Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City

Erik Harms, “Saigon’s Edge: On the Margins of Ho Chi Minh City”
2011 | ISBN-10: 0816656061, 0816656053 | 320 pages | PDF | 3 MB

Much of the world’s population inhabits the urban fringe, an area that is neither fully rural nor urban. Hóc Môn, a district that lies along a key transport corridor on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City, epitomizes one of those places. In Saigon’s Edge, Erik Harms explores life in Hóc Môn, putting forth a revealing perspective on how rapid urbanization impacts the people who live at the intersection of rural and urban worlds.

Unlike the idealized Vietnamese model of urban space, Hóc Môn is between worlds, neither outside nor inside but always uncomfortably both. With particular attention to everyday social realities, Harms demonstrates how living on the margin can be both alienating and empowering, as forces that exclude its denizens from power and privilege in the inner city are used to thwart the status quo on the rural edges.

More than a local case study of urban change, Harms’s work also opens a window on Vietnam’s larger turn toward market socialism and the celebration of urbanization—transformations instructively linked to trends around the globe.

The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience

The Permaculture City: Regenerative Design for Urban, Suburban, and Town Resilience by Toby Hemenway
English | 2015 | ISBN: 1603585265 | 288 pages | EPUB | 23,2 MB

Permaculture is more than just the latest buzzword; it offers positive solutions for many of the environmental and social challenges confronting us. And nowhere are those remedies more needed and desired than in our cities. The Permaculture City provides a new way of thinking about urban living, with practical examples for creating abundant food, energy security, close-knit communities, local and meaningful livelihoods, and sustainable policies in our cities and towns. The same nature-based approach that works so beautifully for growing food―connecting the pieces of the landscape together in harmonious ways―applies perfectly to many of our other needs. Toby Hemenway, one of the leading practitioners and teachers of permaculture design, illuminates a new way forward through examples of edge-pushing innovations, along with a deeply holistic conceptual framework for our cities, towns, and suburbs.

The Permaculture City begins in the garden but takes what we have learned there and applies it to a much broader range of human experience; we’re not just gardening plants but people, neighborhoods, and even cultures. Hemenway lays out how permaculture design can help towndwellers solve the challenges of meeting our needs for food, water, shelter, energy, community, and livelihood in sustainable, resilient ways. Readers will find new information on designing the urban home garden and strategies for gardening in community, rethinking our water and energy systems, learning the difference between a “job” and a “livelihood,” and the importance of placemaking and an empowered community.

This important book documents the rise of a new sophistication, depth, and diversity in the approaches and thinking of permaculture designers and practitioners. Understanding nature can do more than improve how we grow, make, or consume things; it can also teach us how to cooperate, make decisions, and arrive at good solutions.

Exploration Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z [Audiobook] Repost

Exploration Fawcett: Journey to the Lost City of Z [Audiobook] by P. H. Fawcett
English | June 10, 2010 | ASIN: B003R3EQN4, ISBN: 1441763791, 1441763783 | MP3@64 kbps | 15 hrs 36 mins | 431 MB
Narrator: Robin Sachs | Genre: Nonfiction/History

This is the true story of the real Colonel Fawcett, whose life was the inspiration for the best-selling book The Lost City of Z and an upcoming movie starring Brad Pitt. A thrilling account, it tells of Colonel Fawcett and his mysterious disappearance in the Amazon jungle, which is now considered one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.

The mystic and legendary British explorer Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett disappeared in the unknown and unexplored territory of Brazil’s Mato Grosso in 1925. For ten years, he had wandered the forests and death-filled rivers in search of a fabled lost city. Finally, convinced that he had discovered the location, he set out for the last time with two companions, one of whom was his eldest son, to destination “Z”, never to be heard from again.

This thrilling and mysterious account of Fawcett’s 10 years of travels in deadly jungles and forests in search of a secret city was compiled by his younger son from manuscripts, letters, and logbooks. What happened to him afterward remains a mystery.

The City of Mirrors (The Passage Trilogy, Book 3) [Audiobook]

The City of Mirrors (The Passage Trilogy, Book 3) [Audiobook] by Justin Cronin
English | May 24, 2016 | ASIN: B01CRUQPOU | M4B@64 kbps | 29 hrs 29 mins | 811 MB
Narrator: Scott Brick | Genre: Post-Apocalyptic Thriller

In The Passage and The Twelve, Justin Cronin brilliantly imagined the fall of civilization and humanity’s desperate fight to survive. Now all is quiet on the horizon – but does silence promise the nightmare’s end or the second coming of unspeakable darkness? At last this best-selling epic races to its breathtaking finale.

The world we knew is gone. What world will rise in its place?

The Twelve have been destroyed, and the 100-year reign of darkness that descended upon the world has ended. The survivors are stepping outside their walls, determined to build society anew – and daring to dream of a hopeful future.

But far from them, in a dead metropolis, he waits: Zero. The First. Father of the Twelve. The anguish that shattered his human life haunts him, and the hatred spawned by his transformation burns bright. His fury will be quenched only when he destroys Amy – humanity’s only hope, the Girl from Nowhere who grew up to rise against him.

One last time light and dark will clash, and at last Amy and her friends will know their fate.

The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the Murder Capital of Australia? (Repost)

Stephen Orr, “The Cruel City: Is Adelaide the Murder Capital of Australia?”
2011 | pages: 157 | ISBN: 174237509X | EPUB | 1,5 mb

Why is it that Adelaide, a beautiful city of churches and lush gardens, a place renowned for its support of the arts and culture, has become better known as the epicenter of some of Australia’s weirdest and most brutal crimes? One of its denizens seeks the answers in this fascinating investigation. Some crimes are so mysterious or ghastly that they take on a legendary status, and Adelaide seems to have had more than its fair share of them. The whole nation remembers the disappearance of the Beaumont children, the ghastly Snowtown murders where the dismembered bodies were found in barrels in a disused bank vault, and the so called Family murders perpetrated by Bevan Spencer van Einem, with its trail of conspiracy theories, rumor, and innuendo, and other crimes just as notorious. Award-winning novelist and journalist Stephen Orr rounds up the infamous crimes of his native city and looks beyond the myth to the tragic sadness, badness and madness of violent crime and its consequences. Why Adelaide? Read Cruel City and find out. This book was shortlisted for the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and longlisted for the 2011 Miles Franklin.

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