Here are 62 books that Getting There fans have personally recommended if you like
Getting There.
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In 2016, I started thinking about art’s power to unite diverse people. The recent presidential election coincided with a sharp spike in anti-immigrant rhetoric, but artists, musicians, creatives, and performers were fierce defenders of the value of cultural difference. In my own life, I’ve always found inspiration and solace from creative practice. For years now, I’ve been part of an eclectic friend group I first met in painting class. The joy art brings to my life also made me wonder who gets credit and what even constitutes “art.” Is an expensive oil painting really worth more than a comic book, if someone loves the comic book just as much?
Every biographer must do battle with Robert Caro’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, a monumental account of urban planner Robert Moses, whose God-like power redesigning postwar New York City effectively remade the capital of the twentieth century. Over the course of 1,336 pages, Caro details Moses’s world-making vision while also acknowledging problematic issues, such as Moses’s reported use of racial slurs and his remapping of roads and overpasses to exclude poorer communities.
Today, half a century since its first publication, The Power Broker remains one of the greatest English-language biographies. It's also a landmark in showing how world-historical change can begin with aesthetic power. Like all foundational texts, its comprehensive documenting of both the ambitions and the prejudices of that era also lays a path for future insight. In gesturing toward Moses’s faults, this magisterial work also leaves room for subsequent generations to re-examine the problems of the past.
The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro is 'simply one of the best non-fiction books in English of the last forty years' (Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times): a riveting and timeless account of power, politics and the city of New York by 'the greatest political biographer of our times' (Sunday Times); chosen by Time magazine as one of the 100 Best Non-Fiction Books of All Time and by the Modern Library as one of the 100 Greatest Books of the Twentieth Century; Winner of the Pulitzer Prize; a Sunday Times Bestseller; 'An outright masterpiece' (Evening Standard)
My passion from a young age has always been cities, the most fascinating of human creations. This has led me to work on them as an urban designer to help shape and guide them. I have been privileged to work on amazing projects in cities as diverse as s diverse as Toronto, Hartford, Amsterdam, New York, Boston, Montréal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary, St. Louis, Washington DC, Paris, Detroit, Saint Paul and San Juan Puerto Rico. On the way, I met remarkable people, learned valuable lessons, and had the opportunity to collaborate with great colleagues. I have written about these experiences in three books and had the opportunity to share my passion through teaching. I have chosen some of the books that have most inspired me on my journey.
This eye-opening book was a revelation to me as a young student of architecture. It provided the keys to how cities really work. Its observations are as relevant and fresh today as they were when it was published in 1961. For me and many in my generation, it helped us to see and appreciate the organic, human-centered dynamics of neighborhoods, introducing the powerful concept of “organized complexity,” which made sense of things we saw but failed to understand.
I met Jane in Toronto in 1968 where she became a lifelong friend and mentor until her death in 2006. It remains a foundational text for me in understanding urban life and my life’s work.
In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed. The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written.
Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to cities have been let loose on our urban environment. Inspired by the ideals of the Garden City or Le Corbusier's Radiant City, they have dreamt up ambitious projects based on self-contained neighbourhoods, super-blocks, rigid 'scientific' plans and endless acres of grass. Yet they seldom stop to look at what actually…
I was an award-winning New York City newspaper reporter who developed a perspective on how to understand cities from the bottom up, not from the top down, of planners and politicians. I am now a well-known expert on urbanism and speak all over the world on the subject.
While her Death and Life illustrates how cities work, this book helps explain how the economy of a city really works.
Jacobs uses very simple language to make urban economies understandable: her contrast between Manchester and Birmingham shows how one city fails and the other flourishes; her illustration of how the manufacturing of bras emerged from the earlier corset illustrates her observations about new work added to old; she illustrates how Rochester, N.Y. went from a diverse economy of many technological advancements to one all-consuming Kodak dependent making the city totally dependant on one company.
All her illustrations reflect how new small things turn into big economic systems and the importance of diversity in an economy.
In this book, Jane Jacobs, building on the work of her debut, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, investigates the delicate way cities balance the interplay between the domestic production of goods and the ever-changing tide of imports. Using case studies of developing cities in the ancient, pre-agricultural world, and contemporary cities on the decline, like the financially irresponsible New York City of the mid-sixties, Jacobs identifies the main drivers of urban prosperity and growth, often via counterintuitive and revelatory lessons.
I was an award-winning New York City newspaper reporter who developed a perspective on how to understand cities from the bottom up, not from the top down, of planners and politicians. I am now a well-known expert on urbanism and speak all over the world on the subject.
