Meet Me By The Fountain

Download or read book Meet Me by the Fountain written by Alexandra Lange and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Longlisted for the Porchlight Business Book Awards “A smart and accessible cultural history.”-Los Angeles Times A portrait--by turns celebratory, skeptical, and surprisingly moving--of one of America's most iconic institutions, from an author who “might be the most influential design critic writing now” (LARB). Few places have been as nostalgized, or as maligned, as malls. Since their birth in the 1950s, they have loomed large as temples of commerce, the agora of the suburbs. In their prime, they proved a powerful draw for creative thinkers such as Joan Didion, Ray Bradbury, and George Romero, who understood the mall's appeal as both critics and consumers. Yet today, amid the aftershocks of financial crises and a global pandemic, as well as the rise of online retail, the dystopian husk of an abandoned shopping center has become one of our era's defining images. Conventional wisdom holds that the mall is dead. But what was the mall, really? And have rumors of its demise been greatly exaggerated? In her acclaimed The Design of Childhood, Alexandra Lange uncovered the histories of toys, classrooms, and playgrounds. She now turns her sharp eye to another subject we only think we know. She chronicles postwar architects' and merchants' invention of the mall, revealing how the design of these marketplaces played an integral role in their cultural ascent. In Lange's perceptive account, the mall becomes newly strange and rich with contradiction: Malls are environments of both freedom and exclusion--of consumerism, but also of community. Meet Me by the Fountain is a highly entertaining and evocative promenade through the mall's rise, fall, and ongoing reinvention, for readers of any generation.

Download or read book Meet Me at the Museum written by Anne Youngson and published by . This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A professor in Denmark and a grandmother in England begin a correspondence, and a friendship, that develops into something extraordinary.

Download or read book Meet Me in Mumbai written by Sabina Khan and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2022-09-06 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali and Zara Hossain Is Here. Ayesha is on her own, far from home, when she's faced with a choice that will change her life forever. Ayesha is a world away from home when she meets the boy of her dreams. Like her, Suresh is from India but going to high school in Illinois. Once they get together, they are inseparable... until a twist of fate takes Suresh back to India right when Ayesha discovers she's pregnant. Suddenly she feels she's on her own, navigating the biggest decision she'll ever make. Seventeen years later, Ayesha's daughter Mira finds an old box with letters addressed to her from her birth mother. Although Mira loves the moms who adopted her, she's intrigued to discover something more about her history. In one letter, Ayesha writes that if Mira can forgive her for what she had to do, she should find a way to travel to India for her eighteenth birthday and meet her. Mira knows she'll always regret it if she doesn't go. But is she actually ready for what she will learn? From the author of the "heart-wrenching yet hopeful" (Samira Ahmed) novel, The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali, comes a timely story about two teenage girls forced to understand the power and consequences of their choices.

Download or read book The Design of Childhood written by Alexandra Lange and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2018-06-12 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From building blocks to city blocks, an eye-opening exploration of how children's playthings and physical surroundings affect their development. Parents obsess over their children's playdates, kindergarten curriculum, and every bump and bruise, but the toys, classrooms, playgrounds, and neighborhoods little ones engage with are just as important. These objects and spaces encode decades, even centuries of changing ideas about what makes for good child-rearing--and what does not. Do you choose wooden toys, or plastic, or, increasingly, digital? What do youngsters lose when seesaws are deemed too dangerous and slides are designed primarily for safety? How can the built environment help children cultivate self-reliance? In these debates, parents, educators, and kids themselves are often caught in the middle. Now, prominent design critic Alexandra Lange reveals the surprising histories behind the human-made elements of our children's pint-size landscape. Her fascinating investigation shows how the seemingly innocuous universe of stuff affects kids' behavior, values, and health, often in subtle ways. And she reveals how years of decisions by toymakers, architects, and urban planners have helped--and hindered--American youngsters' journeys toward independence. Seen through Lange's eyes, everything from the sandbox to the street becomes vibrant with buried meaning. The Design of Childhood will change the way you view your children's world--and your own.

Download or read book Sundae Best written by Anne Cooper Funderburg and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first comprehensive, documented history of this popular institution, which millions of Americans fondly remember. For 150 years, the soda fountain was a community social center. In big cities, the neighborhood fountain had a clubby atmosphere because it drew its clientele from nearby businesses and apartment buildings. In small towns, soda fountains were very democratic because they attracted all ages and all classes of people. In both cities and small towns, soda fountains were part of the social infrastructure that held the neighborhood together. The evolution of the soda fountain reflected momentous developments in American history: urbanization, the temperance movement and Prohibition, the Great Depression, technological progress, the decline of Main Street and Center City, the Car Culture, and the growth of suburbia. The fountain's evolution was also closely tied to trends in retailing, food service, lifestyles, and the decorative arts.

Download or read book Brief Encounters with Che Guevara written by Ben Fountain and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award * A National Bestseller “An exceptional story collection.” —New York Times Book Review The well-intentioned protagonists of Brief Encounters with Che Guevera—including a disillusioned NGO worker, the wife of a special operations officer, and an obssessed ornithologist—are caught, to both disastrous and hilarious effect, in the maelstrom of political and social upheaval surrounding them. With masterful pacing and a robust sense of the absurd, each story is a self-contained adventure, steeped in the heady mix of tragedy and danger, excitement and hope, that characterizes countries in transition. An intelligent and keenly observed collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevera marks the arrival of a striking and resonant new voice that speaks adeptly to the intimate connection between the foreign, the familiar, and the inescapably human.

Download or read book Writing About Architecture written by Alexandra Lange and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-02-29 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Extraordinary architecture addresses so much more than mere practical considerations. It inspires and provokes while creating a seamless experience of the physical world for its users. It is the rare writer that can frame the discussion of a building in a way that allows the reader to see it with new eyes. Writing About Architecture is a handbook on writing effectively and critically about buildings and cities. Each chapter opens with a reprint of a significant essay written by a renowned architecture critic, followed by a close reading and discussion of the writer's strategies. Lange offers her own analysis using contemporary examples as well as a checklist of questions at the end of each chapter to help guide the writer. This important addition to the Architecture Briefs series is based on the author's design writing courses at New York University and the School of Visual Arts. Lange also writes a popular online column for Design Observer and has written for Dwell, Metropolis, New York magazine, and The New York Times. Writing About Architecture includes analysis of critical writings by Ada Louise Huxtable, Lewis Mumford, Herbert Muschamp, Michael Sorkin, Charles Moore, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Jane Jacobs. Architects covered include Marcel Breuer, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Field Operations, Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, Frederick Law Olmsted, SOM, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright.