[PDF] Dream City eBook

Author : Harry S. Jaffe
Publisher : Black Incorporated
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 16,91 MB
Release : 2014-04
Category : Racism
ISBN : 9780786755936

GET BOOK

With a new afterword covering the two decades since its first publication, two of Washington, D.C.’s most respected journalists expose one of America’s most tragic ironies: how the nation’s capital, often a gleaming symbol of peace and hope, is the setting for vicious contradictions and devastating conflicts over race, class, and power. Jaffe and Sherwood have chillingly chronicled the descent of the District of Columbia—congressional hearings, gangland murders, the establishment of home rule and the inside story of Marion Barry’s enigmatic dynasty and disgrace. Now their afterword narrates the District’s transformation in the last twenty years. New residents have helped bring developments, restaurants, and businesses to reviving neighborhoods. The authors cover the rise and fall of Mayors Adrian Fenty and Vince Gray, how new corruption charges are taking down politicians and businessmen, and how a fading Barry is still a player. The “city behind the monuments” remains flawed and polarized, but its revival is turning it into a distinct world capital—almost a dream city. Harry Jaffe has been a national editor at The Washingtonian magazine since 1990. He has received a number of awards for investigative journalism and feature writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He has taught journalism at Georgetown University and American University. His work has appeared in Esquire, Regardie's, Outside, Philadelphia Magazine, National Geographic Traveler, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, and other newspapers. Jaffe was born and raised in Philadelphia and began his journalism career with the Rutland (Vermont) Herald. He is the co-author of Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington, D.C. He lives in Clarke County, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughters. Tom Sherwood is a reporter for NBC4 in Washington, specializing in politics and the District of Columbia government. Tom also is a commentator for WAMU 88.5 public radio and a columnist for the Current Newspapers. Tom has twice been honored as one of the Top 50 Journalists in Washington by Washingtonian magazine. He began his journalism career at The Atlanta Constitution and covered local and national politics for The Washington Post from 1979 to 1989. He is the co-author of Dream City: Race, Power and the Decline of Washington, D.C. A native of Atlanta, he currently resides in Washington, D.C. and has one son, Peyton.

Author : Lance Berelowitz
Publisher : Douglas & McIntyre
Page : 292 pages
File Size : 10,79 MB
Release : 2010-08-24
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 9781553651703

GET BOOK

Located at the edge of a continent and at the corresponding edge of national public consciousness, Vancouver has developed in unique and unanticipated ways. It is now emerging as an experiment in contemporary city-making, with international interest in Vancouver as a model of post-industrial urbanism increasing exponentially. Lance Berelowitz explores the links between the city's seductive natural setting, its turbulent political history and changing civic values, and its planning and design culture. He also makes the startling case that Vancouver is to Canada's imagination what Los Angeles is to the American -- a mythologized place of endless possibilities, while being grounded in an altogether more limited set of socio-economic and environmental limitations. Dream City is richly illustrated with both historical and contemporary photographs of many significant buildings and public spaces, as well as specially commissioned maps that reveal the underlying patterns of growth and change of Canada's youngest metropolis.

Author : Conrad Kickert
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 457 pages
File Size : 10,66 MB
Release : 2019-06-11
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 0262039346

GET BOOK

Tracing two centuries of rise, fall, and rebirth in the heart of downtown Detroit. Downtown Detroit is in the midst of an astonishing rebirth. Its sidewalks have become a dreamland for an aspiring creative class, filled with shoppers, office workers, and restaurant-goers. Cranes dot the skyline, replacing the wrecking balls seen there only a few years ago. But venture a few blocks in any direction and this liveliness gives way to urban blight, a nightmare cityscape of crumbling concrete, barbed wire, and debris. In Dream City, urban designer Conrad Kickert examines the paradoxes of Detroit's landscape of extremes, arguing that the current reinvention of downtown is the expression of two centuries of Detroiters' conflicting hopes and dreams. Kickert demonstrates the materialization of these dreams with a series of detailed original morphological maps that trace downtown's rise, fall, and rebirth. Kickert writes that downtown Detroit has always been different from other neighborhoods; it grew faster than other parts of the city, and it declined differently, forced to reinvent itself again and again. Downtown has been in constant battle with its own offspring—the automobile and the suburbs the automobile enabled—and modernized itself though parking attrition and land consolidation. Dream City is populated by a varied cast of downtown power players, from a 1920s parking lot baron to the pizza tycoon family and mortgage billionaire who control downtown's fate today. Even the most renowned planners and designers have consistently yielded to those with power, land, and finances to shape downtown. Kickert thus finds rhyme and rhythm in downtown's contemporary cacophony. Kickert argues that Detroit's case is extreme but not unique; many other American cities have seen a similar decline—and many others may see a similar revitalization.

