Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Shop for boho chic in post-hippie Haight, walk in the path of prisoners on Alcatraz, enjoy a pint of Anchor, then leave your heart in a Mission taqueria. Filled with insider favorites and laced with tales of the city, this smart and sassy guide takes you on a joyride through the streets of San Francisco. POUND THE PAVEMENT - handy cross-referenced color maps and seven detailed tours steer you to the... (more)

The Ghost Map

by Steven Johnson

A thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London-and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world. From the dynamic thinker routinely compared to Malcolm Gladwell, E. O. Wilson, and James Gleick, The Ghost Map is a riveting page-turner with a real-life historical hero that... (more)

The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe

The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe

by Charles Nicholl

In 1593 the brilliant but controversial young playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in a Deptford lodging house. The circumstances were shady. Nicholls penetrates four centuries of obscurity to reveal a complex story of entrapment and betrayal. Winner of the Crime Writer's Gold Dagger Award for a nonfiction thriller.

The Alchemist

by Ben Jonson

This edition brings together Jonson's four great comedies Volpone, Epicene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair. The texts of these plays have all been newly edited for this volume, and are presented with modernized spelling. Stage directions have been added to help actors and directors reconstruct the play the way it would have been performed in the seventeenth century, and the introduction, notes, and glossary... (more)

Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

Learning from Las Vegas - Revised Edition: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form

by Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown

"Their insight and analysis, reasoned back through the history of style and symbolism and forward to the recognition of a new kind of building that responds directly to speed, mobility, the superhighway and changing life styles, is the kind of art history and theory that is rarely produced. The rapid evolution of modern architecture from Le Corbusier to Brazil to Miami to the roadside motel in a brief 40-year... (more)

The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (A Contract With God, A Life Force, Dropsie Avenue)

The Contract with God Trilogy: Life on Dropsie Avenue (A Contract With God, A Life Force, Dropsie Avenue)

by Will Eisner

The legendary graphic novel and the sequels that launched an art form. WITH GRAPHIC NARRATIVE that "was closer to the writing of Bernard Malamud or Isaac Bashevis Singer than any comic art which had preceded it" ( The Economist), A Contract with God , originally published in 1978, was the first graphic novel: the prototype— along with Life Force and Dropsie Avenue —for such seminal works as Maus and... (more)

London: A Social History (A "New York Times" Notable Book 1995)

London: A Social History (A "New York Times" Notable Book 1995)

by Roy Porter

This dazzling and yet intimate book is the first modern one-volume history of London from Roman times to the present. An extraordinary city, London grew from a backwater in the Classical age into an important medieval city, a significant Renaissance urban center, and a modern colossus. Roy Porter paints a detailed landscape--from the grid streets and fortresses of Julius Caesar and William the Conqueror to the... (more)

Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty

Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War on Poverty

by Annelise Orleck

In Storming Caesars Palace, historian Annelise Orleck tells the compelling story of how a group of welfare mothers built one of this country’s most successful antipoverty programs. Declaring “We can do it and do it better,” these women proved that poor mothers are the real experts on poverty. In 1972 they founded Operation Life, which was responsible for many firsts for the poor in Las Vegas—the first library,... (more)

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld

The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld

by Herbert Asbury

Published to coincide with the release of Martin Scorsese's film, Gangs of New York, starring Leonard DiCaprio, The Gangs of New York has long been hand-passed among its cult readership. It is a tour through a now unrecognizable city of abysmal poverty and habitual violence cobbled, as Luc Sante has written, from legend, memory, police records, the self-aggrandizements of aging crooks, popular journalism, and... (more)

The Country and the City

by Raymond Williams

As a brilliant survey of English literature in terms of changing attitudes towards country and city, Williams' highly-acclaimed study reveals the shifting images and associations between these two traditional poles of life throughout the major developmental periods of English culture.

The Uglies: Book 2

Pretties

by Scott Westerfeld

Gorgeous. Popular. Perfect. Perfectly wrong. Tally has finally become pretty. Now her looks are beyond perfect, her clothes are awesome, her boyfriend is totally hot, and she's completely popular. It's everything she's ever wanted. But beneath all the fun -- the nonstop parties, the high-tech luxury, the total freedom -- is a nagging sense that something's wrong. Something important. Then a message from Tally's... (more)

The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (Penguin Classics)

The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (Penguin Classics)

by Thomas Nash

Written in the late sixteenth century, at the pinnacle of the English Renaissance, the rich and ingenious works of Thomas Nashe uniquely reveal the ambivant nature of the Elizabethan era. Mingling the devout and the bawdy, scholarship and slang, they express throughout an irrepressible, inexhaustible wit and an astonishing command of language. This collection of Nashe's finest works includes "The Unfortunate... (more)

City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction

City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction

by David MacAulay

Text and black and white illustrations show how the Romans planned and constructed their cities for the people who lived within them.

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Weir of Hermiston (Oxford World's Classics)

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Weir of Hermiston (Oxford World's Classics)

by Emma Letley

This volume includes Stevenson's famous spine-chilling thriller Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as Weir of Hermiston, a brilliant autobiographical portrayal of a father-son relationship.

Volpone: Or, The fox (London medieval and Renaissance series)

Volpone: Or, The fox (London medieval and Renaissance series)

by David Bevington, Peter Hollindale

Renaissance comedy, first performed in 1605. Includes complete text in modernized English, critical and explanatory notes and Introduction. From the Yale Ben Jonson edition.

Fortune Is a River: Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelliªs Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History

Fortune Is a River: Leonardo Da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelliªs Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History

by Roger D. Masters

In the tradition of the New York Times bestselling Longitude comes a popular history that reveals the little known story of what happened when two of the world's most brilliant minds met. Italy, the year 1502. Leonardo da Vinci, engineer and possible spy in the court of Cesare Borgia, crosses paths with Niccol Machiavelli, at that time Florentine ambassador. The two men formed a friendship, and joined... (more)

Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England

Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England

by Judith Flanders

"<Flanders> knows what we want to know and is thoroughly engaging, undidactic company."--Katherine A. Powers, Boston Sunday Globe Nineteenth-century Britain was then the world's most prosperous nation, yet Victorians would bury meat in earth and wring sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. Such drudgery was routine for the parents of people still living, but the knowledge of it has passed as... (more)

The Roaring Girl

by Thomas Middleton

This Jacobean city comedy is a curiosity in that it presents a real-life character, the notorious cross-dresser Moll Frith, who probably was among the first audiences of 'her' play before she was taken up for public misconduct. Middleton and Dekker's 'roaring girl' may outrage her society with her pipe, bluster and swagger, but she turns out to be the moral centre of the play. Her code of honour leads her to... (more)

The Tamer Tamed; or, The Woman's Prize (Revels Student Editions)

The Tamer Tamed; or, The Woman's Prize (Revels Student Editions)

by John Fletcher

This is the first edition for students and general readers of this pro-woman reply to Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew by a playwright (John Fletcher) who was more admired than Shakespeare in the seventeenth century. A unique and essential companion to the numerous textbook editions of Shakespeare's play, The Tamer Tamed provides exciting new material for current debates about the history of gender,... (more)

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Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

by Erik Larson

by Tom Downs