Great Reads for 2010
“The Cultural Creatives” – Ray & Anderson
In this landmark book, the authors draw upon 13 years of survey research studies on over 100,000 Americans, plus over 100 focus groups and dozens of depth interviews. They tell who the Cultural Creatives are, and the fascinating story of their emergence over the last generation, using vivid examples and engaging personal stories to describe the values and lifestyles that make this subculture distinctive.
“Livable Cities?” – Evans
This book explores the linked issues of livelihood and ecological sustainability in major cities of the developing and transitional world. Livable Cities? identifies important strategies for collective solutions by showing how political alliances among local communities, nongovernmental organizations, and public agencies can help ordinary citizens live better lives.
“Place Matters” – Dreier, Mollenkopf & Swanstrom
In Place Matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-First Century, Peter Dreier, John Mollenkopf, and Todd Swanstrom document the proliferation of economic segregation and assert that economy segregation is growing within and between different regions, metropolitan and otherwise. Such economic segregation is having adverse effects on the quality of life, especially for the poor, who tend to belong to ethnic and/or racial minorities and who live in generally decaying central cities.
“City” – Rae
With a novelist’s eye for telling detail, Douglas Rae depicts the features that contributed most to city life in the early “urbanist” decades of the twentieth century. Rae’s subject is New Haven, Connecticut, but the lessons he draws apply to many American cities.
“Race, Neighborhoods and Community Power” – Kraus
Kraus examines the causes and effects of political decisions involving other major development projects as well as the private housing market. The implications of the findings are that rather than being mainly the result of macroeconomic change, the development of concentrated urban poverty has, to a large extent, been shaped by the local political process.
“Neighborhood Government” – Kotler
Kotler discovered “a movement for local control” across America. In the poorest parts of US cities, people were coming together to change their lives in a tangible, political sense. They were demanding the transfer of political authority to institutions they directly controlled, and were using that democratic power to pass their own laws and control rents, prices, banks, taxation, schools, housing and welfare programs.
“ZEN and the Art of Making a Living” – Boldt
If one is searching for a book not necessarily about “getting a job” but about discovering one’s life work and purpose then “Zen and the Art of Making a Living” is not only a fine addition to your library but a book that can transform your life. The book does not concern itself with Zen per se. Its breadth is amazing and it pulls from diverse sources of wisdom spanning the arts, philosophy, all religions, anthropology, science, etc.
