Bøger af Matthys Levy

The authors examine buildings of all kinds, from ancient domes like Istanbul's Hagia Sophia to the state-of-the-art Hartford Civic Arena. Their subjects range from the man-caused destruction of the Parthenon to the earthquake damage of 1989 in Armenia and San Francisco.

The world you know is under water - so where do you go?In a retirement home on the fringe of Miami after decades of rising seas, the remaining residents struggle with the prospect of being relocated as a hurricane approaches. The story follows an environmental scientist, an engineer, a former ballerina and her husband/manager, a couple obsessed by a comparison to the holocaust, a widow warning about the end of times, the owner of the home distraught by the consequences of his inescapable loss, and the nurse who looks to a future with a sense of cautious optimism.All are forced to leave and seek new homes away from the excruciating heat and invading seas. As they move north, they encounter distrust, hardships and masses of refugees competing for the last habitable places on Earth. They also confront an administration unable to find a positive path to the new world resulting in a developing police state with government troops trying to control, often harshly, the movement of the refugees. The characters are all transformed by their experience as some find love, some develop new bonds while others remain resigned to their fate. But all are changed through this voyage of self-discovery as seen from the perspective of an older generation that struggles to process this climate changed world.

How does a city obtain water, gas, and electricity? Where do these services come from? How are they transported? The answer is infrastructure, or the inner, and sometimes invisible, workings of the city. Roads, railroads, bridges, telephone wires, and power lines are visible elements of the infrastructure; sewers, plumbing pipes, wires, tunnels, cables, and sometimes rails are usually buried underground or hidden behind walls. Engineering the City tells the fascinating story of infrastructure as it developed through history along with the growth of cities. Experiments, games, and construction diagrams show how these structures are built, how they work, and how they affect the environment of the city and the land outside it.

"At last an inviting book on earthquakes, written by scientists whose easily understandable prose takes us on a tour not only of seismology but also of modern building technologies, volcanoes, and that California constant, the magnificent rubbing and pushing of tectonic plates beneath us." -San Francisco Chronicle Book Review