Download or read book City of Quartz written by Mike Davis and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2006-09-17 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new edition of the visionary social history of Los Angeles is “as central to the L.A. canon as anything that . . . Joan Didion wrote in the seventies” (New Yorker) No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, L.A. is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide- ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs L.A.’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city’s current status.

Download or read book City of Quartz written by Mike Davis and published by Random House. This book was released on 1998 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recounts the story of Los Angeles. He tells a tale of greed, manipulation, power and prejudice that has made Los Angeles one of the most cosmopolitan and most class-divided cities in the United States.

Download or read book Your House Will Pay written by Steph Cha and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE “[A] suspense-filled page-turner.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Sympathizer "A touching portrait of two families bound together by a split-second decision.” —Attica Locke, Edgar-Award winning author of Bluebird, Bluebird A Best Book of the Year Wall Street Journal * Chicago Tribune * Buzzfeed * South Florida Sun-Sentinel * Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel * Book Riot * LitHub A powerful and taut novel about racial tensions in Los Angeles, following two families—one Korean-American, one African-American—grappling with the effects of a decades-old crime In the wake of the police shooting of a black teenager, Los Angeles is as tense as it’s been since the unrest of the early 1990s. But Grace Park and Shawn Matthews have their own problems. Grace is sheltered and largely oblivious, living in the Valley with her Korean-immigrant parents, working long hours at the family pharmacy. She’s distraught that her sister hasn’t spoken to their mother in two years, for reasons beyond Grace’s understanding. Shawn has already had enough of politics and protest after an act of violence shattered his family years ago. He just wants to be left alone to enjoy his quiet life in Palmdale. But when another shocking crime hits LA, both the Park and Matthews families are forced to face down their history while navigating the tumult of a city on the brink of more violence.

Download or read book Los Angeles Stories written by Ry Cooder and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 2011-10 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Available Now: World-famous musician Ry Cooder publishes his first collection of stories.

Download or read book City at the Edge of Forever written by Peter Lunenfeld and published by Viking. This book was released on 2020 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An engaging account of the uniquely creative spirit and bustling cultural ecology of contemporary Los Angeles ... [The author] weaves together the city's art, architecture, and design, juxtaposes its entertainment and literary histories, and moves from restaurant kitchens to recording studios to ultra-secret research and development labs. In the process, he reimagines Los Angeles as simultaneously an exemplar and cautionary tale for the 21st century"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book American Aviation Daily written by and published by . This book was released on 1955-07 with total page 942 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book A to Z Character Traits in Me written by Jamaal Brown and published by . This book was released on 2019-06-21 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each person who touches this book will find words that will empower them to live their best life. Discover 26 character building words, along with their definitions, and 26 inspirational biographies. Adolescents and adults alike will become motivated and empowered to overcome obstacles, once equipped with the tools that are alive inside of these pages.

Download or read book An Introduction to Discourse Analysis written by James Paul Gee and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discourse analysis considers how language, both spoken and written, enacts social and cultural perspectives and identities. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis examines the field and presents James Paul Gee’s unique integrated approach which incorporates both a theory of language-in-use and a method of research. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis can be used as a stand-alone textbook or ideally used in conjunction with the practical companion title How to do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit. Together they provide the complete resource for students studying discourse analysis. Updated throughout, the fourth edition of this seminal textbook also includes two new chapters: ‘What is Discourse?’ to further understanding of the topic, as well as a new concluding section. A new companion website www.routledge.com/cw/gee features a frequently asked questions section, additional tasks to support understanding, a glossary and free access to journal articles by James Paul Gee. Clearly structured and written in a highly accessible style, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis includes perspectives from a variety of approaches and disciplines, including applied linguistics, education, psychology, anthropology and communication to help students and scholars from a range of backgrounds to formulate their own views on discourse and engage in their own discourse analysis. This is an essential textbook for all advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of discourse analysis.

Download or read book Black Arts West written by Daniel Widener and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-08 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From postwar efforts to end discrimination in the motion-picture industry, recording studios, and musicians’ unions, through the development of community-based arts organizations, to the creation of searing films critiquing conditions in the black working class neighborhoods of a city touting its multiculturalism—Black Arts West documents the social and political significance of African American arts activity in Los Angeles between the Second World War and the riots of 1992. Focusing on the lives and work of black writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers, Daniel Widener tells how black cultural politics changed over time, and how altered political realities generated new forms of artistic and cultural expression. His narrative is filled with figures invested in the politics of black art and culture in postwar Los Angeles, including not only African American artists but also black nationalists, affluent liberal whites, elected officials, and federal bureaucrats. Along with the politicization of black culture, Widener explores the rise of a distinctive regional Black Arts Movement. Originating in the efforts of wartime cultural activists, the movement was rooted in the black working class and characterized by struggles for artistic autonomy and improved living and working conditions for local black artists. As new ideas concerning art, racial identity, and the institutional position of African American artists emerged, dozens of new collectives appeared, from the Watts Writers Workshop, to the Inner City Cultural Center, to the New Art Jazz Ensemble. Spread across generations of artists, the Black Arts Movement in Southern California was more than the artistic affiliate of the local civil-rights or black-power efforts: it was a social movement itself. Illuminating the fundamental connections between expressive culture and political struggle, Black Arts West is a major contribution to the histories of Los Angeles, black radicalism, and avant-garde art.

