All that is Solid Melts Into Air

All that is Solid Melts Into Air
Author: Marshall Berman
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 388
Release: 1983
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780860917854

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

All That Is Solid

All That Is Solid
Author: Danny Dorling
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2014-02-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0141974958

Housing was at the heart of the financial collapse, and our economy is now precariously reliant on the housing market. In this groundbreaking new book, Danny Dorling argues that housing is the defining issue of our times. Tracing how we got to our current crisis and how housing has come to reflect class and wealth in Britain, All That Is Solid radically shows that the solution to our problems - rising homelessness, a generation priced out of home ownership - is not, as is widely assumed, building more homes. Inequality, he argues, is what we really need to overcome.

Modernism in the Streets

Modernism in the Streets
Author: Marshall Berman
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 459
Release: 2017-04-18
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1784785008

Essays tracing the intellectual life of a quintessential New York City writer and thinker Marshall Berman was one of the great urbanists and Marxist cultural critics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and his brilliant, nearly sui generis book All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is a masterpiece of the literature on modernism. But like many New York intellectuals, the essay was his characteristic form, accommodating his multifarious interests and expressing his protean, searching exuberant mind. This collection includes early essays from and on the radical ’60s, on New York City, on literary figures from Kafka to Pamuk, and late essays on rock, hip hop, and gentrification. Concluding with his last essay, completed just before his death in 2013, this book is Berman’s intellectual autobiography, tracing his career as a thinker through the way he read the “signs in the street.””

Adventures in Marxism

Adventures in Marxism
Author: Marshall Berman
Publisher: Verso
Total Pages: 292
Release: 1999
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9781859843093

Citing a lifelong engagement with Marxism, critic and writer Marshall Berman reveals the movement's positive points and suggests a new beginning for Marxism may be on the horizon with its recent 150th anniversary attention.

Communities of Resistance

Communities of Resistance
Author: Ambalavaner Sivanandan
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2019-10-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1788734572

Ambalavaner Sivanandan was one of Britain's most influential radical thinkers. As Director of the Institute of Race Relations for forty years, his work changed the way that we think about race, racism, globalisation and resistance. Communities of Resistance collects together some of his most famous essays, including his excoriating polemic on Thatcherism and the left "The Hokum of New Times". This updated edition contains a new preface by Gary Younge and an introduction by Arun Kundnani.

Adventures in Modernism

Adventures in Modernism
Author: Jennifer Corby
Publisher: UR (Urban Research)
Total Pages:
Release: 2016-05-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9780996004169

Marshall Berman was a political theorist, urbanist, and public intellectual that gave a generation a way to think about what it means to be modern. He offered a vision of Marx as a preeminent modernist and humanist, which served as a touchstone for his exploration into the complexity of our modern world and lives. Marshall was singularly capable of seamlessly weaving together the ideas of Dostoevsky and Kurtis Blow, the experiences of St. Petersburg and the South Bronx. In so doing, he helped make sense of the maelstrom of modern life into which we are born, and helped buttress a sense of optimism in the midst of a chaos in which all that is solid melts into air.Adventures in Modernism: Thinking with Marshall Berman is a testament to just how deeply and broadly his influence can be felt, as its contributors consist of theorists, architects, media critics, urbanists, and historians from across the globe. Some essays demonstrate the potential for applying Marshall?s methods of analysis into new locales such as Iran or Scotland. Others return to familiar places like the South Bronx or Times Square in order to stretchor update Marshall?s analyses. Some essays engage Marshall as a theorist, and analyze his ideas of public, urban life, and of modernism and modernity. Another explores the impact Marshall?s work has in the classroom, as well as his own role as a teacher. Collectively, the essays that comprise this volume reflect deeply on Marshall?s work, and speak to its continued relevance in helping to not only decipher, but to find meaning in our modern world.

Five Faces of Modernity

Five Faces of Modernity
Author: Matei Călinescu
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 416
Release: 1987
Genre: Avant-Garde (Aesthetics)
ISBN: 9780822307679

Five Faces of Modernity is a series of semantic and cultural biographies of words that have taken on special significance in the last century and a half or so: modernity, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, and postmodernism. The concept of modernity--the notion that we, the living, are different and somehow superior to our predecessors and that our civilization is likely to be succeeded by one even superior to ours--is a relatively recent Western invention and one whose time may already have passed, if we believe its postmodern challengers. Calinescu documents the rise of cultural modernity and, in tracing the shifting senses of the five terms under scrutiny, illustrates the intricate value judgments, conflicting orientations, and intellectual paradoxes to which it has given rise. Five Faces of Modernity attempts to do for the foundations of the modernist critical lexicon what earlier terminological studies have done for such complex categories as classicism, baroque, romanticism, realism, or symbolism and thereby fill a gap in literary scholarship. On another, more ambitious level, Calinescu deals at length with the larger issues, dilemmas, ideological tensions, and perplexities brought about by the assertion of modernity.

Solid States

Solid States
Author: Michael Bell
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2010-12
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 9781568988955

DVD features highlights from the conference held at Columbia University.

The Rent Is Too Damn High

The Rent Is Too Damn High
Author: Matthew Yglesias
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 85
Release: 2012-03-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1451663293

From prominent political thinker and widely followed Slate columnist, a polemic on high rents and housing costs—and how these costs are hollowing out communities, thwarting economic development, and rendering personal success and fulfillment increasingly difficult to achieve. Rent is an issue that affects nearly everyone. High rent is a problem for all of us, extending beyond personal financial strain. High rent drags on our country’s overall rate of economic growth, damages the environment, and promotes long commutes, traffic jams, misery, and smog. Yet instead of a serious focus on the issue, America’s cities feature niche conversations about the availability of “affordable housing” for poor people. Yglesias’s book changes the conversation for the first time, presenting newfound context for the issue and real-time, practical solutions for the problem.

A History and Theory of the Social Sciences

A History and Theory of the Social Sciences
Author: Peter Wagner
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2001-07-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1446264513

Divided into two parts, this book examines the train of social theory from the 19th century, through to the ′organization of modernity′, in relation to ideas of social planning, and as contributors to the ′rationalistic revolution′ of the ′golden age′ of capitalism in the 1950s and 60s. Part two examines key concepts in the social sciences. It begins with some of the broadest concepts used by social scientists: choice, decision, action and institution and moves on to examine the ′collectivist alternative′: the concepts of society, culture and polity, which are often dismissed as untenable by postmodernists today. This is a major contribution to contemporary social theory and provides a host of essential insights into the task of social science today.