Alexander Wood – författare

A sweeping history of New York that chronicles the construction of one of the world’s great cities.  Between the 1880s and the 1930s, New York City experienced explosive growth as nearly a million buildings, dozens of bridges and tunnels, hundreds of miles of subway lines, and thousands of miles of streets were erected to meet the needs of an ever-swelling population. This landscape—jagged with skyscrapers, rattling with the sound of mass transit, alive with people—made the city world-famous.  Building the Metropolis offers a revelatory look at this era of urban development by asking, “Who built New York, and how?” Focusing on the work of architects, builders, and construction workers, Alexander Wood chronicles the physical process of the city’s rapid expansion. New York’s towering buildings and busy thoroughfares aren’t just stylish or structural marvels, Wood shows, but the direct result of the many colorful personalities who worked in one of the city’s largest industries. This development boom drew on the resources of the whole community and required money, political will, creative vision, entrepreneurial drive, skilled workmanship, and hard physical labor. Wood shows this to be an even larger story as well. As cities became nodes in a regional, national, and global economy, the business of construction became an important motor of economic, political, and social development. While they held drastically different views on the course of urban growth, machine politicians, reformers, and radicals alike were all committed to city building on an epic scale.  Drawing on resources that include city archives and the records of architecture firms, construction companies, and labor unions, Building the Metropolis tells the story of New York in a way that’s epic, lively, and utterly original.

Originally published in 1954, this biography was the result of many years' labour by its author, Alexander Wood. At the time of Dr Wood's death, he had completed the first ten chapters and left notes for the remaining two, which were finished by Frank Oldham. The volume traces the life of the famous English natural philosopher Thomas Young (1773-1829) from his precocious childhood through his later career as a physician and his accomplishments in the study of optics and languages. As Mr Oldham notes in the preface, 'Young forms a fascinating subject in the field of biography, not only from his amazing scientific record and his wide classical learning combined with his remarkable depth of knowledge in philosophy, but also as a humanist working disinterestedly in the cause of truth.' The book is richly illustrated and contains a memoir of the late author by his acquaintance Professor Charles E. Raven.

The world is losing species and biodiversity at an unprecedented rate. The causes go deep and the losses are driven by a complex array of social, economic, political and biological factors at different levels. Immediate causes such as over-harvesting, pollution and habitat change have been well studied, but the socioeconomic factors driving people to degrade their environment are less well understood. This book examines the underlying causes. It provides analyses of a range of case studies from Brazil, Cameroon, China, Danube River Basin, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, Tanzania and Vietnam, and integrates them into a new and interdisciplinary framework for understanding what is happening. From these results, the editors are able to derive policy conclusions and recommendations for operational and institutional approaches to address the root causes and reverse the current trends. It makes a contribution to the understanding of all those - from ecologists and conservationists to economists and policy makers - working on one of the major challenges we face.