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An award-winning kaleidoscope of a book that "shocks and stirs the urban heart," capturing city life on the edge of the twenty-first century. What kind of person is a city person? This is a question of increasing importance, Colette Brooks suggests, as the city begins to spread, inexorably, into the furthest reaches of the modern mind. One possibility: a city person is someone "who doesn't feel the need to finish a jigsaw puzzle, who relishes jagged edges and orphaned curves, stray bits of data, stories parsed from sentences half overheard on the streets." Someone who is willing, sometimes eager, to immerse herself in mystery. Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, In the City is an idiosyncratic, lyrical, edgy exploration of the urban experience. This daring, unpredictable work breathes new life into the nonfiction form. Chronicling the often haphazard lives of city dwellers and cities themselves, In the City is a window into the urban psyche. An unnamed narrator roams the streets of an unnamed city, practicing "random acts of awareness" as she gathers disjointed pieces of the puzzle. She is sometimes in a city that seems to be New York, and sometimes in cities halfway around the world. In her wanderings she collects bits of stories, some taken from the headlines, some from the streets, some from the distant past. She studies criminals, innocent bystanders, commuters; a renowned painter who fled to the country; a bomber who sends unsuspecting city dwellers lethal packages marked "personal"; a blind, deaf woman who loves to ride the subway; a young cabdriver who keeps an open dictionary at his side as he drives, struggling to learn a strange language; a perplexed explorer who finds himself, against all expectation, stranded at the very edge of the earth. All of these people, she discovers, are city people, whether they know it yet or not. Some will flourish, others will be lost, victims of chance and mischance: the woman who drinks by herself in a brownstone apartment; the ancient city dwellers who couldn't outrun fire or flood; the children whose faces end up on posters on a wall. Those who survive learn, sooner or later, that everyone keeps company with ghosts who walk alongside. In the City shows us that the city is a place where past and present are commingled, where questions rarely have answers, where danger, difficulty, and exhilaration are interwoven in ways we can hardly begin to explain. Welcome to the city, the place where all contrary indications hold true.
An award-winning kaleidoscope of a book that "shocks and stirs the urban heart," capturing city life on the edge of the twenty-first century. Winner of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for a distinguished nonfiction work in progress, In the City is an unclassifiable, thoroughly original consideration of modern urban life. Colette Brooks's remarkable eye traverses an unnamed contemporary city committing "random acts of awareness." Brooks relays vivid glimpses of the anonymous urban dweller's experience, history, and culture to create a portrait that is deeply familiar yet entirely fresh. "Colette Brooks, with In the City, invents a kaleidoscope of prose that shocks and stirs the urban heart and mindset into shifting forms and patternscolor, sadness, shock of recognition, slice of history; lostness, foundness. She wields her sensibility like the conductor of a wayward subway train, following its uncharted route from Wonderland to Oz....In the city, Brooks reflects, 'once the unlikely has occurred, it seems inevitable.' So do the eye and memorable voice of Colette Brooks."PEN/Jerard Fund Award citation
Seattle, with its spectacular natural beauty and rough frontier history, has inspired writers from its earliest days. This anthology spans seven decades and includes fiction, memoirs, histories, and journalism that define the city or use it as a setting, imparting the flavor of the city through a literary prism. Reading Seattle features classics by Horace R. Cayton, Richard Hugo, Betty MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, Murray Morgan, and John Okada as well as more recent works by Sherman Alexie, Lynda Barry, David Guterson, J. A. Jance, Jonathan Raban, and others. It includes cutting-edge work by emerging talents and reintroduces works by important Seattle writers who may have been overlooked in recent years. The writers featured in this volume explore a variety of neighborhoods and districts within the city, delineating urban spaces and painting memorable portraits of characters both historical and fictional.
Acclaimed artist Kenneth Goldsmith’s thousand-page homage to New York City Here is a kaleidoscopic assemblage and poetic history of New York: an unparalleled and original homage to the city, composed entirely of quotations. Drawn from a huge array of sources—histories, memoirs, newspaper articles, novels, government documents, emails—and organized into interpretive categories that reveal the philosophical architecture of the city, Capital is the ne plus ultra of books on the ultimate megalopolis. It is also a book of experimental literature that transposes Walter Benjamin’s unfinished magnum opus of literary montage on the modern city, The Arcades Project, from nineteenth-century Paris to twentieth-century New York, bringing the streets and its inhabitants to life in categories such as “Sex,” “Central Park,” “Commodity,” “Loneliness,” “Gentrification,” “Advertising,” and “Mapplethorpe.” Capital is a book designed to fascinate and to fail—for can a megalopolis truly ever be captured in words? Can a history, no matter how extensive, ever be comprehensive? Each reading of this book, and of New York, is a unique and impossible project.
