Showing results by publisher "Simon & Schuster Audio" in Sociology

The critically lauded author of The Beast Side and The Cook Up returns with an existential look at life in low-income Black communities, while also offering a new framework for how we can improve the conversations occurring about them.

Now updated with a new introduction by number-one New York Times best-selling author Marianne Williamson, the 20th anniversary edition of Healing the Soul of America shares her timeless, visionary message of political healing. This is a time, according to Williamson, for Americans to return once again to our first principles, both politically and spiritually. Here, Williamson draws plans to transform the American political consciousness and encourage powerful citizen involvement to heal our society.

Norwich, a charming Vermont town of roughly 3,000 residents, has sent an athlete to almost every Winter Olympics for the past 30 years - and three times that athlete has returned with a medal. How does Norwich do it? To answer this question, New York Times reporter Karen Crouse moved to Vermont, immersing herself in the lives of Norwich Olympians past and present. There she discovered a culture that's the opposite of the hypercompetitive schoolyard of today's tiger moms and eagle dads.

In the age of Tinder, Hinge, or any other dating app that matches you with randos, the dating game has grown complex and confusing. Cue the Betches. First we helped you win at basically everything, and now we're going to help you win the most important battle a betch can face. Maybe you're a Delusional Dater who needs to get in touch with reality (seriously, he's just not that f***ing into you), or perhaps you're a TGF who needs to stop being so desperate and start playing the game.

Vows is both a moving memoir of two marriages and a thoughtful meditation on marriage itself. Cheryl Mendelson tackles the sociology of commitment through our most traditional promises and shows why they endure.

In his first best seller, The End of Illness, David Agus revealed how to add vibrant years to your life by knowing the real facts of health. In this book he builds on that theme by showing why this is the luckiest time yet to be alive, giving you the keys to the new kingdom of wellness. Medicine is undergoing rapid change. In the old world, you followed general principles, and doctors treated you based on broad, one-size-fits-all solutions.

For nearly a century, the Rikers Island jail complex has stood on a 413-acre manmade island in the East River of New York. Today it is the largest correctional facility in the city, housing eight active jails and thousands of incarcerated individuals who have not yet been tried. It is also one of the most controversial and notorious jails in America. Part on-the-ground reporting, part deep social and architectural history, These Walls is an eye-opening look at Rikers Island and the American justice system—and a challenge to our long-held beliefs about what constitutes power and justice.

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable. So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing a “vampiric real-life story of modern-day greed” (Leah Sottile, host of Bundyville).

Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.

Discover how - and why - Black, Indigenous, and people of color in America experience societal, economic, and infrastructural inequality throughout history covering everything from Columbus’ arrival in 1492 to the War on Drugs to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Popular narratives of American history conceal as much as they reveal, presenting a national identity based on harvesting treasures that lay in wait for European colonization. In Whose Ruins tells another story: winding through the US landscape, from Native American earthworks in West Virginia to the Manhattan Project in New Mexico, this history is a tour of sites that were mined for an empire’s power.

Throughout history, there have been numerous epidemics that have threatened mankind with destruction. Diseases have the ability to highlight our shared concerns across the ages, affecting every social divide from national boundaries, economic categories, racial divisions, and beyond. Whether looking at smallpox, HIV, Ebola, or COVID-19 outbreaks, we see the same conversations arising as society struggles with the all-encompassing question: What do we do now?

After the 2011 Tucson shooting that nearly took her life, basic questions consumed Gabby Giffords and her family: Would Gabby survive the bullet through her brain? Would she walk again? Speak? Her hard-won recovery, though far from complete, has now allowed her and Mark to ask larger questions that confront us as a nation: How can we address our nation’s epidemic of gun violence? How can we protect gun rights for law abiding citizens, while keeping firearms out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill?

According to Williamson, we need a new paradigm of political understanding, a moral commitment to express it, and a new kind of activism to bring it forth. The Healing of America is a blueprint for all three.

Finders Keepers is the remarkable true tale of an ordinary man faced with an extraordinary dilemma - what do you do when you find $1.2 million in unmarked bills? - and the fascinating reactions - from complicity to concern to betrayal - of the friends, family, and neighbors to whom he turns. From Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down.

Outraged by the downward spiral of American intellect and culture, Michael R. LeGault offers the flip side of Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling phenomenon, Blink, which celebrated impulse thinking over factual knowledge or critical analysis. If best-selling books are advising us to not think, LeGault argues, it comes as no surprise that sharp, incisive reasoning is on the decline, leading our society to incompetence and failure.

Guns, an American Conversation follows up on a handful of strangers - teachers and gun-rights advocates, hunters and police officers, mothers and fathers across the United States - brought together in a larger group of 150 people, for a monthlong moderated Facebook group chat. The goal of the project - which expanded on earlier efforts - was to foster a civil, yet honest, dialogue between people whose backgrounds and beliefs led them to have opposing views on the issue.

A searing, on-the-ground examination of the collapsing coal industry - and the communities left behind - in the midst of an economic and environmental crisis. The past few years have highlighted the paradox at the heart of coal country. Despite fueling a century of American progress, the people at the heart of coal country are being left behind, suffering from unemployment, the opioid epidemic, and environmental crises often at greater rates than anywhere else in the country. But what if Appalachia’s troubles are just a taste of what the future holds for all of us?

Are humans close to living forever? With advances in medicine and new therapies that prolong life expectancy, we are on track to make aging even more manageable. This new entry in the exciting Alice in Futureland series explores both the science and cultural impulse behind extending lifespans, and the numerous ways the quest for eternity forces us to reevaluate what it means to be human. Some experts believe that we haven’t fully realized our true human potential, and we are about to embark on an extraordinary evolutionary shift.

Natchez, Mississippi, once had more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in America, and its wealth was built on slavery and cotton. Today it has the greatest concentration of antebellum mansions in the South, and a culture full of unexpected contradictions. Prominent White families dress up in hoopskirts and Confederate uniforms for ritual celebrations of the Old South, yet Natchez is also progressive enough to elect a gay Black man for mayor with 91 percent of the vote.