Whyte is very good at helping you understand how people use and move around a city. He gives a visual explanation of how pedestrians behave. In so doing, he illustrates how important seating opportunities are, even if it is a simple wall. He illustrates why cities are so beneficial to businesses because exchanges between colleagues are just a walk away. Even in the age of the internet, people need people; colleagues need a human connection to each other.
This is a very important book that illustrates how cities actually work on the ground versus the way planners think they should work on the drawing board. It complements Jacobs greatly but from a different vantage point, especially on how people use streets.
Named by Newsweek magazine to its list of "Fifty Books for Our Time."
For sixteen years William Whyte walked the streets of New York and other major cities. With a group of young observers, camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies of street life, pedestrian behavior, and city dynamics. City: Rediscovering the Center is the result of that research, a humane, often amusing view of what is staggeringly obvious about the urban environment but seemingly invisible to those responsible for planning it.
Whyte uses time-lapse photography to chart the anatomy of metropolitan congestion. Why is traffic so badly…
I am a professor in Urban Mobility Futures and, as such, am fascinated by how we think about our mobility present and past and how this limits us in imagining different futures. The problems in our mobility system are so urgent and overwhelming that I like to actively search for alternative ways of seeing and acting and teach others to do the same. Personally, I love to experience the incredible freedom of mind that I find in doing this. Also, see the Shepherd list of recommendations by my co-author, Thalia Verkade.
When you think about it, it makes perfect sense that our streets have been designed through a process of simplification. I did not realize that this all started in the 1920s with the advent of the mass-produced automobile.
The first ‘traffic engineers’ came from water management, and because of that, our streets have become pipelines that should never be clogged! Mind = blown! All this made a lot of sense a hundred years ago, but does it still today? Or should we take this newfound freedom to create new languages to think about and design our streets?
The fight for the future of the city street between pedestrians, street railways, and promoters of the automobile between 1915 and 1930.
Before the advent of the automobile, users of city streets were diverse and included children at play and pedestrians at large. By 1930, most streets were primarily a motor thoroughfares where children did not belong and where pedestrians were condemned as “jaywalkers.” In Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton argues that to accommodate automobiles, the American city required not only a physical change but also a social one: before the city could be reconstructed for the sake of motorists, its…
As an avid explorer having thrice traveled around the world, living and working in over 40 countries, my inspirations as so originally science fiction have found grounding. I looked to level my imagination in the real world and filtered out the impossible from the unnecessary on a path to utopia. Sharing our ideas, exposing misgivings too, all contribute to a shared realization of human potential. This is much of the reason for who I am as a founder of business platforms I designed to achieve things that I envisage as helpful, necessary, and constructive contributions to our world. Those software endeavours underway in 2022, and a longtime coming still, are Horoscorpio and De Democracy.
Ever wondered if you'd survive in the Mad Max universe? Here's the assurance you can, well maybe if you've loaded die. Choose your own adventure has been a staple literary source of my youth and Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson are both united champions of the genre. Freeway Fighter is one of their few which lends more to science than fantasy, and is thoroughly invigorating. For mind-bending characterization, here you've got the original immersion you need in self-discovery.
The smash-hit Fighting Fantasy gamebook comes to comics for the very first time, in a brand-new story of post-apocalyptic racing and survival against all odds! Bella De La Rosa was heir to a great I-400 racing tradition before the virus hit, before most of humanity was wiped out, and civilization fell. Eighteen months after the collapse of society, she and her blue and red Interceptor prowl the remnants of what once was America, eking out a life among the ruins, trying to evade vicious car gangs like the Doom Dogs, and find enough gas, food, and water to survive. But…
When I was about ten, my mother brought home our one and only outdoor Christmas decoration, a plastic choir boy. One blustery night, we saw something streak by the living room windows. Rushing outside, we were shocked to see our choirboy lying amongst the shrubbery, his plastic neck broken. My father made several valiant attempts at surgery with various kinds of glue and tape, but the poor little choir boy was never really the same and eventually he was thrown into the trash. This childhood memory inspired me to write Candy Cane Lane and fortunately I was about to give it a much happier ending.
Eric and his herd of wild cars are a newly discovered species of furry cars which roam the prairie and drinking from outcroppings of oil. Its unique, whimsical, and oddball humor inspired me to start thinking of my own ideas for picture books although it took me another ten years or so to make it happen.
When city inhabitants find the introduction of cars into their lives is destructive to their environment and makes them unhappy, Eric, a wild car, solves the problem.
