Book picks similar to
Cities and City People by Arthur Eloesser


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The Chosen Ones


Steve Sem-Sandberg - 2014
    The reality, however, was very different: in the wake of Germany's annexation of Austria on the eve of World War II, its doctors, nurses, and teachers created a monstrous parody of the institution's benign-sounding brief. The Nazi regime's euthanasia program would come to determine the fate of many of the clinic's inhabitants.Through the eyes of a child inmate, Adrian Ziegler, and a nurse, Anna Katschenka, Steve Sem-Sandberg, the author of the award-winning The Emperor of Lies, explores the very meaning of survival. An absorbing, emotionally overwhelming novel, rich in incident and character, The Chosen Ones is obliquely illuminated by the author's sharp sense of the absurd. Passionately serious, meticulously researched, and deeply profound, this extraordinary and dramatic novel bears witness to oppression and injustice, and offers invaluable and necessary insight into an intolerable chapter in Austria’s past.

Abstract City


Christoph Niemann - 2012
    His posts were inspired by the desire to re-create simple and everyday observations and stories from his own life that everyone could relate to. In Niemann’s hands, mundane experiences such as riding the subway or trying to get a good night’s sleep were transformed into delightful flights of visual fancy. The struggle to keep up with housework became a battle against adorable but crafty goblins, and nostalgia about New York manifested in simple but strikingly spot-on LEGO creations. This brilliantly illustrated collection of reflections on modern life includes all 16 of the original blog posts as well as a new chapter created exclusively for the book. Also available from Christoph Niemann: Sunday Sketching and I LEGO N.Y. Praise for Abstract City: “Everyday experiences—from looking at leaves to riding city subways—are funny and fresh and often a source of wonder when depicted by this brilliant graphic designer.” —Readers Digest “I will call Christoph when anything awful happens to me. And he will make me laugh like crazy about the whole thing. Because he is insanely funny and completely tenderly true. I love every column he did and will do.” —Maira Kalman, author/illustrator of And the Pursuit of Happiness “Christoph Niemann is the best illustrator alive. Every single time I come across a piece of his work, which is often as he either works all the time, or worse, draws incredibly fast, it is wonderful. While the rest of us are lucky to get a proper piece out here and there, Christoph produces hit after hit after hit. If he wasn’t such a genuinely sweet man, we’d surely hate his ass a lot.” —Stefan Sagmeister, author of Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far “Few books have more probingly and humorously gotten inside the mind and day-to-day experience of an artist.” —NPR.org "What’s terrifying (to me, certainly, and possibly to many of his peers) is that nearly every idea he has seems to be equally well formed . . . once again, performing neat, virtuosic circles around the rest of us, to our delight." —PRINT magazine "Irresistible." —Very Short List “A masterpiece of sophisticated humor, this is a brilliant one-of-a-kind work.” —Library Journal, starred review

All Souls' Day


Cees Nooteboom - 1998
    Arthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, has lost his wife and child in a plane crash. In ALL SOULS' DAY we follow Arthur as he wanders the streets of Berlin, a city uniquely shaped by history. Berlin provides the backdrop for Daane's reflections on life as he plans his latest project - a self-funded film that will show the world through Daane's eyes. With a new circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Arthur discusses everything from history to metaphysics, and the cumulative power of remembered images and philosophical musings on the meaning of our contemporary existence comes to permeate the atmosphere of the book. Then one cold, wintry day, Daane meets the young history student Elik Orange and his world is turned upside down. Whenever this mysterious woman beckons, Daane is compelled to follow. ALL SOULS' DAY is, finally, an elegiac love story in which the personal histories of the characters are skilfully interwoven with the history of the countries in which they find themselves. It is also the poignant and affecting tale of a man coming to terms

Animalinside


László Krasznahorkai - 2010
    . . ." To create this work that strains against all constraints, László Krasznahorkai began from one of Max Neumann’s paintings; Neumann, spurred into action, created 14 more images, which unleashed an additional 13 texts from the author. Animalinside is the rare case of two matchless artists meeting across disciplines, and New Directions is very proud to publish a limited edition of this powerful novella, exquisitely produced by Sylph Editions and the Cahiers Series of the American University of Paris with a deluxe seven-stage printing process for the amazing Neumann images.

Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies


Dave Addey - 2018
    In Typeset in the Future, blogger and designer Dave Addey invites sci-fi movie fans on a journey through seven genre-defining classics, discovering how they create compelling visions of the future through typography and design. The book delves deep into 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, WALL·E, and Moon, studying the design tricks and inspirations that make each film transcend mere celluloid and become a believable reality. These studies are illustrated by film stills, concept art, type specimens, and ephemera, plus original interviews with Mike Okuda (Star Trek), Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall), and Ralph Eggleston and Craig Foster (Pixar). Typeset in the Future is an obsessively geeky study of how classic sci-fi movies draw us in to their imagined worlds—and how they have come to represent “THE FUTURE” in popular culture.

Red Love: The Story of an East German Family


Maxim Leo - 2009
    Why did his parents, once passionately in love, grow apart? Why did his father become so angry, and his mother quit her career in journalism? And why did his grandfather Gerhard, the Socialist war hero, turn into a stranger? The story he unearths is, like his country's past, one of hopes, lies, cruelties, betrayals but also love. In Red Love he captures, with warmth and unflinching honesty, why so many dreamed the GDR would be a new world and why, in the end, it fell apart.Growing up in East Berlin, Maxim Leo knew not to ask questions. All he knew was that his rebellious parents, Wolf and Anne, with their dyed hair, leather jackets and insistence he call them by their first names, were a bit embarrassing. That there were some places you couldn't play; certain things you didn't say.

Dead in 5 Heartbeats


Ralph Barger - 2003
    The mass market edition will be an ideal format for Sonny's legions of fans. ⏡tch⟋inkade thought that things were winding down. The former President of the Infidelz, the most powerful motorcycle club in Northern California, Patch has drifted east, hoping to start a new life in Arizona. He wants to forget his old life, a life where being the President of the Infidelz cost him his family. Now, he is responsible for no one but himself.But everything changes one night in Nevada, as bad blood between members of the Infidelz and a rival club, the 2Wheelers, errupts into a firefight, littering a casino with the corpses of both club members and ordinary citizens. The newspapers call it ⁩ke Wars,⟡nd Patch knows he's needed, either to help make a peace––or win a war.Responding to the call to duty, Patch straps on his knives and wipes the dust off his Harley, ready to cruise down the highway for what could be his final ride.

Doré's London: All 180 Illustrations from London, A Pilgrimage


Gustave Doré - 1970
    This comprehensive collection of drawings by Gustave Doré, France's most celebrated graphic artist of the period, presents a panoramic portrait of that engrossing city — from fashionable ladies riding in a sunlit park to ragged wretches in a shadowy side street. Here are amazingly perceptive sketches of workaday London, busy market places, the Christy Minstrels, a waterman's family, thieves gambling, the Devils' Acre in Westminster, flower girls, waifs and strays, a wedding at the Abbey, provincials in search of lodgings, a garden party, prisoners in the Newgate exercise yard, stalls at Covent Garden Opera House, and many other scenes that capture the London of a bygone era.

A Legacy


Sybille Bedford - 1956
    "Each family," writes the author, "stood confident of being able to go on with what was theirs, while in fact they were playthings, often victims, of the now united Germany and what was brewing therein." Did the monstrous thing that followed have its foundation in families such as these? "Writing about them made me think so. Hence the title."

Dresden: Tuesday, 13 February, 1945


Frederick Taylor - 2004
    on Tuesday 13 February 1945, Dresden's air-raid sirens sounded as they had done many times during the Second World War. But this time was different. By the next morning, more than 4,500 tons of high explosives and incendiary devices had been dropped on the unprotected city.At least 25,000 inhabitants died in the terrifying firestorm and thirteen square miles of the city's historic centre, including incalculable quantities of treasure and works of art, lay in ruins. In this portrait of the city, its people, and its still-controversial destruction, Frederick Taylor has drawn on archives and sources only accessible since the fall of the East German regime, and talked to Allied aircrew and survivors, from members of the German armed services and refugees fleeing the Russian advance to ordinary citizens of Dresden.

