-PDF Download- To Destroy A City EBOOK

To Destroy A City

Author: Herman Knell

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2009-06-16

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0786748494

Herman Knell was nineteen and living in Würtzburg in March of 1945 when hundreds of Allied planes arrived overhead, unleashing a torrent of bombs on the city. Würtzburg's tightly packed medieval housing exploded in a firestorm, killing six thousand people in one night and destroying 92 percent of the city's structures. Despite the fact that Würtzburg had no strategic value, the city emerged from World War II second only to Dresden in material destruction inflicted from the air. The experience led Knell to years of research on the history, development, and effects of the strategy of area bombing.To Destroy a City is the result of the author's long and unrelenting investigation. His analysis of this form of warfare, which reached its zenith during World War II, covers the history and the development of wide-area bombing since 1914, examines its wartime effectiveness and the consequences. But the extra dimension that Knell's book offers is his firsthand experience of the tension, fear, tentative defiance, and, finally, utter catastrophe of being on the receiving end of overwhelming air power. For Americans, who fortunately did not experience bombing during the war, this is essential reading.

How to Kill a City

Author: PE Moskowitz

Publisher: Bold Type Books

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1568585241

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A journey to the front lines of the battle for the future of American cities, uncovering the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification -- and the lives that are altered in the process. The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don't realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance. P. E. Moskowitz's How to Kill a City takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America's crises of race and inequality. In the fight for economic opportunity and racial justice, nothing could be more important than housing. A vigorous, hard-hitting expose, How to Kill a City reveals who holds power in our cities-and how we can get it back.

Monsters to Destroy

Author: Navin A. Bapat

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-11-04

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0190061472

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Terrorism kills far fewer Americans annually than automobile accidents, firearms, or even lightning strikes. Given this minimal risk, why does the U.S. continue expending lives and treasure to fight the global war on terror? In Monsters to Destroy, Navin A. Bapat argues that the war on terror provides the U.S. a cover for its efforts to expand and preserve American control over global energy markets. To gain dominance over these markets, the U.S. offered protection to states critical in the extraction, sale, and transportation of energy from their "terrorist" internal and external enemies. However, since the U.S. was willing to protect these states in perpetuity, the leaders of these regimes had no incentive to disarm their terrorists. This inaction allowed terrorists to transition into more powerful and virulent insurgencies, leading the protected states to chart their own courses and ultimately break with U.S. foreign policy objectives. Bapat provides a sweeping look at how the loss of influence over these states has accelerated the decline of U.S. economic and military power, locking it into a permanent war for its own economic security.

Dystopian Cities

Author: Archimedes Muzenda

Publisher:

Published: 2019-10-29

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9781779068873

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

In Dystopian Cities, Archimedes Muzenda reveals how specialist approaches to urban development are destroying cities, committing spatial atrocities that turn African cities into dystopia.

China in One Village

Author: Liang Hong

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2021-06-22

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1839761776

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A global future in the history of a single village After a decade away from her ancestral family village, during which she became a writer and literary scholar in Beijing, Liang Hong started visiting her rural hometown in landlocked Henan Province. What she found was an extended family riven by the seismic changes in Chinese society and a village turned inside out by emigration, neglect, and environmental despoliation. Combining family memoir, literary observation, and social commentary, Liang’s by turns lyrically poetic and movingly raw investigation into the fate of her village became a bestselling book in China and brought her fame. For many months, Liang walked the roads and fields of her village, recording the stories of her relatives—especially her irascible, unforgettable father—and talking to everyone from high government officials to the lowest of village outcasts. Across China, many saw in Liang’s riveting interviews with family members and childhood acquaintances a mirror of their own lives, and her observations about the way the greatest rural-to-urban migration of modern times has twisted the country resonated deeply. China in One Village tells the story of contemporary China through one clear-eyed, literary observer, one family, and one village.

