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Saving America's Cities by Lizabeth Cohen
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Saving America's Cities

Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

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Narrator Keith Sellon-Wright

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Length 16 hours 23 minutes
Language English
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Winner of the Bancroft Prize

In twenty-first-century America, some cities are flourishing and others are struggling, but they all must contend with deteriorating infrastructure, economic inequality, and unaffordable housing. Cities have limited tools to address these problems, and many must rely on the private market to support the public good.

It wasn't always this way. For almost three decades after World War II, even as national policies promoted suburban sprawl, the federal government underwrote renewal efforts for cities that had suffered during the Great Depression and the war and were now bleeding residents into the suburbs. In Saving America's Cities, Lizabeth Cohen follows the career of Edward J. Logue, whose shifting approach to the urban crisis tracked the changing balance between government-funded public programs and private interests that would culminate in the neoliberal rush to privatize efforts to solve entrenched social problems. A Yale-trained lawyer, rival of Robert Moses, and sometime critic of Jane Jacobs, Logue saw renewing cities as an extension of the liberal New Deal. He worked to revive a declining New Haven, became the architect of the "New Boston" of the 1960s, and, later, led New York State's Urban Development Corporation, which built entire new towns, including Roosevelt Island in New York City.

Lizabeth Cohen is Howard Mumford Jones Professor of American Studies in the Department of History at Harvard University. She is the author of Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, which won the Bancroft Prize and the Philip Taft Labor History Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written many articles and essays and is coauthor (with David Kennedy) of The American Pageant. She lives in Belmont, Massachusetts, with her husband and two daughters.

Keith Sellon-Wright is a seasoned professional with a career in Hollywood spanning over thirty years. He has had the good fortune to work with some of Hollywood's seminal directors, including Christopher Guest and Spike Lee. His TV career includes some of the most important shows in TV history, going back to shows such as Wings, Frasier, Seinfeld, and The West Wing. More recently he's appeared on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, NCIS, Mad Men, and Parks and Recreation. The majority of Keith's audiobook work so far is nonfiction, ("I love what I get to learn!") but as a lifelong storyteller, he of course loves fiction too. Keith also serves as a "voice of the New York Times," narrating selected articles for the daily audio edition on Audible. He records from a "killer" booth he built at his residence in Southern California. The quickest way to Keith's heart-introduce him to a great new wine!

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Shop the sale

In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support your local bookstore!

Shop now
Celebrate indie bookstores with our limited-time sale! Shop the sale