In the winter of 1913, Grand Central Station was officially opened and immediately became one of the most beautiful and recognizable Manhattan landmarks. In this celebration of the one hundred year old terminal, Sam Roberts of The New York Times looks back at Grand Central's conception, amazing history, and the far-reaching cultural effects of the station that continues to amaze tourists and shuttle busy commuters. Along the way, Roberts will explore how the Manhattan transit hub truly foreshadowed the evolution of suburban expansion in the country, and fostered the nation's westward expansion and growth via the railroad. Featuring quirky anecdotes and behind-the-scenes information, this book will allow readers to peek into the secret and unseen areas of Grand Central -- from the tunnels, to the command center, to the hidden passageways. With stories about everything from the famous movies that have used Grand Central as a location to the celestial ceiling in the main lobby (including its stunning mistake) to the homeless denizens who reside in the building's catacombs, this is a fascinating and, exciting look at a true American institution.

    This lively narrative of The City from its very beginnings all the way through the earthquake of 1989 tells where to find the historic buildings, sights, and artifacts that make that history come alive.

    The resulting consent decree forced the MTA for a period of ten years to essentially reorient the mass transit system to better serve the city’s poorest residents. A stunning reversal of conventional governance and planning in urban America, which almost always favors wealthier residents, this decision is also, for renowned urban theorist Edward W. Soja, a concrete example of spatial justice in action. In Seeking Spatial Justice, Soja argues that justice has a geography and that the equitable distribution of resources, services, and access is a basic human right. Building on current concerns in critical geography and the new spatial consciousness, Soja interweaves theory and practice, offering new ways of understanding and changing the unjust geographies in which we live. After tracing the evolution of spatial justice and the closely related notion of the right to the city in the influential work of Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others, he demonstrates how these ideas are now being applied through a series of case studies in Los Angeles, the city at the forefront of this movement. Soja focuses on such innovative labor–community coalitions as Justice for Janitors, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and the Right to the City Alliance; on struggles for rent control and environmental justice; and on the role that faculty and students in the UCLA Department of Urban Planning have played in both developing the theory of spatial justice and putting it into practice. Effectively locating spatial justice as a theoretical concept, a mode of empirical analysis, and a strategy for social and political action, this book makes a significant contribution to the contemporary debates about justice, space, and the city.

    4 BC–65 AD). He counseled readers to “study death always,” and took his own advice, returning to the subject again and again in all his writings, yet he never treated it in a complete work. How to Die gathers in one volume, for the first time, Seneca’s remarkable meditations on death and dying. Edited and translated by James Romm, How to Die reveals a provocative thinker and dazzling writer who speaks with a startling frankness about the need to accept death or even, under certain conditions, to seek it out.Seneca believed that life is only a journey toward death and that one must rehearse for death throughout life. Here, he tells us how to practice for death, how to die well, and how to understand the role of a good death in a good life. He stresses the universality of death, its importance as life’s final rite of passage, and its ability to liberate us from pain, slavery, or political oppression.Featuring beautifully rendered new translations, How to Die also includes an enlightening introduction, notes, the original Latin texts, and an epilogue presenting Tacitus's description of Seneca's grim suicide.

    Then from it, nearly overnight, emerged one of the world's largest and most iconic cities. The birth and evolution of Los Angeles--its seemingly impossible, meteoric rise--can be attributed largely to three ingenious but deeply flawed people. D.W. Griffith, the early film pioneer who first conceived of feature-length movies, gave Hollywood its industry. Aimee Semple McPherson, a young evangelist and radio preacher, infused the city with its spiritual identity as a hub for reinvention. And William Mulholland, an Irish immigrant turned ditch-digger turned autodidactic engineer, would design the massive aqueduct that made survival in the harsh climate feasible.But while Mulholland, Griffith, and Semple McPherson were all masters of their craft, each would self-destruct in spectacular fashion. D.W. Griffith, led by his ballooning ego, would go on to produce a string of commercial failures; Semple McPherson would be crucified in the tabloids for fabricating an account of her own kidnapping; and a dam designed by Mulholland would fail just hours after he gave it a safety inspection.Spanning from 1904 to 1930, The Mirage Factory is the enthralling tale of an improbable city and the people who willed it into existence by pushing the limits of human engineering and peddling fantasies.

    Derailed in the 1970s by mental illness, drug use, and the shifting fortunes of the band, Wilson came back again and again over the next few decades, surviving and--finally--thriving. Now he weighs in on the sources of his creative inspiration and on his struggles, the exhilarating highs and the debilitating lows. Whether he's talking about his childhood, his bandmates, or his own inner demons, Wilson's story, told in his own voice and in his own way, unforgettably illuminates the man behind the music, working through the turbulence and discord to achieve, at last, a new harmony.

    The first nonfiction work by one of the most distinctive prose stylists of our era, Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem remains, decades after its first publication, the essential portrait of America—particularly California—in the sixties.It focuses on such subjects as John Wayne and Howard Hughes, growing up a girl in California, ruminating on the nature of good and evil in a Death Valley motel room, and, especially, the essence of San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury, the heart of the counterculture.

    Weaving stories about places to which he has recently traveled with images and memories that have persisted since childhood, Dyer tries "to work out what a certain place--a certain way of marking the landscape--means; what it's trying to tell us; what we go to it for." He takes his title from Gaugin's masterwork, and asks the same questions: Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? The answers are elusive, hiding in French Polynesia, where he travels to write about Gaugin and the lure of the exotic; at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where he goes to see the masterpiece in person only to be told it is traveling; and in Norway, where he and his wife journey to see, but end up not seeing, the Northern Lights. But at home in California, after a medical event that makes Dyer see everything in a different way, he may finally have found what he's been searching for.

