For more than a century, the term "Main Street" has conjured up nostalgic images of American small-town life. Representations exist all around us, from fiction and film to the architecture of shopping malls and Disneyland. All the while, the nation has become increasingly diverse, exposing tensions within this ideal. In The Death and Life of Main Street, Miles Orvell wrestles with the mythic allure of the small town in all its forms, illustrating how Americans continue to reinscribe these images on real places in order to forge consensus about inclusion and civic identity, especially in times of crisis. Orvell underscores the fact that Main Street was never what it seemed; it has always been much more complex than it appears, as he shows in his discussions of figures like Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Frank Capra, Thornton Wilder, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans. He argues that translating the overly tidy cultural metaphor into real spaces--as has been done in recent decades, especially in the new urbanist planned communities of Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Andres Duany--actually diminishes the communitarian ideals at the center of this nostalgic construct. Orvell investigates the way these tensions play out in a variety of cultural realms and explores the rise of literary and artistic traditions that deliberately challenge the tropes and assumptions of small-town ideology and life.

Margaret Jacobson was a sweet-natured girl who had dreams of becoming a teacher until she had a psychotic break in her teens, which sent her down a much darker path. Her Name Was Margaret traces Margaret's life from her childhood to her death as a homeless woman on the streets of Hamilton, Ontario. With meticulous research and deep compassion Denise Davy analyzed over 800 pages of medical records and conducted interviews with Margaret's friends and family, as well as those who worked in psychiatric care, to create this compelling portrait of a woman abandoned by society. Through the revolving door of psychiatric admissions to discharges to rundown boarding homes, Davy shows us the grim impact of deinstutionalization: patients spiralled inexorably toward homelessness and death as psychiatric beds were closed and patients were left to fend for themselves on the streets of cities across North America. Today there are more 235,000 homeless people in Canada annually and 35,000 who are homeless on any given night. Most of them are struggling with mental health issues. Margaret's story is a heartbreaking illustration of what happens in our society to our most vulnerable.

'An excellent and intelligent investigation of the realities of urban living that respond to no design or directive... This is a book about the nature of London itself' Peter Ackroyd, The Times A powerful exploration of the seedy side of Victorian London by one of our most promising young historians. In 1887 government inspectors were sent to investigate the Old Nichol, a notorious slum on the boundary of Bethnal Green parish, where almost 6,000 inhabitants were crammed into thirty or so streets of rotting dwellings and where the mortality rate ran at nearly twice that of the rest of Bethnal Green. Among much else they discovered that the decaying 100-year-old houses were some of the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords, who included peers of the realm, local politicians and churchmen. The Blackest Streets is set in a turbulent period of London's history when revolution was in the air. Award-winning historian Sarah Wise skilfully evokes the texture of life at that time, not just for the tenants but for those campaigning for change and others seeking to protect their financial interests. She recovers Old Nichol from the ruins of history and lays bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole which lay at the very heart of the Empire. A revelatory and prescient read about cities, class and inequality, the message at the heart of The Blackest Streets still resonates today.

for treble recorder and piano A light and airy piece for Christmas. The recorder line is simple and is accompanied by an equally accessible piano part.

In his masterful photo series Harvey Stein explores a country of incredible contrasts and contradictions.

Shining a light on the deadly health consequences of incarceration. Finalist in the PROSE Award for Best Book in Anthropology, Criminology, and Sociology by the Association of American Publishers Kalief Browder was 16 when he was arrested in the Bronx for allegedly stealing a backpack. Unable to raise bail and unwilling to plead guilty to a crime he didn't commit, Browder spent three years in New York's infamous Rikers Island jail—two in solitary confinement—while awaiting trial. After his case was dismissed in 2013, Browder returned to his family, haunted by his ordeal. Suffering through the lonely hell of solitary, Browder had been violently attacked by fellow prisoners and corrections officers throughout his incarceration. Consumed with depression, Browder committed suicide in 2015. He was just 22 years old. In Life and Death in Rikers Island, Homer Venters, the former chief medical officer for New York City's jails, explains the profound health risks associated with incarceration. From neglect and sexual abuse to blocked access to care and exposure to brutality, Venters details how jails are designed and run to create new health risks for prisoners—all while forcing doctors and nurses into complicity or silence. Pairing prisoner experiences with cutting-edge research into prison risk, Venters reveals the disproportionate extent to which the health risks of jail are meted out to those with behavioral health problems and people of color. He also presents compelling data on alternative strategies that can reduce health risks. This revelatory and groundbreaking book concludes with the author's analysis of the case for closing Rikers Island jails and his advice on how to do it for the good of the incarcerated.

