When it feels like the universe is working against her, can Karter keep her head above water? Or, will her constant stress and worrying cost her and Dez the one thing they both so desire, a child? Dez’s first priority is always to protect his family, even when he’s not in the best position to do so. But, with a detective on his back with an ax to grind, can Dez stay a free man? Or, will he have to get his hands dirty one last time to show why he was the king to begin with? “You’ll never make it anywhere in life without a degree.” The words her father said to her still rang strong in Melodee’s ears, even eight years later. Setting out to prove her parents wrong, Melodee focuses on doing what she has to do to secure her future. But, will she allow Dame to step in help, or will her ‘I can do it myself’ attitude run him away? In this final installment, this crew is struggling to keep the family together. But, one thing about the Wright brothers, they always have some tricks up their sleeves, and for the women they love, they’ll paint the town red. Find out why Karter and Melodee are still in love with the King of Chicago.

    Although she’s had her share of downfalls, she continues to be the very best that she can be. Being hurt in the past by her ex-lover only gives her a reason to never love again, until she meets up with Hennessey.After five long years locked behind bars, Hennessey knows that being a drug dealer isn’t something he wants to continue to pursue to get his money up. So, instead he turns his dirty money into opening up furniture businesses. Meeting Keice only motivates him to want to go harder and do better, but that's something that his ex-girlfriend, Camille will not let him do if she's not included.Keice is already scared to love again. However, Hennessey is ready minus the ex-girlfriend issues. With their closest friends sharing this wild journey with them, what will the inevitable bring this unpredictable couple?

    When Jocelyn throws the idea out there that they should start an exotic maid service, they jump on it. The business takes off with a boom and pretty soon, they’re no longer depending on the government for anything. Instead, they all have a new set of problems. Jewel’s fifteen year old son, Jamal, is smoking marijuana. How can she tell him to stop using drugs when she’s addicted to pain pills herself? Daphne’s sixteen year old daughter, Shirrel, may be a lesbian. What can she do to help her daughter when she’s in denial about her own sexuality? Serena’s seventeen year old son could be on his way to becoming a teenaged father. She doesn’t know how to connect with the three children she already has. Will having a grandbaby make her change her ways? Jocelyn’s twelve year old daughter, Breanna, is sexually active. Has her promiscuous ways rubbed off on her child? These four ladies learn being food stamp bitches is just a state of mind. What’s most valuable and precious are family and true friendships.

    Brandy is a gold digger with a capital G! She doesn’t care whose man she sleeps with or goes after. Money was good and business was great until she decides to plot and scheme to set up the wrong person. Tip becomes pregnant, but by who? Her long time boyfriend or the Jamaican man who used to pimp her? Tracy is a good girl gone bad. She is head over heels in love with her first love. She doesn't know about his other life until its too late. Diamond is in love with her high school sweetheart and their relationship is great until she falls for someone else. When Brandy’s diary is found what will happen to their friendship? Will there friendship be able to stand through all the trials and tribulations life throws at them?

    Despite the bad cards life has dealt her, she’s trying to move on and live her best life while tackling college at the same time. Problem is, one of her lovers isn’t ready to let go. The king of Harlem, Carlos Mills aka Loso, is still the street’s finest. Now that everything on the block is running smoothly, he's finally ready to focus on his personal life and commit to his girlfriend, Amaya. He’s got it all figured out. They’re gonna get married, buy a new house and start a family. Everything is perfect until people start to show their true colors. After Remy’s boyfriend found out the truth about her and DC’s affair, she starts to uncover Sur’s secret life too. She wasn’t the only one with skeletons in her closet. But, as the old saying goes… Some lies can get you hurt. DC has now found himself in a love triangle that hits a lot closer to home than he thinks. Promise, his baby mother, isn’t the only woman who has gained a place in his heart. And if that’s not enough, imagine finding out that both of your women know each other almost better than they know you. As these couples embark on a journey of love, heartbreak, betrayal, and pain, they’ll find out that people and things are not always what they appear to be. The minute you think life is what it should be, those slithery snakes come out of hiding. Get ready to unfold all the drama in Diary of The Plug’s Daughter II.

