This 2003 book looks at contesting concepts of crime, and social justice in nineteenth-century industrial America.

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.

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.

In this book, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann chronicles more than three hundred years of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Ukraine, Lithuania and western parts of the Russian Federation. Massive in scale, the book is highly accessible and lavishly illustrated. The readability of the text and the entirely new insights it provides into three hundred years of Central European history make this a vital introduction to one of the least understood periods in the history of art.

The streetscape of London's historic square mile has been evolving for centuries, but the City's busy commercial heart still boasts an extensive network of narrow passages and alleyways, secret squares and half-hidden courtyards. Using his wealth of local knowledge, historian David Long guides you through these ancient rights of passage – many dating back to medieval times or earlier – their evocative names recalling old taverns, notable individuals and City traditions. Hidden behind the glass, steel and stone of London's banks and big business, these survivors of modern development bear witness to nearly 2,000 years of British history.

An unprecedented plunge into New York City's federal court system that gives us a revelatory picture of how our justice system, and the pursuit of justice, really works. A young Italian Mafioso helps get rid of a body in Queens. In Manhattan, a hedge fund portfolio manager misrepresents his company's assets to investors. At JFK International Airport, a college student returns from Jamaica with cocaine stuffed in the handle of her suitcase. These are just a few of the stories that come to life in this comprehensive look at the Southern District Court in Manhattan, and the Eastern District Court in Brooklyn--the two federal courts tasked with maintaining order in New York City. Johnny Dwyer takes us not just into the courtrooms but into the lives of those who enter through its doors: the judges and attorneys, prosecutors and defendants, winners and losers. He examines crimes we've read about in the papers or seen in movies and on television--organized crime, terrorism, drug trafficking, corruption, and white-collar crime--and weaves in the nuances that rarely make it into headlines. Brimming with detail and drama, The Districts illuminates the meaning of intent, of reasonable doubt, of deception, and--perhaps most important of all--of justice.

Documents the story of "Penny" Hardaway, tracing the injuries that halted his progress as a star athlete and his decision to coach the Lester Middle School basketball team in Memphis, where he helped young players to overcome gang violence and domestic abuse to become state champions.