I Will Destroy You

Author: Nick Flynn

Publisher: Graywolf Press

Published: 2019-09-03

Total Pages: 91

ISBN-13: 1644451018

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose “songs of experience hum with immediacy” (The New York Times) Beginning with a poem called “Confessional” and ending with a poem titled “Saint Augustine,” Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive, to remake and reform. But first the maker of art must claim responsibility for his past, his actions, his propensity to destroy others and himself. “Begin by descending,” Augustine says, and the poems delve into the deepest, most defeating parts of the self: addiction, temptation, infidelity, and repressed memory. These are poems of profound self-scrutiny and lyric intensity, jagged and probing. I Will Destroy You is an honest accounting of all that love must transcend and what we must risk for its truth.

Strong Towns

Author: Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2019-10-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1119564816

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A new way forward for sustainable quality of life in cities of all sizes Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Build American Prosperity is a book of forward-thinking ideas that breaks with modern wisdom to present a new vision of urban development in the United States. Presenting the foundational ideas of the Strong Towns movement he co-founded, Charles Marohn explains why cities of all sizes continue to struggle to meet their basic needs, and reveals the new paradigm that can solve this longstanding problem. Inside, you’ll learn why inducing growth and development has been the conventional response to urban financial struggles—and why it just doesn’t work. New development and high-risk investing don’t generate enough wealth to support itself, and cities continue to struggle. Read this book to find out how cities large and small can focus on bottom-up investments to minimize risk and maximize their ability to strengthen the community financially and improve citizens’ quality of life. Develop in-depth knowledge of the underlying logic behind the “traditional” search for never-ending urban growth Learn practical solutions for ameliorating financial struggles through low-risk investment and a grassroots focus Gain insights and tools that can stop the vicious cycle of budget shortfalls and unexpected downturns Become a part of the Strong Towns revolution by shifting the focus away from top-down growth toward rebuilding American prosperity Strong Towns acknowledges that there is a problem with the American approach to growth and shows community leaders a new way forward. The Strong Towns response is a revolution in how we assemble the places we live.

How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps

Author: Ben Shapiro

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2020-07-21

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 0063001896

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! A growing number of Americans want to tear down what it’s taken us 250 years to build—and they’ll start by canceling our shared history, ideals, and culture. Traditional areas of civic agreement are vanishing. We can’t agree on what makes America special. We can’t even agree that America is special. We’re coming to the point that we can’t even agree what the word America itself means. “Disintegrationists” say we’re stronger together, but their assault on America’s history, philosophy, and culture will only tear us apart. Who are the disintegrationists? From Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States to the New York Times’ 1619 project, many modern analyses view American history through the lens of competing oppressions, a racist and corrupt experiment from the very beginning. They see American philosophy as a lie – beautiful words pasted over a thoroughly rotted system. They see America’s culture of rights as a façade that merely reinforces traditional hierarchies of power, instead of being the only culture that guarantees freedom for individuals. Disintegrationist attacks on the values that built our nation are insidious because they replace each foundational belief, from the rights to free speech and self-defense to the importance of marriage and faith communities, with nothing more than an increased reliance on the government. This twisted disintegrationist vision replaces the traditional “unionist” understanding that all Americans are united in a shared striving toward the perfection of universal ideals. How to Destroy America in Three Easy Steps shows that to be a cohesive nation we have to uphold foundational truths about ourselves, our history, and reality itself—to be unionists instead of disintegrationists. Shapiro offers a vital warning that if we don’t recover these shared truths, our future—our union—as a great country is threatened with destruction.

The City's End

Author: Max Page

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2008-01-01

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 030011026X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From nineteenth-century paintings of fires raging through New York City to scenes of Manhattan engulfed by a gigantic wave in the 1998 movie Deep Impact, images of the city’s end have been prolific and diverse. Why have Americans repeatedly imagined New York’s destruction? What do the fantasies of annihilation played out in virtually every form of literature and art mean? This book is the first to investigate two centuries of imagined cataclysms visited upon New York, and to provide a critical historical perspective to our understanding of the events of September 11, 2001. Max Page examines the destruction fantasies created by American writers and imagemakers at various stages of New York’s development. Seen in every medium from newspapers and films to novels, paintings, and computer software, such images, though disturbing, have been continuously popular. Page demonstrates with vivid examples and illustrations how each era’s destruction genre has reflected the city’s economic, political, racial, or physical tensions, and he also shows how the images have become forces in their own right, shaping Americans’ perceptions of New York and of cities in general.