Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees "a fortune beyond counting" in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption....

How will climate change affect our lives? Where will its impacts be most deeply felt? Are we doing enough to protect ourselves from the coming chaos? In Extreme Cities, Ashley Dawson argues that cities are ground zero for climate change, contributing the lion’s share of carbon to the atmosphere, while also lying on the frontlines of rising sea levels. Today, the majority of the world’s megacities are located in coastal zones, yet few of them are...

Jeff Speck has dedicated his career to determining what makes cities thrive. And he has boiled it down to one key factor: walkability. The very idea of a modern metropolis evokes visions of bustling sidewalks, vital mass transit, and a vibrant, pedestrian-friendly urban core. But in the typical American city, the car is still king, and downtown is a place that's easy to drive to but often not worth arriving at. Making walkability happen is relatively...

Empire of Sin re-creates the remarkable story of New Orleans' thirty-years war against itself, pitting the city's elite 'better half' against its powerful and long-entrenched underworld of vice, perversity, and crime. This early-20th-century battle centers on one man: Tom Anderson, the undisputed czar of the city's Storyville vice district, who fights desperately to keep his empire intact as it faces onslaughts from all sides. Surrounding him are...

"In the summer of 2010, photographer Brandon Stanton began an ambitious project--to single-handedly create a photographic census of New York City. The photos he took and the accompanying interviews became the blog Humans of New York. His audience steadily grew from a few hundred followers to, at present count, over twelve million. In 2013, his book Humans of New York, based on that blog, was published and immediately catapulted to the top of the NY...

"Award-winning journalist Sam Anderson's long-awaited debut is a brilliant, kaleidoscopic narrative of Oklahoma City--a great American story of civics, basketball, and destiny. Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in the bizarre but momentous Land Run of 1889, when tens of thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild...

"Alan Ehrenhalt, one of our leading urbanologists, takes us to cities across the country to reveal how the roles of America's cities and suburbs are changing places--young adults and affluent retirees moving in, while immigrants and the less affluent are moving out--and the implications for the future of our society. How will our nation be changed by the populations shifting in and out of the cities? Why are these shifts taking place? Ehrenhalt answers...

"The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina is one of the darkest chapters is American history. A toxic combination of government neglect and socioeconomic inequality turned a crisis into a tragedy. The storm completely transformed one of the most beloved cities in America, leaving nearly 80 percent of New Orleans flooded and damaging 134,000 housing units, causing unprecedented destruction. The response to Katrina is a topic of unending debate and anger....

Describes Father Greg Boyle's work with the gang members of East Los Angeles, discussing how the priest has helped young men and women start their lives over, and exploring why some former gang members are able to make a new life for themselves while others are not.

From master crime writer Joseph Wambaugh, the acclaimed author of such classics as The Onion Field and The Choirboys, comes the extraordinary true story of a firefighter who may have been, according to U.S. government profilers, "the most prolific American arsonist of the twentieth century." John Orr rose through the ranks of the Glendale Fire Department to become fire captain and one of southern California's best-known and respected arson investigators....