It isn't the way of the Amish to rite about themselves. But John A. Hostetler - author of the best-selling Amish Society - has put together a delightful anthology in which they do just that. More than 150 rare and unusual letters and journal entries, poems and stories, riddles, legends, and bits of family lore offer a uniquely authentic view of Amish life from colonial times to the present. With 25 pages of full-color illustrations, this is the Amish story as told by the Amish themselves, by their friends and neighbors, and by others who understand the Amish ways. Amish Roots is more than an a... View More...
How do we transform American Culture through our religious convictions? Discover here the compelling stories of thirteen pioneers for social justice who engaged in peaceful protest and gave voice to the marginalized, working courageously out of their religious convictions to transform American culture. Their prophetic witness still speaks today. Comprising a variety of voices--Catholic and Protestant, gay and straight, men and women of different racial backgrounds--these activist witnesses represent the best of the church's peacemakers, community builders, and inside agitators. Written by sele... View More...
A New York Times bestseller As heard on NPR, a wondrous nationwide celebration of our shared humanity StoryCorps founder and legendary radio producer Dave Isay selects the most memorable stories from StoryCorps' collection, creating a moving portrait of American life. The voices here connect us to real people and their lives--to their experiences of profound joy, sadness, courage, and despair, to good times and hard times, to good deeds and misdeeds. To read this book is to be reminded of how rich and varied the American storybook truly is, how resistant to easy categorization or stereotype... View More...
Selected as A Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his groundbreaking book The Other America, in which he chronicled the lives of people excluded from the Age of Affluence, poverty in America is back with a vengeance. It is made up of both the long-term chronically poor and new working poor -- the tens of millions of victims of a broken economy and an ever more dysfunctional political system. In many ways, for the majority of Americans, financial insecurity has become the new norm. The American Way of Poverty shines a light... View More...
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER An urgent primer on race and racism, from the host of the viral hit video series"Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man""You cannot fix a problem you do not know you have." So begins Emmanuel Acho in his essential guide to the truths Americans need to know to address the systemic racism that has recently electrified protests in all fifty states. "There is a fix," Acho says. "But in order to access it, we're going to have to have some uncomfortable conversations." In Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man, Acho takes on all the questions, large and ... View More...
A volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology West Baltimore stands out in the popular imagination as the quintessential "inner city"--gritty, run-down, and marred by drugs and gang violence. Indeed, with the collapse of manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, the area experienced a rapid onset of poverty and high unemployment, with few public resources available to alleviate economic distress. But in stark contrast to the image of a perpetual "urban underclass" depicted in television by shows like The Wire, sociologists Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson p... View More...
National Bestseller--New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Publisher's WeeklyWhat makes the difference between failure and success? The Traveler's Gift offers a modern day parable of one man's choices--and the attitudes that make the difference between failure and success.Forty-six-year-old David Ponder feels like a total failure. Once a high-flying executive in a Fortune 500 company, he now works a part-time, minimum wage job and struggles to support his family. Then, an even greater crisis hits: his daughter becomes ill, and he can't afford to get her the medical helps she needs. W... View More...
"A self-effacing, humane and unparanoid call to change our wealthy yet often barbaric world for the better." * In this provocative cri de coeur, the philosopher John Armstrong rescues the idea of civilization from irrelevance and connects it to our search for individual happiness. "Civilization" once referred to a society's technological prowess, its political development, or its cultural achievement. In the modern era, however, the word became burdened by the legacy of colonialism and connotations of elitism. For it to have value once again, according to Armstrong, we must understand that a s... View More...
Years before Hillbilly Elegy and White Trash, a raucous, truth-telling look at the white working poor -- and why they have learned to hate liberalism. What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks. Deer Hunting with Jesus is Joe Bageant's report on what he learned when he moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia. Like countless A... View More...
The Sociology of Education and Work is a clear and engaging study of the links between schooling and the workplace in modern society. It explains, in accessible and lively prose, how these links have developed over time, what broad social trends are transforming them now, and offers some empirically-based projections about how these relationships are likely to develop in the future. Examines links between schooling and the modern workplace, from a sociological perspective. Combines and analyzes theory and studies in the sociology of education and the sociology of work. Includes case stud... View More...
In 1987, a group of Lubavitchers, one of the most orthodox and zealous of the Jewish sects, opened a kosher slaughterhouse just outside tiny Postville, Iowa (pop. 1,465). When the business became a worldwide success, Postville found itself both revived and divided. The town's initial welcome of the Jews turned into confusion, dismay, and even disgust. By 1997, the town had engineered a vote on what everyone agreed was actually a referendum: whether or not these Jews should stay. The quiet, restrained Iowans were astonished at these brash, assertive Hasidic Jews, who ignored the unwritten laws ... View More...
Ditching their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water and everything else motorized or "hooked to the grid," the Brende family conceives a real life experiment to see if in fact all our cell phones, wide screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier and better-or whether life would be preferable without them. By turns, the query narrows down to a single question: "What is the least we need to achieve the most?" With this in mind, the Brendes begin an 18-month trial run that will dramatically change the way they live and prove entertaining and surprising to students. Better Off is a smar... View More...
Tom Brokaw, known and beloved for his landmark work in American journalism and for the "New York Times" bestsellers "The Greatest Generation" and "Boom , " now turns his attention to the challenges that face America in the new millennium, to offer reflections on how we can restore America's greatness. "What happened to the America I thought I knew?" Brokaw writes. "Have we simply wandered off course, but only temporarily? Or have we allowed ourselves to be so divided that we're easy prey for hijackers who could steer us onto a path to a crash landing? . . . I do have some thoughts, original an... View More...
We all have an imaginary definition of a great family. We imagine what it would be like to belong to such a family. No fights over the holidays. No getting on one another's nerves. Respect for individual identity. Mutual support, without being intrusive. So many people believe they are disqualified from having a better family experience, primarily because they compare their own family with the mythic ideal, and their reality falls short. Is that a fair standard to judge against?" In the pages of "Why Do I Love These People?," Po Bronson takes us on an extraordinary journey. It begins on a rive... View More...
In his bestselling work of "comic sociology," David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today's upper class--those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture. Their hybrid lifestyle is the atmosphere we breathe, and in this witty and serious look at the cultural consequences of the information age, Brooks has defined a new generation. Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do you ... View More...
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - David Brooks challenges us to rebalance the scales between the focus on external success--"r sum virtues"--and our core principles. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST With the wisdom, humor, curiosity, and sharp insights that have brought millions of readers to his New York Times column and his previous bestsellers, David Brooks has consistently illuminated our daily lives in surprising and original ways. In The Social Animal, he explored the neuroscience of human connection and how we can flourish together. Now, in The Road to Charact... View More...
With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the "New York Times" columnist and bestselling author of "Bobos in Paradise, "has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life. This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica--how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and ... View More...
As of this decade, more than half the earth's population lives in cities; our world is not just globalized, but urbanized. This powerful reappraisal draws on two decades of fieldwork and research to show how the metropolis has become a medium for revolutionary social change. Not just political upheaval but technological, economic, and cultural innovations are forged in our urban centers. From Chicago to Mumbai, in every corner of the world, the city is now a laboratory for revolution, brewing potential solutions to poverty, inequality, and sustainability. Bridging urban studies, economics, and... View More...
Frances Dunn Butterfoss, Ph.D., captured the attention of academics and practitioners everywhere with her landmark textbook, Coalitions and Partnerships in Community Health, which provided a comprehensive approach to coalitions. Ignite Getting Your Community Coalition Fired Up for Change is a more concise, user-friendly book geared for community practitioners, leaders, and activists who want to build and sustain innovative organizations and coalitions to improve the health and well-being of their communities. Learn why sustaining and building a coalition is very much like planning, building, ... View More...
Now a Washington Post Bestseller.During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald J. Trump proclaimed, "The American Dream is dead," a message that resonated across the country. Washington Examiner editor Timothy Carney traveled Middle America, pored over county-level maps and data, and sorted through sociological studies, and had a startling revelation: Donald Trump is right, but the death of the American Dream is a social phenomenon, not an economic one.In some parts of the United States, life seems to be getting worse because citizens are facing their problems alone. These communities have see... View More...
Drawing on psychological and neurological studies that underscore how tightly people's happiness and satisfaction are tied to performing hard work in the real world, Carr reveals something we already suspect: shifting our attention to computer screens can leave us disengaged and discontented.From nineteenth-century textile mills to the cockpits of modern jets, from the frozen hunting grounds of Inuit tribes to the sterile landscapes of GPS maps, The Glass Cage explores the impact of automation from a deeply human perspective, examining the personal as well as the economic consequences of our g... View More...
'Drag Diaries' pulls back the curtain on a campy, vivacious, underground society of high heels and attitude, complete with extravagant cross dressing, glittering exposure and fabulous costumes. Today, drag is everywhere, exerting a major influence on designers and photographers, models and stylists, movies and theatre. View More...
At no time in history, and certainly in no other democratic society, have prisons been filled so quickly and to such capacity than in the United States. And nowhere has this growth been more concentrated than in the disadvantaged--and primarily minority--neighborhoods of America's largest urban cities. In the most impoverished places, as much as 20% of the adult men are locked up on any given day, and there is hardly a family without a father, son, brother, or uncle who has not been behind bars. While the effects of going to and returning home from prison are well-documented, little attention... View More...
For more than twenty-five years, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton has made children her passion and her cause. Her long experience with children -- not only through her personal roles as mother, daughter, sister, and wife but also as advocate, legal expert, and public servant -- has strengthened her conviction that how children develop and what they need to succeed are inextricably entwined with the society in which they live and how well it sustains and supports its families and individuals. In other words, it takes a village to raise a child.This book chronicles her quest -- both deeply per... View More...
As heard on NPR's Fresh Air "This empowering light into a brighter future is a narrative you won't want to miss." - Ralph Nader "Collins not only talks the talk but walks the walk...this is a worthwhile book to read, digest, and share" - Publishers Weekly An essential piece of reading for anyone concerned by the increasing wealth inequality-made worse by the global pandemic and political partisanship The growing wealth inequality continues to dominate headlines. The divide between the haves and have nots in America is increasingly political and tensions are rising. On one side, the wealthy wi... View More...