The true story of an untrue story-- how the murder of a DNC political staffer spawned conspiracy theories, fanned the culture wars, and pitted one family against a media empire. In the small hours of June 16th, gunshots rang out and a young man lay bleeding and fatally wounded on a downtown Washington, DC, street. But who killed Seth Rich? When he was buried in his hometown, his rabbi declared: "There are no answers for a young man gunned down in the prime of his life". But the rabbi was wrong. There were in fact many answers, way too many. The police had a suspect but they could not find evidence to charge him, and into the void hurtled the howling mob. Within 36 hours Reddit had thrown up an explanation: "given his position & timing in politics ... Seth Rich was murdered by corrupt politicians for knowing too much information on election fraud". A month later Julian Assange hinted that Rich might have been the source for stolen DNC emails provided to Wikileaks and offered a $20,000 reward for information. An investigator claimed a Romanian hitman had killed Rich, and that the motive was a political coverup. If this sounds like a great News story then soon it was. Rich's family had viewed the first wild conjecture with morbid curiosity, but soon the story became turbocharged as FOX News began broadcasting segment after segment exploring the murder and the theories surrounding it, no matter how unfounded. Rolling Stone's Washington bureau chief, Andy Kroll, relives one of the foundational conspiracies at the heart of the conspiracy-theory industrial complex, one that would ensnare Hillary Clinton, a pizzeria in northwest DC, Alex Jones, the Drudge Report and a high-level cast of provocatuers from Laura Ingraham to Sean Hannity. He shows how one young aspiring twenty-six-year-old political staffer became a tragic victim of the culture wars, until his family determined that they would save his name, expose the lies and put an end to the distortions and deep web fantasies that had surrounded his death. This then, is the definitive, and true story of Seth Rich, and of those who tried to weaponize him in a war of words unlike any other.

"A deeply moving, funny, and brilliantly written account from one of India’s most original new voices." —Katherine Boo Like Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’s Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology, became a butcher, a tailor, and an electrician’s apprentice; now he is a homeless day laborer in the heart of old Delhi. How did he end up this way? In an astonishing debut, Aman Sethi brings him and his indelible group of friends to life through their adventures and misfortunes in the Old Delhi Railway Station, the harrowing wards of a tuberculosis hospital, an illegal bar made of cardboard and plywood, and into Beggars Court and back onto the streets. In a time of global economic strain, this is an unforgettable evocation of persistence in the face of poverty in one of the world’s largest cities. Sethi recounts Ashraf’s surprising life story with wit, candor, and verve, and A Free Man becomes a moving story of the many ways a man can be free.

Logavina Street was a microcosm of Sarajevo, a six-block-long history lesson. For four centuries, it existed as a quiet residential area in a charming city long known for its ethnic and religious tolerance. On this street of 240 families, Muslims and Christians, Serbs and Croats lived easily together, unified by their common identity as Sarajevans. Then the war tore it all apart. As she did in her groundbreaking work about North Korea, Nothing to Envy, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick tells the story of the Bosnian War and the brutal and devastating three-and-a-half-year siege of Sarajevo through the lives of ordinary citizens, who struggle with hunger, poverty, sniper fire, and shellings. Logavina Street paints this misunderstood war and its effects in vivid strokes—at once epic and intimate—revealing the heroism, sorrow, resilience, and uncommon faith of its people. With a new Introduction, final chapter, and Epilogue by the author

The brutally honest story of an emergency medical technician. At 18, Joseph Clark started working as an ambulance attendant to pay his way through college. For the next seven years he worked New York City's most dangerous neighborhoods as an emergency medical technician (EMT), dealing with the medical emergencies from drug overdoses, gang fights, car crashes and worse, all while juggling schoolwork and a personal life. His stories are a graphic portrayal of the life of an ambulance EMT. From dealing with a body that is frozen solid and trapped under a front porch to climbing into the burned-out wreck of a car to treat the seriously injured driver, Clark's stories are horrifying, poignant, touching and often filled with the dark humor that is so characteristic of the people who work under extreme stress. My Ambulance Education is a testament to the medical first responders who scramble to provide the on-the-spot care so vital to the survival of victims. EMTs struggle daily (and nightly) with emotional strain, sleep deprivation and, inevitably, burnout.