Crisis Cities

Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water - and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk.

When the news broke in 1975 that New York City was on the brink of fiscal collapse, few believed it was possible. How could the country's largest metropolis fail? How could the capital of the financial world go bankrupt? Yet the city was indeed billions of dollars in the red, with no way to pay back its debts. Bankers and politicians alike seized upon the situation as evidence that social liberalism, which New York famously exemplified, was unworkable.

This is the true story of Ephraim Mattos, a former US Navy SEAL, and what he witnessed while volunteering as a frontline combat medic during the historic battle to retake Mosul from ISIS - the deadliest urban combat the world has seen since WWII.

Timothy McVeigh wanted to start a movement. Speaking to his lawyers days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the Gulf War veteran expressed no regrets: killing 168 people was his patriotic duty. New York Times bestselling author Jeffrey Toobin traces the dramatic history and profound legacy of Timothy McVeigh, who once declared, “I believe there is an army out there, ready to rise up, even though I never found it.” But that doesn’t mean his army wasn’t there. With news-breaking reportage, Toobin details how McVeigh’s principles and tactics have flourished in the decades since his death in 2001.

As an educator and avid learner, I set out to understand the complex issue of homelessness in America. After watching hundreds of interviews with people living on the streets, I wrote this book to share their stories and perspectives. Across twenty heartfelt chapters, you will meet individuals like Bruce, a lawyer-turned-beggar in D.C.; Penny, a young woman selling her body for drug money in Detroit; and James, an entrepreneur in Columbus still holding onto hope. Each person describes in their own words how they wound up homeless, whether through job loss, addiction, childhood trauma, lack ...

Growing up in Baltimore, I walked the same streets where Confederate sympathizers had once plotted against the Union my Irish ancestors died defending. But I had no idea of this family legacy—or of the complex, often violent political history that had shaped my hometown long before I was born. The irony runs deeper than I initially realized. My father was a Baltimore native, born and raised in a city that had harbored Confederate sympathies during the Civil War. My mother came from Providence, Rhode Island, descended from Irish immigrants who had sacrificed everything for the Union cause....

Hawke's narrator is a young man in torment, disgusted with himself after the collapse of his marriage, still half hoping for a reconciliation that would allow him to forgive himself and move on as he clumsily, and sometimes hilariously, tries to manage the wreckage of his personal life with whiskey and sex. What saves him is theater: in particular, the challenge of performing the role of Hotspur in a production of Henry IV under the leadership of a brilliant director, helmed by one of the most electrifying - and narcissistic - Falstaff's of all time.

In the 1970s, entire blocks of the South Bronx burned while the rest of New York City looked the other way. City of Fires is the unflinching, deeply researched true story of how deliberate neglect, institutional betrayal, and a brutal calculus of profit over people turned working-class neighborhoods into charred war zones. This isn’t a story of natural decay or “urban blight.” It’s a history of arson-for-profit schemes, city-sanctioned abandonment, and a government that turned a blind eye—sometimes on purpose. Told through the voice of a lifelong New Yorker who lived through the ...

Within hours of the 1995 bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the FBI had evidence pointing to Islamic extremists. But incredibly, federal authorities quickly squelched all investigations implicating Middle Eastern suspects. Here, award-winning investigative reporter Jayna Davis shares a gripping and intensely personal account of her arrival on the scene 13 minutes after the blast, the worldwide search for suspects, and the abrupt abandonment of the manhunt for John Doe #2.

Greedy Bastards tells the story of Sheryl and her new team’s uphill battle to turn around San Antonio city government. She takes you behind closed doors to share the hard changes she made and the strategies she used to create mutually beneficial solutions to the city’s biggest problems. Many of the issues Sheryl found in San Antonio are present in cities across the US. Packed with wins and losses, lessons learned, and pitfalls encountered, Greedy Bastards is a guidebook for any city official tasked with turning around a struggling city.

In recent years the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world's superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality.

Three years after the Monster Massacre, members of Rebecca’s old wolf pack have begun to go missing without a trace. The world has undergone many changes in the years since monsters came out of the shadows. An anti-monster group known as the Black Hand has started to organize across the United States. In response, pro-monster organizations have been growing in numbers and militancy. Targeted killings of suspected monsters and their allies, monsters spirited away in the dead of night, and the beginnings of pro-monster legislation are all signs of a cosmic shift on the horizon.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and the American Book Award, the best-selling Common Ground is much more than the story of the busing crisis in Boston as told through the experiences of three families. As Studs Terkel remarked, it's "gripping, indelible...a truth about all large American cities."

Chicago is a world-class city, but it is also a city in crisis. Crime is up, schools have repeatedly shut down due to conflict between City Hall and the powerful teachers' union, and COVID-19 only deepened the entrenched poverty, institutional racism, and endless tug of war between the city's haves and have nots. For four years, the person at the center of this storm was Lori Lightfoot.

Olivia Strauss is turning thirty-nine. No major milestone. She still considers herself young. At least young enough to assume she has decades (emphasis on the plural) to check the unchecked boxes of her life’s to-do list. Ballerina? Too late. But not too late for poet. Or for reigniting the romantic spark in her marriage, spending more quality time with her son, switching careers, learning to cook, or even dyeing her hair a bright bohemian pink. She’ll get to that one. There’s time—until Olivia’s best friend, Marian, gives her a birthday present she could have lived without.

NEW FOR 2022! The 4th edition has been greatly improved and refreshed with more on-point content and loads of new techniques and strategies. The world is changing. Are you paying attention? Are you prepared? There’s now a growing number of deprived, marginalized and desperate people everywhere. Someone, somewhere, is paying attention and will try to take advantage of everything and everyone. Volatility and instability: these are important concepts to understand and keep in mind during crises. It’s not just the constant up and down of prices and market indexes, but the shifting of rules,...

From the Tsarnaev brothers' years leading up to the act of terror to the bomb scene itself (which both authors witnessed firsthand within minutes of the blast), from the terrifying police shootout with the suspects to the ultimate capture of the younger brother, Boston Strong: A City's Triumph over Tragedy reports all the facts--and so much more.

Dive back into the sultry, shadowy streets of Tampa with Tampa Vice 2, the electrifying sequel to the acclaimed crime saga. Picking up where Santo Trafficante Jr.’s reign ends in 1987, this gripping chronicle traces the city’s evolution from a bolita-soaked Mafia stronghold to a modern hub of vice, pulsing with legalized sin and digital darkness. From the neon glow of strip club empires to the pill mill plague that turned Tampa into America’s opioid epicenter, from cyber scams raking millions to cannabis cash and sports betting wars, Tampa Vice 2 unveils a city where corruption and ...

Could your family really go 72 hours without power, water, or cell service? You live in a city apartment—with kids, pets, and a tight schedule. No basement. No generator. But when everything fails, you still need a plan. This isn't a military manual. It's not alarmist. And it’s not another blog post pretending to be a guide. It’s a realistic, practical handbook by Hunter Ashford—an international crisis response expert who’s translated proven emergency planning into clear, family-friendly steps for everyday urban households. If you live in an apartment and care about your family's ...

Taking cues from progressive cities around the world, including Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, Oslo, Shenzhen, and Sydney, this book is a summons to every city to make small but significant changes that can drastically reduce our carbon footprint. We cannot wait for national governments to agree on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and manage the average temperature rise to within 1.5 degrees. In Solved, David Miller argues that cities are taking action on climate change because they can–and because they must.