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21) This boy
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Description
"Paul Walden is not an alpha lobster, the hypermasculine crustacean king who intimidates the other male lobsters, beds all the lady lobsters, and "wins" at life. At least not according to the ego-bursting feedback he's given in his freshman seminar. But Paul finds a funny, faithful friend in Roby Smalls, and maybe -- oh god, please -- he's beginning to catch the interest of smart, beautiful Natalia Gutierrez. Cruising through high school as a sauced-out,...
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Madame Bovary is the story of a beautiful young woman who marries a luckless and loutish country doctor. She attempts to escape the narrow confines of her life through a series of passionate affairs, hoping to find in other men the romantic ideal she has always dreamed about. Her recklessness comes back to haunt her, however, and the strong-willed and independent Emma finds herself in a desperate fight for existence.
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The middle class has never been so vulnerable. Its every feature is under assault by politicians and the lobbyists who court them, big-business corporations that are sending their jobs overseas, and a media that relies on sensationalism instead of facts when reporting the news. CNN host and commentator Dobbs looks at every aspect of the decline of the middle class--from a lack of political representation to America's corrupt health-care system--to...
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In Promised Land, David Stebenne examines the extraordinary revival of the middle class in mid-twentieth century America and how it drastically changed the country. The story begins with the pervasive income and wealth inequality of the pre-New Deal period. What followed—Roosevelt’s reforms, the regulation of business and finance, higher taxation of the truly affluent, and greater government spending—began a great leveling. World War II brought...
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"Mark Firth is a home builder in Howland, Massachusetts in the early 2000s who, after being swindled by a finanical advisor, feels opportunity passing him by. In the paranoid days after 9/11, a New York money manager, Philip Hadi, moves his family to Howland and hires Mark to turn his his house into a "secure location." When Howland's first selectman passes away suddenly, Hadi runs for office, and begins subtly transforming the town in his image....
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"America is becoming a class-based society. It is now conventional wisdom to focus on the wealth of the top 1 percent-especially the top 0.01 percent-and how the ultra-rich are concentrating income and prosperity while incomes for most other Americans are stagnant. But the most important, consequential, and widening gap in American society is between the upper middle class and everyone else. Reeves defines the upper middle class as those whose incomes...
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In Mrs. Bridge, Evan S. Connell, a consummate storyteller, artfully crafts a portrait using the finest of details in everyday events and confrontations. The novel is comprised of vignettes, images, fragments of conversations, events--all building powerfully toward the completed group portrait of a family, closely knit on the surface but deeply divided by loneliness, boredom, misunderstandings, isolation, sexual longing, and terminal isolation. In...
30) Rabbit at rest
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Description
"Ex-basketball player Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom has acquired heart trouble, a Florida condo and a second grandchild. His son, Nelson, is behaving erratically and his wife, Janice, decides in mid-life to become a working girl. As, through the winter, spring and summer of 1989, Reagan's debt-ridden, AIDS-plagued America yields to that of George Bush, Rabbit explores the bleak terrain of late middle age, looking for reasons to live."
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Controversial upon publication in 1946, Memoirs of Hecate County remained banned for more than a decade before being reissued.
A favorite among his own books, Edmund Wilson's erotic and devestating portrait of the upper middle class still holds up today as a corrosive indictment of the adultery and intellectual posturing that lie at the heart of suburban America.
33) Parallel stories
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The agendas of three European men with dubious political histories converge in the aftermath of an 1989 death linked to the fates of myriad Hungarians, Jews, Germans and Gypsies across the treacherous years of the mid-twentieth century.
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Around the world, populist movements are gaining traction among the white working class. Meanwhile, the professional elite--journalists, managers, and establishment politicians--is on the outside looking in, and left to argue over the reasons why. In White Working Class, Joan C. Williams, described as "something approaching rock star status" in her field by the New York Times, explains why so much of the elite's analysis of the white working class...
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Wall Street veteran Edward Conard argues that our current obsession with income inequality is misguided and will only slow growth further. Conard tracks the implications of an economy now constrained by both its capacity for risk-taking and by a shortage of properly trained talent -- rather than by labor or capital, as was the case historically. He uses this fresh perspective to challenge the conclusions of liberal economists like Larry Summers and...