upon its decks and changed everything.... But I know it now. And save the Five Moons? Damned straight I will. I am Dallas Blake, outworlder to the nines.

Al giovane Christian, palermitano con una perfetta conoscenza della lingua araba, viene affidata dai servizi segreti una delicatissima missione...

This study performed an analysis of the cumulative collision data for Autonomous Vehicles that are currently approved Deployment Permit Holders in California (Cruise LLC and Waymo, LLC). The analysis compared the publicly available safety data of relative conventionally driven vehicles in San Francisco, California and the United States (adjusted for underreporting of collision that do not involve fatality).

US Navy SEAL Jim Schweitzer is a consummate professional, a fierce warrior, and a hard man to kill. But when he sees something he was never meant to see on a covert mission gone bad, he finds himself--and his family--in the crosshairs. Nothing means more to Jim than protecting his loved ones, but when the enemy brings the battle to his front door, he is overwhelmed and taken down. That should be the end of the story.

The Great Migration and the Democratic Party frames the Great Migration as an important economic and social event that also had serious political consequences. Keneshia Grant created one of the first listings of Black elected officials that classifies them based on their status as participants in the Great Migration. She also describes some of the policy/political concerns of the migrants. The Great Migration and the Democratic Party lays the groundwork for ways of thinking about the contemporary impact of Black migration on American politics.

A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early '80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another.

Our world is a strange place. This haunting book peers into the dark spaces that lie somewhere between belief and imagination, and into the weird stories we tell to make sense of where and who we are.

Childhood friends from Trinidad, Colin Warner and Carl King grew into men on opposite sides of prison bars after Colin was arrested for murder in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. With no evidence against him, Colin was wrongfully convicted and wrongfully imprisoned for more than two decades. But time and walls could not break the friends' bond. Carl's extraordinary resolve, sacrifice, and courage were Colin's last rays of hope in a harrowing struggle for freedom and justice.

Why is the city a battleground of hostile principalities and powers? What is the mission of the church in the city? How can the church be supported in accomplishing that mission? These are the questions that Robert Linthicum treats in his comprehensive and probing biblical theology of the city...

"La idea de salir a recorrer -y a contar- las grandes ciudades sudacas se me ocurrió cuando pensé que quería tratar de entender qué es hoy América Latina. Hace mucho que no lo intentamos y, en general, solemos conservar esa imagen rural, ecololó de una región que es, ahora mismo, la más urbana del mundo. Cuatro de cada cinco latinoamericanos viven en ciudades, pero no son ciudades como las que uno imagina cuando piensa en Barcelona o en París. Para saber cómo son -cómo es Latinoamérica- decidí volver a hacer eso que siempre me ha gustado hacer: ir, mirar, escuchar, pensar, contarlo."— Martín Caparrós