Baghdad

Baghdad
Author: Justin Marozzi
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 616
Release: 2014-05-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0141948043

In Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood, celebrated young travelwriter-historian Justin Marozzi gives us a many-layered history of one of the world's truly great cities - both its spectacular golden ages and its terrible disasters 'Justin Marozzi is the most brilliant of the new generation of travelwriter-historians' - Sunday Telegraph Over thirteen centuries, Baghdad has enjoyed both cultural and commercial pre-eminence, boasting artistic and intellectual sophistication and an economy once the envy of the world. It was here, in the time of the Caliphs, that the Thousand and One Nights were set. Yet it has also been a city of great hardships, beset by epidemics, famines, floods, and numerous foreign invasions which have brought terrible bloodshed. This is the history of its storytellers and its tyrants, of its philosophers and conquerors. Here, in the first new history of Baghdad in nearly 80 years, Justin Marozzi brings to life the whole tumultuous history of what was once the greatest capital on earth. Justin Marozzi is a Councillor of the Royal Geographic Society and a Senior Research Fellow at Buckingham University. He has broadcast for BBC Radio Four, and regularly contributes to a wide range of publications, including the Financial Times, for which he has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan and Darfur. His previous books include the bestselling Tamerlane: Sword of Islam, a Sunday Telegraph Book of the Year (2004), and The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus.

City of Peace

City of Peace
Author: Henry G. Brinton
Publisher: Koehler Books
Total Pages: 242
Release: 2019-03-15
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781633937628

When Methodist minister Harley Camden loses his wife and daughter in a European terrorist attack, he spirals downward into grief and anger. The bishop forces him to move to a tiny church in small-town Occoquan, Virginia, to heal and recover. But all hope for serenity is quickly shattered by the mysterious murder of the daughter of the local Iraqi baker, followed by the threat of an attack by Islamic extremists. Harley tries to build bridges to his neighbors, including Muslims and Coptic Christians, and digs into the history of the ancient Galilean city of Sepphoris to find the secret to survival in a fractured and violent world. Past and present come together in surprising ways as Harley sets out to stop the violence and save his new flock. City of Peace is a gripping and fast-paced mystery that will engage people politically and spiritually, leaving them with fresh insight into how they can overcome polarizing divisions among people of differing cultures and faiths.

Still, in the City

Still, in the City
Author: Angela Dews
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2018-09-11
Genre: Self-Help
ISBN: 1510732349

Still, in the City is a collection of stories about the practice of urban Buddhism—when a New York City subway becomes a mobile temple, when Los Angeles traffic becomes a vehicle for awakening, when a Fifth Avenue sidewalk offers a spiritual path through craving, generosity, and sorrow. The instructions offered here for exploring mindfulness in and around our cities are written to be accessible, whether you’ve practiced a lot or a little. Perhaps you’ve returned home from a retreat and want to hold the attention and intention gained from pausing and experiencing the silence. Or perhaps you practice mindfulness and don’t call it Buddhism, or you are just curious about what mindfulness is all about. Still, in the City will speak to you. Practicing in the city comes with its own set of challenges and opportunities, and this book is attuned to both, offering guidance by teachers who see mindfulness not only as an intention for self-acceptance and relief of stress, but also as awareness that leads to dissatisfaction and that inspires our desire for deeper understanding and change. Dedicated to using their practice to make a difference not only in their own lives but also those of others, the authors speak of their involvement with their cities’ diverse communities, and their experience belies the notion that western Buddhists are of an age and race and class. There is amazing clarity in stillness, and the opportunity for a skillful response rather than a reaction, even to injustice. And there is the possibility of equanimity and of freedom, everywhere and for all.

Urban Safety and Peacebuilding

Urban Safety and Peacebuilding
Author: Achim Wennmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2018-12-07
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1351371347

This volume draws together original research related to conceptual and practical advances at the interface of urban safety and peacebuilding. The book reflects the advances in urban safety and peacebuilding to help address the rapidly increasing risk of conflict and insecurity in cities. Specifically, it draws on contributions to the Technical Working Group on the Confluence of Urban Safety and Peacebuilding Practice, an informal expert network co-facilitated by the United Nations Office at Geneva, UN-Habitat’s Safer Cities Programme, and the Geneva Peacebuilding Platform. A focus on ‘sustaining peace’ serves as a framework for situating new policy responses against conflict, violence, and exclusion in the city, and for promoting a conversation across disciplinary and specialist silos. The volume thereby broadens the optic of peacebuilding practice beyond interstate and intrastate armed conflicts – and especially their aftermath – and reconnects it to the community-level origins of building peace. The analysis and practice presented here will remind those willing to work towards peaceful and inclusive cities that there are tried and tested approaches available, and a host of experts and practitioners ready to accompany those prepared to lead in their respective contexts. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of peacebuilding, urban studies, security studies, and international relations.

