Social Science Books
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We Fed an Island: The True Story of Rebuilding Puerto Rico, One Meal at a Time
Andres, Jose
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.99 Sale: $1.83
The true story of how a group of chefs fed hundreds of thousands of hungry Americans after Hurricane Maria and touched the hearts of many more.Chef José Andrés arrived in Puerto Rico four days after Hurricane Maria ripped through the island. The economy was destroyed and for most people there was no clean water, no food, no power, no gas, and no way to communicate with the outside world.Andrés addressed the humanitarian crisis the only way he knew how: by feeding people, one hot meal at a time. From serving sancocho with his friend José Enrique at Enrique’s ravaged restaurant in San Juan to eventually cooking 100,000 meals a day at more than a dozen kitchens across the island, Andrés and his team fed hundreds of thousands of people, including with massive paellas made to serve thousands of people alone.. At the same time, they also confronted a crisis with deep roots, as well as the broken and wasteful system that helps keep some of the biggest charities and NGOs in business.Based on Andrés’s insider’s take as well as on meetings, messages, and conversations he had while in Puerto Rico, We Fed an Island movingly describes how a network of community kitchens activated real change and tells an extraordinary story of hope in the face of disasters both natural and man-made, offering suggestions for how to address a crisis like this in the future.
Downhill from Here: Retirement Insecurity in the Age of Inequality
Newman, Katherine S.
(Hardcover)
List Price: $30.00 Sale: $2.46
A sharp examination of the looming financial catastrophe of retirement in America.As millions of Baby Boomers reach their golden years, the state of retirement in America is little short of a disaster. Nearly half the households with people aged 55 and older have no retirement savings at all. The real estate crash wiped out much of the home equity that millions were counting on to support their retirement. And the typical Social Security check covers less than 40% of pre-retirement wages - a number projected to drop to under 28% within two decades. Old-age poverty, a problem we thought was solved by the New Deal, is poised for a resurgence.With dramatic statistics and vivid portraits, acclaimed sociologist Katherine S. Newman shows that the American retirement crisis touches us all, cutting across class lines and generational divides. White-collar managers have seen retirement benefits vanish; Teamsters have had their pensions cut in half; bankrupt cities like Detroit have walked away from their commitments to municipal workers. And for Generation X, the prospects are even worse: a fifth of them expect to never be able to retire. Only the vaunted “one percent” can face retirement without fear.Other countries are confronting similar demographic challenges, yet they have not abandoned their social contract with seniors. Downhill From Here makes it clear that America, too, can - and must - do better.
Keep Marching: How Every Woman Can Take Action and Change Our World
Rowe-Finkbeiner, Kristin
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $2.46
Keep Marching is a practical guide and highly researched examination of the barriers that hold women back - and how to overcome them.Author Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner - the executive director of MomsRising, and a keynote speaker at the 2017 Women's March in Washington, D.C. - presents compelling data, timeless action plans, thought-provoking stories, a proactive agenda for change, and inspiration for how women can create change in their everyday lives and in the country as a whole.This book provides proven tactics, policy solutions, and strategies any woman can use to build her power.DID YOU KNOW THAT:• One in three women have experienced some form of sexual assault?• When a group includes more women, its collective intelligence rises?• The U.S. doesn't have paid family/medical leave but 177 other countries do?Keep Marching calls on all badass women for justice to come together and rise.
The Fighters: Americans In Combat
Chivers, C. J.
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $2.63
The Fighters vividly conveys the physical and emotional experience of war as lived by six combatants: a fighter pilot, a medic, a scout helicopter pilot, a grunt, an infantry officer, and a Special Forces sergeant. A tour de force, it weaves its characters' experiences into a portrait of warfare that parts from slogans to do for these troops what Stephen Ambrose did for the GIs of WWI and Michael Herr for grunts in Vietnam. The Fighters presents a human side of the long arc of two wars, told with the empathy and understanding of an author who is himself an infantry veteran.
Beyond These Walls: Rethinking Crime and Punishment in the United States
Platt, Tony
(Hardcover)
List Price: $29.99 Sale: $2.79
Beyond These Walls is an ambitious and far-ranging exploration that tracks the legacy of crime and imprisonment in the United States, from the historical roots of the American criminal justice system to our modern state of over-incarceration, and offers a bold vision for a new future. Author Tony Platt, a recognized authority in the field of criminal justice, challenges the way we think about how and why millions of people are tracked, arrested, incarcerated, catalogued, and regulated in the United States.Beyond These Walls traces the disturbing history of punishment and social control, revealing how the criminal justice system attempts to enforce and justify inequalities associated with class, race, gender, and sexuality. Prisons and police departments are central to this process, but other institutions – from immigration and welfare to educational and public health agencies – are equally complicit.Platt argues that international and national politics shape perceptions of danger and determine the policies of local criminal justice agencies, while private policing and global corporations are deeply and undemocratically involved in the business of homeland security.Finally, Beyond These Walls demonstrates why efforts to reform criminal justice agencies have often expanded rather than contracted the net of social control. Drawing upon a long tradition of popular resistance, Platt concludes with a strategic vision of what it will take to achieve justice for all in this era of authoritarian disorder.
