Joel Kotkin’s short book is an account of the city through history, from its prehistoric precursors to its future. It examines how the urban form has evolved over the course of its history, and places particular emphasis on the timeless role of the city as the crossroads of peoples and cultures, as a locus of trade, and as an artistic centre.

City : A Global History

History

Joel Kotkin

World

Weidenfeld & N.

The powerful, the proud, and the passionate clash to possess a fertile land.

The Valley

Literature & Fiction

BANTAM BOOKS

Argues that the future of American business in the Far East lies in building partnerships with the growing Asian economies

The Third Century

Yoriko Kishimoto

Business & Money

Ivy Books

In ways not seen since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, America is becoming a nation of increasingly sharply divided classes. Joel Kotkin's The New Class Conflict breaks down these new divisions for the first time, focusing on the ascendency of two classes: the tech Oligarchy, based in Silicon Valley; and the Clerisy, which includes much of the nation's policy, media, and academic elites. The New Class Conflict is written largely from the point of view of those who are, to date, the losers in this class conflict: the middle class. This group, which Kotkin calls the Yeomanry, has been the traditional bulwark of American society, politics, and economy. Yet under pressure from the ascendant Oligarchs and ever more powerful Clerisy, their prospects have diminished the American dream of class mobility that has animated its history and sustained its global appeal. This book is both a call to arms and a unique piece of analysis about the possible evolution of our society into an increasingly quasi-feudal order. Looking beyond the conventional views of both left and right, conservative and liberal, Kotkin provides a tough but evenhanded analysis of our evolving class system, and suggests some approaches that might restore the middle class to its proper role as the dominant group in the American future.

The New Class Conflict

Telos Press Publishing

In The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, Fred Siegel leverages New York City to uncover the key political conflicts and social contradictions in American liberalism over the last century. This wide-ranging collection of essays critically recounts how passionate intellectual debates and then heated cultural struggles over how to realize "the good life" in the modern city emerged from the writings of early progressive "thought leaders." Herbert Croly and H. G. Wells once envisioned college graduates as a new elite that could pick up the project of enlightened democratic governance where the European aristocracy had failed. Yet, as Eric Hoffer observed, these graduates left top-notch schools as liberal technocrats wanting "power, lordship, and opportunities for imposing action." The flaws in this approach expressed themselves most floridly in John Lindsay's New York, as his activist top-level experts and their many bottom-tier clients aligned themselves against the material aspirations and cultural values of the five boroughs' middle social strata. Lindsay's flashy limousine liberals were a preview of today's politically correct gentry liberalism. Its cultural programs over the past half-century, as Siegel shows, ultimately failed the downtrodden underclass and alienated middle-class New Yorkers trapped in economic stagnation after 9/11. While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama sparred over policy minutiae in the heated 2008 Democratic Party primaries, both candidates neglected voters' worries, like illegal immigrants or China's emerging threats. This misdirection of the nation's and the city's politics by globalist technocratic liberals became the prelude to Donald Trump's angry nationalist reaction to put "America First."

The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump

Fred Siegel

The City, A Global History

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

RecordedBooks

The city : a global History

RECORDED BOOKS^

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Joel Kotkin. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Joel Kotkin