Author : Douglas Unger
Publisher : University of Nevada Press
Page : 423 pages
File Size : 30,61 MB
Release : 2024-10-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1647791669

GET BOOK

In this unconventional tale of Las Vegas during the two delirious boom decades before the bust of the Great Recession, failed actor “C. D.” Reinhart, who has launched a new career in hotel marketing, is gradually losing his moral and existential compass. Working on The Strip during an era when Sin City’s population growth was outpacing any other place in America, C. D. climbs the industry ladder while modeling himself after a Pyramid Resorts top executive, Lance Sheperd. C. D.’s professional choices lead him down a tumultuous road, as Sheperd, a complex and, at times, visionary figure, pilots his ventures through the tangled wheeling and dealing of finance and corporate politics straight into catastrophe. As the story progresses, C. D. comes to understand how his personal losses and the losses of his cohort of hard driving executives on the make—especially the tragic life of his work partner, Greta Olsson, the only woman to break through into their male dominated world—are a result of the make-believe environment he has helped to create, a world where representation replaces reality. Hoping to piece together his faltering marriage and family relationships, C. D. must find a new path as he struggles to hold onto his dreams. In this fictionalized version of the city of glittering lights, author Douglas Unger pits the ideologies of marketing and consumerism in the casino economy of America against the erosion of individual and humane values that success in that world demands. Unger reveals the hard truth that Las Vegas, a blue-collar town considered by many to be “the most honest city,” can be a temple for self-deceptions, emblematic of a service economy that knows the price of everything and too often the value of little else. Dream City becomes both a love song and an elegy for Las Vegas that sets it apart from any other literary novel previously written about this global entertainment attraction that in so many ways represents postmodern America. Sooner or later, the challenge that faces everyone is to discover what matters most, and to learn how to bet on the better angels of our natures.

Author : Darran Anderson
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 573 pages
File Size : 13,71 MB
Release : 2017-04-06
Category : Architecture
ISBN : 022647030X

GET BOOK

How can we understand the infinite variety of cities? Darran Anderson seems to exhaust all possibilities in this work of creative nonfiction. Drawing inspiration from Marco Polo and Italo Calvino, Anderson shows that we have much to learn about ourselves by looking not only at the cities we have built, but also at the cities we have imagined. Anderson draws on literature (Gustav Meyrink, Franz Kafka, Jaroslav Hasek, and James Joyce), but he also looks at architectural writings and works by the likes of Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, Medieval travel memoirs from the Middle East, mid-twentieth-century comic books, Star Trek, mythical lands such as Cockaigne, and the works of Claude Debussy. Anderson sees the visionary architecture dreamed up by architects, artists, philosophers, writers, and citizens as wedded to the egalitarian sense that cities are for everyone. He proves that we must not be locked into the structures that exclude ordinary citizens--that cities evolve and that we can have input. As he says: "If a city can be imagined into being, it can be re-imagined as well.”

Author : Lisa Huang Fleischman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 586 pages
File Size : 41,77 MB
Release : 2011-06-28
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 1451657420

GET BOOK

Marking the debut of a stunning new literary talent, Lisa Huang Fleischman's extraordinary saga -- inspired by her grandmother's life as an early feminist, political activist, and friend of Mao Zedong -- is a masterpiece about one clever and resourceful woman, growing up amidst the turmoil of twentieth-century China. Born in 1890, the privileged and sheltered daughter of a high-ranking imperial official, Jade Virtue spends her childhood enclosed by the towering walls of her family's sprawling mansion, never glimpsing the desperate struggle of China's ancient society, as the old ways are challenged and the twentieth century -- fast, fearsome, and tumultuous -- rushes in. But when her father mysteriously dies, young Jade Virtue is suddenly thrust into poverty, and experiences firsthand a traditional culture falling apart under the onslaught of growing rebellion against the Emperor, rapid social changes, and the mounting aggression of Japan and the West. Fleischman has rendered a richly textured, panoramic vision of Chinese life in the perilous years between the end of the empire and the Communist triumph of 1949, charting Jade Virtue's arranged first marriage to the corrupt opium addict Wang Mang, who harbors a terrible secret in his family's past; her awakening independence and ambivalent politics; her struggles with motherhood; and her fascinating acquaintance with a gifted, idealistic, fiercely ambitious young man named Mao Zedong. But the most important choices of her life are shaped by her conflicting loyalties, her intense lifelong friendship with Jinyu, a fiery woman revolutionary, and to Guai, a government official and sworn enemy of the Communists, with whom she finally discovers true and redemptive love. Exquisitely nuanced and lyrical yet marked with a driving power, Dream of the Walled City is an enthralling novel of hard-won personal independence set against the vivid backdrop of a rapidly changing world. From the final days of the last dynasty through the savage Japanese invasion during World War II to the formidable red dawn of the Communist triumph; from the backward rural province of Hunan to exile on the tropical shores of Taiwan; and from the binding chains of predetermined fate to the exhilarating liberation of a human spirit, this is a remarkable odyssey you will never forget.

Author : Shrikant Deodhar
Publisher : Notion Press
Page : 211 pages
File Size : 41,41 MB
Release : 2023-04-29
Category : Travel
ISBN :

GET BOOK

A tourist guidebook. Generally, tourists visit Dubai with travel groups or Agents. When we get information about such tourist places by a running commentary, our visit to these tourist destinations becomes like "touch and go". All the tourist sites of Dubai are man-made marvels and some of the places are world-record holders. We need to try to enjoying the true beauty of these places and understand their background. The book covers a lot of information and interesting details about these tourist attractions. Dubai...a man-made wonder, a shining star of Global tourism, changes its face every year. It is a challenge to make a tourist guide of such a dynamic dream city that never stops reinventing itself. This guidebook is your friend during your entire Dubai trip. This invisible personal guide will explain every tourist place in detail with a personal touch. All necessary information will be at your fingertips.

Author : James Traub
Publisher : Addison Wesley Publishing Company
Page : 392 pages
File Size : 46,16 MB
Release : 1994-10-20
Category : Education
ISBN :

GET BOOK

Traub relates the daily struggles of men and women trying to gain an education against the odds at the City College of New York, telling the story of the college's difficult present against the backdrop of its 150-year history. Students battle the cultural and economic forces that perpetuate inner-city poverty while the college that produced eight Nobel Laureates now tries to prepare survivors of the public school system for college-level work. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author : Linda Leith
Publisher :
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 29,49 MB
Release : 2021-04-10
Category :
ISBN : 9780889777859

GET BOOK

Vivid stories from a Canadian literary icon, who shares a life spread across continents and immersed in books. It's the life that many young women dream of: education in some of Europe's most beautiful cities before becoming a novelist, essayist, translator and literary curator. But the start of Linda Leith's journey is anything but idyllic. The daughter of a glamorous mother and a charming left-wing doctor, she is never told of her father's psychiatric breakdown or his subsequent shock therapy for what was then called manic depression. As this secret festers, Leith's father uproots the family to various European cities as he reinvents himself as a corporate executive, eventually moving across the Atlantic to Montreal. It's there, in her first year of university, that Leith is inspired by Madame de Staël: a writer and salonnière, banished from Paris by Napoleon himself. With none of Staël's advantages--no wealth, no social status, no château on Lake Geneva--Leith can scarcely imagine a salon, but she is drawn to Paris, and dreams of becoming a writer. This dream fuels her education in London, her marriage and writing in Budapest, and--finally--her journey back to Montreal where she meets a community of writers and readers who she works with to transform the city's literary scene. As Leith publishes, translates, and curates, she also comes to terms with her troubled father and the secrets of her childhood. A luscious read, this book will rivet readers of Jill Ker Conway's The Road from Coorain and Tara Westover's Educated , or anyone who has dreamed of building a cultural life.