Statement of responsibility taken from Jacket.

Skateboarding is both a sport and a way of life. Creative, physical, graphic, urban and controversial, it is full of contradictions – a billion-dollar global industry which still retains its vibrant, counter-cultural heart. Skateboarding and the City presents the only complete history of the sport, exploring the story of skate culture from the surf-beaches of '60s California to the latest developments in street-skating today. Written by a life-long skater who also happens to be an architectural historian, and packed through with full-colour images – of skaters, boards, moves, graphics, and film-stills – this passionate, readable and rigorously-researched book explores the history of skateboarding and reveals a vivid understanding of how skateboarders, through their actions, experience the city and its architecture in a unique way.

A skateboarding book like no other, this collection of stunning color photographs from around the world reveals an authentic, unsentimental view of an often overglamorized subculture. The Irish photographer and skateboarder Richard Gilligan spent four years traveling through Europe and the US to photograph homemade skateparks. The resulting photographs are not your run-of-the-mill action shots filled with miraculous body moves, slashes, twists, and turns. Instead, Gilligan chooses to focus on the sport's "negative space": the out-of-the-way concrete embankments, nondescript suburban lots where kids come to practice, a simple wooden ramp so insubstantial that no one but a skateboarder would recognize its use. Many of these photographs can be appreciated as unique, if prosaic, landscapes, but Gilligan also populates his pictures with skaters at rest, smoking alone, hanging out together, or walking home, board in hand. The images offer a grittily beautiful tribute to the ineffable hunger that unites all skateboarders--young, old, rich, poor. In these photographs Gilligan realizes the act of skating represents more than a quest for glory, but a means of self expression.

More than a Game covers the years that follow the one featured in the ESPN documentary series "The Last Dance." After leaving the Bulls at the end of the 1997-1998 season—the year featured in the new ESPN documentary series "The Last Dance"—Phil Jackson had one year off and started to write this book—together with his old friend, fellow player and coach, the basketball novelist Charley Rosen. Then Phil took the LA Lakers coaching job, Rosen followed him there, and by the time they finished writing this book it was 2000 and Phil had won yet another NBA championship, the first of five he would win with his new team. In More than a Game, Jackson and Rosen look backward to their origins as players and coaches, forward to the future of the game of basketball, and linger in the moving target of the present—lavishing page after page on the Triangle Offense and all the ways it reveals the essence of the game of basketball they both love so much. This is Jackson in his prime, transitioning from the Bulls to the Lakers, a master of the art of winning, who would go on to claim more NBA championships, eleven, than any other coach in NBA history. As he writes in More than a Game of his newest championship team: "We won because our fundamentals were sound, because Shaq was so dominant and Kobe was so creative, but we also won because we developed a certain confidence in our ability to win."

"To be a skateboarder today is a much different experience than it was for much of the 1990s. The photographs, quotes, and anecdotal text in ''93 til' captures a time in skateboarding when making a livable income as a professional skater was a luxury and public understanding of skateboarding was at an all-time low. It was a time when skateboarding was searching for an identity, a time before Instagram and big corporate influences. Street skating was coming of age, testing its limitations and aligning itself with a new and innovate style of hip-hop culture that was emerging. Looking back, many skaters today feel as though the '90s were the golden years of skateboarding. ''93 til' is a captivating portal into a decade and a culture that is remembered with warmth and nostalgia. Much of the photography that Pete has unearthed for '93 til was buried in boxes for close to two decades and hasn't never been seen or published before. The 250-page book also contains several timeless images from his years shooting for SLAP and Transworld Skateboarding Magazine that will be familiar to the initiated. In addition to his stunning action shots are plenty of portraits and unguarded, candid moments that span from the late '80s up through 2004. The book reveals a raw, unapologetic perspective of a world that no longer exists."--Provided by publisher.

At Night She Cries, While He Rides His Steed is a side-splitting satire that perfectly parodies romance novels and western dramas. Our hero, Saint James Street James is a tall, extremely muscular, 32-year-old man whose attributes and possessions include a mind stronger than Socrates on acid, a magnificent horse he loves more than anything in the world, a package so large that it requires a signature, a beautiful, passionate wife with a rack so perfect it belongs on a billiard table, a ton of children, and his own personal gold mine. His life, set in 1849 against the backdrop of the California Gold Rush, is one long parade of amazing sex, dynamite montages, whiskey, and explosive gunfights. The kinds of things men could do when men were actually men. He is the richest man in town—equal parts loved and feared by all. But when the Schläger Brothers come to town, so too comes the end of the good times. St. James is forced to defend everything that matters to him (including, but not limited to: prostitutes, his horse, money, and drugs. Oh, and his wife and children too, sort of). God help anyone who stands in his way.

The Accidental Playground explores the remarkable landscape created by individuals and small groups who occupied and rebuilt an abandoned Brooklyn waterfront in Williamsburg. Without formal authority, capital, professional assistance, grand vision, consensus, or coordination with each other, these "vernacular" builders transformed a vacated waterfront railroad yard into a unique setting for recreation and creative endeavor. With the Manhattan skyline as its backdrop, the collapsing piers, eroded bulkhead, and remaining building foundations of the former Brooklyn Eastern District Terminal (BEDT) became the raw materials for various forms of waterside leisure and social spaces. Lacking predetermined rules governing its use, this waterfront evolved into the home turf for unusual and sometimes spectacular recreational, social, and creative subcultures. These included skateboarders who built a short-lived, but nationally renowned skatepark; a twenty-five-piece "public" marching band, fire performance troupes, and a variety of artists, photographers, and filmmakers. At the same time the site also served basic recreational needs of local residents. Collapsing piers became great places to catch fish, sunbathe, or take in the Manhattan skyline; the foundation of a demolished warehouse became an ideal place to practice music or skateboard; rubble-strewn earth became a compelling setting for film and fashion shoots; broken bulkhead became a beach; and thick patches of weeds dotted by ailanthus trees became a jungle. Drawing on a rich mix of documentary strategies including observation, ethnography, photography, and first-person narrative, Daniel Campo probes this accidental playground, allowing those who created it to share and examine their own narratives, perspectives, and conflicts. The multiple constituencies of this Williamsburg waterfront were surprisingly diverse, their stories colorful and provocative. When taken together, Campo argues, they suggest a radical reimagining of urban public space, the waterfront, and the practices by which they are created and maintained. The Accidental Playground, which treats readers to an utterly compelling story, is an exciting and distinctive contribution to the growing literature on the unplanned and the undesigned spaces and activities in cities today.

Manuel Lima's smash hit Visual Complexity is now available in paperback. This groundbreaking 2011 book—the first to combine a thorough history of information visualization with a detailed look at today's most innovative applications—clearly illustrates why making meaningful connections inside complex data networks has emerged as one of the biggest challenges in twenty-first-century design. From diagramming networks of friends on Facebook to depicting interactions among proteins in a human cell, Visual Complexity presents one hundred of the most interesting examples of informationvisualization by the field's leading practitioners.

This is the definitive - and hugely entertaining - history of Weirdo magazine, the legendary Robert Crumb humour comics anthology from the 1980s. Weirdo took risks, broke barriers, and seriously offended the faint hearted. Ground-breaking and iconoclastic, it was an antidote to the times, a cult favourite show case for the counterculture.

Looks at the features and history of several of the most renowned skate parks in the United States.