Written by the author of Important Artifacts and Personal Property, this book creates an authorly and artistic response to travel, work and being a passenger. It is part of a series of twelve books tied to the twelve lines of the London Underground, as Tfl celebrates 150 years of the Tube with Penguin.

"This is an urban history of London during the pivotal years of the 1960s and 1970s, when the metropolis was transformed from an industrial city that the Victorians might have recognised to an embryonic modern 'world city.' Previous work on London in these years has tended to focus upon the 1960s -in particular the 'Swinging London' phenomenon. Mary Quant, Carnaby Street and the King's Road, Chelsea, all appear in these pages, but it is argued that the 'swinging moment' of the mid-sixties was a passing symptom of a much broader transformation from an industrial to a service-based city, and it is that transformation which this book examines. London is too complex and diverse a city to be comprehended in a simple linear narrative; this book adopts instead an innovative approach to urban history, by which London life and London's transformation are examined through a number of case studies looking at specific themes and areas of the city. Consumerism and the 'experience economy', home ownership and gentrification, deindustrialisation and deprivation, racial tension and unemployment, the attrition of public services and the steady loss of confidence in public agencies - national and local - emerge as overarching themes from the individual case studies in this book. Their combined effect, it is argued, was to prepare the ground for the Britain that Margaret Thatcher is usually held to have created after 1979 - without Thatcher herself having anything to do it"--

The smartphone was an incredibly successful Canadian invention created by a team of engineers and marketers led by Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie. But there was a third key player involved — the community of Kitchener-Waterloo. In this book Chuck Howitt offers a new history of BlackBerry which documents how the resources and the people of Kitchener-Waterloo supported, facilitated, benefited from and celebrated the achievement that BlackBerry represents. After its few short years of explosive growth and pre-eminence, BlackBerry lost its market to digital juggernauts Apple, Samsung and Huawei. No surprises there. Like Nokia and Motorola before it, BlackBerry was eclipsed. Shareholders lost billions. Thousands of employees lost jobs. Bankruptcy was avoided but the company's founding geniuses were gone, leaving an operation that today is only a fragment of what had been. For Kitchener-Waterloo — as Chuck Howitt tells the story — the Blackberry experience is a mixed bag of disappointments and major ongoing benefits. The wealth it generated for its founders produced two very important university research institutes. Many recent digital startups have taken advantage of the city's pool of talented and experienced tech workers and ambitious, well-educated university grads. A strong digital and tech industry thrives today in Kitchener-Waterloo — in a way a legacy of the BlackBerry experience. Across Canada, communities hope for homegrown business successes like BlackBerry. This book underlines how a mid-sized, strong community can help grow a world-beating company, and demonstrates the importance of the attitudes and decisions of local institutions in enabling and sustaining successful innovation. Canada has a lot to learn from BlackBerry Town.

The history you don’t know is the most fascinating of all. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth century, Waterloo, Ontario, could be any small Canadian community. Its familiar histories privilege the “great accomplishments” of those who built the institutions we know today: industry, government, and education. But what of those who were marginalized, weird, and wonderful — real people who lived between the boundaries of mainstream existence? Waterloo You Never Knew reveals forgotten and little known tales of a community in transition and reflects on those lives lived in infamy and obscurity, by choice or design. Meet the rumrunner, the ex-slaves, and the cholera victims, the grave-digging doctor, the séance-loving politician, and the sorcery-practising healer. Come inside. See the Waterloo you never knew, revealed.

Nick Lasseter is in a slump--as a reporter for the Waterloo Weekly, and in every other part of his life as well. When he grudgingly agrees to write a piece about a rising female Republican legislator, he stumbles onto a political fight in which the good guys and bad guys start to seem interchangeable. And not even the deceased can be relied upon to stick to their stories when Nick gets involved with a political insider. As they search the dim depths of a civic past that's anything but dead and buried, they find that some things never change--things like the moral ambiguity of practical politics and the sad, hilarious cluelessness of young men in love. Bittersweet and biting, elegiac and sharply observed, Waterloo is a portrait of a generation in search of itself--and a love letter to the slackers, rockers, hustlers, hacks, and hangers-on who populate Austin, Texas--from a formidable new intelligence in American fiction.

"Edwards skillfully weaves the strands together [in] this twisty whodunit." —Publishers Weekly This atmospheric, fast-moving and intricate thriller features Harry Devlin, one of modern crime fiction's most memorable amateur detectives, in the deadliest case of his life. A notice announcing that Harry Devlin died suddenly on Midsummer's Eve arrives at the office of his law firm one June day. Harry isn't happy to read it: Midsummer's Eve is less than a week away. His partner Jim Crusoe treats the message as a joke, but Harry isn't so sure. Meanwhile, young women are being murdered in Harry's home city of Liverpool. When a friend who has asked to meet him becomes the latest victim, Harry becomes a suspect. He's soon fighting for survival on two fronts. Even as he unravels the shocking secret behind the murders, Harry must discover and confront the enemy who wants him dead if he is to live to see Midsummer's Day.

These were days of uncertainty and peril, of noble deeds and great sacrifice. An exciting time to be young and adventurous . . . but a dangerous time to fall in love.