Titoli in Urbana

Chris Bathum was a respected therapist, addiction specialist, and founder of one of the fastest-growing rehabilitation chains in America. But Bathum was a total fraud: he was a homicidal meth-head with a history of sexually abusing his patients, scamming insurance companies, and eliminating whistle-blowers. Like Rose Stahl. But this intended victim would be his last. Stahl would risk her life to bring down the monster she and so many other people in need had once trusted for their salvation.

Like Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’ Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage - an intimate portrait of an invisible man. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology in college, and after college he learned how to repair television sets, cut suit lengths, and slice chicken. He has lived in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Surat, and Patna, but this evening he is stoned on a street in Sadar Bazaar, in North Delhi. The morning shall bring hangovers, whiskey breakfasts, and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf.

This is the story of an unforgivable con man. Vulnerable families were his prey. His promise was an impossible dream and a lie. Peter Candlewood understood the system. That’s how he could commute prison sentences and reunite hopeless families with incarcerated loved ones. For a price. Except there was no Candlewood. No hope. Just a lowly Texas con artist who bet on the desperate - and won. And he wasn’t working alone. The multimillion-dollar deception cost the betrayed more than their savings.

The crisscrossing stories of Mark, a white devout Christian who sells his suburban home to move to Baltimore’s inner city, and Nicole, a Black mother determined to leave West Baltimore for the suburbs, chronicle how the region became so deeply segregated and why these fault lines persist today.

In Those Who Wander, Vivian Ho delves deep into a rising subculture that’s changing the very fabric of her city and all of urban America. Moving beyond the disheartening statistics, she gives voices to these young people - victims of abuse, failed foster care, mental illness, and drug addiction. She also doesn’t ignore the threat they pose to themselves and to others as a dangerous dark side emerges. With alarming urgency, she asks what can be done to save the next generation of America’s vagabond youth.

One prisoner’s ninety-year murder conviction becomes another prisoner’s crusade in this ongoing true account of an unlikely friendship forged behind bars and the enduring power of hope. For seventeen years and counting, Robert Chattler has made good on his promise to help exonerate his former cellmate, Lee Harris, who he believes was baited and duped by Chicago PD and buried by the false testimony of a bribed witness. In this emotional story of courage and trust, suspicion and sacrifice, Tori Marlan reveals the uncanny friendship powering an impassioned fight for justice.

After the fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald by a white police officer, Chicagoans demanded change. Can a new state’s attorney, the first black woman to hold the position, bring real reform to a broken system? With a brick on her desk from the Cabrini-Green housing project where she spent her childhood, Kim Foxx must adapt her hard-won ideals to the realities of criminal justice in Chicago. In this intimate narrative by award-winning author Steve Bogira, Foxx reveals: “My mother taught me how to be a hustler. Hustle in the sense of work hard, grind - find a way out of no way.”

More than two decades after Darrell Cannon was tortured into a false confession of murder, he was finally released from prison with hardly an apology. He wasn’t the only one with a story to tell. Award-winning author Natalie Y. Moore reveals the fight for justice and reparations engineered by Chicago’s Black People Against Police Torture movement. More than one hundred African Americans were brutalized by Chicago Police Department Commander Jon Burge’s sadistic, state-sanctioned “interrogation” ring that operated within the department for decades.

It’s easy to get lost in Chicago’s Cook County Jail, the size of seventy-two football fields. For many released into the harsh elements beyond the walls, it can be impossible to find their way home. This haunting and powerful narrative reveals the intentionally disorienting tactics of the system and how the punishments meted out to prisoners, their families, and even innocent victims extend beyond the cages. Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve, the award-winning author of Crook Country, exposes the moral, spiritual, legal, and psychological wasteland - inside and out - of the nation’s largest jail.

When a middle-class kid from the suburbs was caught using Facebook to distribute firearms bought legally at Indiana gun shows to notorious gangsters across the border - was he a kingpin or a scapegoat? David Lewisbey received perhaps the harshest sentence ever in a gun-trafficking trial. A college student from the suburban outskirts of Chicago, he allegedly embodied the enterprising swagger of his favorite rap lyrics, moving weapons for stacks of cash. John H. Richardson tours Chicago’s gun-soaked South Side with Lewisbey’s clientele and meets with the “Big Man” himself to unpack the truth.

Childhood friends from Trinidad, Colin Warner and Carl King grew into men on opposite sides of prison bars after Colin was arrested for murder in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. With no evidence against him, Colin was wrongfully convicted and wrongfully imprisoned for more than two decades. But time and walls could not break the friends' bond. Carl's extraordinary resolve, sacrifice, and courage were Colin's last rays of hope in a harrowing struggle for freedom and justice.

Shawn Harrington returned to Marshall High School as an assistant coach years after appearing as a player in the iconic basketball documentary film Hoop Dreams. In January of 2014, Marshall's struggling team was about to improve after the addition of a charismatic but troubled player. Everything changed, however, when two young men opened fired on Harrington's car as he drove his daughter to school. Harrington was struck and paralyzed. The mistaken-identity shooting was followed by a series of events that had a devastating impact on Harrington and Marshall's basketball family.

The new dating craze among the divorced, recently broken up with, and frustrated singles of Los Angeles starts with the creation of “the List.” The converted swear by it—just write down everything you want in a partner, and the cosmos will provide. But could such a simple, old-fashioned technique actually work? Enter Jade, who investigates this increasingly popular path to a soul mate, with charming and hilarious effects, tracing the history of list making—and learning about dating and love along the way.

On an average day in America, seven young people aged 19 or under will be shot dead. In Another Day in the Death of America, award-winning Guardian journalist Gary Younge tells the stories of the lives lost during the course of a single day in the United States. It could have been any day, but Younge has chosen November 23, 2013. Far from a dry account of gun policy in the United States or a polemic about the dangers of gun violence, the book is a gripping chronicle of an ordinary but deadly day in American life.

On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto - a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original interpretation, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the 16th century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot understand the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the history of the ghetto in Europe, as well as later efforts to understand the problems of the American city.

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein explodes the myth that America's cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation - that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, he incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation - the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments - that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Tras perder la audición de un oído al paso de una ambulancia, Gabi Martínez se preguntó cómo afecta el entorno urbano a nuestra salud. Este audiolibro, narrado por el autor, reflexiona sobre la necesidad de transformación de las ciudades ante un modelo urbano ya caduco y nos cuenta cómo se creó la idea de la supermanzana, uno de los conceptos urbanísticos más revolucionarios de las últimas décadas: su acogida, su implantación y las polémicas que generó.

Why has land reform been such a failure in South Africa? Will expropriation without compensation solve the problem? What can be done to get the land programme back on track? Tembeka Ngcukaitobi tackles these questions and more. Going back in history, he shows how Africans’ communal land ownership was used by colonial rulers to deny that Africans owned the land at all. He explores the effect of the Land Acts, Bantustans and forced removals. And he considers the ANC’s policies on land throughout the 20th century, during the negotiations of the 1990s, and in government.

Adults don’t talk about the business of doing our business. We work on one assumption: The world of public bathrooms is problem - and politics-free. No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs reveals the opposite is true. No Place to Go is a toilet tour from London to San Francisco to Toronto and beyond. From pay potties to deserted alleyways, No Place to Go is a marriage of urbanism, social narrative, and pop culture that shows the ways - momentous and mockable - public bathrooms just don’t work.

In the 12 lessons of Notorious London: A City Tour, you will experience a rich sampling of some of the city’s most shocking stories and infamous personalities. Taught by Professor Paul Deslandes of the University of Vermont, Notorious London dips into various regions and eras of London’s past to give you a multifaceted look into this remarkable metropolis.