The Works: Anatomy of a City

Amazon.com Price: $17.99 (as of 05/12/2019 14:40 PST- Details)

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Description

A fascinating guided tour of the ways things work in a modern city

Have you ever wondered how the water in your faucet gets there? Where your garbage goes? What the pipes under city streets do? How bananas from Ecuador get to your local market? Why radiators in apartment buildings clang? The usage of New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes readers down manholes and at the back of the scenes to give an explanation for exactly how an urban infrastructure operates. Deftly weaving text and graphics, creator Kate Ascher explores the systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and a lot more. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works gives readers a unique glimpse at what lies at the back of and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.
Kate Ascher could not have chosen a much drier topic for a book than water mains, parking meters, railroad classification yards, and the other doodads of city infrastructure. But in Ascher’s captivating book, The Works, the innards of New York City come alive. Wonderfully illustrated, the book combines text, maps, and other graphics to tell the story of the systems that keep The us’s greatest city running smoothly. How are traffic lights coordinated? How do potholes form and which areas have streets with the best “smoothness score”? How is mail processed? What happens when you flush the bathroom? Ascher, who has a PhD in government from the London School of Economics and is now executive vice president of the New York City Economic Development Corporation, dissects the colorful workings of a majority of these systems and a lot more.

The Works contains a section on pretty much every aspect of the Big Apple’s infrastructure. You can learn the mystery of the shiny silver tanks that have turn into a familiar sight on New York streets. (They prevent moisture from damaging underground phone lines.) Ascher explains how the city’s 23 million daily pieces of mail are processed. We also learn about the 27-mile underground pneumatic mail tube that used to carry canisters with 500 letters up to 30 miles per hour around Manhattan. Also interesting: the story of the nine-foot-long, 800-pound robot submarine that city engineers send to probe leaks in the Delaware Aqueduct–which, it might interest you to know, is the world’s longest continuous underground tunnel. And You can find out all about Colonel Waring and his “White Wings.” A great coffee table book for New York lovers or anyone with a curiosity bone. –Alex Roslin

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