Download or read book World War Z written by Max Brooks and published by Broadway Books. This book was released on 2013 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An account of the decade-long conflict between humankind and hordes of the predatory undead is told from the perspective of dozens of survivors who describe in their own words the epic human battle for survival, in a novel that is the basis for the June 2013 film starring Brad Pitt. Reissue. Movie Tie-In.

Download or read book The Accidental written by Ali Smith and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-04-10 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Filled with the bestselling, award-winning author's trademark wordplay and inventive storytelling, here is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family’s summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people. Each of the Smarts—parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid—encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to see their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith’s narrative freedom and exhilarating facility with language propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion.

Download or read book Hitler in Los Angeles written by Steven J. Ross and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-10-24 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A 2018 FINALIST FOR THE PULITZER PRIZE “[Hitler in Los Angeles] is part thriller and all chiller, about how close the California Reich came to succeeding” (Los Angeles Times). No American city was more important to the Nazis than Los Angeles, home to Hollywood, the greatest propaganda machine in the world. The Nazis plotted to kill the city's Jews and to sabotage the nation's military installations: Plans existed for murdering twenty-four prominent Hollywood figures, such as Al Jolson, Charlie Chaplin, and Louis B. Mayer; for driving through Boyle Heights and machine-gunning as many Jews as possible; and for blowing up defense installations and seizing munitions from National Guard armories along the Pacific Coast. U.S. law enforcement agencies were not paying close attention--preferring to monitor Reds rather than Nazis--and only attorney Leon Lewis and his daring ring of spies stood in the way. From 1933 until the end of World War II, Lewis, the man Nazis would come to call “the most dangerous Jew in Los Angeles,” ran a spy operation comprised of military veterans and their wives who infiltrated every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles. Often rising to leadership positions, they uncovered and foiled the Nazi's disturbing plans for death and destruction. Featuring a large cast of Nazis, undercover agents, and colorful supporting players, the Los Angeles Times bestselling Hitler in Los Angeles, by acclaimed historian Steven J. Ross, tells the story of Lewis's daring spy network in a time when hate groups had moved from the margins to the mainstream.

Download or read book The Control of Nature written by John McPhee and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the control of Nature is won, not given." In the morning sunlight, that central phrase--"the control of nature"--seemed to sparkle with unintended ambiguity. Bilateral, symmetrical, it could with equal speed travel in opposite directions. For some years, he had been planning a book about places in the world where people have been engaged in all-out battles with nature, about (in the words of the book itself) "any struggle against natural forces--heroic or venal, rash or well advised--when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth, to take what is not given, to rout the destroying enemy, to surround the base of Mt. Olympus demanding and expecting the surrender of the gods." His interest had first been sparked when he went into the Atchafalaya--the largest river swamp in North America--and had learned that virtually all of its waters were metered and rationed by a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' project called Old River Control. In the natural cycles of the Mississippi's deltaic plain, the time had come for the Mississippi to change course, to shift its mouth more than a hundred miles and go down the Atchafalaya, one of its distributary branches. The United States could not afford that--for New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and all the industries that lie between would be cut off from river commerce with the rest of the nation. At a place called Old River, the Corps therefore had built a great fortress--part dam, part valve--to restrain the flow of the Atchafalaya and compel the Mississippi to stay where it is. In Iceland, in 1973, an island split open without warning and huge volumes of lava began moving in the direction of a harbor scarcely half a mile away. It was not only Iceland's premier fishing port (accounting for a large percentage of Iceland's export economy) but it was also the only harbor along the nation's southern coast. As the lava threatened to fill the harbor and wipe it out, a physicist named Thorbjorn Sigurgeirsson suggested a way to fight against the flowing red rock--initiating an all-out endeavor unique in human history. On the big island of Hawaii, one of the world's two must eruptive hot spots, people are not unmindful of the Icelandic example. McPhee went to Hawaii to talk with them and to walk beside the edges of a molten lake and incandescent rivers. Some of the more expensive real estate in Los Angeles is up against mountains that are rising and disintegrating as rapidly as any in the world. After a complex coincidence of natural events, boulders will flow out of these mountains like fish eggs, mixed with mud, sand, and smaller rocks in a cascading mass known as debris flow. Plucking up trees and cars, bursting through doors and windows, filling up houses to their eaves, debris flows threaten the lives of people living in and near Los Angeles' famous canyons. At extraordinary expense the city has built a hundred and fifty stadium-like basins in a daring effort to catch the debris. Taking us deep into these contested territories, McPhee details the strategies and tactics through which people attempt to control nature. Most striking in his vivid depiction of the main contestants: nature in complex and awesome guises, and those who would attempt to wrest control from her--stubborn, often ingenious, and always arresting characters.