Germany: Memories of a Nation


Neil MacGregor - 2014
    Written and presented by Neil MacGregor, it is produced by BBC Radio 4, in partnership with the British Museum.Whilst Germany s past is too often seen through the prism of the two World Wars, this series investigates a wider six hundred-year-old history of the nation through its objects. It examines the key moments that have defined Germany s past its great, world-changing achievements and its devastating tragedies and it explores the profound influence that Germany s history, culture, and inventiveness have had across Europe.The objects featured in the radio series range from large sculptures to small individual artifacts and items that are prosaic, iconic, and symbolic. Each has a story to tell and a memory to invoke."

The Sons


Franz Kafka - 1913
    "'The Stoker,' 'The Metamorphosis,' and 'The Judgment' belong together, both inwardly and outwardly. There is an obvious connection among the three, and, even more important, a secret one, for which reason I would be reluctant to forego the chance of having them published together in a book, which might be called The Sons."Seventy-five years later, Kafka's request is granted, in a volume including these three classic stories of filial revolt as well as his own poignant "Letter to His Father," another "son story" located between fiction and autobiography. A devastating indictment of the modern family, The Sons represents Kafka's most concentrated literary achievement as well as the story of his own domestic tragedy. Grouped together under this new title and in newly revised translations, these texts—the like of which Kafka had never written before and (as he claimed at the end of his life) would never again equal—take on fresh, compelling meaning.

Tea in the Harem


Mehdi Charef - 1985
    Madjid is growing up caught between two cultures. At home, he listens to his mother's constant invective in Arabic as she attempts to make sense of her unfamiliar surroundings; at school, he tries to be part of French culture, a culture that rejects and insults Arabs. In a direct language, punctuated by moments of poetic beauty, Mehdi Charef portrays a reality only too rarely the subject of fiction. An immediate success upon publication in France in 1983, Tea in the Harem became the rallying-point for second-generation Algerians and Moroccans, who gave themselves the name 'beur': slang for 'Arab'.

Shibboleth: My Revolting Life


Penny Rimbaud - 1998
    Penny Rimbaud, founder, lyricist, and drummer of Crass, a band unique in the history of rock 'n' roll. Crass took the idealism of punk seriously. When Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten screamed "No Future" the challenge was taken. In the space of seven short years, from 1977 to their breakup in 1984, Crass almost single-handedly breathed life back into the then moribund peace and anarchist movements. They birthed a huge underground network of do-it-yourself activism, fanzines, record labels, activist action groups, and concert halls. While remaining on their own independent record label, and steadfastly refusing any interviews with the major press, they managed to sell literally millions of records. Their political "pranks" included the now infamous "KGB tapes," trumpeted among others, on the front page of the New York Times, and the duping of Total Loving magazine into including a Crass song (ranting against the patriarchy of marriage) as the "perfect song to play on your wedding day." In this book, Penny takes us from his strict lower-middle class childhood and his experiences in art school to the Crass years, the hippies, and Free Festivals, including the now legendary, illegal Stonehenge Festival, of which Rimbaud was a cofounder.Shibboleth also includes, for the first time, the full story of Wally Hope—"The Last of the Hippies," close friend of Rimbaud, cofounder of the Stonehenge Festival, and who was murdered by the State while incarcerated in a mental institution.

The Berlin Crossing


Kevin Brophy - 2012
    Brandenburg 1993: The Berlin Wall is down, the country is reunified and thirty-year-old school teacher Michael Ritter feels his life is falling apart. His wife has thrown him out, his new West German headmaster has fired him for being a socialist, former Party member and he is still clinging on to the wreckage of the state that shaped him. Disenfranchised and disenchanted, Michael heads home to care for his terminally ill mother. Before she dies, she urges him to seek out an evangelical priest, Pastor Bruck, who is the only one who knows the truth about his father. When Michael eventually tracks him down, he is taken on a journey of dark discoveries, one which will shatter his foundations, but ultimately bring him hope to rebuild them.