Beeline: What Spelling Bees Reveal About Generation Z's New Path to Success
Shankar, Shalini
(Hardcover)
List Price: $30.00 Our Price: $3.29
An anthropologist uses spelling bees as a lens to examine the unique and diverse traits of Generation Z - and why they are destined for successAt first glance, Generation Z (youth born after 1997) seems to be made up of anxious overachievers, hounded by Tiger Moms and constantly tracked on social media. One would think that competitors in the National Spelling Bee - the most popular brain sport in America - would be the worst off. Counterintuitively, anthropologist Shalini Shankar argues that, far from being simply overstressed and overscheduled, Gen Z spelling bee competitors are learning crucial twenty-first-century skills from their high-powered lives, displaying a sophisticated understanding of self-promotion, self-direction, and social mobility. Drawing on original ethnographic research, including interviews with participants, judges, and parents, Shankar examines the outsize impact of immigrant parents and explains why Gen Z kids are on a path to success.
American Fix: Inside the Opioid Addiction Crisis - And How To End It
Hampton, Ryan
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.99 Sale: $3.51
Nearly every American knows someone who has been affected by the opioid crisis. Addiction is a trans-partisan issue that impacts individuals from every walk of life. Millions of Americans, tired of watching their loved ones die while politicians ignore this issue. Where is the solution? Where is the hope? Where's the outrage?Ryan Hampton is a young man who has made addiction and recovery reform his life's mission. Through the wildly successful non-profit organization Facing Addiction, Hampton has been rocketed to the center of America’s rising recovery movement - quickly emerging as the de facto leader of the national conversation on addiction. He understands firsthand how easy it is to develop a dependency on opioids, and how destructive it can quickly become. Now, he is waging a permanent campaign to change our way of thinking about and addressing addiction in this country.In American Fix, Hampton describes his personal struggle with addiction, outlines the challenges that the recovery movement currently faces, and offers a concrete, comprehensive plan of action towards making America’s addiction crisis a thing of the past.
Inmigracion: Las Nuevas Reglas (Una Guia De Univision)
Aguilar
(Paperback)
List Price: $12.95 Sale: $3.51
Todo lo que un inmigrante debe conocer para vivir legalmente en Estados UnidosInmigrar a Estados Unidos tiene nuevas reglas: Un gobierno que quiere imponer leyes más estrictas, amenaza de deportación, falsa información, estafas, miedo. Todo ha complicado la situación del inmigrante. Por eso Univision te brinda los recursos y los consejos para que puedas enfrentar la nueva realidad que estamos viviendo. En esta guía, los expertos en inmigración de Univision, el abogado Armando A. Olmedo y el editor principal de inmigración Jorge Cancino, te explican claramente varios aspectos que todo inmigrante debe saber: • Cómo funciona el proceso migratorio de Estados Unidos• Las principales visas para entrar al país de visita o para trabajar• Qué es asilo y refugio y quiénes pueden acogerse a ellos • Cómo obtener la residencia• Cómo convertirte en ciudadano Americano• Legal o ilegal: Qué debes hacer ante la nueva realidad• Cuáles son tus deberes y derechos como inmigranteCon un texto informativo, claras ilustraciones, datos precisos y casos reales,Inmigración, las nuevas reglas es la guía de Univision que te acompañará en tu proceso de inmigración, desde que dejas tu tierra hasta que vives el sueño americano.
American Dream
Deparle, Jason
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $3.91
Bill Clinton's drive to "end welfare" sent 9 million women and children streaming from the rolls. In this masterful work, New York Times reporter and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Jason DeParle cuts between the mean streets of Milwaukee and the corridors of Washington to produce the definitive account. As improbable as fiction, and equally fast-paced, this classic of literary journalism has captured the acclaim of the Left and Right. At the heart of the story are three cousins, inseparable at the start but launched on differing arcs. Leaving welfare, Angie puts her heart in her work. Jewell bets on an imprisoned man. Opal guards a tragic secret that threatens her kids and her life. DeParle traces back their family history six generations to slavery, and weaves poor people, politicians, reformers, and rogues into a spellbinding epic. At times, the very idea of America seemed on trial: we live in a country where anyone can make it, yet generation after generation some families don't. To read American Dream is to understand why.
A Country for All
Ramos, Jorge
(Softcover)
List Price: $14.95 Sale: $3.91
For decades, fixing the United States' broken immigration system has been one of the most urgent challenges facing our country, and time and time again, politicians have passed the buck. With anti-immigrant sentiment rising around the country, and presidential elections on the horizon, it's no surprise immigration reform is on every candidate's agenda. While some candidates offer viable solutions, others perpetuate negative stereotypes and unpractical resolve. Ramos fearlessly questions political tactics, and has undoubtedly become the voice of the Latino vote in the US. It is now more important than ever to remember the role immigrants play in enriching our economy and culture, and to find a way to incorporate the millions of productive, law-abiding workers who have been drawn to the United States by the inexorable pull of freedom and economic opportunity. In this timely book, award-winning journalist Jorge Ramos makes the case for a practical and politically achievable solution to this poignant issue. Ramos argues that we have a simple choice: to take a pragmatic approach that deals with the reality of immigration, or to continue a cruel and capricious system that doesn't work, wastes billions of dollars, and which stands in direct opposition to our national principles.
