Synopses & Reviews
How much do you really know about the systems that keep a city alive?
The Works: Anatomy of a City contains everything you ever wanted to know about what makes New York City run. When you flick on your light switch the light goes on how? When you put out your garbage, where does it go? When you flush your toilet, what happens to the waste? How does water get from a reservoir in the mountains to your city faucet? How do flowers get to your corner store from Holland, or bananas get there from Ecuador? Who is operating the traffic lights all over the city? And what in the world is that steam coming out from underneath the potholes on the street? Across the city lies a series of extraordinarily complex and interconnected systems. Often invisible, and wholly taken for granted, these are the systems that make urban life possible.
The Works: Anatomy of a City offers a cross section of this hidden infrastructure, using beautiful, innovative graphic images combined with short, clear text explanations to answer all the questions about the way things work in a modern city. It describes the technologies that keep the city functioning, as well as the people who support them the pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, the electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that delivers power to subways.
Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long, and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take the curvature of the earth's surface into account when designing it? Did you know that the George Washington Bridge takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls? Did you know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form natural reefs for fish? Or that if the telecom cables under New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the earth to the sun? While the book uses New York as its example, it has relevance well beyond that city's boundaries as the systems that make New York a functioning metropolis are similar to those that keep the bright lights burning in big cities everywhere.
The Works is for anyone who has ever stopped midcrosswalk, looked at the rapidly moving metropolis around them, and wondered, how does this all work?
Review
"
The Works is both a reference guide and a geeky pleasure."
-Time Out New York
"It's a rare person who won't find something of interest in The Works, whether it's an explanation of how a street-sweeper works or the view of what's down a manhole."
-New York Post
Review
“What a beautiful book it is! A treasured possession.” —Mary Beard
“No astronomy book can claim to be as beautiful as the night sky, but Stories in the Stars comes closest! I'm learning something new every day and having a lot of fun in the process.” —Tristan Gooley, The Natural Navigator
Synopsis
Read Kate Ascher's posts on the Penguin Blog. A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern city
Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and behind the scenes to explain exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, author Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.
Synopsis
A beautifully illustrated Penguin Hardcover that invites readers to travel the night sky and discover the universe of stories in the stars
To those who can decipher it, the night sky is alive with gods and goddesses, animals and mythical creaturesan endless carnival played out in shining constellations. Amidst this jet-black canvas pricked with white dots, a hunter leaps in pursuit with his dogs at his heels, a sea monster threatens a maiden in distress, and a pair of twins lives forever.
In Stories in the Stars, writer and stargazer Susanna Hislop and international artist Hannah Waldron present an imaginative journey through the heavens. Leaping between centuries, cultures, and traditions, they explore each of the night skys eighty-eight constellations through gorgeous illustrations and vivid descriptions that will linger in readers minds long after theyve closed the book and stepped outside on a starry night.
About the Author
Kate Ascher received her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in government from the London School of Economics and her B.A. in political science from Brown University. She formerly served as assistant director of the Port at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and worked overseas in corporate finance before taking up her current position with the City of New York as executive vice president of the Economic Development Corporation.