Social Cities

The stars are out in Kansas City - the baseball stars, that is! Mike and Kate are at the All-Star game, and even get to go on the field during the Home Run Derby to catch pop-ups! That's where they meet Andy, whose dad, Josh Robinson, is an All-Star catcher. But before the Home Derby ends, Josh finds himself in hot water. Someone is playing practical jokes on the other players, and the coach is sure it's him. Andy swears his dad is innocent. Who would want to frame Josh? And why?

Perhaps all of Jonathan Ames' problems, and the genesis of this hilarious audiobook, can be traced back to the late onset of his puberty. After all, it can't be easy to be 16 with a hairless penis "undistinguishable from that of a five-year-old's".

The Greco-Persian Wars are often portrayed as a battle between good and evil. This is simultaneously an exaggeration and an oversimplification, but there is no doubt that this war, or series of wars, fought between some of the most powerful civilizations of the ancient era helped to plot the course of human history that we have been following up until this very day.

With over-the-top fun and humor, this scrumptious story features Tom Watson’s trademark laughs, adventure, and hilarious stick-figure drawings, perfect for fans of the Stick Dog, Big Nate, Timmy Failure, and Diary of a Wimpy Kid books. Stick Cat is going somewhere he’s never been before—his best friend Edith’s apartment. It’s got everything: donut crumbs in the sink, a fire escape, and a window with a great view of the big city. While admiring the view, Stick Cat sees trouble. Hazel, the bagel maker, is in serious danger in the building across the alley. Stick Cat will use his smarts—and Edith’s appetite—to devise a rescue plan. But can Hazel hang on long enough for this dynamic duo to save her? Even reluctant readers gobble up the Stick Cat and Stick Dog books!

From centres of antiquity like Athens or Rome to modern metropolises like New York or Shanghai, cities throughout history have been the engines of human progress and the epicentres of our greatest achievements. Now, for the first time, more than half of humanity lives in cities, a share that continues to rise. In the developing world, cities are growing at a rate never seen before. In this book, Professor Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin show why making our societies fairer, more cohesive and sustainable must start with our cities.

Karachi. Pakistan’s largest city is a sprawling metropolis of 20 million people, twice the size of New York City. It is a place of political turbulence in which those who have power wield it with brutal and partisan force. It takes an insider to know where is safe, whom to trust, and what makes Karachi tick. In this powerful debut, Samira Shackle explores the city of her mother’s birth in the company of a handful of Karachiites.

Over the course of a decade spent reporting on the ground in China as a financial journalist, Dinny McMahon gradually came to the conclusion that the widely held belief in China’s inevitable economic ascent is dangerously wrong. Debt, entrenched vested interests, a frenzy of speculation, and an aging population are all pushing China toward an economic reckoning. China’s Great Wall of Debt unravels an incredibly complex and opaque economy, one whose fortunes - for better or worse - will shape the globe like never before.

Chicago has long struggled with racial residential segregation, high rates of poverty, and deepening class stratification. Unequal City examines the ways in which Chicago's most vulnerable residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law. In this pioneering analysis of the intersection of race, place, and opportunity, sociologist and criminal justice expert Carla Shedd illuminates how schools either reinforce or ameliorate the social inequalities that shape the worlds of these adolescents.

Sisters Sunday, Bo, Lee, and Lil are four sisters from a patchwork family. Bonded by their love of music, these sisters formed a musical babysitting band business Operation Sisterhood that just planned the best garden wedding party their Harlem community has seen. Imaginative Sunday impulsively announces her next big community project—staging an original musical—everybody’s counting on her, especially her sisters, Bo and the Twins, Lil and Lee. Then, disaster: Sunday has lost her creative mojo just when she most want to impress her new neighbor, TV star Talitha Thomas.

Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, withdraws from the comforts of life on a university campus in search of a place to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings, widespread poverty, and rampant crime - a complicated source of national fascination, often stereotyped and little understood. Arriving with no job, no friends, and no money, Philp is naïvely determined to fix the huge, broken city with his own hands and on his own terms.

Geoffrey West's research centres on a quest to find unifying principles and patterns connecting everything, from cells and ecosystems to cities, social networks and businesses. Scale addresses big, urgent questions about global sustainability, population explosion, urbanization, ageing, cancer, human life spans and the increasing pace of life but also encourages us to question the world around us.

Five generations after Riley and Clay first set foot on Shiprock, the community is thriving. Liberated from the Breeders, the new society is free to live and love how they chose. Eighteen-year-old Meg is Shiprock’s apprentice gunslinger and wise-cracking security guard, keeping the people safe as she patrols the stony cliffs. She can hit a target at 50 paces with her eyes closed, and yet, she’s never ventured outside the sheer cliffs of her home. It isn’t safe out there. Marauders still roam, snatching up unsuspecting victims.

The City of the Sun, published in Italian in 1602 as La città del sole, is a philosophical work by the Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella. It is an important utopian work, was inspired by Plato's Republic, and describes a theocratic society where goods, women, and children are held in common.

Incensed by the rapacious tactics of unseen, untraceable, and unprosecutable Russian hackers, Taryn Booker, a rising star at a prominent social media powerhouse, strikes back. Her actions, however, provoke a retaliatory firestorm of salacious kompromat that threatens her freedom and her career. Mayar Tabak appears to be an unassuming undergrad from a moderate Muslim family in Brooklyn. Behind the screen of her laptop, however, she is an uber hacker, a mujahid intent on deploying a cyberbomb that could permanently cripple New York City's electrical grid. Taryn and Mayar risk their lives in a...

At a time when Google Maps can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite's remotest trails and cell phones double as navigational systems, it's hard to imagine there's any uncharted ground left on the planet. In Unruly Places, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination. Bonnett's remarkable tour includes moving villages, secret cities, no man's lands, and floating islands.

The eagerly awaited sequel to the best-selling The Glass Sentence - a historical, fantastical adventure perfect for fans of Philip Pullman! It is the summer of 1892, one year since Sophia Tims and her friend, Theo, embarked upon the dangerous adventure that rewrote the map of the world. Since their return home to Boston, she has continued searching for clues to her parents' disappearance, combing archives and libraries, grasping at even the most slender leads.

A lauded expert on European history paints a vivid picture of Paris, London, and New York during the Age of Revolutions, exploring how each city fostered or suppressed political uprisings within its boundaries. In The Unruly City, historian Mike Rapport offers a vivid history of three intertwined cities toward the end of the 18th century - Paris, London, and New York - all in the midst of political chaos and revolution.

Tras décadas de expansión descontrolada, más personas que nunca están volviendo a la ciudad. La vida urbana densa se ha prescrito como la panacea para la crisis medioambiental y de recursos de nuestro tiempo. ¿Pero es mejor o peor para nuestra felicidad? ¿Son el metro, las aceras y las torres de apartamentos una mejora respecto a la dependencia del coche en los suburbios?

In this audiobook, a young boy spends an overnight visit with his nana and is frightened to find that the city where she lives is filled with noise and crowds and scary things. But then Nana makes him a special cape to help him be brave, and soon the everyday sights, sounds, and smells of the city are not scary - but wonderful.

In this brilliant, gracefully written, and important new book, former Secretary of the Interior and Governor of Arizona Bruce Babbitt brings fresh thought to questions of how we can build a future we want to live in.