How Does It Feel to Be Unwanted?: Stories of Resistance and Resilience from Mexicans Living in the United States
Truax, Eileen
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $3.91
In an era of increasing anti-immigrant sentiment and bigotry, each of these 13 stories illuminates the issues affecting the Mexican community and shows the breadth of a frequently stereotyped population.Dreamers and their allies, those who care about immigration justice, and anyone interested in the experience of Mexicans in the US will respond to these stories of Mexican immigrants (some documented, some not) illuminating their complex lives. Regardless of status, many are subjected to rights violations, inequality, and violence--all of which existed well before the Trump administration--and have profound feelings of being unwanted in the country they call home.There's Monica Robles, the undocumented mother of three US citizens who is literally confined to a strip of territory between two checkpoints--one at the Mexico border and one twenty-seven miles north of the border. We meet Jeanette Vizguerra, who came to symbolize the sanctuary movement when she took shelter in a Denver church in February 2017 to avoid deportation. (Later that year, Time magazine named her one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.) There's Daniel Rodriguez, the first undocumented immigration lawyer in Arizona to successfully obtain a license to practice. Alberto Mendoza, who suffered persecution as a gay man for years, in 2013 founded Honor 41, a national Latina/o LGBTQ organization that promotes positive images of their community. After crossing the border illegally with his mother as a child, Al Labrada later joined the military to get on a path to citizenship; in March 2017, he was promoted to captain in the Los Angeles Police Department. These and eight other stories will broaden how you think about Mexicans in America.
Maximum Canada: Toward a Country of 100 Million
Saunders, Doug
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.95 Sale: $3.91
To face the future, Canada needs more Canadians. But why and how many?Canada’s population has always grown slowly, when it has grown at all. That wasn’t by accident. For centuries before Confederation and a century after, colonial economic policies and an inward-facing world view isolated this country, attracting few of the people and building few of the institutions needed to sustain a sovereign nation. In fact, during most years before 1967, a greater number of people fled Canada than immigrated to it. Canada’s growth has faltered and left us underpopulated ever since.At Canada’s 150th anniversary, a more open, pluralist and international vision has largely overturned that colonial mindset and become consensus across the country and its major political parties. But that consensus is ever fragile. Our small population continues to hamper our competitive clout, our ability to act independently in an increasingly unstable world, and our capacity to build the resources we need to make our future viable.In Maximum Canada, a bold and detailed vision for Canada’s future, award-winning author and Globe and Mail columnist Doug Saunders proposes a most audacious way forward: to avoid global obscurity and create lasting prosperity, to build equality and reconciliation of indigenous and regional divides, and to ensure economic and ecological sustainability, Canada needs to triple its population.
Stranger: El Desafio De Un Inmigrante Latino En La Era De Trump
Ramos, Jorge
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $3.91
Jorge Ramos, periodista galardonado con premios Emmy, reconocido presentador del Noticiero Univisión y considerado “la voz de los sin voz” de la comunidad latina, fue expulsado de una rueda de prensa del candidato presidencial Donald Trump en Iowa en el año 2015 tras cuestionar sus planes sobre inmigración.En este manifiesto personal, Ramos explora qué significa ser un inmigrante latino, o simplemente un inmigrante, en los Estados Unidos de nuestros días. Mediante datos y estadísticas, su olfato para encontrar historias y su propia memoria personal, Ramos nos muestra el rostro cambiante de America y explora las razones por las que él, y muchos otros millones de inmigrantes, aún se sienten como strangers en este país.
Tell Them Who I Am
Liebow, Elliot
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.00 Sale: $3.91
Creating portraits that are at once intimate and objective, Elliot Liebow breaks down the simplistic stereotypes and dehumanizing labels so often used to describe homeless women. He writes about their daily habits, the challenge of killing time for twelve hours a day when the shelter is closed, the fight against constant exhaustion, and the struggle to make an inadequate system work on their behalf. But he also writes about their humor, their friendships, their care for one another, and their tremendous strength - a strength that enables them to maintain the belief that the future will be better. A future that can include compassionate solutions to the problem of homelessness. 339 pages.
Border Vigils: Keeping Migrants Out of the Rich World
Harding, Jeremy
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.95 Sale: $4.39
Ours is an era marked by extraordinary human migrations, with some 200 million people alive today having moved from their country of origin. The political reaction in Europe and the United States has been to raise the drawbridge: immigrant workers are needed, but no longer welcome. So migrants die in trucks or drown en route; they are murdered in smuggling operations or ruthlessly exploited in illegal businesses that make it impossible for the abused to seek police help. More than 15,000 people have died in the last twenty years trying to circumvent European entry restrictions.In this beautifully written book, Jeremy Harding draws haunting portraits of the migrants – and anti-immigrant zealots – he encountered in his investigations in Europe and on the US–Mexico border. Harding’s painstaking research and global perspective identify the common characteristics of immigration policy across the rich world and raise pressing questions about the future of national boundaries and universal values.
