Midcentury Tales: Unfettered Youth


Book Description

Follow Ron and Roger Hull through a life that begins in a tiny rural town of Owen, Wisconsin at the start of World War II. Except for what seems like two epic journeys to Indiana, one across Lake Michigan in a terrible storm their world is small. But that changes when they enter grade school and their father gets a job driving truck in the big industrial city of Wausau. In a big rambling, deteriorating Victorian, they are in a changing neighborhood with two kinds of kids: good kids and bad kids. After a run in with the law, they decide to stay on the good side. The boys took music lessons, joined the Boy Scouts, but couldn't make it in the rich father run Little League. At nine, they were introduced to picking green beans in the field for money, earning about three dollars for an entire day of work. To learn, they worked a lot for free. Snow shoveling was something they could do and earn some money doing that. But even though they had bikes, they both decided not to deliver newspapers. Just as they were about to enter junior high school, their father moved to a trucking company in Marshfield, a medium-size rural town with homegrown industries like mobile homes, shoes and boots, woodcraft and hunting outerwear. Once again, the brothers adjusted well to an environment they considered inferior and backward compared to Wausau. They worked at a nearby mobile home factory to provide a substantial part of their college funds. College-bound from an early age, the twins left home at 18 well-prepared to be on their own and independent. Earning their way as they went through life with the lessons that they learned from family, teachers and friends. But active lives lead to mishaps and injury. You will learn how both brothers experienced injuries that were quite severe. But Ron, becoming paralyzed during surgery, had to restructure his college career towards a different direction than Roger. On his own, Ron got an assistantship to the University of Wisconsin to study engineering. While there, he got a fellowship to Stanford to study engineering closer to his desire. Going to California presented a whole new set of adventures. Finally, near the end of the book you will follow Ron through his oversee trips to Guatemala, his missed trips, and his trip around the world to Frankfurt, Cairo, Karachi, Bangkok and all of Thailand, Bangladesh and the Philippines Inside, you'll find great adventures with lots of freedom to explore. You will also find tragedy because no life is without some of that. if you open the pages you may find a bit of yourself portrayed as you read. Those times in the mid century of the 20th were wonderful times to live and experience. By reading our tales, you can vicariously live them with us as well.




Hornet's Nest


Book Description




Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out


Book Description

An examination of young people's everyday new media practices—including video-game playing, text-messaging, digital media production, and social media use. Conventional wisdom about young people's use of digital technology often equates generational identity with technology identity: today's teens seem constantly plugged in to video games, social networking sites, and text messaging. Yet there is little actual research that investigates the intricate dynamics of youths' social and recreational use of digital media. Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out fills this gap, reporting on an ambitious three-year ethnographic investigation into how young people are living and learning with new media in varied settings—at home, in after-school programs, and in online spaces. Integrating twenty-three case studies—which include Harry Potter podcasting, video-game playing, music sharing, and online romantic breakups—in a unique collaborative authorship style, Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out is distinctive for its combination of in-depth description of specific group dynamics with conceptual analysis.




The Stressed Years of Their Lives


Book Description

From two leading child and adolescent mental health experts comes a guide for the parents of every college and college-bound student who want to know what’s normal mental health and behavior, what’s not, and how to intervene before it’s too late. “The title says it all...Chock full of practical tools, resources and the wisdom that comes with years of experience, The Stressed Years of their Lives is destined to become a well-thumbed handbook to help families cope with this modern age of anxiety.” —Brigid Schulte, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author of Overwhelmed and director of the Better Life Lab at New America All parenting is in preparation for letting go. However, the paradox of parenting is that the more we learn about late adolescent development and risk, the more frightened we become for our children, and the more we want to stay involved in their lives. This becomes particularly necessary, and also particularly challenging, in mid- to late adolescence, the years just before and after students head off to college. These years coincide with the emergence of many mood disorders and other mental health issues. When family psychologist Dr. B. Janet Hibbs's own son came home from college mired in a dangerous depressive spiral, she turned to Dr. Anthony Rostain. Dr. Rostain has a secret superpower: he understands the arcane rules governing privacy and parental involvement in students’ mental health care on college campuses, the same rules that sometimes hold parents back from getting good care for their kids. Now, these two doctors have combined their expertise to corral the crucial emotional skills and lessons that every parent and student can learn for a successful launch from home to college.




