Social Class

In the era of mass incarceration, over 600,000 people are released from federal or state prison each year, with many returning to chaotic living environments. In these circumstances, how do former prisoners navigate reentering society? In Homeward, sociologist Bruce Western examines the tumultuous first year after release from prison. Drawing from in-depth interviews with over 100 individuals, he describes the lives of the formerly incarcerated and demonstrates how poverty, racial inequality, and failures of social support trap many in a cycle of vulnerability.

We all know how identities - notably, those of nationality, class, culture, race, and religion - are at the root of global conflict, but the more elusive truth is that these identities are created by conflict in the first place. In provocative, entertaining chapters, Kwame Anthony Appiah interweaves keen-edged argument with engrossing historical tales and reveals the tangled contradictions within the stories that define us.

Darren McGarvey has experienced poverty and its devastating effects firsthand. He knows why people from deprived communities all around Britain feel angry and unheard. And he wants to explain...So he invites you to come on a safari of sorts. But not the kind where the wildlife is surveyed from a safe distance. This audiobook takes you inside the experience of poverty to show how the pressures really feel and how hard their legacy is to overcome.

In this audiobook, as in his previous ones, social media expert Maximus Pierce explains the how, why, where, and when of social interaction to ensure you graduate with honors in this social media master class.

The fiery US senator from Massachusetts and best-selling author offers a passionate, inspiring book about why our middle class is under siege and how we can win the fight to save it.

Christophe Guilluy, a French geographer, makes the case that France has become an "American society" - one that is both increasingly multicultural and increasingly unequal. The divide between the global economy's winners and losers in today's France has replaced the old left-right split, leaving many on "the periphery".

Millennials are the first generation in Ireland to be worse off than their parents. Trapped in a game of rental roulette, stuck living at home as adults, and many on the brink of homelessness, the Irish housing crisis has defined the lives of an entire generation—and it is set to continue. With housing costs in Ireland the highest in the EU, the property ladder has been kicked from under thousands. So how did we get here…and how do we break the cycle?

Billionaire oligarchs want to own our republic, and they’re nearly there, thanks to legislation and Supreme Court decisions that they have essentially bought. They put Trump and his political allies into office and support a vast network of think tanks, publications, and social media that every day push our nation closer and closer to police-state tyranny.

Prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity is an expose on how fracking shattered a rural Pennsylvania town, and how one lifelong resident brought the story into the national spotlight. This is an incredible true account of investigative journalism and a devastating indictment of energy politics in America.

For the past three decades, America has steadily become a nation of haves and have-nots. Our incomes are increasingly unequal. This steady growing apart is often mentioned as a troubling indicator by scholars and policy analysts, though seldom addressed by politicians. What economics Nobelist Paul Krugman terms "the Great Divergence" has till now been treated as little more than a talking point, a rhetorical club to be wielded in ideological battles. But this Great Divergence may be the most important change in this country during our lifetimes.

Carlos Bulosan’s idealism and ambition would seem to position him for certain success in America, even given how young he is when he first makes the journey from the Philippines. However, after arriving in Seattle, employers are far more concerned with his Filipino background than they are with his character. Low-paying jobs - and an uncertain future - remain his daily reality.

When famous agent Lucy LaRoux drops by Classroom 13, she makes an offer no one can refuse - she makes all of the students famous. You might think this was sweet, but it was not. It was selfish. (Lucy wants their money.) With great fame comes frightening stage fright, broken bones, rotten reality television, and other awful accidents. As the students of Classroom 13 are about to learn, being famous (or infamous) isn't always fun.

Written as a practical guide for teachers, this audio edition of Carol Ann Tomlinson’s groundbreaking work covers the fundamentals of differentiation and provides additional guidelines and new strategies for how to go about it.

Home Fires is the powerful saga of the Gordon family--real people, names unchanged. Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma--the recognizable components of family life. This is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes.

Most of the top jobs for the future require students to have a strong foundational understanding of mathematics. Our failure to mathematically educate most students in general, and students of color in particular, is bad not only for these students individually but also for our society. In Choosing to See, Pamela Seda and Kyndall Brown offer a substantive, rigorous, and necessary set of interventions to move mathematics education toward greater equity, particularly in serving the needs of Black and Brown students, who are underrepresented and underserved as math scholars.

In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook draws upon three decades of wide-ranging research and thinking to make the persuasive assertion that almost all aspects of Western life have vastly improved in the past century; and yet today, most men and women feel less happy than in previous generations. Why this is so and what we should do about it is the subject of this book.

When discrimination is race-based, we call it racism; when it's gender-based, we call it sexism. Somebodies and Nobodies introduces rank-based discrimination - or "rankism" - a form of injustice that everyone knows, but no one sees. It explains our reluctance to confront rankism, shows where analyses based on identity fall short and, using dozens of examples, traces many forms of injustice and unfairness to rankism.

Most people are keenly aware that every student is different and that today's classrooms challenge educators to build safe and successful learning communities comprising students whose races, languages, cultures, experiences, assets, and dreams vary greatly. This book offers teachers both the foundations for differentiating their instruction and the means to maximize learning opportunities. Everybody's Classroom extends Tomlinson's previous work by looking more deeply at specific student populations to help educators create classrooms that are more inclusive than ever before.

In "Radical Chic", Wolfe focuses primarily on one symbolic event: a gathering of the politically correct at Leonard Bernstein’s duplex apartment on Park Avenue to meet spokesmen of the Black Panther Party. He re-creates the incongruous scene - and its astonishing repercussions - with high fidelity. In the companion essay, Wolfe travels west to San Francisco to survey another meeting-ground between militant minorities and the liberal white establishment. "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" deals with the newly emerging art of confrontation, as practiced by San Francisco’s militant minorities.

There was a time, not so very long ago, when perfectly rational people ran the Republican Party. So how did the party of Lincoln become the party of lunatics? That is what this book aims to answer. Fear not, the Dems come in for their share of tough talk - they are zombies, a party of the living dead. Mike Lofgren came to Washington in the early eighties - those halcyon, post-Nixonian glory days - for what he imagined would be a short stint on Capitol Hill.