Maximum City

A native of Bombay, Suketu Mehta gives us an insider’s view of this stunning metropolis. He approaches the city from unexpected angles, taking us into the criminal underworld of rival Muslim and Hindu gangs, following the life of a bar dancer raised amid poverty and abuse, opening the door into the inner sanctums of Bollywood, and delving into the stories of the countless villagers who come in search of a better life and end up living on the sidewalks. As each individual story unfolds, Mehta also recounts his own efforts to make a home in Bombay after more than twenty years abroad. Candid, impassioned, funny, and heartrending, Maximum City is a revelation of an ancient and ever-changing world.

Every year, U.S. casinos give away more than a billion dollars worth of amenities to customers in return for their gambling action. These giveaways, known as "comps" (short for complimentaries), range from parking and drinks to gourmet meals and airfare. Are you getting your share? From nickel slot players to $500 a hand blackjack high rollers, Comp City has shown tens of thousands of gamblers how to get free casino vacations.

Escalations in student violence continue throughout the nation, but inner-city schools are the hardest hit, with classrooms and corridors infected by the anger, aggression, and criminality endemic to street life. Technological surveillance, security personnel, and paramilitary control tactics to maintain order and safety are the common administrative response. Essential educational programs are routinely slashed from school budgets, even as the number of guards, cameras, and metal detectors continues to multiply. Based on years of frontline experience in New York's inner-city schools, Maximum Security demonstrates that such policing strategies are not only ineffectual, they divorce students and teachers from their ethical and behavioral responsibilities. Exploring the culture of violence from within, John Devine argues that the security system, with its uniformed officers and invasive high-tech surveillance, has assumed presumptive authority over students' bodies and behavior, negating the traditional roles of teachers as guardians and agents of moral instruction. The teacher is reduced to an information bureaucrat, a purveyor of technical knowledge, while the student's physical well-being and ethical actions are left to the suspect scrutiny of electronic devices and security specialists with no pedagogical mission, training, or interest. The result is not a security system at all, but an insidious institutional disengagement from the caring supervision of the student body. With uncompromising honesty, Devine provides a powerful portrayal of an educational system in crisis and bold new insight into the malignant culture of school violence.

From a noted journalist who has spent much of his life in Cairo, here is a dazzling cultural excavation of that most ancient, colorful, and multifaceted of cities. The seat of pharaohs and sultans, the prize of conquerors from Alexander to Saladin to Napoleon, Cairo--nicknamed "the Victorious"--has never ceased reinventing herself. With intimate knowlege, humor, and affection, Rodenbeck takes us on an insider's tour of the magnificent city: its backstreets and bazaars, its belly-dance theaters and hashish dens, its crowded slums and fashionable salons, its incomparably rich past and its challenging future. Cairo: The City Victorious is a unique blend of travel and history, an epic, resonant work that brings one of the world's great metropolises to life in all its dusty, chaotic beauty.

Hawk, the daughter of Maximum Ride, teams with her mother up to help save their beloved but dangerous city in this action-packed thriller. For Hawk, being a hero weighs heavily on her wings. In the City of the Dead, life happens in the shadows. That's why a war is brewing against an enemy no one can see. Hawk and Maximum Ride never back down from a conflict, or from each other, and they argue more than they agree. But as the dead begin to outnumber the living, a mother's experience and a daughter's instinct can make for one powerful arsenal.

In this dark dystopian tale, 17-year-old Hawk is growing up hard and fast in post-apocalyptic New York City—until a perilous destiny forces her to take flight and protect her home. Where is Maximum Ride? Ten years ago a girl with wings fought to save the world. But then she disappeared. Now she's just a fading legend, remembered only in stories. Hawk doesn't know her real name. She doesn't know who her family was, or where they went. The only thing she remembers is that she was told to wait on a specific street corner, at a specific time, until her parents came back for her. She stays under the radar to survive . . . until a destiny that's perilously close to Maximum Ride's forces her to take flight. Someone is coming for her. But it's not a rescue mission. It's an execution.

An impassioned defence of global immigration from the acclaimed author of Maximum City. Drawing on his family's own experience emigrating from India to Britain and America, and years of reporting around the world, Suketu Mehta subjects the worldwide anti-immigrant backlash to withering scrutiny. The West, he argues, is being destroyed not by immigrants but by the fear of immigrants. He juxtaposes the phony narratives of populist ideologues with the ordinary heroism of labourers, nannies and others, from Dubai to New York, and explains why more people are on the move today than ever before. As civil strife and climate change reshape large parts of the planet, it is little surprise that borders have become so porous. This Land is Our Land also stresses the destructive legacies of colonialism and global inequality on large swathes of the world. When today's immigrants are asked, 'Why are you here?', they can justly respond, 'We are here because you were there.' And now that they are here, as Mehta demonstrates, immigrants bring great benefits, enabling countries and communities to flourish. Impassioned, rigorous, and richly stocked with memorable stories and characters, This Land Is Our Land is a timely and necessary intervention, and literary polemic of the highest order.

The definitive oral history—with a foreword by Lou Reed—of the center of New York’s 1960s and ’70s underground culture. From its opening in December 1965 on Park Avenue South, Max’s Kansas City, a hybrid restaurant, bar, nightclub, and art gallery, was the boisterous meeting spot for famous—or soon-to-be-famous—figures in New York’s underground art, music, literary, film, and fashion scenes. Max’s regulars included Andy Warhol (and his superstars such as Viva, Ultra Violet, Edie Sedgwick, Gerard Malanga, Holly Woodlawn, and Candy Darling), Mick Jagger, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, Jane Fonda, and dozens more. A hotbed of drugs, sex, and creative collaboration, Max’s was the place to see and be seen among the city’s cultural elite for nearly two decades. With reminiscences from the likes of Alice Cooper, Bebe Buell, Betsey Johnson, Leee Black Childers, Holly Woodlawn, and John Chamberlain, along with Max’s owner Mickey Ruskin and several waitresses and bartenders, this vivid oral history evokes an unforgettable place where a spontaneous striptease, a brawl over the meaning of art, and an early performance by the Velvet Underground were all possibilities on any given night. High on Rebellion dazzles with rare photos and other Max’s memorabilia, and firsthand accounts of legendary nights, chance encounters, romances sparked and extinguished, and stars being born.