Uneasy Peace

Uneasy Peace
Author: Patrick Sharkey
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 039335654X

From the late ’90s to the mid-2010s, American cities experienced an astonishing drop in violent crime, dramatically changing urban life. In many cases, places once characterized by decay and abandonment are now thriving, the fear of death by gunshot wound replaced by concern about skyrocketing rents. In Uneasy Peace, Patrick Sharkey, “the leading young scholar of urban crime and concentrated poverty” (Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis) reveals the striking effects: improved school test scores, because children are better able to learn when not traumatized by nearby violence; better chances that poor children will rise into the middle class; and a marked increase in the life expectancy of African American men. Some of the forces that brought about safer streets—such as the intensive efforts made by local organizations to confront violence in their own communities—have been positive, Sharkey explains. But the drop in violent crime has also come at the high cost of aggressive policing and mass incarceration. From Harlem to South Los Angeles, Sharkey draws on original data and textured accounts of neighborhoods across the country to document the most successful proven strategies for combating violent crime and to lay out innovative and necessary approaches to the problem of violence. At a time when crime is rising again, the issue of police brutality has taken center stage, and powerful political forces seek to disinvest in cities, the insights in this book are indispensable.

Seek the Peace of the City

Seek the Peace of the City
Author: Eldin Villafañe
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
Total Pages: 168
Release: 1995
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 9780802807298

This volume extends a summons to today's churches to give primacy once again to urban ministry. Villafane lays out a vision of a church that, unlike the trend today, refuses to retreat from the challenges of city life.

Windows of the Heavens

Windows of the Heavens
Author: Henry G. Brinton
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2021-11-23
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1666733415

When the heavens open on the small river town of Occoquan, Virginia, the streets flood and a candle shop is swept away. A Methodist pastor named Harley Camden witnesses the destructive deluge and then discovers, in the debris, a dead man with a crude carving of Satan’s claws in his back. Harley is drawn into the mystery of what caused the flood and who killed the man, while diving into questions of good and evil, body and spirit, humanity and the environment—especially questions about the change in climate that now threatens life around the globe. He discovers that there is a spiritual dimension to every social issue, whether it be the violence of Central American gangs or the racism that leads a black businessman to make a fateful choice. When the windows of the heavens open, surprising truths are revealed about how people can coexist in an interfaith, multicultural community, and how humans can establish a sustainable relationship with the natural world around them.

Occupied City

Occupied City
Author: David Peace
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2011-02-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307276511

“An extraordinary and highly original crime novel” (New York Times Book Review) that plunges us into post–World War II Occupied Japan in a Rashomon–like retelling of a mass poisoning (based on an actual event), its aftermath, and the hidden wartime atrocities that led to the crime. “Hugely daring, utterly irresistible, deeply serious and unlike anything I have ever read.”—New York Times Book Review On January 26, 1948, a man identifying himself as a public health official arrives at a bank in Tokyo. There has been an outbreak of dysentery in the neighborhood, he explains, and he has been assigned by Occupation authorities to treat everyone who might have been exposed to the disease. Soon after drinking the medicine he administers, twelve employees are dead, four are unconscious, and the “official” has fled.... Twelve voices tell the story of the murder from different perspectives. One of the victims speaks, for all the victims, from the grave. We read the increasingly mad notes of one of the case detectives, the desperate letters of an American occupier, the testimony of a traumatized survivor. We meet a journalist, a gangster-turned-businessman, an “occult detective,” a Soviet soldier, a well-known painter. Each voice enlarges and deepens the portrait of a city and a people making their way out of a war-induced hell. Occupied City immerses us in an extreme time and place with a brilliantly idiosyncratic, expressionistic, mesmerizing narrative. It is a stunningly audacious work of fiction from a singular writer.

A Bowl Full of Peace

A Bowl Full of Peace
Author: Caren Stelson
Publisher: Carolrhoda Books
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2020
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 154152148X

A powerful picture book about finding hope and peace after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki