Los Angeles Union Station--opened on May 7, 1939, after days of celebration--was the last great train station built in the United States. Intended as a grand portal to a grand Los Angeles, it was an anomaly, built at a time when America was eager to drive or fly to its chosen destinations. Protected by early inclusion on the National Registry of Historic Places for its iconic architecture, Los Angeles Union Station has had an astonishing and unpredictable rebirth. As the city modernizes its public transportation system linking the culturally and geographically diverse communities of Southern California, Union Station--in all its Mission Revival glory--is suddenly the hub of the country's newest light rail and subway system, serving hundreds of thousands of people each week. Where Pullman cars and Harvey Girls once served commuters, where the Super Chief and the Coast Starlight, Streamliners and Domeliners converged, Los Angeles Union Station is now a living-breathing center of transportation modernity.Author William Bradley relates a rich history of fierce battles, cultural relocation, and astounding financial risks culminating in one of California's most important stories. Augmenting his words with vintage images, Bradley not only shares the tale of the terminal, but of the trains that rode its tracks--those 1939 tracks to the future.

Union Station today is a celebrated architectural icon and vibrant centerpiece of Los Angeles’s regional transportation network. Designed by John and Donald B. Parkinson, its mission revival architecture speaks to a mythic vision of Spanish heritage, but with streamline moderne and art deco details. At first glance this masterpiece, conceived as a magnificent gateway to the growing metropolis, offers no hint of the civic, financial, and legal battles surrounding its development, siting, style, and construction—battles that were waged across decades in the early twentieth century and that went as high as the U.S. Supreme Court. Los Angeles Union Station explores this compelling example of how transit and corporations disrupted regional balances of power and political economies. Aided by new research and beautiful drawings from the Getty Research Institute’s archive, the authors demonstrate how contentious politics informed architectural design—and the many ways in which Union Station was at the heart of the rise of Los Angeles. The book accompanies the exhibition No Further West, on view at the Los Angeles Public Library from May 2 through August 10, 2014.

"Good SciFi comedy is as rare as hen's teeth. This was a fun read." Kelly Frank is EarthCent's top diplomat on Union Station, but her job description has always been a bit vague. The pay is horrible and she's in hock up to her ears for her furniture, which is likely to end up in a corridor because she's behind on rent for her room. Sometimes she has to wonder if the career she has put ahead of her personal life for fifteen years is worth it. When Kelly receives a gift subscription to the dating service that's rumored to be powered by the same benevolent artificial intelligence that runs the huge station, she decides to swallow her pride and give it a shot. But as her dates go from bad to worse, she can only hope that the supposedly omniscient AI is planning a happy ending.

A "gripping…sober and meticulous" (David Margolick, Wall Street Journal) biography of the infamous Nazi doctor, from a former Justice Department official tasked with uncovering his fate. Perhaps the most notorious war criminal of all time, Josef Mengele was the embodiment of bloodless efficiency and passionate devotion to a grotesque worldview. Aided by the role he has assumed in works of popular culture, Mengele has come to symbolize the Holocaust itself as well as the failure of justice that allowed countless Nazi murderers and their accomplices to escape justice. Whether as the demonic doctor who directed mass killings or the elusive fugitive who escaped capture, Mengele has loomed so large that even with conclusive proof, many refused to believe that he had died. As chief of investigative research at the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations in the 1980s, David G. Marwell worked on the Mengele case, interviewing his victims, visiting the scenes of his crimes, and ultimately holding his bones in his hands. Drawing on his own experience as well as new scholarship and sources, Marwell examines in scrupulous detail Mengele’s life and career. He chronicles Mengele’s university studies, which led to two PhDs and a promising career as a scientist; his wartime service both in frontline combat and at Auschwitz, where his “selections” sent innumerable innocents to their deaths and his “scientific” pursuits—including his studies of twins and eye color—traumatized or killed countless more; and his postwar flight from Europe and refuge in South America. Mengele describes the international search for the Nazi doctor in 1985 that ended in a cemetery in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and the dogged forensic investigation that produced overwhelming evidence that Mengele had died—but failed to convince those who, arguably, most wanted him dead. This is the riveting story of science without limits, escape without freedom, and resolution without justice.

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.