Something about America


Book Description

In poetic free verse, the 13-year-old narrator comes to term with her life in America after having fled from the war in Kosovo.




Something for Nothing


Book Description

Drawing on a vast body of research, Lears ranges through the entire sweep of American history as he uncovers the hidden influence of risk taking, conjuring, soothsaying, and sheer dumb luck on our culture, politics, social lives, and economy."--BOOK JACKET.




A Nation of Moochers


Book Description

We have experienced a shift in American character: we've become a nation of moochers. Increasingly dependent on the efforts of others over our own, Americans are free to freeload. From the corporate bailouts on Wall Street to the alarming increases in personal default and dependency, from questionable tax exemptions to enormous pension, healthcare, and other entitlement costs, the new moocher culture cuts across lines of class, race, and private and public sectors. And the millions that plan and behave sensibly, only to bail out the profligate? They're angry. Charles Sykes' argument is not against compassion or legitimate charity, but targets the new moocher culture, in which self-reliance and personal responsibility have given way to mass grasping after handouts. A Nation of Moochers is a persuasively argued and entertaining rallying cry for Americans who are tired of playing by the rules and paying for those who don't.




Something from the Oven


Book Description

Author of the forthcoming What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food That Tells Their Stories (Summer 2017) In this captivating blend of culinary history and popular culture, the award-winning author of Perfection Salad shows us what happened when the food industry elbowed its way into the kitchen after World War II, brandishing canned hamburgers, frozen baked beans, and instant piecrusts. Big Business waged an all-out campaign to win the allegiance of American housewives, but most women were suspicious of the new foods—and the make-believe cooking they entailed. With sharp insight and good humor, Laura Shapiro shows how the ensuing battle helped shape the way we eat today, and how the clash in the kitchen reverberated elsewhere in the house as women struggled with marriage, work, and domesticity. This unconventional history overturns our notions about the ’50s and offers new thinking on some of its fascinating figures, including Poppy Cannon, Shirley Jackson, Julia Child, and Betty Friedan.




Getting Something to Eat in Jackson


Book Description

James Beard Foundation Book Award Nominee • Winner of the Ida B. Wells-Barnett Book Award, Association of Black Sociologists • Winner of the C. Wright Mills Award, the Society for the Study of Social Problems A vivid portrait of African American life in today’s urban South that uses food to explore the complex interactions of race and class Getting Something to Eat in Jackson uses food—what people eat and how—to explore the interaction of race and class in the lives of African Americans in the contemporary urban South. Joseph Ewoodzie Jr. examines how “foodways”—food availability, choice, and consumption—vary greatly between classes of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi, and how this reflects and shapes their very different experiences of a shared racial identity. Ewoodzie spent more than a year following a group of socioeconomically diverse African Americans—from upper-middle-class patrons of the city’s fine-dining restaurants to men experiencing homelessness who must organize their days around the schedules of soup kitchens. Ewoodzie goes food shopping, cooks, and eats with a young mother living in poverty and a grandmother working two jobs. He works in a Black-owned BBQ restaurant, and he meets a man who decides to become a vegan for health reasons but who must drive across town to get tofu and quinoa. Ewoodzie also learns about how soul food is changing and why it is no longer a staple survival food. Throughout, he shows how food choices influence, and are influenced by, the racial and class identities of Black Jacksonians. By tracing these contemporary African American foodways, Getting Something to Eat in Jackson offers new insights into the lives of Black Southerners and helps challenge the persistent homogenization of blackness in American life.




Stand for Something


Book Description

The bestselling book from the host of the popular Fox news show "The Heartland with John Kasich" delivers a powerful wake-up call for all Americans to set their country back on the right path.




Mediocre


Book Description

From the author of the smash hit #1 New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, an "illuminating" (New York Times Book Review) history of white male identity in America What happens to a country that tells generations of white men that they deserve power? What happens when their identity is defined by status over women and people of color? Through the last 150 years of American history, Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy. She then envisions a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism. Now with a new preface addressing the harrowing 2021 Capitol attack, Mediocre confronts our founding myths, in hopes that we will write better stories for future generations.




Nickel and Dimed


Book Description

The New York Times bestselling work of undercover reportage from our sharpest and most original social critic, with a new foreword by Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job—any job—can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity—a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. And now, in a new foreword, Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, explains why, twenty years on in America, Nickel and Dimed is more relevant than ever.




Something's Coming, Something Good


Book Description

A critical and comprehensive exploration of the influential Broadway musical analyzes West Side Story against a backdrop of its cultural period while considering its reflection of both classical Shakespeare conflicts and modern youth issues. Original.




How the Word Is Passed


Book Description

This “important and timely” (Drew Faust, Harvard Magazine) #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives. Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the reader on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves. It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers. A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted. Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Winner of the Stowe Prize Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021