The story of how the richest city in the world became one of the poorest in North America, with a new introduction by Peter Kwong How did New York City come to be a network of steel towers, banks, and nail salons, with chain drugstores on every block—a place where, increasingly, no one can afford to live except the lords of Wall Street and foreign billionaires, and where more and more of the Big Apple’s best-loved businesses have closed their doors? It didn’t start with Michael Bloomberg—or with Robert Moses. As Robert Fitch meticulously demonstrates in this eye-opening book, the planning to assassinate New York began a century ago, as the city’s very richest few—the Morgans, the Mellons, and especially the Rockefellers—looked for ways to maximize the value of their real estate by pushing Gotham’s vibrant and astonishingly varied manufacturing sector out of town, and with it, the city’s working class. The Assassination of New York attacks a Goliath-like enemy: the real-estate developers who maintain a stranglehold on the city’s most valuable commodity. Their efforts to increase land value by replacing low-rent workers and factories with high-rent professionals and office buildings was one of the single most decisive factors in the city’s downturn. In the 1980s the number of real-estate vacancies eclipsed that of the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. In September of 1992 there was a staggering twenty-five million square feet of empty office space. Are the city’s problems fixable? How will the future of New York play out through the twenty-first century? Fitch comes up with solutions, from saving jobs to promoting economic diversity to rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure. But it will take vision and hard work to restore New York to what it once was while creating a new and better home for coming generations.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The first definitive history of the Mossad, Shin Bet, and the IDF’s targeted killing programs, hailed by The New York Times as “an exceptional work, a humane book about an incendiary subject.” WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD IN HISTORY NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY JENNIFER SZALAI, THE NEW YORK TIMES NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Economist • The New York Times Book Review • BBC History Magazine • Mother Jones • Kirkus Reviews The Talmud says: “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” This instinct to take every measure, even the most aggressive, to defend the Jewish people is hardwired into Israel’s DNA. From the very beginning of its statehood in 1948, protecting the nation from harm has been the responsibility of its intelligence community and armed services, and there is one weapon in their vast arsenal that they have relied upon to thwart the most serious threats: Targeted assassinations have been used countless times, on enemies large and small, sometimes in response to attacks against the Israeli people and sometimes preemptively. In this page-turning, eye-opening book, journalist and military analyst Ronen Bergman—praised by David Remnick as “arguably [Israel’s] best investigative reporter”—offers a riveting inside account of the targeted killing programs: their successes, their failures, and the moral and political price exacted on the men and women who approved and carried out the missions. Bergman has gained the exceedingly rare cooperation of many current and former members of the Israeli government, including Prime Ministers Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, and Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as high-level figures in the country’s military and intelligence services: the IDF (Israel Defense Forces), the Mossad (the world’s most feared intelligence agency), Caesarea (a “Mossad within the Mossad” that carries out attacks on the highest-value targets), and the Shin Bet (an internal security service that implemented the largest targeted assassination campaign ever, in order to stop what had once appeared to be unstoppable: suicide terrorism). Including never-before-reported, behind-the-curtain accounts of key operations, and based on hundreds of on-the-record interviews and thousands of files to which Bergman has gotten exclusive access over his decades of reporting, Rise and Kill First brings us deep into the heart of Israel’s most secret activities. Bergman traces, from statehood to the present, the gripping events and thorny ethical questions underlying Israel’s targeted killing campaign, which has shaped the Israeli nation, the Middle East, and the entire world. “A remarkable feat of fearless and responsible reporting . . . important, timely, and informative.”—John le Carré

From the urban affairs correspondent of the New York Times--the story of a city through twenty-seven structures that define it. As New York is poised to celebrate its four hundredth anniversary, New York Times correspondent Sam Roberts tells the story of the city through bricks, glass, wood, and mortar, revealing why and how it evolved into the nation's biggest and most influential. From the seven hundred thousand or so buildings in New York, Roberts selects twenty-seven that, in the past four centuries, have been the most emblematic of the city's economic, social, and political evolution. He describes not only the buildings and how they came to be, but also their enduring impact on the city and its people and how the consequences of the construction often reverberated around the world. A few structures, such as the Empire State Building, are architectural icons, but Roberts goes beyond the familiar with intriguing stories of the personalities and exploits behind the unrivaled skyscraper's construction. Some stretch the definition of buildings, to include the city's oldest bridge and the landmark Coney Island Boardwalk. Others offer surprises: where the United Nations General Assembly first met; a hidden hub of global internet traffic; a nondescript factory that produced billions of dollars of currency in the poorest neighborhood in the country; and the buildings that triggered the Depression and launched the New Deal. With his deep knowledge of the city and penchant for fascinating facts, Roberts brings to light the brilliant architecture, remarkable history, and bright future of the greatest city in the world.

Gathered for the 40th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this is the complete "New York Times" coverage of the days that changed America forever.

As familiar as we are with images of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the charming former first lady, fewer know the dynamic woman who called New York City home. Shortly after JFK's assassination in 1964, Jackie moved to Manhattan and lived there for the next three decades. This intimate collection of photographs celebrates her life in the city as a mother, book editor, style icon, and most of all, a New Yorker. Eating ice cream with her kids on Fifth Avenue, working with authors at Doubleday Books, riding her bike through Central Park—these images capture the real-life joy, creative passion, and effortless grace of New York Jackie.

Gotham at War: New York City, 1860-1865 is a concise, highly readable account of New York City during the greatest internal crisis in American history. A growing metropolis that was by far America's biggest and most powerful city, New York played a major role in the Civil War, mobilizing an enthusiastic though poorly trained military force during the first month of the war that helped protect Washington, D.C., from Confederate capture. Urban historian Edward K. Spann provides insights on both the varied ways in which the war affected the city and the ways in which the city's people and industry influenced the divided nation. Gotham at War includes observations regarding political, racial, ethnic, and economic aspects of this wartime society and shows how New York served as a center for manpower, military supplies, and shipbuilding, and for assisting sick and wounded soldiers. The efforts of its great Republican newspapers, local leaders such as William E. Dodge and Mayor George Opdyke, women, African-Americans, New Englanders, and the Irish and Germans of New York are all explored. The most southern of the northern cities, New York became a center for many citizens who opposed th

Mike Dash is a master of atmospheric and entertaining historical narrative. In Satan's Circus he vividly opens up the world of twentieth-century New York, telling the gripping story of police officer Charley Becker's rise and fall and of the sensational murder trials that led to his gruesome death in the electric chair. With a cast of colourful characters, from Big Tim Sullivan, the election-rigging vice lord, to future President Theodore Roosevelt and beloved gangster Jack Zelig, Satan's Circus brings to life an almost forgotten Gotham - a raucous, gaudy and utterly corrupt city.