Class Politics

Like Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’ Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage - an intimate portrait of an invisible man. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology in college, and after college he learned how to repair television sets, cut suit lengths, and slice chicken. He has lived in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Surat, and Patna, but this evening he is stoned on a street in Sadar Bazaar, in North Delhi. The morning shall bring hangovers, whiskey breakfasts, and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf.

Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the United States following the death of Michael Brown revealed something far deeper than a passionate display of age-old racial frustrations; they unveiled a public chasm that has been growing for years, as America has consistently and intentionally denied significant segments of its population access to full freedom and prosperity.

Geld ist nicht alles? Aber Geld ist ziemlich viel: Macht, Status, Lebensgrundlage. Und Grund für ziemlich viele Gefühle: Scham, Neid, Eifersucht. Aber auch Sicherheit, Glück, Freiheit. Was macht Geld mit uns, und was machen wir mit Geld? Mareice Kaiser erzählt ihre eigene Geldgeschichte und trifft Menschen, mit denen sie über Geld spricht. Vom Pfandflaschensammler bis zum Multi-Millionär stellt sie ihnen Fragen: Wie viel Geld ist genug? Wie viel Geld macht glücklich? Wer sollte mehr Geld haben? Wer weniger? Und wie könnte Geld gerechter verteilt sein?

A critical examination of how inequality and cultural inertia hinder meaningful climate action. The challenges of climate change, like so many issues today, are not evenly distributed across social and economic lines. In this sobering exploration of the interconnected crises of climate change and social inequality, William M. Epstein examines how entrenched cultural values and systemic inequities thwart meaningful climate action, driving humanity closer to catastrophic consequences.

In Moving Up, Moving Out, Will Cooley discusses the damage racism and discrimination have exacted on black Chicagoans in the 20th century, while accentuating the resilience of upwardly mobile African Americans. Cooley examines how class differences created fissures in the black community and produced quandaries for black Chicagoans interested in racial welfare. While black Chicagoans engaged in collective struggles, they also used individualistic means to secure the American Dream.

In Privilege Lost, Jessi Streib traces the lives of over 100 youth born into the upper-middle-class. Following them for over 10 years as they transition from teens to young adults, Streib examines who falls from the upper-middle-class, how, and why don't they see it coming. In doing so, she reveals the patterned ways that individuals' resources and identities push them onto mobility paths - and the complicated choices youth make between staying true to themselves and staying in their class position.

Un argumento contundente contra una sociedad en desequilibrio de la mano del premio Nobel de Economía Joseph Stiglitz. El 1 % de la población disfruta de las mejores viviendas, la mejor educación, los mejores médicos y el mejor nivel de vida, pero hay una cosa que el dinero no puede comprar: la comprensión de que su destino está ligado a cómo vive el otro 99 %. A lo largo de la historia esto es algo que esa minoría solo ha logrado entender, cuando ya era demasiado tarde.

Richard Schweid examines home health care in detail, focusing on the women who tend to our elderly and disabled loved ones and how we fail to value their work. They are paid minimum wage so that we might be absent, getting on with our own lives. The book calls for a rethinking of home health care and explains why changes are urgent: the current system offers neither a good way to live nor a good way to die.

In a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America’s schools.

Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into America's small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order -the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities - underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans' anger, their culture must be explored more fully. Moving beyond simplistic depictions of the residents of America's heartland, The Left Behind offers a clearer picture of how this important population will influence the nation's political future.

The author of the critically acclaimed The Viral Underclass (one of Kirkus Reviews best books of 2022) is back with The Overseer Class, which explores what happens when members of historically minoritized groups are selected for high-visibility positions of power within existing...

Elite networks are informal social networks between politicians in power and top executives of politically connected firms where personal ties and long-term interactions build trust and loyalty between involved actors. Both groups draw benefits from these interactions; politicians stay in power, and corporate executives extract rents for their firms. Firms reward connected executives with higher salaries thus widening the dispersion of earnings in society. In Elite Networks, Vuk Vukovic offers a different perspective on the long-run origins of inequality.

Life in a castle isn’t always a fairytale, as the Duchess of Rutland vividly illustrates in her fascinating, revealing and funny autobiography. When Emma Watkins, the pony-mad daughter of a Welsh farmer, imagined her future it was as the wife of a younger version of her father. But then she fell in love with David Manners, having no idea that he was heir to one of the most senior hereditary titles in the land. When David succeeded his father, against all the odds Emma became the chatelaine of Belvoir Castle, ancestral home of the Dukes of Rutland.

Cities and the Creative Class gathers in one place for the first time the research leading up to Richard Florida's theory on how the growth of the creative economy shapes the development of cities and regions. In a new introduction, Florida updates this theory and responds to the critics of his 2002 best seller, The Rise of the Creative Class.

From widespread unemployment and mounting international hostilities, every day we are swept into more political chaos—so one brave man looks to the Star Wars universe for answers to our most urgent problems. “You can’t stop the change — anymore than you can stop the sun from setting.”...

The bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed goes back undercover to do for America's ailing middle class what she did for the working poor. Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed explored the lives of low-wage workers. Now, in BAIT AND SWITCH, she enters another hidden realm of the economy—the...

Der Traum einer Gesellschaft, in der jeder die gleichen Chancen hat und ohne materielle Sorgen sein Glück suchen kann, ist vorbei. Die Schere zwischen Arm und Reich klafft in Deutschland immer weiter auseinander. Die breite Mittelschicht, die einst unser Land gekennzeichnet und unsere Gesellschaft getragen hat, erodiert. Die Krisen der letzten Jahre haben diesen Trend verstärkt und die Politik will oder kann nicht gegensteuern.

Da Prada ai Ferragnez, ritratti della vera nobilità italiana. Quella senza blasone. Chi sono e cosa fanno i ricchi in Italia, oggi? Quelli che i soldi li hanno da sempre, gli aristocratici, ne hanno sempre meno. E la borghesia, col suo tanto decantato fascino discreto e con l'operosità instancabile? E i nuovi ricchi, quelli delle start up, che diventano milionari in una notte, esistono o sono solo una specie d'oltreoceano? Con il piglio del naturalista Michele Masneri inizia un esilarante viaggio attraverso il bel Paese alla scoperta di questa specie facoltosa, deciso a descriverne vizi, virtù e abitudini.

A prominent conservative scholar traces the post-1960s divisions between the Right and the Left, taking aim at liberals' victimization of African Americans and their failure to offer a viable way forward for American society. The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress.

In a country of critics and where shouting and snarky tweets dominate public communication, neighborliness is in short supply. Duct-tape Community - Hope for Neighborliness in an Unequal World finds it in the most unexpected places, from public housing janitors to farmers in overalls.