Twin Towers Los Angeles

Red brick. Cold steel. White concrete. These are the building blocks of Twin Towers. It is the largest mental health facility in the world. What happens inside? Who ends up as inmates? Who runs the facility? The book, Twin Towers Los Angeles, follows the life of Peter Jo for a year. Peter used to be a professional with an MBA from UCLA. He has experienced the best in life, wearing custom clothes, eating at posh restaurants and living in upscale neighborhoods. How does Peter go from living the dream to serving time in Twin Towers? He lives a mundane life in Pasadena. He then meets a woman, Anna. Who is she? Where does she come from? What does she want? Peter falls under Annas infl uence. Peter ends up breaking the law. His punishment is time in Twin Towers. In Twin Towers, Peter is faced with many challenges. The most important one is survival. Who can he trust? What is life really like inside the walls of Twin Towers? He quickly learns the rules and the politics that govern life inside with the many gangsters of Los Angeles. One wrong move can cost him his life. Besides the obstacles of jail, Peter has to deal with his mental illness. He sees and hears what others dont. Are they visions? Are they messages from a higher being? Does he see the future?

Black and Brown in Los Angeles is a timely and wide-ranging, interdisciplinary foray into the complicated world of multiethnic Los Angeles. The first book to focus exclusively on the range of relationships and interactions between Latinas/os and African Americans in one of the most diverse cities in the United States, the book delivers supporting evidence that Los Angeles is a key place to study racial politics while also providing the basis for broader discussions of multiethnic America. Students, faculty, and interested readers will gain an understanding of the different forms of cultural borrowing and exchange that have shaped a terrain through which African Americans and Latinas/os cross paths, intersect, move in parallel tracks, and engage with a whole range of aspects of urban living. Tensions and shared intimacies are recurrent themes that emerge as the contributors seek to integrate artistic and cultural constructs with politics and economics in their goal of extending simple paradigms of conflict, cooperation, or coalition. The book features essays by historians, economists, and cultural and ethnic studies scholars, alongside contributions by photographers and journalists working in Los Angeles.

Whenever the topic of large jails and public hospitals in urban America is raised, a single idea comes to mind. It is widely believed that because we as a society have dis-invested from public health, the sick and poor now find themselves within the purview of criminal justice institutions. In Redistributing the Poor, ethnographer and historical sociologist Armando Lara-Millán takes us into the day-to-day operations of running the largest hospital and jail system in the world and argues that such received wisdom is a drastic mischaracterization of the way that states govern urban poverty at the turn of the 21st century. Rather than focus on our underinvestment of health and overinvestment of criminal justice, his idea of "redistributing the poor" draws attention to how state agencies circulate people between different institutional spaces in such a way that generates revenue for some agencies, cuts costs for others, and projects illusions that services have been legally rendered. By centering the state's use of redistribution, Lara-Millán shows how certain forms of social suffering-the premature death of mainly poor, people of color-are not a result of the state's failure to act, but instead the necessary outcome of so-called successful policy.

Originally published: London: Allen Lane, 1971.

For thirty years, the twin towers of the World Trade Center soared above the New York City skyline, eventually becoming one of the most conspicuous symbolic structures in the world. They appeared in hundreds of films, from Godspell and Death Wish to Trading Places, Ghostbusters and The Usual Suspects. The politicians, architects and engineers who developed the towers sought to imbue them with a powerful visual presence. The resulting buildings provided filmmakers with imposing set pieces capable of conveying a range of moods and associations, from the sublime and triumphal to the sinister and paranoid. While they stood, they captured the imagination of the world with their enigmatic symbolism. In their dramatic destruction, they became icons of a history that is still being written. Here viewed in the context of popular cinema, the twin towers are emblematic of how architecture, film and narrative interact to express cultural aspirations and anxieties.

For too many of us, Latin America exists "below the fold," an echo barely heard beyond the roar of U.S. economics, politics, and culture; the source of little more than dance steps, mesmerizing soccer, spicy food, and questionable politics. But Latin America has been a vital part of the global community since the seventeenth century, when the Spanish silver peso became the world's first global currency instrument. Today it is home to six hundred million people and some of the fastest-growing economies on the planet. Latin America may not outshine or outspend the United States on the world stage anytime soon, but its voices will be heard. Its consumers, resources, and emigrants are already affecting us; they will be even bigger factors in our future. What if Latin America Ruled the World? deftly braids together the histories of North and South America from the exploits of Hernán Cortés to the political showmanship of Hugo Chávezand Evo Morales. Scholar Oscar Guardiola-Rivera is an ideal guide for a searching portrait of the Latin America that we rarely hear about.