The Works: Anatomy of a City

The Works - Anatomy of a City by Kate Ascher

The ultimate guide to how 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?
Who is operating the traffic lights all over the city?

Using New York City as its point of reference, The Works takes you down the manhole and behind the scenes to explain everything you ever wanted to know about what makes New York City run. Explore the complex systems that manage water, traffic, sewage and garbage, subways, electricity, mail, and much more. The Works: Anatomy of a City offers a cross section of this hidden infrastructure, using beautiful, innovative graphic images combined with short, clear text explanations to answer all the questions about the way things work in a modern city. It describes the technologies that keep the city functioning, as well as the people who support them - the pilots that bring the ships in over the Narrows sandbar, the sandhogs who are currently digging the third water tunnel under Manhattan, the television engineer who scales the Empire State Building's antenna for routine maintenance, the electrical wizards who maintain the century-old system that delivers power to subways. Full of fascinating facts and anecdotes, The Works provides a unique glimpse at what lies behind and beneath urban life in the twenty-first century.

• Did you know that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is so long, and its towers are so high, that the builders had to take the curvature of the earth's surface into account when designing it?
• Did you know that the George Washington Bridge takes in approximately $1 million per day in tolls?
• Did you know that retired subway cars travel by barge to the mid-Atlantic, where they are dumped overboard to form natural reefs for fish?
• Or that if the telecom cables under New York were strung end to end, they would reach from the earth to the sun?

While the book uses New York as its example, it has relevance well beyond that city's boundaries as the systems that make New York a functioning metropolis are similar to those that keep the bright lights burning in big cities everywhere. This book is for anyone who has ever stopped midcrosswalk, looked at the rapidly moving metropolis around them, and wondered, how does all this work?

Book Details:

• Number of Pages: 240
• Book Size: 8.82" x 11.22"
• Book Type: Hardcover with Dust Jacket
• Recommended Ages: 8 through adult
• ISBN 10: 1594200718
• ISBN 13: 978-1594200717

Book Condition:

• This book is brand new and is in perfect condition. 

"The Works is both a reference guide and a geeky pleasure." - Time Out New York

"It's a rare person who won't find something of interest in The Works, whether it's an explanation of how a street-sweeper works or the view of what's down a manhole." - New York Post

Why We Love It

Children and adults get a rare inside glimpse into what makes a large city work. This book can be used as a history lesson, a geography lesson, a science lesson, and much more!