Here are 100 books that Excluded fans have personally recommended if you like
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My passion from a young age has always been cities, the most fascinating of human creations. This has led me to work on them as an urban designer to help shape and guide them. I have been privileged to work on amazing projects in cities as diverse as s diverse as Toronto, Hartford, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Montréal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, St. Louis, Washington DC, Paris, Detroit, Saint Paul and San Juan Puerto Rico. On the way, I met remarkable people, learned valuable lessons, and had the opportunity to collaborate with great colleagues. I have written about these experiences in three books and had the opportunity to share my passion through teaching. I have chosen some of the books that have most inspired me on my journey.
This eye-opening book was a revelation to me as a young student of architecture. It provided the keys to how cities really work. Its observations are as relevant and fresh today as they were when it was published in 1961. For me and many in my generation, it helped us to see and appreciate the organic, human-centered dynamics of neighborhoods, introducing the powerful concept of “organized complexity,” which made sense of things we saw but failed to understand.
I met Jane in Toronto in 1968 where she became a lifelong friend and mentor until her death in 2006. It remains a foundational text for me in understanding urban life and my life’s work.
In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a neighborhood that was stable, safe, and stimulating. After my freshman year in college, I signed up for an “urban experience” in Detroit. It turned out to be the summer of the Detroit riots. I woke up to U.S. Army vehicles rumbling into the park across from my apartment. Over the next month, I witnessed the looting and burning of whole neighborhoods. I remember thinking: what a waste! Why are we throwing away neighborhoods like Kleenex? I have been trying to answer that question ever since.
In an age of global warming, Klinenberg’s study of how Chicago did (and did not) cope with a horrible heat wave that hit the city in 1995, killing 739 residents, is more relevant than ever.
He shows how death rates varied hugely across neighborhoods, not so much based on socioeconomic status but on the cohesiveness of the community. In places where neighbors looked in on each other the death rate was lower.
Strong neighborhoods do not just enhance our lives, they can save lives.
On Thursday, July 13, 1995, Chicagoans awoke to a blistering day on which the temperature would eventually climb to 106 degrees. It was the start of an unprecedented heat wave that would last a full week - and leave more than seven hundred people dead. Rather than view these deaths as the inevitable consequence of natural disaster, sociologist Eric Klinenberg decided to figure out why so many people - and, specifically, so many elderly, poor, and isolated people - died, and to identify the social and political failures that together made the heat wave so deadly. Published to coincide with…
I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a neighborhood that was stable, safe, and stimulating. After my freshman year in college, I signed up for an “urban experience” in Detroit. It turned out to be the summer of the Detroit riots. I woke up to U.S. Army vehicles rumbling into the park across from my apartment. Over the next month, I witnessed the looting and burning of whole neighborhoods. I remember thinking: what a waste! Why are we throwing away neighborhoods like Kleenex? I have been trying to answer that question ever since.
The civil rights movement was a great triumph, but I’ve always suspected that we lost something along the way–or maybe this solution just created new problems.
Lance Freeman shows how the pre-civil rights ghetto, enforced by racist laws, was often a hothouse of Black culture, Black-controlled institutions, and Black power. The contemporary Black ghetto, largely abandoned by the middle class, is a place of concentrated poverty and despair.
We never want to go back to Jim Crow, but we need to address the concentrated poverty that is eviscerating many neighborhoods. Rejecting simplistic understandings of gentrification, Freeman shows that Black gentrification, under the right circumstances, could make Black spaces havens again. Freeman is not only smart, I think, but brave in challenging conventional wisdom.
The black ghetto is thought of as a place of urban decay and social disarray. Like the historical ghetto of Venice, it is perceived as a space of confinement, one imposed on black America by whites. It is the home of a marginalized underclass and a sign of the depth of American segregation. Yet while black urban neighborhoods have suffered from institutional racism and economic neglect, they have also been places of refuge and community.
In A Haven and a Hell, Lance Freeman examines how the ghetto shaped black America and how black America shaped the ghetto. Freeman traces the…
Trapped in our world, the fae are dying from drugs, contaminants, and hopelessness. Kicked out of the dark fae court for tainting his body and magic, Riasg only wants one thing: to die a bit faster. It’s already the end of his world, after all.
I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a neighborhood that was stable, safe, and stimulating. After my freshman year in college, I signed up for an “urban experience” in Detroit. It turned out to be the summer of the Detroit riots. I woke up to U.S. Army vehicles rumbling into the park across from my apartment. Over the next month, I witnessed the looting and burning of whole neighborhoods. I remember thinking: what a waste! Why are we throwing away neighborhoods like Kleenex? I have been trying to answer that question ever since.
Benjamin Looker shows how an idealized image of neighborhoods animated cultural and political identities from World War II to the Reagan era.
I was particularly fascinated by his treatment of the 1970s when “power to the neighborhoods” was a rallying cry for both the left and the right. Jimmy Carter used neighborhood rhetoric to mobilize urban ethnics in 1976, while Ronald Reagan outdid him in 1980, using the gauzy rhetoric of neighborhood empowerment to mask his lack of support for federal policies to help neighborhoods.
This incredibly well-researched scholarly book is wonderfully written and sparkling with insights.
Despite the pundits who have written its epitaph and the latter-day refugees who have fled its confines for the half-acre suburban estate, the city neighborhood has endured as an idea central to American culture. In A Nation of Neighborhoods, Benjamin Looker presents us with the city neighborhood as both an endless problem and a possibility. Looker investigates the cultural, social, and political complexities of the idea of "neighborhood" in postwar America and how Americans grappled with vast changes in their urban spaces from World War II to the Reagan era. In the face of urban decline, competing visions of the…
I was first introduced to George Orwell on 30 October 1969 when I bought the Penguin Road to Wigan Pier at Sussex University bookshop. The light blue sticker on the inside verifies time and place. The price shows that I was willing to fork out as much as 4 shillings, (or two days worth of cigarettes) for one of the most enduring friendships of my life.
If you are going to read Orwell you need to know something about what Mckibbin calls the “fundamental mentalities and structures” of English social and political life. This is the best, covering Orwell’s life-span. These were the years when England first began to see itself as ‘democratic’, and yet, “the great mass of the English people was unmoved, or unmoved directly, by the cultures of the country’s intellectual elites”. Enter George Orwell.
Ross McKibbin investigates the ways in which 'class culture' characterized English society, and intruded into every aspect of life, during the period from 1918 to the mid-1950s. He demonstrates the influence of social class within the mini 'cultures' which together constitute society: families and family life, friends and neighbours, the workplace, schools and colleges, religion, sexuality, sport, music, film, and radio. Dr McKibbin considers the ways in which language was used (both spoken and written) to define one's social grouping, and how far changes occurred to language and culture more generally as a result of increasing American influence. He assesses…
My mother was the child of immigrants from Finland with grade-school educations who grew up in a small Alaskan town with no roads in or out. She came down to the “lower 48” during the Second World War to work her way through the University of Washington, where she met my father. He was a multigenerational American with two college-educated parents. His mother graduated from Whitman College in 1919 and looked down on my mother as a child of poorly educated immigrants. She was also openly hostile toward Catholics, Blacks, and Jews and probably didn’t think much of Finns either. Witnessing my grandmother’s disdain for minorities and the poor including my mother, I learned about racism and class prejudice firsthand. But I am my mother’s son, and I resented my grandmother’s self-satisfied posturing. Therefore I’ve always been on the side of the underdog and made it my business to learn all that I could about how inequalities are produced and perpetuated in the United States, and to do all I can to make the world a fairer, more egalitarian place.
In addition to neighborhoods, Americans also experience rampant inequalities across other social settings such as families, schools, and peer networks. These settings define the ecological context within which humans develop and each “sphere of influence” determines the development trajectories of people as the move from childhood, through adolescence, and into adulthood. This book examines how each of these spheres affects human development at different stages of the life course among White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian young people in the United States to produce the racial and class inequalities that characterize contemporary American society.
The black-white divide has long haunted the United States as a driving force behind social inequality. Yet, the civil rights movement, the increase in immigration, and the restructuring of the economy in favor of the rich over the last several decades have begun to alter the contours of inequality. Spheres of Influence, co-authored by noted social scientists Douglas S. Massey and Stefanie Brodmann, presents a rigorous new study of the intersections of racial and class disparities today. Massey and Brodmann argue that despite the persistence of potent racial inequality, class effects are drastically transforming social stratification in America. This data-intensive…
Everyday Medical Miracles
by
Joseph S. Sanfilippo (editor),
Frontiers of Women from the healthcare perspective. A compilation of 60 true short stories written by an extensive array of healthcare providers, physicians, and advanced practice providers.
All designed to give you, the reader, a glimpse into the day-to-day activities of all of us who provide your health care. Come…
I was born on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin. Raised during the often troubled, often wonderful decade of the 1960s, I learned to stand up for what I thought was right. I joined forces with my beautiful wife during our high school years, and together, we ran away to build our own life aided by the Oneida principle of “looking ahead seven generations.” Encountering many obstacles along the way, including a poetry professor who said that what I wrote wasn’t poetry and a theater professor who said that if what I wrote was any good it was already being done. Still, I continue to write.
I loved this book because the author was able to share the racist encounters that she had to deal with and the racist encounters all minorities deal with at one time or another. This book puts a new intellectual perspective on those types of happenings. They also illustrated many racist encounters that are all too common and yet hard to believe. A must-read for all.
THE TIME NONFICTION BOOK OF THE YEAR | #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
"Powerful and timely ... I cannot recommend it strongly enough" - Barack Obama
From one of America's most celebrated and insightful writers, the moving, eye-opening bestseller about what lies hidden under the surface of ordinary lives
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human…
I grew up with a graveyard in my backyard: the historic Schenck-Covenhoven Graveyard in Penns Neck, New Jersey, just outside Princeton. This small square plot, filled with the 18th- and 19th-century graves of local families, served as the perfect playground for hide-and-seek and cops-and-robbers with my friends. Working as a tour guide and volunteer at Laurel Hill Cemetery for nearly thirty years, I fell in love with its rich history and its architectural and horticultural beauty. As I grow older, I have come to value cemeteries for their role as both a meeting place and a mediator between the living and the dead.
January 1901: Queen Victoria is dead and her subjects nervously await a new king and a new century. Two families—the aristocratic Colemans and middle-class Waterhouses—meet at their adjoining plots in London’s elegant Highgate Cemetery. Their five-year-old daughters form an immediate bond. The lives of the two families entwine over the next decade as they struggle with social change, betrayal, and grief. Surprisingly, Highgate offers a release from the confining decorum of their everyday lives. The two girls play among the graves with a gravedigger’s son, while adult members of their households indulge in forbidden liaisons there. Chevalier’s crisp prose creates rich character portraits and vivid historical scenes with only a few strokes. This slim novel resonated in my mind long after I finished it.
'Sex and death meet again in [a] marvellous evocation of Edwardian England' Daily Mail
The girl reminded me of my favourite chocolates, whipped hazelnut creams, and I knew just from looking at her that I wanted her for my best friend.
Queen Victoria is dead. In January 1901, the day after her passing, two very different families visit neighbouring graves in a London cemetery. The traditional Waterhouses revere the late Queen where the Colemans have a more modern outlook, but both families are appalled by the friendship that springs up between their respective daughters.
I am a lover of romance. I feel love is one feeling that no one can get rid of; it is one of the elements that can patch up hurt, and it is also an element that can be expressed in many different forms. Having a wide imagination also adds to this passion. I grew up watching Disney movies such as Ariel and FairyTopia. Not only do I draw my inspiration from movies but also from books. I love reading romance books, the image we create in our mind can take us beyond some images created in movies. It takes us to a world we normally don't see in real life.
Jane Austin is a classical writer of romance and a perfect combination of well-written English. The love Mr Darcy had for Elizabeth was explained with passion through the English language.
It addressed issues within that time, and the beauty of a girl, as well as the strength of a man, was portrayed well. Jane Austin has other books, but my favorite was this one.
Jane Austen's best-loved novel is an unforgettable story about the inaccuracy of first impressions, the power of reason, and above all the strange dynamics of human relationships and emotions.
Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is illustrated by Hugh Thomson and features an afterword by author and critic, Henry Hitchings.
A tour de force of wit and sparkling dialogue, Pride and…
Karl's War is a coming-of-age-meets-thriller set in Germany on the eve of Hitler coming to power. Karl – a reluctant poster boy for the Nazis – meets Jewish Ben and his world is up-turned.
Ben and his family flee to France. Karl joins the German army but deserts and finds…
Bad boys in young adult romance have always been one of my favorite tropes to read. For seven years, I facilitated a poetry workshop with teens in a juvenile detention center and got to hear their stories—the heartbreak, the challenges, and the triumphs under all that bad boy façade. My memoir, Kids in Orange: Voices from Juvenile Detention, is about the workshops and helped me understand both myself as a writer and the “bad boys” who wrote poetry each week. There are a lot of complexities to bad boy characters and the most satisfying stories are the ones where the bad boys redeem themselves and find love.
Perfect Chemistry is one of the books I read as a model for writing the character relationship between my young adult novel characters, Shantel and Christopher. Alex is the perfectly crafted bad boy character who falls in love with Brittany and in the process is changed with how he sees his life.
From the New York Times bestselling author Simone Elkeles comes an epic love story like no other . . . First in the gripping PERFECT CHEMISTRY series, this is the next addictive read for fans of Anna Todd's AFTER series, and Caroline Kepnes's YOU.
When Brittany Ellis walks into chemistry class on the first day of senior year, she has no clue that her carefully created 'perfect' life is about to unravel before her eyes. Forced to be lab partners with Alex Fuentes, a gang member from the other side of town, Brittany finds herself having to protect everything she's…