     America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the 3 percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly... Or are they? As Edward Glaeser proves in this myth-shattering book, cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in cultural and economic terms) places to live. New Yorkers, for instance, live longer than other Americans; heart disease and cancer rates are lower in Gotham than in the nation as a whole. More than half of America's income is earned in twenty-two metropolitan areas. And city dwellers use, on average, 40 percent less energy than suburbanites. Glaeser travels through history and around the globe to reveal the hidden workings of cities and how they bring out the best in humankind. Even the worst cities-Kinshasa, Kolkata, Lagos- confer surprising benefits on the people who flock to them, including better health and more jobs than the rural areas that surround them. Glaeser visits Bangalore and Silicon Valley, whose strangely similar histories prove how essential education is to urban success and how new technology actually encourages people to gather together physically. He discovers why Detroit is dying while other old industrial cities-Chicago, Boston, New York-thrive. He investigates why a new house costs 350 percent more in Los Angeles than in Houston, even though building costs are only 25 percent higher in L.A. He pinpoints the single factor that most influences urban growth-January temperatures-and explains how certain chilly cities manage to defy that link. He explains how West Coast environmentalists have harmed the environment, and how struggling cities from Youngstown to New Orleans can "shrink to greatness." And he exposes the dangerous anti-urban political bias that is harming both cities and the entire country. Using intrepid reportage, keen analysis, and eloquent argument, Glaeser makes an impassioned case for the city's import and splendor. He reminds us forcefully why we should nurture our cities or suffer consequences that will hurt us all, no matter where we live.

    More than a diatribe against the trade, La Cecla makes a call to rethink urban space and take the cities back from “casino capitalism” that has left a string of failed urban projects, such as the Sagrera of Barcelona and the expansion of Columbia University in New York City. Recounting his travels across the globe, La Cecla provides insights to aid in resisting the planners and to find the spirit of a place. These commentaries on the works of past and present masters of urban and landscape will take an important place in continued public discourse for years to come.

    Historian Ben Wilson, author of bestselling and award-winning books on British history, now tells the grand, glorious story of how city living has allowed human culture to flourish. Beginning with Uruk, the world's first city, dating to 5000 BC and memorably portrayed in the Epic of Gilgamesh, he shows us that cities were never a necessity but that once they existed their density created such a blossoming of human endeavor--producing new professions, forms of art, worship, and trade--that they kick-started nothing less than civilization. Guiding readers through famous cities over 7,000 years, he reveals the innovations driven by each: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Epoque Paris. In the modern age, he studies the impact of verticality in New York City, the sprawl of L.A., and the eco-reimagining of twenty-first-century Shanghai. Lively, erudite, page turning, and irresistible, Metropolis is a grand tour of human achievement.

    In Makeshift Metropolis, Rybczynski has drawn upon a lifetime of observing cities to craft a concise and insightful book that is at once an intellectual history and a masterful critique. Makeshift Metropolis describes how current ideas about urban planning evolved from the movements that defined the twentieth century, such as City Beautiful, the Garden City, and the seminal ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Jacobs. If the twentieth century was the age of planning, we now find ourselves in the age of the market, Rybczynski argues, where entrepreneurial developers are shaping the twenty-first-century city with mixed-use developments, downtown living, heterogeneity, density, and liveliness. He introduces readers to projects like Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Yards in Washington, D.C., and, further afield, to the new city of Modi’in, Israel—sites that, in this age of resource scarcity, economic turmoil, and changing human demands, challenge our notion of the city. Erudite and immensely engaging, Makeshift Metropolis is an affirmation of Rybczynski’s role as one of our most original thinkers on the way we live today.

