Town Government

This is the story of a local government manager who got hired by a small mountain town in the Colorado Rocky Mountains in his first city manager job. The job got complicated from the first day and developed into more and more complexity.

One of the nation's most acclaimed journalists, the New York Times' Mark Leibovich, presents a blistering, penetrating, controversial--and often hysterical--look at Washington's incestuous "media industrial complex...

In Confessions of a Recovering Engineer, renowned speaker and author of Strong Towns Charles L. Marohn, Jr., delivers an accessible and engaging exploration of America's transportation system, laying bare the reasons why it no longer works as it once did, and how to modernize transportation to better serve local communities.

In the small town of Ashbrook, the last night of October is sacred. But when a mysterious government alert freezes the clock at 11:59 PM, the town is plunged into a single, repeating, impossible moment. The decorations are still up, but the people are vanishing, leaving only empty costumes behind—perfect, three-dimensional silhouettes of ash. Sheriff Keener and historian Ellen Rourke discover the town isn't just haunted. It’s contained. Trapped in a terrifying temporal sink, they are at the mercy of an ancient entity that has come to 'collect' on a forgotten offering. As the military ...

In the fall of 1973, the Greek oil shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, husband of President John F. Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and arguably the richest man in the world, proposed to build an oil refinery on the New Hampshire coast, in the town of Durham. But three women vehemently opposed the project. Small Town, Big Oil is the story of how the residents of Durham, led by three women, out-organized, out-witted, and out-maneuvered the governor, media, and Onassis cartel to hand the powerful Greek billionaire the most humiliating defeat of his business career.

"Simultaneously hilarious, poignant, and deeply unsettling." ―The New Republic A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to...

In the idyllic town of Autumn Creek, the annual Harvest Festival is a celebration of life. But as the leaves turn gold, a secret as old as the mountains awakens. Two people have vanished, and a prize steer has been ritualistically slaughtered, its entrails arranged in a perfect, horrifying spiral . The idyllic mask is slipping, and the town’s folklore is about to become its eulogy. They sent a weapon to handle it. Rebuilt from the wreckage of a past massacre, Commander Quinn Mallory is more monster than woman, her body a fusion of scarred flesh and cutting-edge prosthetics . She and her ...

Seeking to understand the recent deaths and disappearances in their town, a disgraced homicide detective and a group of grieving high schoolers unwittingly join forces. But what this ragtag bunch of answer-seekers find will not only force them into a fight to save themselves and their town, but all of humanity as we know it... Welcome to Cedar Mills. PRAISE FOR CEDAR MILLS... “Plunges right into the action and never lets up!” Readers' Favorite "Cedar Mills is the kind of horror novel that stays with you..." Independent Book Review "Great action, a scary beast, and a beating heart in the...

Escaping the Housing Trap is the must-have resource for everyone with a stake in the future of housing in America-and that means everyone. Listeners will find discussions of housing as an investment and how the country's neighborhoods are being transformed by the introduction of large amounts of investment; explorations of housing as shelter, including discussions of zoning policy and NIMBYism; and a comprehensive overview of the Strong Towns approach to solving the American housing crisis.

The annual UFO festival in New Mexico is a joke, a tourist trap. For five friends, it’s a way to kill a summer afternoon. But when they stumble upon a dusty, forgotten notebook filled with cryptic equations and terrifying eyewitness accounts, the joke ends. The notebook leads them to a shocking discovery: the legendary 1947 crash was real, but the story the world knows is a lie. The government isn’t just hiding a crashed ship; they're hiding a beacon. And it's been reactivated. Hunted by a shadowy organization that will kill to protect its secrets, the group is locked in a desperate ...

Holding the Line, Barbara Kingsolver's first nonfiction book, is the story of women's lives transformed by an a signal event. Set in the small mining towns of Arizona, it is part oral history and part social criticism, exploring the process of empowerment that occurs when people work together as a community. Like Kingsolver's award-winning novels, Holding the Line is a beautifully written book grounded on the strength of its characters.

Kerri Arsenault grew up in the rural working class town of Mexico, Maine. For over 100 years, the community orbited around a paper mill that employs most townspeople, including three generations of Arsenault’s own family. Years after she moved away, Arsenault realized the price she paid for her seemingly secure childhood. The mill, while providing livelihoods for nearly everyone, also contributed to the destruction of the environment and the decline of the town’s economic, physical, and emotional health in a slow-moving catastrophe.

Eamonn McCann’s account of what it is like to grow up a Catholic in a Northern Irish ghetto - first published in 1974 - quickly became a classic account of the feelings generated by British rule. The author was at the center of events in Derry which first brought Northern Ireland to world attention. He witnessed the gradual transformation of the civil rights movement from a mild campaign for “British Democracy” to an all-out military assault on the British state. This book describes the people involved in the war and gives an account of the springs of the "Catholic" opposition.

Part biography, part history, part love story, A Small Town Rises chronicles the lives of two civil rights activists who met in the tiny cotton town of Shaw at the tail end of the Mississippi Summer Project, the voting-rights campaign known as Freedom Summer. Shaw was, like countless segregated towns across the South, a pressure cooker of violent white resistance to the growing civil rights movement. The two young freedom fighters joined forces in 1964 with local Black activist Andrew Hawkins.

Hello, Shadowlands takes a deep plunge into crime rings both large and small. It also examines how China’s rise and America’s decline are creating new opportunities for transnational syndicates to thrive. Focusing on human stories on both sides of this crime wave, the acclaimed Bangkok-based broadcaster and journalist Patrick Winn intimately profiles the men and women of the region who are forced to make agonizing choices in the absence of law.

Reality is broken. And someone is watching. Isabella Reyes just wanted one night away—an old-school hip hop show and the road trip that goes with it. But when she and Noah take a wrong turn outside of Chicago, they arrive in Millbrook, Illinois, a town where time glitches, the sky pulses, and a silent alien ship hovers above the cornfields. They’re not alone. The infected roam the woods. Survivors from different eras huddle in fear. And something is rewriting the rules of existence itself. As they search for a way out, they uncover the truth: they’ve entered a living experiment—an ...

Enrique Krauze, en esta lúcida colección de ensayos - a caballo entre la política, la filosofía, la literatura y la historia - advierte de los peligros de la acumulación del poder en una sola persona y sale en defensa de la democracia, el debate, la pluralidad y la tolerancia. En defensa de la libertad.

In these thrilling stories, Mitchum investigates three dangerous cases -- and learns that chasing the truth means going to the point of no return. Hidden: After being rejected from the Navy SEALs, Mitchum becomes his small town's unofficial private eye. But his investigation skills are put to...

Destructive forces have been eroding the University of Cape Town, Africa’s leading university. This audiobook tells the sad, true tale of what has been transpiring. It is a saga of lunacy, criminality, pandering, and identity politics. The mad and the bad–the deranged, deluded, the depraved–have been granted endless latitude in bullying and abusing others.

The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.