I’m an author and former journalist with a fascination with design and consumer culture. I’ve been writing about design and pop culture since completing an assignment on Jack Telnack’s Ford Taurus and Thunderbird designs for a national news magazine. My interest deepened when I moved to daily journalism and wrote about Raymond Loewy’s design for the S-1 Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive. When the newspaper industry began cratering in a blizzard of mergers, buyouts, and bad management, I spent 25 years working in media relations at Penn State and Juniata College. I looked for an involving side project as a respite from writing professorial profiles and found safe haven with the life and legacy of Raymond Loewy.
Randall Rothenberg, an advertising industry reporter for The New York Times, applied the Tracy Kidder Method of journalistic immersion in a process or profession to a single advertising campaign from start to finish. He chose wisely, focusing on the then up-and-coming Weiden + Kennedy—an ad agency riding the success of Nike’s “Bo Knows” commercials. His choice of product? Subaru of America, which, at the time, was the cellar-dweller of Japanese imports. Rothenberg effortlessly captures the high-stakes tension of the ad industry while not neglecting aspects of the industry that are more smoke and mirrors than research-grounded truths.
Rothenberg is exceptional at providing windows into advertising history as his story unfolds. Throughout the span of the campaign, he unsparingly documents inspiration, idiocy (W+K assigns a creative director who hates cars), and an intimate look at how advertising works.
"For all the right reasons." "Cars that can." "What to Drive." "The perfect Car for an Imperfect World." Only one of these slogans would be chosen by Subaru of America to sell its cars in the recession year of 1991.
As six advertising agencies scrambled for the account and the winner tried to churn out the Big Idea that would install Subaru in the collective national unconscious, Randall Rothenberg was there, observing every nuance of the chaos, comedy, creativity, and egotism that made up an ad campaign.
One can read Rothenberg's book as the behind-the-scenes chronicle of the brief and…
I’m an author and former journalist with a fascination with design and consumer culture. I’ve been writing about design and pop culture since completing an assignment on Jack Telnack’s Ford Taurus and Thunderbird designs for a national news magazine. My interest deepened when I moved to daily journalism and wrote about Raymond Loewy’s design for the S-1 Pennsylvania Railroad locomotive. When the newspaper industry began cratering in a blizzard of mergers, buyouts, and bad management, I spent 25 years working in media relations at Penn State and Juniata College. I looked for an involving side project as a respite from writing professorial profiles and found safe haven with the life and legacy of Raymond Loewy.
Examining automobiles people buy offers, if not a window into their soul, then a peek into their personal values. Ingrassia, a Wall Street Journal automotive reporter, guides us down a freeway of history and consumerism that “begat the middle class, the suburbs, shopping malls, McDonald's, Taco Bell, drive-through banking and other things.” He traces our romance with tires, horsepower, and wood-trimmed interiors through 15 models ranging from the Model T to the Prius. As stories of the Corvette, Jeep, GTO, VW Beetle and VWMicrobus, the unfairly maligned Chevy Corvair, and others roll by, Ingrassia integrates how each successive model forever changed customer desires and the often-cramped minds of auto executives. His cruise-control writing style rewards us with a smooth journey among the cars of our dreams.
From Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Paul Ingrassia comes a narrative of America like no other: a cultural history that explores how cars have both propelled and reflected the national experience—from the Model T to the Prius.
A narrative like no other: a cultural history that explores how cars have both propelled and reflected the American experience— from the Model T to the Prius.
From the assembly lines of Henry Ford to the open roads of Route 66, from the lore of Jack Kerouac to the sex appeal of the Hot Rod, America’s history is a vehicular history—an idea brought brilliantly to…
I have loved reading my whole life. So when I became a mom, I started reading to my kids pretty much as soon as they came home from the hospital. They absolutely love to have books read to them, and we have shelves full of picture books. My favorite picture books to read out loud are ones with eye-catching illustrations, witty stories that spark imagination or learning, and rhymes that flow rhythmically. As a bonus, if the characters lend themselves to fun voices, those are always winners. I hope you enjoy reading these books to your kids as much as I do.
Honestly, I read it to myself just for the fun of it. But every child I read it to loves it as well.
Chris Van Dusen (my all-time favorite illustrator) hits all the marks of a great picture book: wonderfully imaginative, absolutely beautiful retro 50’s style artwork, and his rhyming text has such perfect rhythmic timing.
It’s a joy to read, and each page is so full of hidden wonders. After you read this one, you will definitely want to check out his other “If I Built” books and see what a house and a school could be like with a little, or a lot, of creativity.
Young Jack is giving an eye-opening tour of the car he'd like to build. There's a snack bar, a pool, and even a robot named Robert to act as chauffeur. With Jack's soaring imagination in the driver's seat, we're deep-sea diving one minute and flying high above traffic the next in this whimsical, tantalizing take on the car of the future. Illustrations packed with witty detail, bright colors, and chrome recall the fabulous fifties and an era of…
