On My Radar:

The End of Policing
by Alex S. Vitale
Verso Books
Trade Paperback


From the publisher's website:

Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression—most dramatically in Ferguson, Missouri, where longheld grievances erupted in violent demonstrations following the police killing of Michael Brown. Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself. “Broken windows” practices, the militarization of law enforcement, and the dramatic expansion of the police’s role over the last forty years have created a mandate for officers that must be rolled back.

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice—even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives—such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction—has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.

Forthcoming Book:

Explore Everything: Place-Hacking the City
by Bradley L. Garrett
Verso Books

Hardcover

Street Date: 10/8/13

It is assumed that every inch of the world has been explored and charted; that there is nowhere new to go. But perhaps it is the everyday places around us—the cities we live in—that need to be rediscovered. What does it feel like to find the city’s edge, to explore its forgotten tunnels and scale unfinished skyscrapers high above the metropolis? Explore Everything reclaims the city, recasting it as a place for endless adventure. 

Plotting expeditions from London, Paris, Berlin, Detroit, Chicago, Las Vegas and Los Angeles, Bradley L. Garrett has evaded urban security in order to experience the city in ways beyond the boundaries of conventional life. He calls it ‘place hacking’: the recoding of closed, secret, hidden and forgotten urban space to make them realms of opportunity. 

Explore Everything is an account of the author’s escapades with the London Consolidation Crew, an urban exploration collective. 

The book is also a manifesto, combining philosophy, politics and adventure, on our rights to the city and how to understand the twenty-first century metropolis.

New Nonfiction Hardcover Titles This Week

Books I'd Like to Read

A Colossal Wreck: A Road Trip Through Political Scandal, Corruption, and American Culture
by Alexander Cockburn

Verso Books
Hardcover

Alexander Cockburn was without question one of the most influential journalists of his generation, whose writing stems from the best tradition of Mark Twain, H.L. Menchken and Tom Paine. Colossal Wreck, his final work, finished shortly before his death in July 2012, exemplifies the prodigious literary brio that made Cockburn's name.  

Whether ruthlessly exposing Beltway hypocrisy, pricking the pomposity of those in power, or tirelessly defending the rights of the oppressed, Cockburn never pulled his punches and always landed a blow where it mattered. In this panoramic work, covering nearly two decades of American culture and politics, he explores subjects as varied as the sex life of Bill Clinton and the best way to cook wild turkey. He stands up for the rights of prisoners on death row and exposes the chicanery of the media and the duplicity of the political elite. As he pursues a serpentine path through the nation, he charts the fortunes of friends, famous relatives, and sworn enemies alike to hilarious effect.  

This is a thrilling trip through the reefs and shoals of politics and everyday life. Combining a passion for the places, the food and the people he encountered on dozens of cross-country journeys, Cockburn reports back over seventeen years of tumultuous change among what he affectionately called the “thousand landscapes” of the United States.

Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
by Bill Dedman and Paul Clark Newell, Jr.
Ballantine Books / Random House

Hardcover

When Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Bill Dedman noticed in 2009 a grand home for sale, unoccupied for nearly sixty years, he stumbled through a surprising portal into American history. Empty Mansions is a rich mystery of wealth and loss, connecting the Gilded Age opulence of the nineteenth century with a twenty-first-century battle over a $300 million inheritance. At its heart is a reclusive heiress named Huguette Clark, a woman so secretive that, at the time of her death at age 104, no new photograph of her had been seen in decades. Though she owned palatial homes in California, New York, and Connecticut, why had she lived for twenty years in a simple hospital room, despite being in excellent health? Why were her valuables being sold off? Was she in control of her fortune, or controlled by those managing her money? Dedman has collaborated with Huguette Clark’s cousin, Paul Clark Newell, Jr., one of the few relatives to have frequent conversations with her. Dedman and Newell tell a fairy tale in reverse: the bright, talented daughter, born into a family of extreme wealth and privilege, who secrets herself away from the outside world. Huguette was the daughter of self-made copper industrialist W. A. Clark, nearly as rich as Rockefeller in his day, a controversial senator, railroad builder, and founder of Las Vegas. She grew up in the largest house in New York City, a remarkable dwelling with 121 rooms for a family of four. She owned paintings by Degas and Renoir, a world-renowned Stradivarius violin, a vast collection of antique dolls. But wanting more than treasures, she devoted her wealth to buying gifts for friends and strangers alike, to quietly pursuing her own work as an artist, and to guarding the privacy she valued above all else. The Clark family story spans nearly all of American history in three generations, from a log cabin in Pennsylvania to mining camps in the Montana gold rush, from backdoor politics in Washington to a distress call from an elegant Fifth Avenue apartment. The same Huguette who was touched by the terror attacks of 9/11 held a ticket nine decades earlier for a first-class stateroom on the second voyage of theTitanic. Empty Mansions reveals a complex portrait of the mysterious Huguette and her intimate circle. We meet her extravagant father, her publicity-shy mother, her star-crossed sister, her French boyfriend, her nurse who received more than $30 million in gifts, and the relatives fighting to inherit Huguette’s copper fortune. Richly illustrated with more than seventy photographs, Empty Mansions is an enthralling story of an eccentric of the highest order, a last jewel of the Gilded Age who lived life on her own terms.

Word of Mouse: 101+ Trends in How We Buy, Sell, Live, Learn, Work, and Play
by Marc Ostrofsky

Simon & Schuster
Hardcover

Gain a competitive edge— get the most from today’s technology! 

Technology changes so fast that it’s easy to be intimidated by it. Our personal choices and business decisions are increasingly driven by digital “word of mouse”— and it’s essential to our success and satisfaction to take control of the gadgets, apps, and trends that are shaping our world.

Bestselling author and trend watcher Marc Ostrofsky is here to help. In this groundbreaking new book, Ostrofsky reveals the ways that new technologies implant themselves in our daily lives and how we can easily take advantage of them to live, learn, buy, sell, work, play, communicate, and socialize better.

Covering diverse topics from how the Internet affects our health to how we can become bargain-hunting pros, Ostrofsky’s book could come at no better time. The Internet’s presence is only growing, and new technologies are sprouting up every day. We must learn how to cultivate these new tools so that we can remain competitive and live happier, healthier lives.

Word of Mouse gives you the tools you need to conquer information overload—and puts you in the driver’s seat of the world’s most potent technologies. 

On My Radar:

Irregular Army: How the U.S. Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror
by Matt Kennard
Verso Books
Hardcover

From the publisher website:

     Since the launch of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars - now the longest wars in American history - the U.S. military has struggled to recruit troops. It has responded, as Matt Kennard's explosive investigative report makes clear, by opening its doors to neo-Nazis, white supremacists, gang members, criminals of all stripes, the overweight, and the mentally ill. Based on several years of reporting, Irregular Army includes extensive interviews with extremist veterans and leaders of far-right hate groups - who spoke openly of their eagerness to have their followers acquire military training for a coming domestic race war.  As a report commissioned by the Department of Defense put it, "Effectively, the military has a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy concerning extremism."

     Irregular Army connects some of the War on Terror's worst crimes to this opening-up of the U.S. military. With millions of veterans now back in the U.S. and domestic extremism on the rise,  Kennard's book is a stark warning about potential dangers facing Americans - from their own soldiers.