Showing results by publisher "Brilliance Audio" in Sociology

Mathabane argues that the reason many Americans are turned off by the current divisive racial dialogue is because the discussion has mostly been about the politics of race and avoids the elephant in the room - - what each of us can do to become agents for racial healing. His solution is for people to learn to speak the language of Ubuntu, a Zulu word for common humanity.

Something unimaginable occurred from 1764 to 1767 in the remote highlands of south-central France. For three years, a real-life monster, or monsters, ravaged the region, slaughtering by some accounts more than 100 people, mostly women and children, and inflicting severe injuries upon many others.

Why is it that so many efforts by liberals to lift the Black underclass not only fail, but often harm the intended beneficiaries? In Please Stop Helping Us, Jason L. Riley examines how well-intentioned welfare programs are in fact holding Black Americans back. Minimum-wage laws may lift earnings for people who are already employed, but they price a disproportionate number of Blacks out of the labor force. Affirmative action in higher education is intended to address past discrimination, but the result is fewer Black college graduates than would otherwise exist.

Part memoir and part how-not-to guide, The Wrong End of the Table is everything you wanted to know about Arabs but were afraid to ask, with chapters such as “Tattoos and Other National Security Risks,” “You Can’t Blame Everything on Your Period; Sometimes You’re Going to Be a Crazy Bitch: and Other Advice from Mom,” and even an open letter to Trump. This is the story of every American outsider on a path to find themselves in a country of beautiful diversity. 

How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care about others? Since Darwin, scientists have tried to answer this question using evolutionary theory. In The Kindness of Strangers, psychologist Michael E. McCullough shows why they have failed and offers a new explanation instead. From the moment nomadic humans first settled down until the aftermath of the Second World War, our species has confronted repeated crises that we could only survive by changing our behavior. 

We've decided by consensus that consensus is good. In In Defense of Troublemakers, psychologist Charlan Nemeth argues that this principle is completely wrong: left unchallenged, the majority opinion is often biased, unoriginal, or false. It leads planes and markets to crash, causes juries to convict innocent people, and can quite literally make people think blue is green. In the name of comity, we embrace stupidity. We can make better decisions by embracing dissent. Dissent forces us to question the status quo, consider more information, and engage in creative decision-making.

Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically. Boundaries between leisure and work, public space and private space, and home and office have blurred and become permeable. How many of us now work from home, our wireless economy allowing and encouraging us to work 24/7? How many of us talk to our children while scrolling through e-mails on our BlackBerrys? How many of us feel overextended, as we are challenged to play multiple roles - worker, boss, parent, spouse, friend, and client - all in the same instant?

Dalton Conley, social scientist and writer, provides us with an X-ray view of our new social reality. In Elsewhere, U.S.A., Conley connects our daily experience with occasionally overlooked sociological changes: women's increasing participation in the labor force; rising economic inequality generating anxiety among successful professionals; the individualism of the modern era - the belief in self-actualization and expression - being replaced by the need to play different roles in the various realms of one's existence. In this groundbreaking book, Conley offers an essential understanding of how the technological, social, and economic changes that have reshaped our world are also reshaping our individual lives.

Gail Sheehy traveled to Middletown shortly after the disaster and began in-depth interviews with many of the bereaved.

Middletown, America was written as the year progressed, following parallel and intertwining stories of selected individuals and their families. A mother who was doubly bereft when she lost her only son as he tried to fill the shoes of her absentee husband; the sole survivor in an office of 67 people who escaped the 88th floor of Tower 2 seconds before the floor was decimated.

In 1973, Roseann Quinn, an Irish-Catholic teacher at a school for deaf children, was killed in New York City after bringing a man home to her apartment from an Upper West Side pub. The crime made headlines and the ensuing case quickly evolved into a cultural phenomenon. In this groundbreaking true crime tale, Lacey Fosburgh, the New York Times reporter first assigned to the story, utilizes an inventive dramatization technique to veer between the chilling, suspenseful personal interactions leading up to the brutal stabbing and the gritty details of its aftermath.

We are all fascinated by them - that enigmatic class of people often referred to as the rich. With all the emphasis on the rich and famous in America, it seems we would know everything about them. In reality, very few of us truly understand those who make up the very wealthiest Americans - those with liquid assets of $5 million or more. What is this new class of people, and how did they get that way?

In cultures that champion the individual, guilt is advertised as the cornerstone of conscience. Yet while guilt holds individuals to personal standards, it proves impotent in the face of corrupt corporate policies. In recent yearswe have been asked to assuage our guilt about these problems as consumers by buying organic foods or fair-trade products, for example. Yet unless nearly everyone participates, the impact of individual consumer consciousness is microscopic.

Burned-out after years of doing development work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina, as recounted in his award-winning memoir Twelve by Twelve. Could he live a similarly minimalist life in the heart of New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot "micro-apartment" in Greenwich Village.  

Cops, politicians, and ordinary people are afraid of black men. The result is the Chokehold: laws and practices that treat every African American man like a thug. In this explosive new book, an African American former federal prosecutor shows that the system is working exactly the way it's supposed to. Black men are always under watch, and police violence is widespread - all with the support of judges and politicians.

Each year thousands of young adults deemed out of control - suffering from depression, addiction, anxiety, and rage - are carted off against their will to remote wilderness programs and treatment facilities across the country. Desperate parents of these “troubled teens” fear it’s their only option. The private, largely unregulated behavioral boot camps break their children down, a damnation the children suffer forever.

Like a lot of Americans, Steve Almond spent the weeks after the 2016 election lying awake, in a state of dread and bewilderment. The problem wasn’t just the election, but the fact that nobody could explain, in any sort of coherent way, why America had elected a cruel, corrupt, and incompetent man to the Presidency. Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country is Almond’s effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces.

From the inquisitive layperson to the professional economist or policymaker, The Inequality Paradox is essential listening for understanding the global economy in its present state. McWilliams is a fresh, authoritative voice entering the global discussion, making this book indispensable in preparing for the imminent economic challenges of our changing world. 

When Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age appeared in 1967, it rocked the education world. Based on the Rhodes Scholar’s first year of teaching in Boston’s Black community, the book described the abuse and neglect of children for no reason but the color of their skin. Since that National Book Award-winning volume, Kozol has spent more than fifty years visiting with children and working with their teachers in other deeply troubled and unequal public schools.

For the majority of young adults today, the transition to independence is a time of excitement and possibility. But nearly five million young people experience entry into adulthood as abrupt abandonment, a time of disconnection from school, work, and family. For this growing population of Americans, which includes kids aging out of foster care and those entangled with the justice system, life screeches to a halt when adulthood arrives. Abandoned is the first-ever exploration of this tale of dead ends and broken dreams.

In these impassioned, powerful essays, an award-winning journalist deals forthrightly with what it means to be Black in Trump’s America. South Carolina-based journalist Issac J. Bailey reflects on a wide range of complex, divisive topics which have taken on a fresh urgency with the protest movement sparked by George Floyd’s killing. Bailey has been honing his views on these issues for the past quarter of a century in his professional and private life, which included an 18-year stint as a member of a mostly white Evangelical Christian church.

Nearly 40 million people in the United States live below the poverty line - about $26,200 for a family of four. Low-income families and individuals are everywhere, from cities to rural communities. While poverty is commonly seen as a personal failure, or a deficiency of character or knowledge, it's actually the result of bad policy. Public policy has purposefully erected barriers that deny access to basic needs, creating a society where people can easily become trapped - not because we lack the resources to lift them out, but because we are actively choosing not to.