Download or read book City of Inmates written by Kelly Lytle Hernández and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2017-02-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Los Angeles incarcerates more people than any other city in the United States, which imprisons more people than any other nation on Earth. This book explains how the City of Angels became the capital city of the world's leading incarcerator. Marshaling more than two centuries of evidence, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez unmasks how histories of native elimination, immigrant exclusion, and black disappearance drove the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles. In this telling, which spans from the Spanish colonial era to the outbreak of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Hernandez documents the persistent historical bond between the racial fantasies of conquest, namely its settler colonial form, and the eliminatory capacities of incarceration. But City of Inmates is also a chronicle of resilience and rebellion, documenting how targeted peoples and communities have always fought back. They busted out of jail, forced Supreme Court rulings, advanced revolution across bars and borders, and, as in the summer of 1965, set fire to the belly of the city. With these acts those who fought the rise of incarceration in Los Angeles altered the course of history in the city, the borderlands, and beyond. This book recounts how the dynamics of conquest met deep reservoirs of rebellion as Los Angeles became the City of Inmates, the nation's carceral core. It is a story that is far from over.

Download or read book The Praetorian STARShip the untold story of the Combat Talon written by and published by DIANE Publishing. This book was released on 2001 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jerry Thigpen's study on the history of the Combat Talon is the first effort to tell the story of this wonderfully capable machine. This weapons system has performed virtually every imaginable tactical event in the spectrum of conflict and by any measure is the most versatile C-130 derivative ever produced. First modified and sent to Southeast Asia (SEA) in 1966 to replace theater unconventional warfare (UW) assets that were limited in both lift capability and speed the Talon I quickly adapted to theater UW tasking including infiltration and resupply and psychological warfare operations into North Vietnam. After spending four years in SEA and maturing into a highly respected UW weapons system the Joint Chief of Staff (JCS) chose the Combat Talon to lead the night low-level raid on the North Vietnamese prison camp at Son Tay. Despite the outcome of the operation the Talon I cemented its reputation as the weapons system of choice for long-range clandestine operations. In the period following the Vietnam War United States Air Force (USAF) special operations gradually lost its political and financial support which was graphically demonstrated in the failed Desert One mission into Iran. Thanks to congressional supporters like Earl Hutto of Florida and Dan Daniel of Virginia funds for aircraft upgrades and military construction projects materialized to meet the ever-increasing threat to our nation. Under the leadership of such committed hard-driven officers as Brenci Uttaro Ferkes Meller and Thigpen the crew force became the most disciplined in our Air Force. It was capable of penetrating hostile airspace at night in a low-level mountainous environment covertly to execute any number of unconventional warfare missions.

Download or read book Discovering the Us on a Bicycle written by Edward Abair and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2015-10-16 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With $250 in his pocket, a bicycle, and a pack weighing thirty-seven pounds, author Edward Abair set off for this adventure of a lifetime in 1972. Twenty-seven years old, this teacher and former Army medic bicycled 5,800 miles alone from Long Beach, California, to Miami, Florida, to Boston, Massachusetts. In Discovering the US on a Bicycle, Abair shares a recap of his travels on that trip. He tells how he burned in 110-degree Southwest deserts, crossed the rugged West, ascended the Continental Divide, fed Mississippi mosquitoes, poured sweat in the humid swamplands of the South, and witnessed the devastation of a hurricane in Pennsylvania. On the way, he slept in river washes, abandoned motels, fire stations, jails, a river park with water moccasins, barns, and under porch roofs. Forty years later, Abair kept a promise to travel the northern United States on the Lewis and Clark Trail in reverse from Astoria, Oregon, to St. Louis, Missouri. This time, he used modern equipment and had a wife supporting him in an automobile. At age 68, he tackled the rollercoaster roads of the Missouri River watershed, with painful knees and a sore rear end. With age and experience, he shares observations of finding the people and adventures from small town America to the St. Louis Gateway Arch.

Download or read book Across the Continent by the Lincoln Highway written by Effie Price Gladding and published by . This book was released on 1915 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: