Growing Up Underground

An entertaining coming-of-age memoir from Steven Heller, award-winning designer, writer, and former senior art director at the New York Times. Featuring 100 color photographs, Growing Up Underground takes readers on a visually inspired look back on being at the center of New York's youth culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Steven Heller's memoir is no chronological trek through the hills and valleys of his comparatively "normal" life, but instead, a coming-of-age tale whereby, with luck and circumstance, he found himself in curious and remarkable places at critical times during the 1960s and ‘70s in New York City. Heller's delightful account of his life between the ages of 16 and 26 shows his ambitious journey from the start of his illustrious career as a graphic designer, cartoonist, and writer. Follow his journey through stints at the New York Review of Sex, Screw, and the New York Free Press, until he became the youngest art director (and occasional illustrator) for the New York Times Op-Ed page at age twenty-three.

From beloved indie musician Andrew McMahon comes a searingly honest and beautifully written memoir about the challenges and triumphs of his life and career, as seen through the lens of his personal connection to three pianos. Andrew McMahon grew up in sunny Southern California as a child prodigy, learning to play piano and write songs at a very early age, stunning schoolmates and teachers alike with his gift for performing and his unique ability to emotionally connect with audiences. McMahon would go on to become the lead singer and songwriter for Something Corporate and Jack's Mannequin, and to release his debut solo album, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, in 2014. But behind this seemingly optimistic and quintessentially American story of big dreams come true lies a backdrop of overwhelming challenges that McMahon has faced—from a childhood defined by his father's struggle with addiction to his very public battle with leukemia in 2005 at the age of twenty-three, as chronicled in the intensely personal documentary Dear Jack. Overcoming those odds, McMahon has found solace and hope in the things that matter most, including family, the healing power of music and the one instrument he's always turned to: his piano. Three Pianos takes readers on a beautifully rendered and bitter-sweet American journey, one filled with inspiration, heartbreak, and an unwavering commitment to shedding our past in order to create a better future.

John Hazlett's engaging study of writers from the 1960s demonstrates the ways in which the idea of the generation has affected autobiographical writing in this century. Autobiographers from the sixties claim to speak on behalf of all members of their generation. However, each writer presents a unique political and personal agenda.

Why is the Victoria Line so hot? What is an Electrical Multiple Unit? Is it really possible to ride from King's Cross to King's Cross on the Circle line? The London Underground is the oldest, most sprawling and illogical metropolitan transport system in the world, the result of a series of botch-jobs and improvisations.Yet it transports over one billion passengers every year - and this figure is rising. It is iconic, recognised the world over, and loved and despised by Londoners in equal measure. Blending reportage, humour and personal encounters, Andrew Martin embarks on a wonderfully engaging social history of London's underground railway system (which despite its name, is in fact fifty-five per cent overground). Underground, Overground is a highly enjoyable, witty and informative history of everything you need to know about the Tube.

This ethnographic study looks at teenagers trapped in poverty--how some succeed in the struggle to get out and others finally give up trying. It is an outgrowth of interviews with some 900 teens in New York City, Cleveland, Louisville, and Meridian, Mississippi. The neighborhoods where they live are socially and racially diverse. Among them are white areas slding into poverty as traditional blue-collar jobs in smokestack industries fade away, and black and Hispanic neighborhoods where chronic unemployment has long been the prevailing tradition and fact of life. Based on the teenagers' own accounts, the book describes their experiences with working and seeking work, achievements in school and athletics, family life, and the positive influences of their peers and adult mentors. It also details the negative choices that tend to make poverty a life sentence: prostitution and street hustles, pregnancy and early parenthood, gang membership and criminal outlets, drugs and withdrawal into despair. Still, hope is an unquenchable attribute of youth, and it bubbles up in this book as the authors show how much these teenagers seek to do for themselves in exercising their limited options.

Young Oliver Diplexito and his family's trusted valet, Mr. Scant, live a comfortable life, thwarting robberies and getting home in time for tea. But when arch anarchist Aurelian Binns returns, Oliver and his mentor soon feel the heat. After Aurelian steals a priceless diamond from the Tower of London, it's up to Diplexito and Scant to defend king and country. And when an old ally of Mr. Scant's emerges—only to side with Binns—the betrayal sends the heroes spinning. So begins a chase that will take Oliver and Mr. Scant all around the globe. As danger draws nearer and secrets emerge, Oliver starts to wonder—who's truly in the wrong?