It's a Working Man's Town


Book Description

In a valuable addition to the debate on the nature of contemporary working-class culture, Thomas Dunk shows that the function and meaning of gender, ethnicity, popular leisure activities, and common-sense knowledge are intimately linked with the way an individual's experience is structured by class. After reviewing the principal theoretical problems relating to the study of working-class culture and consciousness, Dunk provides a detailed ethnographic analysis of "the Boys" – the male working-class subjects of this study. Male working-class culture, he argues, contains both the seeds of a radical response to social inequality and a defensive reaction against alternative social practices and ideas. In a new forward, Dunk contextualizes the original text with regard to the debates about class and masculinity that have occurred since the book was first published.




It's a Working Man's Town


Book Description

In a valuable addition to the debate on the nature of contemporary working-class culture, Thomas Dunk examines the ordinary weekend pursuits of working-class males in his home town of Thunder Bay, Ontario. He shows that the function and meaning of gender, ethnicity, popular leisure activities, and common-sense knowledge are intimately linked with the way an individual's experience is structured by class. After reviewing the principal theoretical problems relating to the study of working-class culture and consciousness, Dunk provides a detailed ethnographic analysis of "the Boys" - the male working-class subjects of this study. Male working-class culture, he argues, contains both the seeds of a radical response to social inequality and a defensive reaction against alternative social practices and ideas.




Building the Workingman's Paradise


Book Description

This innovative and absorbing book surveys a little known chapter in the story of American urbanism—the history of communities built and owned by single companies seeking to bring their workers' homes and place of employment together on a single site. By 1930 more than two million people lived in such towns, dotted across an industrial frontier which stretched from Lowell, Massachusetts, through Torrance, California to Norris, Tennessee. Margaret Crawford focuses on the transformation of company town construction from the vernacular settlements of the late eighteenth century to the professional designs of architects and planners one hundred and fifty years later. Eschewing a static architectural approach which reads politics, history, and economics through the appearance of buildings, Crawford portrays the successive forms of company towns as the product of a dynamic process, shaped by industrial transformation, class struggle, and reformers' efforts to control and direct these forces.




Working on Earth


Book Description

This collection of essays examines the relationship between environmental injustice and the exploitation of working-class people. Twelve scholars from the fields of environmental humanities and the humanistic social sciences explore connections between the current and unprecedented rise of environmental degradation, economic inequality, and widespread social injustice in the United States and Canada. The authors challenge prevailing cultural narratives that separate ecological and human health from the impacts of modern industrial capitalism. Essay themes range from how human survival is linked to nature to how the use and abuse of nature benefit the wealthy elite at the expense of working-class people and the working poor as well as how climate change will affect cultures deeply rooted in the land. Ultimately, Working on Earth calls for a working-class ecology as an integral part of achieving just and sustainable human development.




It's Even Worse Than You Think


Book Description

From David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of the bestselling The Making of Donald Trump, comes his New York Times bestseller about how the Trump Administration’s policies will affect our jobs, savings, taxes, and safety—completed revised and updated. New York Times bestselling author and longtime Trump observer David Cay Johnston shines a light on the political termites who have infested our government under the Trump administration, destroying it from within and compromising our jobs, safety, finances, and more. In It’s Even Worse Than You Think, Johnston exposes shocking details about the Mexican border wall, and how American consumers will end up paying for it, if it ever gets built; climate change, and all about Scott Pruitt who spent much of his career trying to destroy the agency he now heads; stocking—not draining—the swamp, despite his promise to do the opposite, Trump has filled his cabinet with millionaires and billionaires; and the Kleptocracy, where Donald Jr. and Eric run an eyes-wide-open blind trust of Trump holdings to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest—but not the reality. With story after story, It’s Even Worse Than You Think "diagnoses the Trump administration as a…government by the least qualified and most venal among us” (The Washington Post). This is “a momentously thorough account of President Trump’s alarmingly chaotic first year in office…a precise and fiery indictment of an unstable, unethical president that concludes with a call for us to defend our democracy” (Booklist) and is “urgent, necessary reading” (Kirkus Reviews).










This Town


Book Description

The #1 New York Times bestseller! Washington D.C. might be loathed from every corner of the nation, yet these are fun and busy days at this nexus of big politics, big money, big media, and big vanity. There are no Democrats and Republicans anymore in the nation's capital, just millionaires. Through the eyes of Leibovich we discover how the funeral for a beloved newsman becomes the social event of the year; how political reporters are fetishized for their ability to get their names into the predawn e-mail sent out by the city's most powerful and puzzled-over journalist; how a disgraced Hill aide can overcome ignominy and maybe emerge with a more potent "brand" than many elected members of Congress. And how an administration bent on "changing Washington" can be sucked into the ways of This Town with the same ease with which Tea Party insurgents can, once elected, settle into it like a warm bath. Outrageous, fascinating, and very necessary, This Town is a must-read whether you're inside the highway which encircles DC - or just trying to get there.




Men in My Town


Book Description

The story of the abduction, beating, and rape of a teenage boy, followed by the unsolved brutal murder of his assailant, is now a moving novel written by the man who survived this vicious attack.