The Restless Hungarian

The Restless Hungarian
Author: Tom Weidlinger
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2019-04-16
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1943006970

The Restless Hungarian is the saga of an extraordinary life set against the history of the rise of modernism, the Jewish Diaspora, and the Cold War. A Hungarian Jew whose inquiring spirit helped him to escape the Holocaust, Paul Weidlinger became one of the most creative structural engineers of the twentieth century. As a young architect, he broke ranks with the great modernists with his radical idea of the “Joy of Space.” As an engineer, he created the strength behind the beauty in mid-century modern skyscrapers, churches, museums, and he gave concrete form to the eccentric monumental sculptures of Pablo Picasso, Isamu Noguchi, and Jean Dubuffet. In his private life, he was a divided man, living behind a wall of denial as he lost his family to war, mental illness, and suicide. In telling his father’s story, the author sifts meaning from the inspiring and contradictory narratives of a life: a motherless child and a captain of industry, a clandestine communist who designed silos for the world’s deadliest weapons during the Cold War, a Jewish refugee who denied he was a Jew, a husband who was terrified of his wife’s madness, and a man whose personal saints were artists.

Radiant City

Radiant City
Author: Lauren B. Davis
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 349
Release: 2015-01-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1443444731

Scarred by his experiences as a war correspondent, Matthew flees to Paris to heal and forget—even as he must stir up the past to write the memoir he’s promised to his impatient literary agent. Resurrecting a friendship with Jack, a Vietnam vet and ex-mercenary, Matthew enters Jack’s alcohol-dimmed world of shadowy bars and calculating lovers. But there is also Saida—beautiful, damaged and proud—who fled Lebanon with her family and now runs a café. Matthew is drawn to her kindness, and to her fierce love for her teenage son, who is growing into manhood on the treacherous streets of the North African quarter. This is Paris far from the glimmer of tourist lights. Here secrets are divulged, guilt and passion revealed, and Matthew is caught up in an inescapable final confrontation. The Radiant City is a novel of astonishing depth and power.

Radiant Child

Radiant Child
Author: Javaka Steptoe
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Total Pages: 44
Release: 2016-11-08
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0316394327

Winner of the Randolph Caldecott Medal and the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award! Jean-Michel Basquiat and his unique, collage-style paintings rocketed to fame in the 1980s as a cultural phenomenon unlike anything the art world had ever seen. But before that, he was a little boy who saw art everywhere: in poetry books and museums, in games and in the words that we speak, and in the pulsing energy of New York City. Now, award-winning illustrator Javaka Steptoe's vivid text and bold artwork echoing Basquiat's own introduce young readers to the powerful message that art doesn't always have to be neat or clean—and definitely not inside the lines!—to be beautiful.

Landscape and Utopia

Landscape and Utopia
Author: Jody Beck
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2022-12-22
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 135105371X

This book examines three landmark utopian visions central to 20th century landscape architectural, planning, and architectural theory. The period between the 1890s and the 1940s was a fertile time for utopian thinking. Significant geographic shifts of large populations; radically altered relations between capital and labor; rapid technological developments; large investments in transportation and energy infrastructure; and repetitive economic disruptions motivated many individuals to wholly reimagine society – including the connections between social relations and the built environment. Landscape and Utopia examines the role of landscapes in the political imaginations of the Garden City, the Radiant City, and Broadacre City. Each project uses landscapes to propose a reconstruction of the relationships between land, labor, and capital but - while the projects are well-known – the role played by landscapes has been largely left unexamined. Similarly, the radical anti-capitalism that underpinned each project has similarly been, for the most part, left out of contemporary discussions. This book sets these projects within a historical and philosophical context and opens a discussion on the role of landscapes in society today. This book will be a must-read for instructors, students, and researchers of the history and theory of landscape architecture, planning, and architecture as well as utopian studies, cultural and social history, and environmental theory.