Down to the River


Book Description

Down to the River is a family saga set in the late 1960s in Cambridge, Massachusetts against the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Twin brothers, Nash and Remi Potts, have grown up as entitled, Harvard-educated, golden boys, heirs to an old, but dwindling family fortune. With the passage of time, the gold veneer of prosperity begins to chip away, and their lives begin to falter. We meet Remi and Nash in 1968, in their mid-forties and partners in a sporting goods store in Harvard Square. The twins' marriages are in trouble. Their youngest children, Chickie and Hen (mistakes, they're often called....), are coming of age during the turbulent urban wilderness of the late 1960s-- school bomb threats, racial tensions, war protests and demonstrations at Harvard and beyond. With all hell breaking loose at home, and any semblance of "parenting" hanging ragged in the wind, the two cousins are left largely to their own devices. Suddenly freed from old rules and restrictions, they head out onto the streets of Cambridge, which become their concrete playground, tumbling headlong into a world of politics, sex, drugs, rock and roll.




The Moral Imagination


Book Description

"John Paul Lederach's work in the field of conciliation and mediation is internationally recognized. He has provided consultation, training and direct mediation in a range of situations from the Miskito/Sandinista conflict in Nicaragua to Somalia, Northern Ireland, Tajikistan, and the Philippines. His influential 1997 book Building Peace has become a classic in the discipline. In this book, Lederach poses the question, "How do we transcend the cycles of violence that bewitch our human community while still living in them?" Peacebuilding, in his view, is both a learned skill and an art. Finding this art, he says, requires a worldview shift. Conflict professionals must envision their work as a creative act-an exercise of what Lederach terms the "moral imagination." This imagination must, however, emerge from and speak to the hard realities of human affairs. The peacebuilder must have one foot in what is and one foot beyond what exists. The book is organized around four guiding stories that point to the moral imagination but are incomplete. Lederach seeks to understand what happened in these individual cases and how they are relevant to large-scale change. His purpose is not to propose a grand new theory. Instead he wishes to stay close to the "messiness" of real processes and change, and to recognize the serendipitous nature of the discoveries and insights that emerge along the way. overwhelmed the equally important creative process. Like most professional peacemakers, Lederach sees his work as a religious vocation. Lederach meditates on his own calling and on the spirituality that moves ordinary people to reject violence and seek reconciliation. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in the field he explores the evolution of his understanding of peacebuilding and points the way toward the future of the art." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0616/2004011794-d.html.




Women, Race, & Class


Book Description

From one of our most important scholars and civil rights activist icon, a powerful study of the women’s liberation movement and the tangled knot of oppression facing Black women. “Angela Davis is herself a woman of undeniable courage. She should be heard.”—The New York Times Angela Davis provides a powerful history of the social and political influence of whiteness and elitism in feminism, from abolitionist days to the present, and demonstrates how the racist and classist biases of its leaders inevitably hampered any collective ambitions. While Black women were aided by some activists like Sarah and Angelina Grimke and the suffrage cause found unwavering support in Frederick Douglass, many women played on the fears of white supremacists for political gain rather than take an intersectional approach to liberation. Here, Davis not only contextualizes the legacy and pitfalls of civil and women’s rights activists, but also discusses Communist women, the murder of Emmitt Till, and Margaret Sanger’s racism. Davis shows readers how the inequalities between Black and white women influence the contemporary issues of rape, reproductive freedom, housework and child care in this bold and indispensable work.




From Poverty to Power


Book Description

Offers a look at the causes and effects of poverty and inequality, as well as the possible solutions. This title features research, human stories, statistics, and compelling arguments. It discusses about the world we live in and how we can make it a better place.




Haunted Media


Book Description

Examines the repeated association of new electronic media with spiritual phenomena from the telegraph in the late 19th century to television.




Golden Gulag


Book Description

Since 1980, the number of people in U.S. prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world." Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces, ranging from global to local, conjoined to produce the prison boom. In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the "three strikes" law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.