A noted urban historian traces the story of the suburb from its origins in nineteenth-century London to its twentieth-century demise in decentralized cities like Los Angeles.

Built in 1969, Metsamor, Armenia (then the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic), was intended as a settlement for employees of a nearby nuclear power plant to be completed between 1976 and 1980. But the power plant would never realize the ambitions of its creators. In 1988, an earthquake caused the facility to be shut down. In 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union prompted a complete construction freeze. The symbol of the dream of a technologically advanced nation, Metsamor remained incomplete and fell into decay undiminished by the recommissioning of the power plant in 1995. Utopia and Collapse documents the rise and fall of Metsamor. The book brings together an oral history of Metsamor with essays by Sarhat Petrosyan and a team of contributors and art and photographic research by Katharina Roters, including more than one hundred photographs. Among the topics discussed are Armenia's cultural and and architectural histories; the typology of Soviet atomograds, or atomic cities; and the phenomenon of modern ruins. Although today the power plant's workers live in a partly built failed utopia, Metsamor stands as examples of the highly idiosyncratic Armenian variety of Soviet Modernism of the 1960s and '70s, making this a fascinating story for anyone with an interest in Soviet-era buildings and architecture.

This fascinating account of Los Angeles’ buried past tells the story of Job Harriman, a former minister turned union organizer and attorney, who in 1911 was narrowly defeated as mayor of Los Angeles running on the Socialist ticket. Behind his defeat lay an unthinkably brutal, stop-at-nothing campaign headed by Los Angeles’ de facto political boss, General Harrison Gray Otis, publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Harriman’s progressive mayoral campaign represented an epic battle for the future of Los Angeles against the bitterly reactionary forces of Otis and his backers. The authors amply demonstrate that Otis was the victor in this contest, and how that victory explains much about why Los Angeles is the way it is today. "Bread and Hyacinths" follows Harriman through his childhood as an Indiana farm boy, through his formative years as a union organizer to his emergence as a key figure in the pivotal era of American socialism. It eloquently describes his lifelong optimism and determination in the face of poor health, financial woes, and personal and political troubles. Viewed in perspective against the backdrop of a city - and a nation - torn by labor strife and political corruption, Harriman emerges as a crucial, if ultimately marginalized, figure in American political history. Viewed in the light of today's uncertain economy and political unrest, this period of California history can be seen as a disturbing omen of things to come. "Bread and Hyacinths" has been optioned as a motion picture by director Paul Haggis ("Crash", "Billion Dollar Baby", "Flags of Our Fathers"). This brief, useful book illuminates an obscure chapter in the history of Los Angeles and America’s socialist movement...The book also serves as a corrective to the Times’s distorted history of the Llano del Rio Cooperative Colony, a socialist community founded by Harriman in Southern Calfornia’s Antelope Valley. – Los Angeles Times This slender but potent book draws us into an early and unfamiliar era of Southern California, when Los Angeles seemed more like Charcoal Alley than Lotusland...[A] fine example of what regional publishing can and ought to be: vigorous, knowing, committed and unafraid, even if a bit eccentric. – Los Angeles Daily News

Utopia is a work of fiction and socio-political satire by Thomas More published in 1516 in Latin. The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs. Many aspects of More's description of Utopia are reminiscent of life in monasteries.

"Before there was a West, there was Christendom. This book tells the story of how both came to be." (from the Introduction) The Age of Paradise is the first of a projected four-volume history of Christendom, a civilization with a supporting culture that gave rise to what we now call the West. At a time of renewed interest in the future of Western culture, author John Strickland-an Orthodox scholar, professor, and priest-offers a vision rooted in the deep past of the first millennium. At the heart of his story is the early Church's "culture of paradise," an experience of the world in which the kingdom of heaven was tangible and familiar. Drawing not only on worship and theology but statecraft and the arts, the author reveals the remarkably affirmative character Western culture once had under the influence of Christianity-in particular, of Eastern Christendom, which served the West not only as a cradle but as a tutor and guardian as well.