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Urban eBooks

If you like Urban eBooks, then you'll love these top picks.
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  • Why New Orleans Matters

    by Tom Piazza ...
    Every place has its history. But what is it about New Orleans that makes it more than just the sum of the events that have happened there? What is it about the spirit of the people who live there that could produce a music, a cuisine, an architecture, a total environment, the mere mention of which can bring a smile to the face of someone who has never even set foot there?What is the meaning of a ... Read more

    $7.99 USD

  • Palaces for the People

    How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life

    “A comprehensive, entertaining, and compelling argument for how rebuilding social infrastructure can help heal divisions in our society and move us forward.”—Jon StewartNAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • “Engaging.”—Mayor Pete Buttigieg, The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)We are living in a time of deep divisions. Americans are sorting themselves along racial, religious, ... Read more

    $12.99 USD

  • Downtown

    Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950

    Winner of a Lewis Mumford Prize: “Extremely engaging reading for those interested in the history of cities and urban experience.” —BooklistWritten by one of this country’s foremost urban historians, Downtown is the first history of what was once viewed as the heart of the American city. It tells the fascinating story of how downtown—and the way Americans thought about downtown—changed over time. ... Read more

    $20.99 USD or Free with Kobo Plus

  • Fighting to Breathe

    Race, Toxicity, and the Rise of Youth Activism in Baltimore

    Series Book 54 - California Series in Public Anthropology
    Industrial toxic emissions on the South Baltimore Peninsula are among the highest in the nation. Because of the concentration of factories and other chemical industries in their neighborhoods, residents face elevated rates of lung cancer and other respiratory illnesses in addition to heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular disease, all of which can lead to premature death. Fighting to Breathe ... Read more

    $28.99 USD

  • Brooklyn Was Mine

    A tribute to New York City's most literary borough-featuring original nonfiction pieces by today's most celebrated writers.Of all the urban landscapes in America, perhaps none has so thoroughly infused and nurtured modern literature as Brooklyn. Though its literary history runs deep-Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer are just a few of its storied inhabitants-in recent years the borough ... Read more

    $4.99 USD

  • Main Street

    How a City's Heart Connects Us All

    Mindy Thompson Fullilove traverses the central thoroughfares of our cities to uncover the ways they bring together our communitiesAfter an 11-year study of Main Streets in 178 cities and 14 countries, Fullilove discovered the power of city centers to “help us name and solve our problems.” In an era of compounding crises including racial injustice, climate change, and COVID-19, the ability to rely ... Read more

    $20.99 USD

  • Reclaiming the Discarded

    Life and Labor on Rio's Garbage Dump

    In Reclaiming the Discarded Kathleen M. Millar offers an evocative ethnography of Jardim Gramacho, a sprawling garbage dump on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, where roughly two thousand self-employed workers known as catadores collect recyclable materials. While the figure of the scavenger sifting through garbage seems iconic of wageless life today, Millar shows how the work of reclaiming ... Read more

    $19.99 USD

  • The New Political Economy of Urban Education

    Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City

    Series series Critical Social Thought
    Urban education and its contexts have changed in powerful ways. Old paradigms are being eclipsed by global forces of privatization and markets and new articulations of race, class, and urban space. These factors and more set the stage for Pauline Lipman's insightful analysis of the relationship between education policy and the neoliberal economic, political, and ideological processes that are ... Read more

    $59.99 USD

  • In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

    How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities

    Across America, universities have become big businesses—and our cities their company towns. But there is a cost to those who live in their shadow.Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and ... Read more

    $16.99 USD

  • The Devil in the White City

    A Saga of Magic and Murder at the Fair that Changed America

    by Erik Larson ...
    **#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile comes the true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.“As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.” —San Francisco Chronicle* ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • Mission High

    One School, How Experts Tried to Fail It, and the Students and Teachers Who Made It Triumph

    "This book is a godsend a moving portrait for anyone wanting to go beyond the simplified labels and metrics and really understand an urban high school, and its highly individual, resilient, eager and brilliant students and educators." -- Dave Eggers, co-founder, 826 National and ScholarMatchDarrell is a reflective, brilliant young man, who never thought of himself as a good student. He always ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • Smack

    Heroin and the American City

    Series series Politics and Culture in Modern America
    Why do the vast majority of heroin users live in cities? In his provocative history of heroin in the United States, Eric C. Schneider explains what is distinctively urban about this undisputed king of underworld drugs.During the twentieth century, New York City was the nation's heroin capital—over half of all known addicts lived there, and underworld bosses like Vito Genovese, Nicky Barnes, and ... Read more

    $28.99 USD

  • Gentrification is Inevitable and Other Lies

    by Leslie Kern ...
    **Shortlisted for the Architectural Book of the YearHow gentrification is killing our cities, and what we can do about it**What does gentrification look like? Can we even agree that it is a process that replaces one community with another? It is a question of class? Or of economic opportunity? Who does it affect the most? Is there any way to combat it? Leslie Kern, author of the best selling ... Read more

    $9.99 USD

  • The World in a City

    Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

    by Joseph Berger ...
    “The whole world can be found in this city. . . .”–from the PrefaceFifty years ago, New York City had only a handful of ethnic groups. Today, the whole world can be found within the city’s five boroughs–and celebrated New York Times reporter Joseph Berger sets out to discover it, bringing alive the sights, smells, tastes, and people of the globe while taking readers on an intimate tour of the ... Read more

    $3.99 USD

  • Wide-Open Town

    A History of Queer San Francisco to 1965

    Wide-Open Town traces the history of gay men and lesbians in San Francisco from the turn of the century, when queer bars emerged in San Francisco's tourist districts, to 1965, when a raid on a drag ball changed the course of queer history. Bringing to life the striking personalities and vibrant milieu that fueled this era, Nan Alamilla Boyd examines the culture that developed around the bar scene ... Read more

    $24.99 USD

  • Ed Koch and the Rebuilding of New York City

    Series series Columbia History of Urban Life
    In 1978, Ed Koch assumed control of a city plagued by filth, crime, bankruptcy, and racial tensions. By the end of his mayoral run in 1989 and despite the Wall Street crash of 1987, his administration had begun rebuilding neighborhoods and infrastructure. Unlike many American cities, Koch's New York was growing, not shrinking. Gentrification brought new businesses to neglected corners and ... Read more

    $17.99 USD

  • Re-Imagining Spaces and Places

    Interdisciplinary Essays on the Relationship between Identity, Space, and Place

    Series series Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions
    While 'space' and 'place' appear as key concepts in the study of culture, their complexity and mutability require ever-new frameworks when approaching them critically. Including chapters by authors from different fields, career stages, and geopolitical backgrounds, the contributors in this edited collection scrutinize the changing dynamics of space and place in relation to current political, ... Read more

    $81.99 USD

  • Homicide

    A Year on the Killing Streets

    by David Simon ...
    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 ... Read more

    $13.99 USD $3.99 USD

  • Street Archives and City Life

    Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania

    by Emily Callaci ...
    Series series Radical Perspectives
    In Street Archives and City Life Emily Callaci maps a new terrain of political and cultural production in mid- to late twentieth-century Tanzanian urban landscapes. While the postcolonial Tanzanian ruling party (TANU) adopted a policy of rural socialism known as Ujamaa between 1967 and 1985, an influx of youth migrants to the city of Dar es Salaam generated innovative forms of urbanism through the ... Read more

    $20.99 USD

  • Barrio America

    How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City

    The compelling history of how Latino immigrants revitalized the nation's cities after decades of disinvestment and white flightThirty years ago, most people were ready to give up on American cities. We are commonly told that it was a "creative class" of young professionals who revived a moribund urban America in the 1990s and 2000s. But this stunning reversal owes much more to another, far less ... Read more

    $18.99 USD

  • Everything Now

    Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles

    A LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER. NAMED A BEST CALIFORNIA BOOKS OF 2021 BY THE NEW YORK TIMESA provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States’ most confounding metropolis—not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-stateAmerica is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place ... Read more

    $11.99 USD

  • The Soft City

    Sex for Business and Pleasure in New York City

    Series series The Cosmopolitan Life
    There is no rawer human experience than sex, and in a city as diverse as New York, sexual experiences come in many forms. In the pre-Giuliani days, temptation flooded Times Square on theater marquees and neon signs. Behind unmarked doors downtown, more adventurous experiences awaited for those in the know.In The Soft City, the ethnographer Terry Williams, with the help of accomplices and ... Read more

    $21.99 USD

  • Paved Paradise

    How Parking Explains the World

    by Henry Grabar ...
    **Shortlisted for the Zócalo Book PrizeNamed one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker and The New Republic“Consistently entertaining and often downright funny.”—The New Yorker“Wry and revelatory.” —The New York Times"A romp, packed with tales of anger, violence, theft, lust, greed, political chicanery and transportation policy gone wrong... highly entertaining."—The Los Angeles TimesAn ... Read more

    $14.99 USD

  • When a Heart Turns Rock Solid

    t/c

    by Timothy Black ...
    A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEARBased on an unprecedented eighteen-year study, the center of this riveting book are three engaging streetwise brothers who provide powerful testimony to the exigencies of life lived on the social and economic margins. With profound lessons regarding the intersection of social forces and individual choices, Black succeeds in putting a human face on some of the ... Read more

    $14.99 USD