Elsewhere might be revealed in the tract-house adventures of a home-décor reality show, at a discount funeral home in a strip mall, or in the story of an armed man named Honey Bear in the hunt for his beloved but now missing sleeper sofa which he left in a store unit. Off Ramp shows us America through the humorous gaze of Hank Stuever, who finds beauty in the midst of the most unlikely and invisible lives and places.

    Two assaults have already failed. After a morning-long battle involving machine guns, explosives, and tear gas, the radicals remain defiant. In a command post across the street from the boarded-up row house that serves as the militants' headquarters, the beleaguered police commissioner weighs his options and decides on a new plan. He will bomb the house.Let It Burn is the true-life story of the confrontation between the Philadelphia Police Department and the MOVE organization—a group that rejected modern technology and fought for what it called "natural law." The police commissioner's decision to drop an "explosive device" onto the house's roof—and then to let the resulting fire burn while adults and children remained in the house—was the final tragic chapter in a decades-long series of clashes that had already left one policeman dead and others injured, dozens of MOVE members behind bars, and their original compound razed to the ground.By the time the fire burned itself out, eleven MOVE members, many of them women and small children, would be dead. Sixty-one houses in the neighborhood would be destroyed.There would be a city inquiry, numerous civil suits, and two grand-jury inquests following the confrontation. Michael Boyette served on one of the grand juries, where he had a front-row seat as the key players and witnesses—including Mayor Wilson Goode and future Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell—recounted their roles in the tragedy. After the grand jury concluded its investigation, he and coauthor Randi Boyette conducted additional independent research—including exclusive interviews with police who had been on the scene and with MOVE members—to create this moment-by-moment account of the confrontation and the events leading up to it.

    . . lightened not only by cartoons but by narrative approach."-New York Herald TribuneThe history of New Orleans is a street-level story, with names like Iberville, Terpsichore, Gravier, Tchoupitoulas, and, of course, Bourbon, presenting the city's past with every step. The late John Churchill Chase eloquently chronicles the origins and development of the most fascinating of American cities in this humorous read.Frenchmen, Desire, Good Children details the interesting stories of the developers and families as well as the infamous and famous people, places, and events from which the city's names and character are drawn. First published by now-defunct New Orleans publisher Robert L. Crager in 1949, the book remains funny and informative, generally accepted as a standard reference about the Crescent City.

    By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journaliststo bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city's mostimportant thoroughfare. Today the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards. In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City's rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, thepublic was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creationof Atlantic City as the Nation's Playground was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urbanbalance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantlypoor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling into every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days. Simon's moving narrative of Atlantic City's past points to the troubling fate of urban America and the nation's cultural trajectory in the twentieth century, with broad implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.

    This haunting story continues to be an unsolved mystery today. Lehto conducts all the research to bring you the most accurate account of what songwriter Woody Guthrie called the "1913 Massacre."

    His award-winning work was featured in Davis Guggenheim's documentary Waiting for "Superman," and he has been hailed by media, activists, teachers, and national leaders. Michelle Obama called him "one of my heroes," and Oprah Winfrey refers to him as "an angel from God." Here, Canada draws on his years of work with inner-city youth and on his own turbulent boyhood to offer a moving and revelatory look at the little-understood emotional lives of boys. And who better for this task than the man Elizabeth Mehren of the Los Angeles Times calls "one of this country's leading advocates for youth."

    In Money Has No Smell, Paul Stoller offers us a more complete portrait of the complex lives of West African immigrants like Diallo, a portrait based on years of research Stoller conducted on the streets of New York City during the 1990s.Blending fascinating ethnographic description with incisive social analysis, Stoller shows how these savvy West African entrepreneurs have built cohesive and effective multinational trading networks, in part through selling a simulated Africa to African Americans. These and other networks set up by the traders, along with their faith as devout Muslims, help them cope with the formidable state regulations and personal challenges they face in America. As Stoller demonstrates, the stories of these West African traders illustrate and illuminate ongoing debates about globalization, the informal economy, and the changing nature of American communities.

    No fewer than twenty players have or will eventually make it to the Hall of Fame; the best scorers were matched up against the best goalies; brilliant coaches could be found on both benches; and two of the league's smartest general managers ruthlessly tried to one-up each other at every NHL trade deadline. Blood Feud is a rollicking story of a fierce, and often violent, rivalry.

    In the decades that followed, Jacobs remained a brilliant and revered commentator on architecture, urban life, and economics until her death in 2006. These interviews capture Jacobs at her very best and are an essential reminder of why Jacobs was—and remains—unrivaled in her analyses and her ability to cut through cant and received wisdom.

    He's known as "Earl the Black Pearl," and he's left the homeboys behind—way behind. He's cool, sharp as an ice crystal, and it seems that no one can touch him. Until someone even higher up puts the heat on and his friends begin dropping like flies—of lead poisoning. That's when Earl fights back...and all hell breaks loose!

    Disappointed, Josie decides to stay the day and then cancel her trip since it’s no fun being alone. But her plans change when Chris Barnes, visiting his grandfather, comes to her aid and offers to show her the sites. When she learns that Chris is raising his deceased brother’s child, she is touched. Amid snowball fights, snowmen, and snow angels, Josie’s life changes when she falls in love with the little girl, but Ellie wants a mommy. Even though Chris is a great guy with wonderful attributes, Josie has absolutely no plans to marry, or can this four-year-old change Josie’s plans.

    This book covers urban economics as the discipline that lies at the intersection of geography and economics. The sixth edition is a thorough revision of previous incarnations - the author has reorganized and rewritten every chapter, to produce a sleek and up-to-date text that will bring renewed attention to the Urban Economics course. This sixth edition offers an extreme makeover from previous editions, while also incorporating the remarkable progress in the field of urban economics in the last ten to fifteen years. Part I of the book explains why cities exist and what causes them to grow or shrink.

    Many of these small details are so obvious as to be invisible.

    Three days later, police discovered the mutilated body of Bob Seaman - a successful auto industry engineer, softball coach and passionate collector of vintage Mustangs - in the back of the family's Ford Explorer. As the shackles were placed on her wrists, Nancy Seaman asserted that her husband had been beating her, and she'd killed him in self-defense.At her trial, two radically different stories emerged. One of the couple's sons, Greg, testified that his father had been abusing his mother for years. The other, Jeff, testified for the prosecution, charging his mother as a cold blooded killer.Joyce Maynard's chilling work delves beyond the events of the crime itself, to explore the lives of an American family who seemed to have everything. Her exploration of the story led to a year's research in suburban Detroit - but the story she found there will take the reader to the Depression-era farm country of Illinois, the working class neighborhoods of the auto industry in its heyday and even, surprisingly, to a Baptist church in burned-out downtown Detroit. Along the way we meet a Transylvanian forensic pathologist, a beautiful young prosecutor, an old-school police chief, a television news crew hungry for ratings, the softball scorekeeper mom accused of carrying on an affair with the murdered man, and her two shell shocked teenagers, still reeling from the death of their beloved coach, and a mother who has to tell her daughter why her favorite teacher won't be in school any more.As in Joyce Maynard's previous books - including To Die For, based on a true crime, and her best selling memoir, At Home in the World - Joyce Maynard's themes here involve family secrets, the deep fissures that lie below the surface of the glittering exteriors, and the deep, potentially fatal, fissures in the American Dream.

    With peerless authority, Cannato explores how Lindsay Liberalism failed to save New York, and, in the opinion of many, left it worse off than it was in the mid-1960's.