Unfathomable City

Presents twenty-two color maps and accompanying essays providing details on the people, ecology, and culture of the city.

What makes a place? Rebecca Solnit reinvents the traditional atlas, searching for layers of meaning & connections of experience across San Francisco.

Nonstop Metropolis,Êthe culminating volume in a trilogy of atlases, conveys innumerable unbound experiences of New York City through twenty-six imaginative maps and informative essays. Bringing together the insights of dozens of expertsÑfrom linguists to music historians, ethnographers, urbanists, and environmental journalistsÑamplified by cartographers, artists, and photographers, it explores all five boroughs of New York City and parts of nearby New Jersey. We are invited to travel through ManhattanÕs playgrounds, from polyglot Queens to many-faceted Brooklyn, and from the resilient Bronx to the mystical kung fu hip-hop mecca of Staten Island. The contributors to this exquisitely designed and gorgeously illustrated volume celebrate New York CityÕs unique vitality, its incubation of the avant-garde, and its literary history, but they also critique its racial and economic inequality, environmental impact, and erasure of its past.ÊNonstop MetropolisÊallows us to excavate New YorkÕs buried layers, to scrutinize its political heft, and to discover the unexpected in one of the most iconic cities in the world. It is both a challenge and homage to how New Yorkers think of their city, and how the world sees this capital of capitalism, culture, immigration, and more. Contributors:ÊSheerly Avni,ÊGaiutra Bahadur,ÊMarshall Berman,ÊJoe Boyd,ÊWill Butler,ÊGarnette Cadogan,ÊThomas J. Campanella,ÊDaniel Aldana Cohen,ÊTeju Cole,ÊJoel Dinerstein,ÊPaul La Farge,ÊFrancisco Goldman,ÊMargo Jefferson,ÊLucy R. Lippard,ÊBarry Lopez,ÊValeria Luiselli,ÊSuketu Mehta,ÊEmily Raboteau, Molly Roy, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts,ÊLuc Sante,ÊHeather Smith,ÊJonathan Tarleton,ÊAstra Taylor,ÊAlexandra T. Vazquez,ÊChristina Zanfagna Interviews with:ÊValerie Capers, Peter Coyote, Grandmaster Caz,ÊGrand Wizzard Theodore,ÊMelle Mel, RZA

"In 1851, a war began in what would become Yosemite National Park, a war against the indigenous inhabitants that has yet to come to a real conclusion. A century later - 1951 - and about a hundred and fifty miles away, another war began when the U.S. government started setting off nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site. It was called a "nuclear testing program" but functioned as a war against the land and people of the Great Basin."--

For decades, American hungers sustained Tijuana. In this scientific detective story, a public health expert reveals what happens when a border city's lifeline is brutally severed. Despite its reputation as a carnival of vice, Tijuana was, until recently, no more or less violent than neighboring San Diego, its sister city across the border wall. But then something changed. Over the past ten years, Mexico's third-largest city became one of the world's most dangerous. Tijuana's murder rate skyrocketed and produced a staggering number of female victims. Hundreds of women are now found dead in the city each year, or bound and mutilated along the highway that lines the Baja coast. When Dan Werb began to study these murders in 2013, rather than viewing them in isolation, he discovered that they could only be understood as one symptom among many. Environmental toxins, drug overdoses, HIV transmission: all were killing women at overwhelming rates. As an epidemiologist, trained to track epidemics by mining data, Werb sensed the presence of a deeper contagion targeting Tijuana's women. Not a virus, but some awful wrong buried in the city's social order, cutting down its most vulnerable inhabitants from multiple directions. Werb's search for the ultimate causes of Tijuana's femicide casts new light on immigration, human trafficking, addiction, and the true cost of American empire-building. It leads Werb all the way from factory slums to drug dens to the corridors of police corruption, as he follows a thread that ultimately leads to a surprising turn back over the border, looking northward. “City of Omens is a compelling and disturbing tour of a border world that outsiders rarely see - and simultaneously, a clear guide to a field of public health that offers an essential framework for understanding how both ideas and diseases can spread.” -- MAIA SZALAVITZ, author of Unbroken Brain “Dan Werb combines his expertise as a trained epidemiologist with his keen discernment as an investigative journalist to depict what happens when poverty, human desperation, and unfathomable greed at the highest levels of a society mix with imperial ambition and a criminally ill-conceived policy towards drug use. It is a riveting and heartbreaking story, told with eloquence and compassion.” -- GABOR MATÉ, MD, bestselling author of In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction “City of Omens is an urgent and needed account of a desperate problem. The perils that Mexico's women face haunt the conscience of a nation.” -- ALFREDO CORCHADO, author of Homelands and Midnight in Mexico

Gifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed three boxes of ripening apricots, which lay, mountainous, on her bedroom floor - a windfall, a riddle, an emergency to be dealt with. The fruit came from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance came stories spun like those of Scheherazade, who used her gifts as a storyteller to change her fate and her listener's heart. As she looks back on the year of apricots and emergencies, Solnit weaves her own story into fairytales and the lives of others - the Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley and Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. She tells of unexpected invitations and adventures, from a library of water in Iceland to the depths of the Grand Canyon. She tells of doctors and explorers, monsters and moths. She tells of warmth and coldness, of making art and re-making the self.

The Essence of Zen is an expert's guided tour of the ins and outs of the tradition's approach to meditation, enlightenment, and the oneness of all things. To read it is to enter into one of modern Japanese Zen's most subtle and sophisticated minds. Sekkei Harada skillfully pushes us to drop those parts of ourselves that grasp and make demands regarding our understanding or progress in meditation practice. He enables us to see clearly-and steer clear of-the philosophical stumbling blocks that can make the path precarious. The Essence of Zen represents the most succinct of his teachings, making it of immediate value to anyone with an interest in Zen. The book also contains Harada's explanations of the differences between the tradition's primary schools, making it particularly helpful to newcomers.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • An "extraordinary ... profoundly moving" history (The New York Times Book Review) of the American Civil War that reveals the ways that death on such a scale changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation. An estiated 750,000 soldiers lost their lives in the American Civil War. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be seven and a half million. In This Republic of Suffering, Drew Gilpin Faust describes how the survivors managed on a practical level and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the unprecedented carnage with its belief in a benevolent God. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, nurses, northerners and southerners come together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. With a new introduction by the author, and a new foreword by Mike Mullen, 17th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Since cities emerged ten thousand years ago, they have become one of the most impressive artifacts of humanity. But their evolution has been anything but linear—cities have gone through moments of radical change, turning points that redefine their very essence. In this book, a renowned architect and urban planner who studies the intersection of cities and technology argues that we are in such a moment. The authors explain some of the forces behind urban change and offer new visions of the many possibilities for tomorrow’s city. Pervasive digital systems that layer our cities are transforming urban life. The authors provide a front-row seat to this change. Their work at the MIT Senseable City Laboratory allows experimentation and implementation of a variety of urban initiatives and concepts, from assistive condition-monitoring bicycles to trash with embedded tracking sensors, from mobility to energy, from participation to production. They call for a new approach to envisioning cities: futurecraft, a symbiotic development of urban ideas by designers and the public. With such participation, we can collectively imagine, examine, choose, and shape the most desirable future of our cities.

Reporting from the front lines of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg sound a warning bell to all urban residents. Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty.