Delicious Metropolis brings together two of Wayne Thiebaud's most celebrated bodies of work: desserts and cityscapes. Between the two, fascinating juxtapositions develop. The layers of a Neapolitan cake echo the shadows cast across a street in the late afternoon. The pastel hues of iced sponge cakes match California's candy-colored houses. Curators, critics, and artists guide the reader through the book via insightful bite-size essays. This gorgeous hardcover offers fans and newcomers a refreshing and accessible way to enjoy the oeuvre of this iconic American painter. Complete with multicolored page edges evoking the layers of one of Thiebaud's mouthwatering cakes, it's a treat for art lovers, city-dwellers, and gourmets alike.

Contemporary food goes way beyond avocado and quinoa salads. Delicious Places presents the new wave of cafés, restaurants and entrepreneurs that are writing a fresh chapter on culinary culture.Food culture has come a long way. New restaurants, bars and cafés are born out of fresh ideas that, with a clever twist, lead to an ­unprecedented culinary experience that ­balances location and concept--and ultimately influences a new world of food.Delicious Places collects the examples that execute the business idea in the best possible way. Single-dish restaurants, traditional ­pasticcerias, fisherman cooperatives with the freshest produce or high-end restaurants in the mountains. They offer a unique experience that starts the moment you set foot in the door and spans from the interiors to the branding, and behind the scenes to the supply chains and sustainable procedures. Take a seat at the table and feast your senses one by one--the mind will follow.

Two contrasting terms are joined to conjugate the traditional idea of metropolis with horizontality; to combine the center of a vast territory--hierarchically organized, dense, vertical, and produced by polarization--with the idea of a more diffuse, isotropic urban condition, where center and periphery blur. Beyond a simplistic center versus periphery opposition, the concept of a horizontal metropolis reveals the dispersed condition as a potential asset, rather than a limit, to the construction of a sustainable and innovative urban dimension. Around 1990, Terry McGee, an urban researcher at University of British Columbia, coined the term desakota, deriving from Indonesian “desa” (village) and “kota” (city). Desakota areas typically occur in Asia, especially South East Asia. The term describes an area situated outside the periurban zone, often sprawling alongside arterial and communication roads, sometimes from one agglomeration to the next. They are characterized by high population density and intensive agricultural use, but differ from densely populated rural areas by more urban-like characteristics. The new book The Horizontal Metropolis investigates such areas alongside examples in the US, Italy, and Switzerland. The study highlights the advantages of the concept and its relevance under economical, ecological, and social aspects. The concept reflects a vision of global urbanization that does no longer allow for “outside” areas and that will test the urban ecosystem to its limits.

In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations. “A towering achievement.... Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling.” —The Wall Street Journal During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. From their very beginnings, cities created such a flourishing of human endeavor—new professions, new forms of art, worship and trade—that they kick-started civilization. Guiding us through the centuries, Wilson reveals the innovations nurtured by the inimitable energy of human beings together: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Époque Paris. In the modern age, the skyscrapers of New York City inspired utopian visions of community design, while the trees of twenty-first-century Seattle and Shanghai point to a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Page-turning, irresistible, and rich with engrossing detail, Metropolis is a brilliant demonstration that the story of human civilization is the story of cities.

In his final book, New York Times bestselling author Philip Kerr treats readers to his beloved hero's origins, exploring Bernie Gunther's first weeks on Berlin's Murder Squad. Summer, 1928. Berlin, a city where nothing is verboten. In the night streets, political gangs wander, looking for fights. Daylight reveals a beleaguered populace barely recovering from the postwar inflation, often jobless, reeling from the reparations imposed by the victors. At central police HQ, the Murder Commission has its hands full. A killer is on the loose, and though he scatters many clues, each is a dead end. It's almost as if he is taunting the cops. Meanwhile, the press is having a field day. This is what Bernie Gunther finds on his first day with the Murder Commisson. He's been taken on beacuse the people at the top have noticed him--they think he has the makings of a first-rate detective. But not just yet. Right now, he has to listen and learn. Metropolis is a tour of a city in chaos: of its seedy sideshows and sex clubs, of the underground gangs that run its rackets, and its bewildered citizens--the lost, the homeless, the abandoned. It is Berlin as it edges toward the new world order that Hitler will soo usher in. And Bernie? He's a quick study and he's learning a lot. Including, to his chagrin, that when push comes to shove, he isn't much better than the gangsters in doing whatever her must to get what he wants.

"Published on the occasion of the exhibition Wayne Thiebaud: 1958/1968, organized and presented by the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, January 16/May 14, 2018."--Copyright page.

This is a lucid study of Walter Benjamin's lifelong fascination with the city and forms of metropolitan experience, highlighting the relevance of Benjamin's work to our contemporary understanding of modernity.