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"An eminent sociologist--and coauthor, with Aziz Ansari, of the #1 New York Times bestseller Modern Romance--makes the provocative case that the future of democratic societies rests not only on shared values but also on shared "social infrastructure": the libraries, childcare centers, bookstores, coffee shops, pools, and parks that promote crucial, sometimes life-saving connections between people who might otherwise fail to find common cause"--
"The...
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"A groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap from the bestselling author of Bowling Alone: why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility. It's the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in--a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a disturbing "opportunity...
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"Fifty years after Michael Harrington published his ... 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...
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"In 1947 Forbes magazine declared Lancaster, Ohio, the epitome of the all-American town. Today it is damaged, discouraged, and fighting for its future. In Glass House, journalist Brian Alexander uses the story of one town to show how seeds sown thirty-five years ago have sprouted to give us Trumpism, inequality, and an eroding national cohesion." The book describes how the Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware,...
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"Matt Taibbi's genius is in untangling complex stories and making us care about them by providing striking moral clarity and a genuine sense of outrage. He has become among the most read journalists in America, leading the dialogue with epic Rolling Stone pieces that offer an "almost startling reminder of the power of good writing" (Washington Post). In this new work, he once again takes readers into the biggest, most urgent story in America: a widening...
29) Tailspin: the people and forces behind America's fifty-year fall--and those fighting to reverse it
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Publisher's description: Journalist Steven Brill examines how and why major American institutions no longer serve us as they should, causing a deep rift between the vulnerable majority and the protected few. Covering the years 1967 to 2017, Brill shows us how America's core values -- meritocracy, innovation, due process, free speech, and even democracy itself -- have somehow managed to power its decline into dysfunction. They have isolated our best...
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Charles Peters, the legendary founder of Washington Monthly magazine, whose career as a critic and student of the nations capital spans forty years, writes about a spirit of collaboration, generosity, and community that flourished in the 1930swhen government was actually a force for goodand has since been lost. The rise of lobbying, snobbery, and money as the measure of all things have come to define an America that, despite its progress, has become...
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Set against the backdrop of rising economic insecurity and rolled up safety nets, Cooper explores what keeps Americans up at night. Through poignant case studies, she reveals what families are concerned about, how they manage their anxiety, whose job it is to worry, and how social class shapes all of these dynamics, including what is even worth worrying about in the first place. This powerful study is packed with intriguing discoveries ranging from...
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"In Stakes Is High, Smith exposes the contradictions at the heart of American life--between patriotism and justice, between freedom and inequality, incarceration, police violence. In a series of incisive essays, Smith holds us to account individually and as a nation. He examines his own shortcomings, grapples with the anxiety of feeling stuck, and looks in new directions for the tools to build a just America. He questions whether Martin Luther King,...
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At a time when the crises of income inequality, climate, and democracy, are compounding to create epic wealth disparity and the prospect of a second American civil war, four billionaires are hyping schemes that are designed to divert our attention away from issues that really matter. Each scheme--the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, and transhumanism--is an existential threat in moral, political, and economic terms. In The End of Reality,...
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Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how—and why—we eat the way we do. Packed with lyrical storytelling and groundbreaking research, as well as Fielding-Singh’s personal experiences with...
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"A leading voice for social justice reveals how he stopped arguing with white people who deny the ongoing legacy of racism-and offers a proven path forward for Black people and people of color based on the history of nonviolent struggle. When the rallying cry "Black Lives Matter" was heard across the world in 2013, Andre Henry was one of the millions for whom the movement caused a political awakening and a rupture in some of his closest relationships...
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"External physical characteristics that are genetically encoded are things over which no individual has control. But rather than appreciating the gift of diversity, some have chosen to use it to drive wedges between groups of people. Some of these external characteristics are associated with the past moral failing of slavery. Though slavery in America formally ended in the 1860s, the vestiges of that evil institution are still with us today, and those...
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From the cover. How has the United States gone from the striking bipartisan cooperation and relative economic equality of the war years and post-war period to the extreme inequality and savage partisan divisions of today? In Deeply Divided, Doug McAdam and Karina Kloos depart from established explanations of the conservative turn in the United States and trace the roots of political polarization and economic inequality back to the shifting racial...
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"In the United States, children of color are disproportionately affected by poverty, poor educational outcomes, and structural discrimination. In Reimagining Equality, Nancy E. Dowd sets out to examine the roots of these inequalities and their implications for all children by tracing the life course of black boys from birth to age 18. Drawing on interdisciplinary research, the book demonstrates that black boys encounter challenges and barriers that...