"This is not a book I ever intended to write. It emerged as I worked to understand the events of September 11, 2001. It is my effort to make sense of my life and my profession during a difficult time. My aim is to suggest that understanding information technology requires an understanding of society and its people and organizations, especially as we look out over the wreckage of the high-tech industry and the contradictory aims of government to protect and control us."-Richard Cox In this series of four essays, Richard J. Cox explores the social and professional ramifications of 9/11 on our information landscape. "Musing," written on the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks, looks back at a year of change and commemoration. "Reacting" examines the impact of 9/11 on a department of information sciences. "Preparing" is a cogent argument for the need to rethink current disaster and contingency planning practices. "Teaching" focuses on the author's experiences developing and teaching a doctoral seminar on the role of the information professional in a post 9/11 world. Miss Manners assures us that a floral arrangement is always appropriate, no matter how much time has passed since the event. Neither a cautionary tale nor practical advice, Flowers After the Funeral is one such bouquet, its simplicity and thoughtfulness are certain to provide both comfort and inspiration to its recipients.
For readers of Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Odell, this poetic and inventive blend of history, memoir, and visual essay reflects on how we can resist the erasure of our collective memory in this American century. Our sense of our history requires us to recall the details of time, of experiences that help us find our place in the world together and encourage us in the search for our individual identities. When we lose sight of the past, our ability to see ourselves and to understand one another is diminished. In this book, Colette Brooks explores how some of the more forgotten aspects of recent American experiences explain our challenging and often puzzling present. Through intimate and meticulously researched retellings of individual stories of violence, misfortune, chaos, and persistence—from the first mass shooting in America from the tower at the University of Texas, the televised assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald, life with nuclear bombs and the Doomsday Clock, obsessive diarists and round-the-clock surveillance, to pandemics and COVID-19—Brooks is able to reframe our country’s narratives with new insight to create a prismatic account of how efforts to reclaim the past can be redemptive, freeing us from the tyranny of the present moment.
The splendors of science, delightfully demystified. How do we make sense of the modern world? Science is a profoundly affecting aspect of contemporary life, and yet the gulf between experts and everyone else is widening. Colette Brooks bridges the gap by playing the role of curious layperson, serving as a tour guide to some of the most important discoveries and innovations of the last five centuries. Through serious and absurd stories alike, Brooks takes readers back and forth in time, from dark, cavernous laboratories to the pristine facilities of the twenty–first century. Laugh along with Newton, peer at the moon with Galileo, work beside the Wright Brothers, ride with the astronauts of Apollo 11, watch for UFOs in the 1950s, probe the secrets of the fruit fly, visit Chernobyl, or examine suspicious packages in a Hazmat suit. With Brooks as the guide, it’s easy to become immersed in the twists, turns, and surprises of each imaginative leap forward. Through a series of “thought experiments," Brooks also poses questions and offers helpful tips that ease the readers way into this strange but provocative territory. Bringing her unique perspective to the larger cultural conversation about science, Brooks ultimately unleashes the most powerful force of all: our own wonder.
Roughly 80% of the world’s population now lives in urban areas. Cities offer anonymity to violent criminals as well as to those who value privacy. New digital technologies allow purveyors of hatred and assorted smut to enter our homes and pedophiles use the Internet to bait our children and victimize them. This book is designed to provide you with a tested methodology for being secure in the concrete jungle without slipping into paranoia or denial. You don’t have to be a just another crime statistic! About the Author Jim Wygand has provided seminars on personal security to companies, diplomats, government security personnel, schools, families and individuals for the past 18 years. He has been involved in the negotiation of several kidnaps and has written numerous articles and monographs on the issue of personal security. His method for avoiding violent crime is based on the same techniques employed by law enforcement, CIA, FBI, diplomatic and military personnel, to recognize and deal with possible danger. He has a strong personal reason for writing this book and he wants YOU and YOUR FAMILY to be safe. Jim Wygand is also the author of a novel entitled The Story of Charlie Mullins: The Man in the Middle.