The countless individuals, both famous and unknown, who shaped Mexico' history come alive . . . they prosper, decline, and rise again before being extinguished by political and social upheavals beyond their control.

    This work recounts the adventurous life of his beloved 'Cello Prieto, ' tracing its history through each of its previous owners from Stradivari in 1720 to the author himself

    Now, in Favela, Perlman carries that story forward to the present. Re-interviewing many longtime favela residents whom she hadfirst met in 1969--as well as their children and grandchildren--Perlman offers the only long-term perspective available on the favelados as they struggle for a better life.Perlman discovers that while educational levels have risen, democracy has replaced dictatorship, and material conditions have improved, many residents feel more marginalized than ever. The greatest change is the explosion of drug and arms trade and the high incidence of fatal violence that hasresulted. Yet the greatest challenge of all is job creation--decent work for decent pay. If unemployment and under-paid employment are not addressed, she argues, all other efforts will fail to resolve the fundamental issues. Foreign Affairs praises Perlman for writing with compassion, artistry, and intelligence, using stirring personal stories to illustrate larger points substantiated with statistical analysis.

    In Havana Nocturne, T.J. English offers a multifaceted true tale of organized crime, political corruption, roaring nightlife, revolution & international conflict that interweaves the dual stories of the Mob in Havana & the event that would overshadow it, the Cuban Revolution.As the Cuban people labored under a violently repressive regime throughout the 50s, Mob leaders Meyer Lansky & Charles "Lucky" Luciano turned their eye to Havana. To them, Cuba was the ultimate dream, the greatest hope for the future of the US Mob in the post-Prohibition years of intensified government crackdowns. But when it came time to make their move, it was Lansky, the brilliant Jewish mobster, who reigned supreme. Having cultivated strong ties with the Cuban government & in particular the brutal dictator Fulgencio Batista, Lansky brought key mobsters to Havana to put his ambitious business plans in motion. Before long, the Mob, with Batista's corrupt government in its pocket, owned the biggest luxury hotels & casinos in Havana, launching an unprecedented tourism boom complete with the most lavish entertainment, the world's biggest celebrities, the most beautiful women & gambling galore. But their dreams collided with those of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara & others who would lead the country's disenfranchised to overthrow their corrupt government & its foreign partners—an epic cultural battle that English captures in all its sexy, decadent, ugly glory. Bringing together long-buried historical information with English's own research in Havana—including interviews with the era's key survivors—Havana Nocturne takes readers back to Cuba in the years when it was a veritable devil's playground for mob leaders. English deftly weaves together the parallel stories of the Havana Mob—featuring notorious criminals such as Santo Trafficante Jr & Albert Anastasia—& Castro's 26th of July Movement in a riveting, up-close look at how the Mob nearly attained its biggest dream in Havana—& how Fidel Castro trumped it all with the revolution.

    

    Enormous growth, raging crime, and tumultuous politics have also made it one of the most feared and misunderstood. Yet in the past decade, the city has become a hot spot for international business, fashion, and art, and a magnet for thrill-seeking expats from around the world. In 2002, Daniel Hernandez traveled to Mexico City, searching for his cultural roots. He encountered a city both chaotic and intoxicating, both underdeveloped and hypermodern. In 2007, after quitting a job, he moved back. With vivid, intimate storytelling, Hernandez visits slums populated by ex-punks; glittering, drug-fueled fashion parties; and pseudo-native rituals catering to new-age Mexicans. He takes readers into the world of youth subcultures, in a city where punk and emo stand for a whole way of life—and sometimes lead to rumbles on the streets. Surrounded by volcanoes, earthquake-prone, and shrouded in smog, the city that Hernandez lovingly chronicles is a place of astounding manifestations of danger, desire, humor, and beauty, a surreal landscape of “cosmic violence.” For those who care about one of the most electrifying cities on the planet, “Down & Delirious in Mexico City is essential reading” (David Lida, author of First Stop in the New World).

    Winner, Southwest Book Award, Border Regional Library Association, 2011What do you call a place where people are tortured and murdered and buried in the backyard of a nice, middle-class condo? Where police work for the drug cartels? Where the meanings of words such as "border" and "crime" and "justice" are emptying out into the streets and flowing down into the sewers? You call it Juárez or, better yet, Dreamland.Realizing that merely reporting the facts cannot capture the massive disintegration of society that is happening along the border, Charles Bowden and Alice Leora Briggs use nonfiction and sgraffito drawings to depict the surreality that is Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Starting from an incident in which a Mexican informant for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security murdered a man while U.S. agents listened in by cell phone—and did nothing to intervene—Bowden forcefully and poetically describes the breakdown of all order in Juárez as the power of the drug industry outstrips the power of the state. Alice Leora Briggs's drawings—reminiscent of Northern Renaissance engraving and profoundly disquieting—intensify the reality of this place where atrocities happen daily and no one, neither citizens nor governments, openly acknowledges them.With the feel of a graphic novel, the look of an illuminated medieval manuscript, and the harshness of a police blotter, Dreamland captures the routine brutality, resilient courage, and rapacious daily commerce along the U.S.-Mexico border.

    The product of the centuries-long struggle among three mighty empires--France, Spain, and England--and among their respective American colonies and enslaved African peoples, it has always seemed like a foreign port to most Americans, baffled as they are by its complex cultural inheritance.The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans’s first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana’s statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, “rock the city.”

    Written by a Mexican journalist, this book chronicles the disintegration of the city's physical and social structure, the widespread grassroots organizing against government corruption and incompetence, and the reliency of the human spirit.

    City infrastructure was crumbling, strong financial policies and systems were nonexistent, many executive positions were vacant, public satisfaction was low, ethical standards were weak, and public safety union salaries and benefits were outpacing revenues, crowding out other essential city services. Simply put: San Antonio was on the verge of collapse.Greedy Bastards tells the story of Sheryl and her new team's uphill battle to turn around San Antonio city government. She takes you behind closed doors to share the hard changes she made and the strategies she used to create mutually beneficial solutions to the city's biggest problems.Many of the issues Sheryl found in San Antonio are present in cities across the US. Packed with wins and losses, lessons learned, and pitfalls encountered, Greedy Bastards is a guidebook for any city official tasked with turning around a struggling city.

    For over two decades, Site Planning has remained the only comprehensive source of information on all the principal activities and concerns of arranging the outdoor physical environment. Now, new illustrations double the visual material and one hundred pages of new appendixes cover special techniques, provide references to more detailed technical sources, and put numerical standards in a concise form.An introduction summarizes the site planning process. This is followed by a case study of a typical professional project and ten chapters which provide new materials on user analysis, programming, site planning for built places, housing tenures and their planning implications, cost estimating, mapping, the reading of air photographs, site design for housing in developing countries, design strategies, environmental impact analyses, and many others--all illustrated with in-text photographs and line drawings and with Lynch's characteristic marginal sketches.

    Thankfully, Mexico City: An Opinionated Guide for the Curious Traveler lends a thorough, guiding hand to help make the visitor's stay outstanding. Written by a longtime resident who knows the city inside and out, this travel guide delivers detailed walking tours of the city that include the most popular tourist sights as well as lesser-known spots. Johnston knows where to stay, what to do, and where to eat: everything from authentic market food to sophisticated Mexican cuisine.What began as a collection of notes to share with good friends is now available to every newcomer looking for a joyful, memorable stay in Mexico City."This is the guidebook that I want. Wonderfully written, airtight information, organized in the smartest possibly way. I can't imagine a better Mexico City guide for these times."-Tony Cohan, author of Mexican Days and On Mexican Time"Johnston is the friend you wish you had in every great city, toting you from palace to museum to park but never missing the exquisite pastelería, the grand hotel lobby or the clean public bathroom."-San Francisco Chronicle

    In the second half of the twentieth century, revolutions reshaped our world--the civil rights movement in America, the fall of the shah in Iran, the collapse of the Soviet bloc, and the end of apartheid in South Africa. All of these revolutions were fundamentally urban. They were the revolutions of Detroit, Gdansk, Berlin, Tehran, and Johannesburg, uprisings of city dwellers intent on ending their marginalization and securing their place in the world economy.In Welcome to the Urban Revolution, internationally recognized urbanist Jeb Brugmann draws on two decades of fieldwork and research to show how the city is now a medium for revolutionary change. Not just political upheaval but technological, economic, and social innovations are forged in our cities. We may think of cities as hotbeds of crime or engines of globalization, but Brugmann shows how cities are becoming laboratories for solving major challenges of the twenty-first century: poverty, inequality, and environmental sustainability.Bridging urban studies, economics, and sociology, Brugmann gives us a new way of looking at cities, giving shape to the emerging practice of urbanism. His positive, unconventional analysis turns traditional ideas about the city on their head.

    In Brazil's biggest city, a mysterious prisoner orders hit men to gun down forty-one police officers and prison guards in two days. In southwest Mexico, a meth maker is venerated as a saint while enforcing Old Testament justice on his enemies.A new kind of criminal kingpin has arisen: a hybrid of CEO, terrorist, and part rock star, commanding guerrilla attacks, strong-arming governments, and taking over much of the world's trade in narcotics, guns, and humans. What they do affects you now--from the gas in your car, to the gold in your jewelry, to the tens of thousands of Latin Americans calling for refugee status in the United States. Gangster Warlords is the first definitive account of the crime wars unleashing humanitarian disaster in Central and South America and the Caribbean, regions largely abandoned by the United States after the Cold War. Author of the critically acclaimed El Narco, Ioan Grillo has covered Latin America since 2001 and gained access up the cartel chain of command in what he calls the new battlefields of the Americas. Moving between militia-controlled ghettos and the halls of top policymakers, Grillo provides a disturbing new understanding of a war that has spiraled out of control--and needs to be confronted now.

    Horizontal Vertigo: The title refers to the fear of ever-impending earthquakes that led Mexicans to build their capital city outward rather than upward. With the perspicacity of a keenly observant flaneur, Juan Villoro wanders through Mexico City seemingly without a plan, describing people, places, and things while brilliantly drawing connections among them. In so doing he reveals, in all its multitudinous glory, the vicissitudes and triumphs of the city ’s cultural, political, and social history: from indigenous antiquity to the Aztec period, from the Spanish conquest to Mexico City today—one of the world’s leading cultural and financial centers. In this deeply iconoclastic book, Villoro organizes his text around a recurring series of topics: “Living in the City,” “City Characters,” “Shocks,” “Crossings,” and “Ceremonies.” What he achieves, miraculously, is a stunning, intriguingly coherent meditation on Mexico City’s genius loci, its spirit of place.