Give People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World
Lowrey, Annie
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Sale: $4.39
A brilliantly reported, global look at universal basic income - a stipend given to every citizen - and why it might be necessary in an age of rising inequality, persistent poverty, and dazzling technology.Imagine if every month the government deposited $1,000 into your bank account, with nothing expected in return. It sounds crazy. But it has become one of the most influential and hotly debated policy ideas of our time. Futurists, radicals, libertarians, socialists, union representatives, feminists, conservatives, Bernie supporters, development economists, child-care workers, welfare recipients, and politicians from India to Finland to Canada to Mexico - all are talking about UBI.In this sparkling and provocative book, economics writer Annie Lowrey examines the UBI movement from many angles. She travels to Kenya to see how a UBI is lifting the poorest people on earth out of destitution, India to see how inefficient government programs are failing the poor, South Korea to interrogate UBI’s intellectual pedigree, and Silicon Valley to meet the tech titans financing UBI pilots in expectation of a world with advanced artificial intelligence and little need for human labor.Lowrey explores the potential of such a sweeping policy and the challenges the movement faces, among them contradictory aims, uncomfortable costs, and, most powerfully, the entrenched belief that no one should get something for nothing. In the end, she shows how this arcane policy has the potential to solve some of our most intractable economic problems, while offering a new vision of citizenship and a firmer foundation for our society in this age of turbulence and marvels.
Playbook for Progressives: 16 Qualities of the Successful Organizer
Mann, Eric
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $4.39
An organizing manifesto for the twenty-first century, Playbook for Progressives is a must-have for the activist's tool kit. This comprehensive guide articulates pragmatically what is required in the often mystifying and rarely explained on-the-ground practice of organizing. Here, Eric Mann distills lessons he learned from over forty years as an organizer, as well as from other organizers within the civil rights, labor, LGBT, economic justice, and environmental movements.
Stranger: The Challenge of a Latino Immigrant in the Trump Era
Ramos, Jorge
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $4.39
Jorge Ramos, an Emmy award-winning journalist, Univision's longtime anchorman and widely considered the "voice of the voiceless" within the Latino community, was forcefully removed from an Iowa press conference in 2015 by then-candidate Donald Trump after trying to ask about his plans on immigration.In this personal manifesto, Ramos sets out to examine what it means to be a Latino immigrant, or just an immigrant, in present-day America. With current research and statistics, a journalist nose for a story, and his own personal experience, Ramos shows us the changing face of America while trying to find an explanation for why he, and millions of others, still feel like strangers in this country.
Losing Our Way: An Intimate Portrait of a Troubled America
Herbert, Bob
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.95 Sale: $4.60
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The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
Ehrenhalt, Alan
(Softcover)
List Price: $16.95 Sale: $4.79
Eye-opening and thoroughly engaging, this is an indispensible look at American urban/suburban society and its future. In The Great Inversion, Alan Ehrenhalt, one of our leading urbanologists, reveals how the roles of America's cities and suburbs are changing places--young adults and affluent retirees moving in, while immigrants and the less affluent are moving out--and addresses the implications of these shifts for the future of our society. Ehrenhalt shows us how the commercial canyons of lower Manhattan are becoming residential neighborhoods, and how mass transit has revitalized inner-city communities in Chicago and Brooklyn. He explains why car-dominated cities like Phoenix and Charlotte have sought to build twenty-first-century downtowns from scratch, while sprawling postwar suburbs are seeking to attract young people with their own form of urbanized experience.
The New Poverty
Armstrong, Stephen
(Paperback)
List Price: $26.95 Sale: $4.79
75 years after the Beveridge Report: The shocking extent of hardship in the UKRight now in the UK, 13 million people live in poverty; one in five children subsist below the poverty line. Figures such as these suggest devastating repercussions for health, education and life expectancy. The new poor, however, is an even larger group than these official statistics suggest, and its conditions are something new to our era. More often than not, these people are the working poor, living precariously and betrayed by austerity.In The New Poverty, Stephen Armstrong tells the stories of the most vulnerable in British society. He explores an unreported country, abandoned by politicians and stranded as the welfare state has shrunk. Furthermore, as benefit cuts continue into 2018 and beyond, Armstrong asks what will be the long-term impact of Brexit and—on the anniversary of the Beveridge Report—what we can do to keep the giants of indigence at bay.
Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence
Clements, Brian (Edt)
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Sale: $5.19
A powerful call to end American gun violence from celebrated poets and those most impacted.Focused intensively on the crisis of gun violence in America, this volume brings together poems by dozens of our best-known poets, including Billy Collins, Patricia Smith, Natalie Diaz, Ocean Vuong, Danez Smith, Brenda Hillman, Natasha Threthewey, Robert Hass, Naomi Shihab Nye, Juan Felipe Herrera, Mark Doty, Rita Dove, and Yusef Komunyakaa.Each poem is followed by a response from a gun violence prevention activist, political figure, survivor, or concerned individual, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Jody Williams; Senator Christopher Murphy; Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts; survivors of the Columbine, Sandy Hook, Charleston Emmanuel AME, and Virginia Tech shootings; and Samaria Rice, mother of Tamir, and Lucy McBath, mother of Jordan Davis.The result is a stunning collection of poems and prose that speaks directly to the heart and a persuasive and moving testament to the urgent need for gun control.
Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive
Land, Stephanie
(Paperback)
List Price: $22.99 Sale: $5.19
At 28, Stephanie Land's plans of breaking free from the roots of her hometown in the Pacific Northwest to chase her dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer, were cut short when a summer fling turned into an unexpected pregnancy. She turned to housekeeping to make ends meet, and with a tenacious grip on her dream to provide her daughter the very best life possible, Stephanie worked days and took classes online to earn a college degree, and began to write relentlessly. She wrote the true stories that weren't being told: the stories of overworked and underpaid Americans. Of living on food stamps and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) coupons to eat. Of the government programs that provided her housing, but that doubled as halfway houses. The aloof government employees who called her lucky for receiving assistance while she didn't feel lucky at all. She wrote to remember the fight, to eventually cut through the deep-rooted stigmas of the working poor. Maid explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it's like to be in service to them. "I'd become a nameless ghost," Stephanie writes about her relationship with her clients, many of whom do not know her from any other cleaner, but who she learns plenty about. As she begins to discover more about her clients' lives-their sadness and love, too-she begins to find hope in her own path. Her compassionate, unflinching writing as a journalist gives voice to the "servant" worker, and those pursuing the American Dream from below the poverty line. Maid is Stephanie's story, but it's not her alone. It is an inspiring testament to the strength, determination, and ultimate triumph of the human spirit.
Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
Eubanks, Virginia
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Sale: $5.43
A powerful investigative look at data-based discrimination—and how technology affects civil and human rights and economic equityThe State of Indiana denies one million applications for healthcare, foodstamps and cash benefits in three years—because a new computer system interprets any mistake as “failure to cooperate.” In Los Angeles, an algorithm calculates the comparative vulnerability of tens of thousands of homeless people in order to prioritize them for an inadequate pool of housing resources. In Pittsburgh, a child welfare agency uses a statistical model to try to predict which children might be future victims of abuse or neglect.Since the dawn of the digital age, decision-making in finance, employment, politics, health and human services has undergone revolutionary change. Today, automated systems—rather than humans—control which neighborhoods get policed, which families attain needed resources, and who is investigated for fraud. While we all live under this new regime of data, the most invasive and punitive systems are aimed at the poor.In Automating Inequality, Virginia Eubanks systematically investigates the impacts of data mining, policy algorithms, and predictive risk models on poor and working-class people in America. The book is full of heart-wrenching and eye-opening stories, from a woman in Indiana whose benefits are literally cut off as she lays dying to a family in Pennsylvania in daily fear of losing their daughter because they fit a certain statistical profile.The U.S. has always used its most cutting-edge science and technology to contain, investigate, discipline and punish the destitute. Like the county poorhouse and scientific charity before them, digital tracking and automated decision-making hide poverty from the middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhumane choices: which families get food and which starve, who has housing and who remains homeless, and which families are broken up by the state. In the process, they weaken democracy and betray our most cherished national values.This deeply researched and passionate book could not be more timely.
No Is Not Enough: Resisting the New Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
Klein, Naomi
(Paperback)
List Price: $22.95 Sale: $5.88
The election of Donald Trump produced a frightening escalation in a world of cascading crises. The Trump Administration's vision--the deconstruction of the welfare and regulatory state, the unleashing of a fossil fuel frenzy (which requires the sweeping aside of climate science) and an all-out attack on vulnerable communities under the guise of a war on crime and terrorism--will generate wave after wave of crises and shocks around the world, to the economy, to national security, to the environment. In No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein embraces a lively conversation with the reader to expose the forces behind Trump's success and explain why he is not an aberration but the product of our time--Reality TV branding, celebrity obsession and CEO-worship, Vegas and Guantanamo, fake news and vulture bankers all rolled into one. And she shares a bold vision, a clear-eyed perspective on how to break the spell of his shock tactics, counter the rising chaos and divisiveness at home and abroad, and win the world we need.
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration
Caplan, Bryan
(Softcover)
List Price: $19.99 Sale: $6.95
Economist Bryan Caplan makes a bold case for unrestricted immigration in this fact-filled graphic nonfiction.American policy-makers have long been locked in a heated battle over whether, how many, and what kind of immigrants to allow to live and work in the country. Those in favor of welcoming more immigrants often cite humanitarian reasons, while those in favor of more restrictive laws argue the need to protect native citizens.But economist Bryan Caplan adds a new, compelling perspective to the immigration debate: He argues that opening all borders could eliminate absolute poverty worldwide and usher in a booming worldwide economy - greatly benefiting humanity.With a clear and conversational tone, exhaustive research, and vibrant illustrations by Zach Weinersmith, Open Borders makes the case for unrestricted immigration easy to follow and hard to deny.
