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Topographies is an innovative synthesis of different cultural disciplines: radical geography, body theory, cybernetics, gender studies. Their point of convergence is the mapping of space and time. It is our hope that in making these unique groupings we may draw attention to the various aspects of the emerging bio-colonialism and perhaps offer suggestions for meaningful forms of resistance. All items are available in the City Lights Bookstore (Map & Directions). You can also order these items directly from our web site, simply click on the "add to cart" button next to the book of your choice. All orders will be sent by DHL Ground service. For expedited shipping or international orders, please see our Ordering Information . |
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Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin by Gray Brechin San Francisco is a city clouded in myth. This urban biography provides an entirely new vision of the city's history, laying bare the inner dynamics of the regional civilization centered in San Francisco. Imperial San Francisco examines the far-reaching environmental impact that one city and the elite families that hold power in it have had on the Pacific Basin for over a century and a half. The book provides a literate, myth-shattering interpretation of the hidden costs that the growth of San Francisco has exacted on its surrounding regions, presenting along the way a revolutionary new theory of urban development. Written in a lively, accessible style, the narrative is filled with vivid characters, engrossing stories, and a rich variety of illustrations. University of California Press $19.95 |
| Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World by Robert Neuwirth Investigative journalist Robert Neuwirth lived among squatter communities from Rio to Bombay to Nairobi to Istanbul to give us an impassioned, inside view of squatter life and a glimpse into the urban future. He met people in Nairobi who built homes with their bare hands, Turkish families who plot land invasions, and children in Rio whose parents justify outfoxing the authorities as the only path to a better life. And he shows us that in cities like Rio, squatter settlements have become decent places to live for formerly landless people. Tracing the notion of private property from the enclosure movement in Europe to the settlement of the U.S., Neuwirth shows how squatting rights may actually be seen asmore "natural" than the current laws practiced in the U.S. Routledge $18.95 |
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Rebuilt: My Journey Back to the Hearing World by Michael Chorost After Michael Chorost suddenly lost what was left of his hearing, he took the radical step of having a cochlear implant – a tiny computer – installed in his head. A technological marvel, the device not only restored to him the world of sound but also could be routinely upgraded with new software. Despite his intitial fear of the technology's potentially dehumanizing effects, Chorost's implant allowed him to connect with others in surprising ways: as a cyborg, he learned about love, joined a writing group, and formed deeper friendships. More profoundly, his perception of the world around him was dramatically altered. 0618717609 Mariner Books 13.95 Temporarily out of stock |
| City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles by Mike Davis No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA's shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. $16.95 Verso |
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Dead Cities by Mike Davis As Mike Davis shows, prophecies of urban doom too often come true. Beginning with a trip to New York's Ground Zero, Davis pairs the horror of lower Manhattan's falling skyscrapers with Las Vegas' delirious delight in blowing up its landmark hotels, where environmental terrorism is practiced in the name of urban development. We stop at "German Village," the Utah wasteland where Allied scientists once perfected their plans to destroy Berlin, then move on to Los Angeles, the frontline of a "Second Civil War" that lies waiting to be ignited in cities across the country. The New Press $16.95 |
| Close to the Machine Technophilia and Its Discontents by Ellen Ullman Here is the candid account of the life of a software engineer who runs her own computer consulting business in San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch. As Ullman sees it, the cool world of cyberculture is neither the death of civilization nor its salvationit is the vulnerable creation of people who are not so sure of just where they're taking us all. City Lights $12.95 |
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. Vintage $14.95 |
| Dark Age Ahead by Jane Jacobs In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs convincingly argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we stand on the brink of a new dark age, a period of cultural collapse. Jacobs pinpoints five pillars of our culture that are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation, and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions. The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor. 1400076706 Vintage Books $13.00 |
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Wanderlust: A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit Drawing together many histories–of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores–Rebecca Solnit creates a fascinating portrait of the range of possibilities presented by walking. Arguing that the history of walking includes walking for pleasure as well as for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit focuses on the walkers whose everyday and extreme acts have shaped our culture, from philosophers to poets to mountaineers. 0140286012 Penguin $16.00 |
| Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism by Rebecca Solnit & Susan Schwartzenberg Reporting from the front line of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit examines the consequences when artists' love for space and authenticity in working-class areas, and rich peoples' love for the fashionable bohemia of artists' neighborhoods, are combined. The Mission, for instance, with its easier access to Silicon Valley, has become a standoff between hi tech's nouveaux riches and existing residents under threat from spiraling rents, including supporters of the Yuppie Eradication Project who advocate vandalizing expensive cars and restaurants in retaliation. Verso 20.00 |
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Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformations by Nancy N. Chen In the twenty-first century, the body is experienced less as a fixed entity than it is as a protean product and a project of technological, medical and artistic invention. These essays address the proliferation of such transformative practices as tattooing, piercing, self-cutting, cosmetic and trans-sexual surgery, prosthetics, organ transplants and life extension technologies. Establishing links among these varied practices, the contributors illuminate the dramatic and widespread changes that have taken place across generations in attitudes towards the relation of the body to the mind, to agency and to subjectivity. $12.00 New Pacific Press |
| Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis Counterpointing L.A.'s central role in America's fantasy life – the city has been destroyed no less than 138 times in novels and films since 1909 – with its wanton denial of its own real history, Davis creates a revelatory kaleidoscope of American fact, imagery, and sensibility. Drawing upon a vast array of sources, Ecology of Fear meticulously captures the nation's violent malaise and desperate social unease at the millennial end of "the American century." With savagely entertaining wit and compassionate rage, this book conducts a devastating reconnaissance of our all-too-likely urban future. Vintage $15.00 |
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The Dance of the Molecules: How Nanotechnology is Changing Our Lives
by Ted Sargent In this groundbreaking exploration of the future of nanotechnology, Ted Sargent reveals how all disciplines of science, from medicine to microchips, are converging to create materials using the tiniest scale possible — molecule by molecule. And instead of trying to overcome the natural world, nanotech takes its every move from the perfect, elegant structure of nature itself. Its potential is seemingly endless, with practical implications that will revolutionize the way we live, work, and play. $15.95 Thunder's Mouth Press |
| Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy by Paul Virilio Negative Horizon is Paul Virilio's most original and unified exploration of the key themes and ideas running through his work and thought. Provocatively and forcefully written, it sets out Virilio's theory of dromoscopy - a way of apprehending speed and its pivotal - and potentially destructive - role in contemporary global society. This brilliant translation by Michael Degener makes available in English one of Virilio's seminal works - set to be required reading for anyone interested in the rise of new technologies and the direction of global politics. $19.95 Continuum International Publishing Group |
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A Field Guide to Getting Lost
by Rebecca Solnit A Field Guide to Getting Lost is about the stories we use to navigate our way through the world and the places we traverse, from wilderness to cities, in finding ourselves or losing ourselves. Written as a series of autobiographical essays, it draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit’s own life to explore issues of uncertainty, trust, loss, memory, desire, and place. $15.00 ISBN: 0143037242 Viking |
| A Hacker Manifesto by Mckenzie Wark A Hacker Manifesto deftly defines the fraught territory between the ever more strident demands by drug and media companies for protection of their patents and copyrights and the pervasive popular culture of file sharing and pirating. This vexed ground, the realm of so-called "intellectual property," gives rise to a whole new kind of class conflict, one that pits the creators of information--the hacker class of researchers and authors, artists and biologists, chemists and musicians, philosophers and programmers--against a possessing class who would monopolize what the hacker produces. Drawing in equal measure on Guy Debord and Gilles Deleuze, A Hacker Manifesto offers a systematic restatement of Marxist thought for the age of cyberspace and globalization. Hardcover $21.95 Harvard University Press |
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Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
by Mike Davis Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of high imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives. $20.00 ISBN: 1859843824 Verso Temporarily out of stock |
| Making Time: Essays on the Nature of Los Angeles by William L. Fox William L. Fox is a longtime explorer of cognition and landscape — the notion of what makes a space into a place. In this book he turns his gaze on Los Angeles, a city dominated by the movie industry, which specializes in bringing places from far away in time into what we experience as here and now — making time, in essence. Time, Fox tells us, is the most invisible nature of all, “its effects are always and everywhere around us.” $15.00 Shoemaker & Hoard |
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Marching Plague: Germ Warfare & Global Public Health
by Critical Art Ensemble Autonomedia’s sixth title from the Critical Art Ensemble, Marching Plague, dismantles the rhetoric around germ warfare, showing how the empty spectacle of threat is used by authoritarian forces of order as well as the engines of profit. Marching Plague offers a radical reframing of the discourse surrounding germ warfare. ISBN 157027178X Autonomedia $9.95 Temporarily out of stock |
| The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil For over three decades, Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine, in which the knowledge and skills embedded in our brains will be combined with the vastly greater capacity, speed, and knowledge-sharing ability of our creations. $18.00 Penguin |
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Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
by Ruth Gilmore Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces from the global to the local conjoined to produce the prison boom. ISBN 0520242017 University of California Press $19.95 |
| CODE: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy by Rishab Aiyer Ghosh The contributors to CODE, from such diverse fields as economics, anthropology, law, and software development, examine collaborative creativity from a variety of perspectives, looking at new and old forms of creative collaboration and the mechanisms emerging to study them. Discussing the philosophically resonant issues of ownership, property, and the commons, they ask if the increasing application of the language of property rights to knowledge and creativity constitutes a second enclosure movement -- or if the worldwide acclaim for free software signifies a renaissance of the commons. $18.95 ISBN: 0262572362 The MIT Press; |
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Information Feudalism: Who Owns the Knowledge Economy?
by Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite This powerful book is the definitive history of how the new global intellectual property regime—the rulebook for the knowledge economy—came to be. Drawing on more than five years of research and more than five hundred interviews with key figures—including negotiators for First and Third World countries, leaders of multinational corporations, and public-interest experts, Information Feudalism uncovers the story of how a small coterie of multi-national corporations wrote the charter for the global information order. ISBN 1595581227 New Press $16.95 |
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