The Smart Enough City

The Smart Enough City
Author: Ben Green
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2019-04-09
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0262352257

Why technology is not an end in itself, and how cities can be “smart enough,” using technology to promote democracy and equity. Smart cities, where technology is used to solve every problem, are hailed as futuristic urban utopias. We are promised that apps, algorithms, and artificial intelligence will relieve congestion, restore democracy, prevent crime, and improve public services. In The Smart Enough City, Ben Green warns against seeing the city only through the lens of technology; taking an exclusively technical view of urban life will lead to cities that appear smart but under the surface are rife with injustice and inequality. He proposes instead that cities strive to be “smart enough”: to embrace technology as a powerful tool when used in conjunction with other forms of social change—but not to value technology as an end in itself. In a technology-centric smart city, self-driving cars have the run of downtown and force out pedestrians, civic engagement is limited to requesting services through an app, police use algorithms to justify and perpetuate racist practices, and governments and private companies surveil public space to control behavior. Green describes smart city efforts gone wrong but also smart enough alternatives, attainable with the help of technology but not reducible to technology: a livable city, a democratic city, a just city, a responsible city, and an innovative city. By recognizing the complexity of urban life rather than merely seeing the city as something to optimize, these Smart Enough Cities successfully incorporate technology into a holistic vision of justice and equity.

City of Stairs

City of Stairs
Author: Robert Jackson Bennett
Publisher: Del Rey
Total Pages: 466
Release: 2014-09-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0804137188

An atmospheric and intrigue-filled novel of dead gods, buried histories, and a mysterious, protean city--from one of America's most acclaimed young fantasy writers. The city of Bulikov once wielded the powers of the gods to conquer the world, enslaving and brutalizing millions—until its divine protectors were killed. Now Bulikov has become just another colonial outpost of the world's new geopolitical power, but the surreal landscape of the city itself—first shaped, now shattered, by the thousands of miracles its guardians once worked upon it—stands as a constant, haunting reminder of its former supremacy. Into this broken city steps Shara Thivani. Officially, the unassuming young woman is just another junior diplomat sent by Bulikov's oppressors. Unofficially, she is one of her country's most accomplished spies, dispatched to catch a murderer. But as Shara pursues the killer, she starts to suspect that the beings who ruled this terrible place may not be as dead as they seem—and that Bulikov's cruel reign may not yet be over.

Radiant Fugitives

Radiant Fugitives
Author: Nawaaz Ahmed
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2021-08-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1640094059

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR PUBLISHING TRIANGLE'S EDMUND WHITE DEBUT FICTION AWARD In the last weeks of her pregnancy, a Muslim Indian lesbian living in San Francisco receives a visit from her estranged mother and sister that surfaces long held secrets and betrayals in this "sweeping family saga . . . with the beautiful specificity of real lives lived, loved, and fought for" (Entertainment Weekly) Working as a consultant for Kamala Harris’s attorney general campaign in Obama-era San Francisco, Seema has constructed a successful life for herself in the West, despite still struggling with her father’s long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the Black father of her unborn son, Seema seeks solace in the company of those she once thought lost to her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, traveling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, a doctor living in Texas with her husband and children. But instead of a joyful reconciliation anticipating the birth of a child, the events of this fateful week unearth years of betrayal, misunderstanding, and complicated layers of love—a tapestry of emotions as riveting and disparate as the era itself. Told from the point of view of Seema’s child at the moment of his birth, and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and verses from the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is a moving tale of a family and a country grappling with acceptance, forgiveness, and enduring love.

Radiant

Radiant
Author: Marian Jordan
Publisher: B&H Publishing Group
Total Pages: 218
Release: 2010
Genre: Christian women
ISBN: 0805446729

Through author Marian Jordan's modern anecdotes and the Bible's eternal truths, young women are encouraged to shine for the Lord in an ever darkening world

L'Unité D'habitation

L'Unité D'habitation
Author: David Jenkins
Publisher: Phaidon Incorporated Limited
Total Pages: 57
Release: 1993-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9780714827704

The Unite d'Habitation at Marseilles is a key building of the twentieth century, and a seminal work in Le Corbusier's oeuvre. A precursor of buildings in Nantes, Berlin, Briey-en-Foret and Firminy, it established, in built form, Le Corbusier's ideas of public housing that had existed only on paper for more than twenty-five years. David Jenkins argues that the Marseilles Unite stands out as a powerful and convincing testament of Le Corbusier's fundamental humanism and his faith in the principles of the Ville Radieuse and the Brutalist medium of rough cast concrete which in other, less able hands, have since been called into question.