The latest edition of this urban classic takes a fresh look at the architectural treasures that define New York -- from its most characteristic landmarks to its less famous local favorites.To prepare this edition -- the first revision since 1987 -- Norval White has visited and revisited more than 5,000 buildings, making this by far the most complete guide of its kind. This generously illustrated handbook presents the structures of the New York City--from the magnificent to the obscure -- in over 3,000 new photographs, more than 130 new maps, and hundreds of revised and new entries. Beyond the skyscrapers and historical buildings, the guide also leads the way to the city's bridges, parks, and public monuments.From the tip of the Empire State Building to the brownstones in Brooklyn, the AIA Guide to New York City reveals how the city's spirit, fortitude, and character are captured and expressed in its architecture. Thoughtful and humorous descriptions include fascinating bits of local information that bring the city's history to life, telling the stories behind the bricks and mortar. Together, the maps, photographs, and expert critiques invite you on a special grand tour of the city at your own pace.This guide is a definitive record of New York's architectural heritage and provides a compact, authoritative directory for lovers of New York City all over the world. Its portability and encyclopedic quality make it an ideal traveling companion for any walker in the city. For the sightseer, the architect, or anyone on a casual stroll, the AIA Guide to New York City is the book to grab on your way out the door.

     Drawing on his uncommon background and global perspective, in Breaking Ground Daniel Libeskind explores ideas about tragedy and hope, and the way in which architecture can memorialize-and reshape-human experience. Born in 1946 to Holocaust survivors in Poland, Daniel Libeskind eventually emigrated to New York City in 1959. A virtuoso musician before studying architecture, Libeskind has designed iconic buildings around the world, including the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England. In February 2003, Libeskind was chosen as the Master Plan Architect for the World Trade Center reconstruction. Full of the vitality, humor, and visionary spark that helped win him the Trade Center Commission, Breaking Ground invites readers to see architecture-and the larger world-through new perspectives.

    Deciding that taking a leap into the unknown was better than making no decision at all, they borrowed a little money from some good friends, packed up their belongings and headed to a mobile home site just outside Cannes. Whilst there, they would look for work with the hope of settling in the region. What no one bothered to tell France’s newest arrivals was that the people they were about to be interviewed by and eventually work for were all blisteringly, yet deliciously mad. Whilst minding his own business in the garden belonging to one of these certifiable lunatics, Brent gets adopted by a dog with his own obsession, maintaining the author's theory that sanity is an extremely rare commodity in the south of France.

    The world is a different place after dark, and this breathtaking book illuminates the mesmerizing realm of all things nocturnal, with more than 250 glorious images. Page after page of vivid photographs explore the many nuances of night vision--from the sea by moonlight to night markets in Laos to the face of a child lit up by a screen in a darkened room. The range of images in these pages is breathtaking: A smoky jazz club. Flowers that bloom only at night. Phosphorescent fish. Lions photographed with infrared cameras. The Eiffel Tower, all lit up. Faces around a campfire. A stadium lit by floodlights. Earth from space. Elegant, sexy, and a little mysterious, this richly illustrated book is a stunning pathway to some of the world's most captivating sights.

    A long-buried personal sadness is enfolding her—and her career is stalled—when she stumbles upon an unusual group of immigrants living in rural California. She follows them on their annual return to the remote Azorean islands in the Atlantic Ocean, where bulls run down village streets, volcanoes are active, and the people celebrate festas to ease their saudade, a longing so deep that the Portuguese word for it can’t be fully translated.Years later, California is in a terrible drought, the wildfires seem to never end, and Diana finds herself still dreaming of those islands and the chuva—a rain so soft you don’t notice when it begins or ends.With her troublesome Labrador retriever, Murphy, in tow, Diana returns to the islands of her dreams only to discover that there are still things she longs for—and one of them may be a most unexpected love.

    Places" Jonathan Meades has an obsessive preoccupation with places. He has spent thirty years constructing sixty films, two novels and hundreds of pieces of journalism that explore an extraordinary range of them, from natural landscapes to man-made buildings and 'the gaps between them', drawing attention to what he calls 'the rich oddness of what we take for granted'. This book collects 54 pieces and six film scripts that dissolve the barriers between high and low culture, good and bad taste, deep seriousness and black comedy. Meades delivers 'heavy entertainment' - strong opinions backed up by an astonishing depth of knowledge. To read Meades on places, buildings, politics, or cultural history is an exhilarating workout for the mind. He leaves you better informed, more alert, less gullible. "Everything is fantastical if you stare at it for long enough. Everything is interesting."

    These are the stories of that frozen river.And so opens one of the most breathtaking and original works being published this season. The Frozen Thames contains forty vignettes based on events that actually took place each time the river froze between 1142 and 1895. Like a photograph captures a moment, etching it forever on the consciousness, so does Humphreys’ achingly beautiful prose. She deftly draws us into these intimate moments, transporting us through time so that we believe ourselves observers of the events portrayed. Whether it’s Queen Matilda trying to escape her besieged castle in a snowstorm, or lovers meeting on the frozen river in the plague years; whether it’s a simple farmer persuading his oxen the ice is safe, or Queen Bess discovering the rare privacy afforded by the ice-covered Thames, the moments are fleeting and transformative for the characters — and for us, too.Stunningly designed and illustrated throughout with full-colour period art, The Frozen Thames is a triumph.

    Hanff recalls her serendipitous discovery of a volume of lectures by a Cambridge don, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. She devoured Q’s book, and, wanting to read all the books he recommended, began to order them from a small store in London, at 84, Charing Cross Road. Thus began a correspondence that became an enormously popular book, play and television production, and that finally led to the trip to England – and a visit to Q’s study – that she recounts here. In this exuberant memoir, Hanff pays her debt to her mentor and shares her joyous adventures with her many fans.

    It is a tour through a now unrecognizable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence cobbled, as Luc Sante has written, "from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, and solid historical research." Asbury presents the definitive work on this subject, an illumination of the gangs of old New York that ultimately gave rise to the modern Mafia and its depiction in films like The Godfather.

    Introducing the science of "proxemics," Hall demonstrates how man's use of space can affect personal business relations, cross-cultural exchanges, architecture, city planning, and urban renewal.

     Dozens of Top 10 lists provide vital information on each destination, as well as insider tips, from uncovering a city's most memorable sights to finding the best restaurants and hotels in each neighborhood. And to save you time and money, there's even a Top 10 list of Things to Avoid. Each "Top 10" contains a pull-out map and guide that includes fold-out maps of city metro systems, useful phone numbers, and 60 great ideas on how to spend your day.

    But it is at its most acute in the “world cities” where the rich choose to live (or invest their fortunes in real estate). Nowhere is this more evident than New York City, where the top 1% earns upwards of $500,000/year, while 22,000 children are homeless.What does this chasm of wealth feel like to people who live and work in NYC? The stories in Tales of Two Cities mix fiction and reportage to convey the indignities and heartbreak, the callousness and solidarities, of living side-by-side with people who have a stupefyingly different income.In these pages we read of the polarizing effect of a violent attack on the Q train as it crosses the Manhattan Bridge, of the subterranean lives of homeless people who must find a bed in the city’s underground tunnels, and of the rage felt by a millionaire at being stuck in a snowstorm. We hear of the stresses that burgeoning gentrification can bring to neighbors in a Brooklyn apartment block, and of the way destitution in India shapes the perception of poverty in New York for an immigrant from the sub-continent. We walk past the luxury pet spas and yoga studios that have opened next to cheap hair braiding salons and detox clinics in Hamilton Heights, witness the shenanigans of seriously alienated night shift paralegals, and find out what it’s like to be a housing defendant standing up for tenants whose landlords go to shocking lengths to raise rents.Eschewing more direct sociological or economic analysis, the pieces here focus on the human dimension of penury and profligacy coexisting in the tightest of quarters. In his successful election campaign, Mayor Bill de Blasio referred often to the “tale of two cities” that is life in today’s New York. With writing that will move the reader, not just emotionally but perhaps, too, to action, this anthology gives life to the meaning of those words in the streets and buildings of the metropolis.

    The "Capcom 30th Anniversary Character Encyclopedia" celebrates Capcom's 30 years in the industry and gives fans concise information about every major Capcom character, their key artwork, statistics, background information, and interesting notes on the history of each character and game franchise. Including almost 200 characters from the Capcom family, this "Character Encyclopedia" sheds new light on these characters in a way nothing else does!

    And The Grand Tour has seen some of them. That’s why few people are better placed to lead you around this vast planet of ours than Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. As long as you don’t mind getting hot and lost. Welcome, everyone, to The Grand Tour Guide to The World.In this indispensable guide, you will find an abundance of information, most of which is probably wrong and possibly dangerous. As well as occasionally accurate guides to the places visited on the show, you’ll find exclusive interviews with the presenters and discover their favourite locations for car-based cocking about.As well as being a factually dubious encyclopaedia, The Grand Tour Guide to the World is also a travel companion for those of you who have been inspired by the Grand Tour circus. You’ll find tips on how to sing like a native in the Bahamas, how to speak Welsh (wrongly), and how to navigate the magic roundabout in Swindon. On top of all this, we reveal the world’s fastest cop cars and the greatest car makers. And there’s a picture of James May in an anorak.

    Chronicling the story of New York from its establishment as a Dutch trading post in 1624 to its global preeminence today, the book is at once the biography of a great city and a vivid exploration of the myriad forces -- commercial, cultural, demographic -- that converged in New York to usher in the contemporary world.Weaving the strands of the city's sweeping history into a single compelling narrative, New York carries us through nearly four centuries of turbulent growth and change -- from the first settlement on the tip of "Manna-hata" Island to the destruction wrought by the Revolutionary War; to the city's stunning emergence in the nineteenth century as the nation's premier industrial metropolis; to the waves of early-twentieth-century immigration that forever transformed the city and the nation; to New York's transfiguration as the world's first modern city -- pioneering skyscrapers, apartment houses, subways, and highways -- and its role as the birthplace of so much of American popular culture. Along the way, we witness the building of the city's celebrated landmarks and neighborhoods, from the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building and the United Nations; from Wall Street and Times Square to the Lower East Side, Harlem, and SoHo.The book brims with vibrant illustrations, including hundreds of rare photographs, paintings, lithographs, prints, and period maps. The narrative incorporates the voices and stories of men and women -- statesmen, entrepreneurs, artists, and visionaries -- who have lived in and built the city: an extraordinary cast of characters that includes Peter Stuyvesant, Alexander Hamilton, John Jacob Astor, Walt Whitman, Boss Tweed, Jacob Riis, Emma Lazarus, J. P. Morgan, Al Smith, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Gershwin, Fiorello La Guardia, Robert Moses, and Jane Jacobs.Accompanying the book's narrative are interviews with Robert A. Caro, David Levering Lewis, and Robert A. M. Stern, and essays by a group of distinguished New York historians and critics -- Kenneth T. Jackson, Mike Wallace, Marshall Berman, Phillip Lopate, Carol Berkin, and Daniel Czitrom -- who add their insights about the city to this splendid history.From the Hardcover edition.