The Line Becomes a River: Dispatches From the Border
Cantu, Francisco
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Sale: $7.27
For Francisco Cantú, the border is in the blood: his mother, a park ranger and daughter of a Mexican immigrant, raised him in the scrublands of the Southwest. Driven to understand the hard realities of the landscape he loves, Cantú joins the Border Patrol. He and his partners learn to track other humans under blistering sun and through frigid nights. They haul in the dead and deliver to detention those they find alive. Plagued by a growing awareness of his complicity in a dehumanizing enterprise, he abandons the Patrol for civilian life. But when an immigrant friend travels to Mexico to visit his dying mother and does not return, Cantú discovers that the border has migrated with him, and now he must know the full extent of the violence it wreaks, on both sides of the line.
The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture
Mac Donald, Heather
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.99 Sale: $7.83
America is in crisis, from the university to the workplace. Toxic ideas first spread by higher education have undermined humanistic values, fueled intolerance, and widened divisions in our larger culture. Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton? Oppressive. American history? Tyranny. Professors correcting grammar and spelling, or employers hiring by merit? Racist and sexist. Students emerge into the working world believing that human beings are defined by their skin color, gender, and sexual preference, and that oppression based on these characteristics is the American experience. Speech that challenges these campus orthodoxies is silenced with brute force.The Diversity Delusion argues that the root of this problem is the belief in America’s endemic racism and sexism, a belief that has engendered a metastasizing diversity bureaucracy in society and academia. Diversity commissars denounce meritocratic standards as discriminatory, enforce hiring quotas, and teach students and adults alike to think of themselves as perpetual victims. From #MeToo mania that blurs flirtations with criminal acts, to implicit bias and diversity compliance training that sees racism in every interaction, Heather Mac Donald argues that we are creating a nation of narrowed minds, primed for grievance, and that we are putting our competitive edge at risk.But there is hope in the works of authors, composers, and artists who have long inspired the best in us. Compiling the author’s decades of research and writing on the subject, The Diversity Delusion calls for a return to the classical liberal pursuits of open-minded inquiry and expression, by which everyone can discover a common humanity.
Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare
Dezember, Ryan
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.99 Sale: $7.83
His assignment was to write about a real-estate frenzy lighting up the Redneck Riviera. So Ryan Dezember settled in and bought a home nearby himself. Then the market crashed, and he became one of the millions of Americans who suddenly owed more on their homes than they were worth. A flood of foreclosures made it impossible to sell. It didn't help that his quaint neighborhood fell into disrepair and drug-induced despair. He had no choice but to become a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord to move on. Meanwhile, his reporting showed how the speculative mania that caused the crash opened the U.S. housing market to a much larger breed of investors.In this deeply personal story, Dezember shows how decisions on Wall Street and in Washington played out on his street in a corner of the Sunbelt that was convulsed by the foreclosure crisis. Readers will witness the housing market collapse from Dezember’s perch as a newspaper reporter. First he’s in the boom-to-bust South where a hot-air balloonist named Bob Shallow becomes one of the world’s top selling real-estate agents arranging condo flips, developers flop in spectacular fashion and the law catches up with a beach-town mayor on the take. Later he’s in New York, among financiers like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman who are building rental empires out of foreclosures, staking claim to the bastion of middle-class wealth: the single-family home. Through it all, Dezember is an underwater homeowner caught up in the mess.A cautionary tale of Wall Street's push to turn homes into assets, Underwater is a powerful, incisive story that chronicles the crash and its aftermath from a fresh perspective—the forgotten, middle-class homeowner.
We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast
Foer, Jonathan Safran
(Hardcover)
List Price: $25.00 Sale: $7.83
Some people reject the fact, overwhelmingly supported by scientists, that our planet is warming because of human activity. But do those of us who accept the reality of human-caused climate change truly believe it? If we did, surely we would be roused to act on what we know. Will future generations distinguish between those who didn’t believe in the science of global warming and those who said they accepted the science but failed to change their lives in response?In We Are the Weather, Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves - with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home and way of life. And it all starts with what we eat - and don’t eat - for breakfast.
Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea
Duneier, Mitchell
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $8.04
A five-hundred-year story of exclusion and containment, from the first Jewish ghetto to the presentOn March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in a closed quarter, il geto—named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck, and soon began its long and consequential history. In this sweeping account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present day. We meet pioneering black thinkers such as Horace Cayton, a graduate student whose work on the South Side of Chicago established a new paradigm for thinking about Northern racism and black poverty in the 1940s. We learn how the psychologist Kenneth Clark subsequently linked the slum conditions in Harlem with black powerlessness in the civil rights era, and we follow the controversy over Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the black family. We see how the sociologist William Julius Wilson refocused the debate on urban America as the country retreated from racially specific remedies, and how the education reformer Geoffrey Canada sought to transform the lives of inner-city children in the ghetto. By expertly resurrecting the history of the ghetto from Venice to the present, Duneier’s Ghetto provides a remarkable new understanding of an age-old concept. He concludes that if we are to understand today’s ghettos, the Jewish and black ghettos of the past should not be forgotten.
Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America
Arnade, Chris
(Hardcover)
List Price: $30.00 Sale: $8.23
With stark photo essays and unforgettable true stories, Chris Arnade cuts through "expert" pontification on inequality, addiction, and poverty to allow those who have been left behind to define themselves on their own terms.After abandoning his Wall Street career, Chris Arnade decided to document poverty and addiction in the Bronx. He began interviewing, photographing, and becoming close friends with homeless addicts, and spent hours in drug dens and McDonald's. Then he started driving across America to see how the rest of the country compared. He found the same types of stories everywhere, across lines of race, ethnicity, religion, and geography. The people he got to know, from Alabama and California to Maine and Nevada, gave Arnade a new respect for the dignity and resilience of what he calls America's Back Row--those who lack the credentials and advantages of the so-called meritocratic upper class. The strivers in the Front Row, with their advanced degrees and upward mobility, see the Back Row's values as worthless. They scorn anyone who stays in a dying town or city as foolish, and mock anyone who clings to religion or tradition as naïve.As Takeesha, a woman in the Bronx, told Arnade, she wants to be seen as she sees herself: "a prostitute, a mother of six, and a child of God." This book is his attempt to help the rest of us truly see, hear, and respect millions of people who've been left behind.
Break 'Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money
Teachout, Zephyr
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.99 Sale: $8.63
Every facet of American life is being overtaken by big platform monopolists like Facebook, Google, and Bayer (which has merged with the former agricultural giant Monsanto), resulting in a greater concentration of wealth and power than we've seen since the Gilded Age. They are evolving into political entities that often have more influence than the actual government, bending state and federal legislatures to their will and even creating arbitration courts that circumvent the US justice system. How can we recover our freedom from these giants? Anti-corruption scholar and activist Zephyr Teachout has the answer: Break 'Em Up.This book is a clarion call for liberals and leftists looking to find a common cause. Teachout makes a compelling case that monopolies are the root cause of many of the issues that today's progressives care about; they drive economic inequality, harm the planet, limit the political power of average citizens, and historically-disenfranchised groups bear the brunt of their shameful and irresponsible business practices. In order to build a better future, we must eradicate monopolies from the private sector and create new safeguards that prevent new ones from seizing power.Through her expert analysis of monopolies in several sectors and their impact on courts, journalism, inequality, and politics, Teachout offers a concrete path toward thwarting these enemies of working Americans and reclaiming our democracy before it’s too late.
Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles -- and All of Us
Foroohar, Rana
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Sale: $8.63
“Don’t be evil” was enshrined as Google’s original corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company’s cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous.Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever: from digital surveillance and the loss of privacy to the spreading of misinformation and hate speech to predatory algorithms targeting the weak and vulnerable to products that have been engineered to manipulate our desires.How did we get here? How did these once-scrappy and idealistic enterprises become rapacious monopolies with the power to corrupt our elections, co-opt all our data, and control the largest single chunk of corporate wealth - while evading all semblance of regulation and taxes? In Don’t Be Evil, Financial Times global business columnist Rana Foroohar tells the story of how Big Tech lost its soul - and ate our lunch.Through her skilled reporting and unparalleled access - won through nearly thirty years covering business and technology - she shows the true extent to which behemoths like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are monetizing both our data and our attention, without us seeing a penny of those exorbitant profits.Finally, Foroohar lays out a plan for how we can resist, by creating a framework that fosters innovation while also protecting us from the dark side of digital technology.
On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal
Klein, Naomi
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Sale: $8.63
#1 international and New York Times bestselling author Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, makes the case for a Green New Deal - explaining how bold climate action can be a blueprint for a just and thriving society. For more than twenty years, Naomi Klein has been the foremost chronicler of the economic war waged on both people and planet - and an unapologetic champion of a sweeping environmental agenda with justice at its center. In lucid, elegant dispatches from the frontlines of contemporary natural disaster, she pens surging, indispensable essays for a wide public: prescient advisories and dire warnings of what future awaits us if we refuse to act, as well as hopeful glimpses of a far better future. On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal gathers for the first time more than a decade of her impassioned writing, and pairs it with new material on the staggeringly high stakes of our immediate political and economic choices.These long-form essays show Klein at her most prophetic and philosophical, investigating the climate crisis not only as a profound political challenge but as a spiritual and imaginative one, as well. Delving into topics ranging from the clash between ecological time and our culture of “perpetual now,” to the soaring history of humans changing and evolving rapidly in the face of grave threats, to rising white supremacy and fortressed borders as a form of “climate barbarism,” this is a rousing call to action for a planet on the brink.With reports spanning from the ghostly Great Barrier Reef, to the annual smoke-choked skies of the Pacific Northwest, to post-hurricane Puerto Rico, to a Vatican attempting an unprecedented “ecological conversion,” Klein makes the case that we will rise to the existential challenge of climate change only if we are willing to transform the systems that produced this crisis.An expansive, far-ranging exploration that sees the battle for a greener world as indistinguishable from the fight for our lives, On Fire captures the burning urgency of the climate crisis, as well as the fiery energy of a rising political movement demanding a catalytic Green New Deal.
Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence
Berenson, Alex
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.00 Sale: $8.63
An eye-opening report from an award-winning author and former New York Times reporter reveals the link between teenage marijuana use and mental illness, and a hidden epidemic of violence caused by the drug - facts the media have ignored as the United States rushes to legalize cannabis.Recreational marijuana is now legal in nine states. Almost all Americans believe the drug should be legal for medical use. Advocates argue cannabis can help everyone from veterans to cancer sufferers. But legalization has been built on myths - that marijuana arrests fill prisons; that most doctors want to use cannabis as medicine; that it can somehow stem the opiate epidemic; that it is not just harmless but beneficial for mental health. In this meticulously reported book, Alex Berenson, a former New York Times reporter, explodes those myths:• Almost no one is in prison for marijuana• A tiny fraction of doctors write most authorizations for medical marijuana, mostly for people who have already used• Marijuana use is linked to opiate and cocaine use. Since 2008, the US and Canada have seen soaring marijuana use and an opiate epidemic. Britain has falling marijuana use and no epidemic• Most of all, THC - the chemical in marijuana responsible for the drug’s high - can cause psychotic episodes. After decades of studies, scientists no longer seriously debate if marijuana causes psychosis.Psychosis brings violence, and cannabis-linked violence is spreading. In the four states that first legalized, murders have risen 25 percent since legalization, even more than the recent national increase. In Uruguay, which allowed retail sales in July 2017, murders have soared this year.Berenson’s reporting ranges from the London institute that is home to the scientists who helped prove the cannabis-psychosis link to the Colorado prison where a man now serves a thirty-year sentence after eating a THC-laced candy bar and killing his wife. He sticks to the facts, and they are devastating.With the US already gripped by one drug epidemic, this book will make readers reconsider if marijuana use is worth the risk.
Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities
Kaufmann, Eric
(Hardcover)
List Price: $35.00 Sale: $8.63
Whiteshift: the turbulent journey from a world of racially homogeneous white majorities to one of racially hybrid majoritiesThis is the century of whiteshift. As Western societies are becoming increasingly mixed-race, demographic change is transforming politics. Over half of American babies are non-white, and by the end of the century, minorities and those of mixed race are projected to form the majority in the UK and other countries. The early stages of this transformation have led to a populist disruption, tearing a path through the usual politics of left and right. Ethnic transformation will continue, but conservative whites are unlikely to exit quietly; their feelings of alienation are already redrawing political lines and convulsing societies across the West. One of the most crucial challenges of our time is to enable conservatives as well as cosmopolitans to view whiteshift as a positive development.In this groundbreaking book, political scientist Eric Kaufmann examines the evidence to explore ethnic change in North American and Western Europe. Tracing four ways of dealing with this transformation—fight, repress, flight, and join—he charts different scenarios and calls for us to move beyond empty talk about national identity. If we want to avoid more radical political divisions, he argues, we have to open up debate about the future of white majorities.Deeply thought provoking, enriched with illustrative stories, and drawing on detailed and extraordinary survey, demographic, and electoral data, Whiteshift will redefine the way we discuss race in the twenty-first century.
Formerly Known As Food: How the Industrial Food System Is Changing Our Minds, Bodies, and Culture
Lawless, Kristin
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.99 Sale: $9.11
If you think buying organic from Whole Foods is protecting you, you're wrong. Our food - even what we're told is good for us - has changed for the worse in the past 100 years, its nutritional content deteriorating due to industrial farming and its composition altered due to the addition of thousands of chemicals from pesticides to packaging. We simply no longer know what we’re eating.In Formerly Known as Food, Kristin Lawless argues that, because of the degradation of our diet, our bodies are literally changing from the inside out. The billion-dollar food industry is reshaping our food preferences, altering our brains, changing the composition of our microbiota, and even affecting the expression of our genes. Lawless chronicles how this is happening and what it means for our bodies, health, and survival.An independent journalist and nutrition expert, Lawless is emerging as the voice of a new generation of food thinkers. After years of "eat this, not that" advice from doctors, journalists, and food faddists, she offers something completely different. Lawless presents a comprehensive explanation of the problem - going beyond nutrition to issues of food choice, class, race, and gender - and provides a sound and simple philosophy of eating, which she calls the "Whole Egg Theory."Destined to set the debate over food politics for the next decade, Formerly Known as Food speaks to a new generation looking for a different conversation about the food on our plates.
Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul
Moss, Jeremiah
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.99 Sale: $9.51
An unflinching portrait of gentrification in the twenty-first century, and a love letter to lost New York, by the creator of the popular and incendiary blog Vanishing New York.
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