    P. Rose—a visionary in urban development and renewal—champions the role of cities in addressing the environmental, economic, and social challenges of the twenty-first century.Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity—and the home of eighty percent of the world’s population by 2050. As the 21st century progresses, metropolitan areas will bear the brunt of global megatrends such as climate change, natural resource depletion, population growth, income inequality, mass migrations, education and health disparities, among many others.In The Well-Tempered City, Jonathan F. P. Rose—the man who “repairs the fabric of cities”—distills a lifetime of interdisciplinary research and firsthand experience into a five-pronged model for how to design and reshape our cities with the goal of equalizing their landscape of opportunity. Drawing from the musical concept of “temperament” as a way to achieve harmony, Rose argues that well-tempered cities can be infused with systems that bend the arc of their development toward equality, resilience, adaptability, well-being, and the ever-unfolding harmony between civilization and nature. These goals may never be fully achieved, but our cities will be richer and happier if we aspire to them, and if we infuse our every plan and constructive step with this intention.A celebration of the city and an impassioned argument for its role in addressing the important issues in these volatile times, The Well-Tempered City is a reasoned, hopeful blueprint for a thriving metropolis—and the future.

    Here are window-ledge pillows designed expressly for people-watching and a forest of artificial trees for sufferers of hay fever. The Brotherhood of Immaculate Consumption deals with the matter of products that outlive their owners; a school of dance is based upon the choreographic motion of paying with cash; high-visibility construction vests are marketed to lonely people as a method of getting noticed. With cutting wit Katchor reveals a world similar to our own—lives are defined by possessions, consumerism is a kind of spirituality—but also slightly, fabulously askew. Frequently and brilliantly bizarre, and always mesmerizing, Hand-Drying in America ensures that you will never look at a building, a bar of soap, or an ATM the same way.

    When you flick on your light switch the light goes on--how? When you put out your garbage, where does it go? When you flush your toilet, what happens to the waste? How does water get from a reservoir in the mountains to your city faucet? How do flowers get to your corner store from Holland, or bananas get there from Ecuador? Who is operating the traffic lights all over the city? And what in the world is that steam coming out from underneath the potholes on the street? Across the city lies a series of extraordinarily complex and interconnected systems. Often invisible, and wholly taken for granted, these are the systems that make urban life possible. The Works: Anatomy of a City offers a cross section of this hidden infrastructure, using beautiful, innovative graphic images combined with short, clear text explanations to answer all the questions about the way things work in a modern city. It describes the technologies that keep the city functioning, as well as the people who support them-the pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, the electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that delivers power to subways. Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long, and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take the curvature of the earth's surface into account when designing it? Did you know that the George Washington Bridge takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls? Did you know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form natural reefs for fish? Or that if the telecom cables under New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the earth to the sun? While the book uses New York as its example, it has relevance well beyond that city's boundaries as the systems that make New York a functioning metropolis are similar to those that keep the bright lights burning in big cities everywhere. The Works is for anyone who has ever stopped midcrosswalk, looked at the rapidly moving metropolis around them, and wondered, how does this all work?

    In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

    The love of her life is doing big things, and she’s almost done with law school. What is supposed to be the happiest night of Jayda’s life is cut short within a matter of seconds, and her world changes forever. Jayda becomes numb. She’s just walking through life existing, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be the same again. It’s not until she meets Azaan that she realizes that she’s still capable of feeling something. Determined to use the situation for her own gain and nothing more, Jayda soon discovers that the handsome Haitian hitta from Miami, might not be as easy to get over on as she predicted. 
 Azaan Cezar is big on family, which is why he has no issues leaving Miami and heading to North Carolina to start a business for his younger brother. Beautiful, successful women come a dime a dozen in Miami, and a pretty face was never the thing to get Azaan riled up. Jayda is more than beautiful though. Her entire vibe is hypnotizing, and Azaan discovers that he just might not be ready for the emotionally scarred and obviously bitter Jayda.

    Zyrie finds herself starting over, after ending a bad relationship. She’s back at her mom’s, figuring out what direction she wants to take her life. All plans go awry when Mike enters the picture. Coming fully equipped with a slick tongue and a big bank roll, Zyrie’s mother feels that she’s snagged a winner. Zye entertains the notion, until she lays eyes on Amir, Mike’s cousin. Amir is everything Mike isn’t, but in Zyrie’s eyes he’s forbidden fruit. Still, temptation proves too much for Zyrie as she does the unthinkable.Sit back and take a ride with Zyrie, Amir, and Mike. Get an up-close and personal glimpse of just how down and dirty everyone can truly get. It’s a dog eat dog kind of world, and everyone knows that you just can’t trust these bitches.