    Forest won the First Division championship, two League Cups and back-to-back European Cups and they did it, incredibly, with five of the players Clough inherited at a club that was trying to avoid relegation to the third tier of English football.I Believe In Miracles accompanies the critically-acclaimed documentary and DVD of the same name. Based on exclusive interviews with virtually every member of the Forest team, it covers the greatest period in Clough's extraordinary life and brings together the stories of the unlikely assortment of free transfers, bargain buys, rogues, misfits and exceptionally gifted footballers who came together under the most charismatic manager there has ever been.

    Through a series of disastrous decisions, the state government had switched the city’s water to a source that corroded Flint’s aging lead pipes. Complaints about the foul-smelling water were dismissed: the residents of Flint—a largely poor African American city of about 100,000 people—were not seen as credible, even in matters of their own lives.It took 18 months of activism and a band of dogged outsiders to force the state to admit that the water was poisonous. But this was only after 12 people died and Flint's children suffered irreparable harm. The long battle for accountability and a humane response to this man-made disaster have only just begun.In the first full-length account of this epic failure, The Poisoned City recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water through the people who caused it, suffered from it, and exposed it. It is a chronicle of one town, but could also be about any American city, all made precarious by the neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision-making. Cities like Flint are set up to fail—and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences may be mortal.A 2019 Library of Michigan Notable Books

    It contains accounts by Richard 'The Iceman' Kuklinski, the contract killer who claimed to have murdered over 200 people in a career lasting 43 years.

    In this insightful book, the author looks at the teachings of ancient and modern prophets concerning the times we live in now and the times to come. In a clear and straightforward manner, he discusses dozens of signs of the latter days and examines many specific prophecies about what has happened and what will happen--and how we can be prepared for whatever comes. A memorable, easy-to-understand portrait of the last days

    The small, poignant touches are riveting." -"Kirkus Discoveries""I think about what I want and what makes me happy, But orderly and quietly to myself. Because my thoughts tear down fortresses and walls, My thoughts are free. -German folk song, author unknown"The beautiful, safe, joyful places in young Tilli's imagination were her only refuge from the bombing that tore through the sky above her during World War II. Her thoughts were her only freedom from Hitler's Nazi tyranny, and they were her strength to survive after the war ended, when Russians invaded her tiny farming village in eastern Germany; forced her into months of hiding in a dark attic crawlspace; and took her innocence, her childhood, and nearly her life.Tilli's dreams-of a time when she could think and act freely, and travel, work, write, worship, and live however she wished-were what fueled the sixteen-year-old to courageously and single-handedly escape the terror of Stalin's harsh Communist rule and create her own happy ending in a free America.This true tale of sorrow and terror, hope and triumph, is Tilli's story-but it's also the story of the unthinkable suffering and untold bravery of countless innocent children who have lived through a war and its aftermath.

    It helped in the American conquest of California, the launch of the Republican Party, and the ignition of the western Indian wars. And along the way, Lake Tahoe even found the time to invent the ski industry, spark the sexual revolution, and win countless Academy Awards. Tahoe beneath the Surface brings this hidden history of America s largest mountain lake to life through the stories of its most celebrated residents and visitors over the last ten thousand years. It mixes local Washoe Indian legends with tales of murderous Mafia dons, and Rat Pack tunes with Steinbeck novels. It establishes Tahoe as one of America s literary hot spots by tracing the steps of more than a dozen authors including Bertrand Russell, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Michael Ondaatje. Tahoe beneath the Surface reveals how the lake transformed the lives of conservationists like John Muir, humorists like Mark Twain, and Hollywood icons like Frank Sinatra. It even touches upon some of the darker aspects of American history, including anti-Chinese racism and the Kennedy assassination. Despite the impact Lake Tahoe has had on America, environmental threats loom large, and Tahoe Blue a term that Lankford uses to encompass the whole range of life, beauty, and meaning the lake represents grows increasingly vulnerable. In Tahoe beneath the Surface, human history and natural history combine in a most engaging way, one that will both inform and inspire all who would keep Tahoe blue.

    Out on the pitch a lone brass player sounds the haunting Post Horn Gallop, for 80 years the home players' entrance tune. Spines tingle. Air is gulped into opposition lungs. Game time, time to begin the chase. Burning fox eyes peer down from between the decks of one of the stands. On the stadium's outside wall a royal blue LCD display says #Fearless.Welcome to Leicester City. They were always a club with a difference but in 2015-16 they created a story that in modern football stands unique. Who could believe it: from relegation certainties to champions of England? It was when, on behalf of every small club, dreams were hunted at the King Power, a season where the impossible became merely quarry.5,000-1 shots when the campaign started, Leicester's transformation has been remarkable. This is the most incredible cast of written-offs, grafters, misfits and journeymen, coming together in a special time and place to simultaneously have the season of their lives. Fearless will document Leicester's hunt of their impossible dream. It will tell the greatest football tale of the Premier League era, in loving detail, with the inside track. Now that Leicester have gone all the way and won the title, it is the best story in world sports - for years.Premier League champions. The side who'd been adrift at the bottom 12 months previously, who's started the season as relegation favourites, whose manager was favourite to be the first one sacked once the campaign got underway. A League One side only seven seasons previously. A squad of �500,000 and �1m men. Leicester. Ridiculous. Miraculous. Fearless.