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List of contents
Introduction.
1. Cities and Neighborhoods.
Houselessness and Homelessness, Jim Burklo.
Silent Dancing, Judith Ortiz Cofer.
Homeplace: A Site of Resistance, bell hooks.
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, Mary Kay Blakely.
Graffiti: Tunnel Notes of a New Yorker, Leonard Kriegel.
2. Cities and Crime.
One Violent Crime, Bruce Shapiro.
Guns Aren't the Only Issue, Daryl F. Gates.
School Shootings and White Denial, Tim Wise.
The Drug War Goes Up in Smoke, Sasha Abramsky.
Masked Racism: Reflections on the Prison Industrial Complex, Angela Davis.
3. Cities and Suburbs.
Stressed Out in Suburbia, Nicholas Lemann.
The New Black Suburbs, David J. Dent.
Separate and Unequal, David Moberg.
Park Slope: Notes on a Middle-Class “Utopia,” Jan Rosenberg.
4. Cities and Race.
An American Tale: A Lynching and the Legacies Left Behind, C. Carr.
Bloods and Crips Proposal for LA's Facelift, Bloods/Crips
Building Democracy from Below, Manning Marable¿
What Really Happened in Cincinnati, Heather Mac Donald.
5. Cities and Citizenship.
From Guilt to Solidarity: Sweatshops and Political Responsibility, Iris Marion Young.
Hate Radio, Patricia J. Williams.
Speaking for Ourselves, Makani Themba-Nixon and Nan Rubin.
Pathfinders, Peter Medoff and Holly Sklar.
Credits.
Summary
Part of the Longman Topics reader series City Life examines social and cultural issues embedded in urban life and encourages reflective public writing.
This brief collection of readings focuses on the struggle over the meanings of cities and city life in contemporary society. Thought-provoking selections ask students to think about timely and relevant issues, such as: suburbanization, representations of crime, the significance of neighborhoods, the meanings of urban citizenship, and the challenges of race. Divided into five chapters, each chapter features five or six essays of varying lengths. Brief apparatus helps students write more thoughtfully in response to the selections and engage actively the civic consequences of writing.
“Longman Topics” are brief, attractive readers on a single, complex, but compelling topic. Featuring about 30 full-length selections, these volumes are generally half the size and half the cost of standard composition readers.
