September 27th, 2011 § 0
Product Description
Drawing on a wide range of classic writings and contemporary empirical selections, this text examines important topics in the field and exposes students to examples of sociological research and different theoretical approaches to studying the world of work…. More >>
June 9th, 2011 § 0
Product Description
In Someplace Like America, writer Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael S. Williamson take us to the working-class heart of America, bringing to life–through shoe leather reporting, memoir, vivid stories, stunning photographs, and thoughtful analysis–the deepening crises of poverty and homelessness. The story begins in 1980, when the authors joined forces to cover the America being ignored by the mainstream media–people living on the margins and losing their jobs as a result of deindustrialization. Since then, Maharidge and Williamson have traveled more than half a million miles to investigate the state of the working class (winning a Pulitzer Prize in the process). In Someplace Like America, they follow the lives of several families over the thirty-year span to present an intimate and devastating portrait of workers going jobless. This brilliant and essential study–begun in the trickle-down Reagan years and culminating with the recent banking catast… More >>
May 10th, 2011 § 0
Product Description
In a clear, cohesive format, Delivering Health Care in America provides a comprehensive overview of the basic structures and operations of the US health system from its historical origins and resources, to its individual services, cost, and quality. Using a unique systems approach, it brings together an extraordinary breadth of information into a highly accessible, easy-to-read text that clarifies the complexities of health care organization and finance, while presenting a solid overview of how the various components fit together…. More >>
May 3rd, 2011 § 0
Product Description
“Nobody who works hard should be poor in America,” writes Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler. Clear-headed, rigorous, and compassionate, he journeys deeply into the lives of individual store clerks and factory workers, farm laborers and sweat-shop seamstresses, illegal immigrants in menial jobs and Americans saddled with immense student loans and paltry wages. They are known as the working poor.
They perform labor essential to America’s comfort. They are white and black, Latino and Asian–men and women in small towns and city slums trapped near the poverty line, where the margins are so tight that even minor setbacks can cause devastating chain reactions. Shipler shows how liberals and conservatives are both partly right–that practically every life story contains failure by both the society and the individual. Braced by hard fact and personal testimony, he unravels the forces that confine people in the quagmire of low wages. And unlike most… More >>
April 6th, 2011 § 0
Product Description
America used to define itself by the things it built. We designed and produced the world’s most important innovations, and in doing so, created a vibrant manufacturing sector that built the middle class. We manufactured our way to the top and became the undisputed economic leader among all nations. But over the last several decades, and especially in the last ten years, the sector that was America’s great pride has eroded, costing millions of jobs and putting our long-term prosperity at risk. Now, as we struggle to recover from the worst recession in generations, our only chance to turn things around is to revive the American manufacturing sector—and to revolutionize it. In MAKE IT IN AMERICA: The Case for Reinventing the Economy, Andrew Liveris — Chairman and CEO of The Dow Chemical Company—offers a thoughtful and passionate argument that America’s future economic growth and prosperity depends on the strength of its manufacturing sector. The book … More >>
March 19th, 2011 § 0
Product Description
He’s one of America’s most capable, canny, candid, and independent financial experts. Now David M. Walker sounds a call to action. Comeback America is a tough-minded, innovative, inspiring guide to help us avoid the approaching economic abyss and put the country back on track again.
As comptroller general of the United States and head of the Government Accountability Office (GAO)—”the nation’s top auditor”—Walker warned Congress and the administration as the federal surplus became a giant deficit under George W. Bush. As president and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, he now works full-time to raise public awareness regarding mounting debt burdens being imposed on future generations. Comeback America is his crucial manifesto, a way for President Obama to end out-of-control government spending and reform our tax, retirement, health care, defense, and other systems—before it’s too late.
Walker believes that by 2030, a… More >>
Comeback America: Turning the Country Around and Restoring Fiscal Responsibility
March 19th, 2011 § 0
Product Description
Since its U.S. debut a quarter-century ago, this brilliant text has set a new standard for historical scholarship of Latin America. It is also an outstanding political economy, a social and cultural narrative of the highest quality, and perhaps the finest description of primitive capital accumulation since Marx.Rather than chronology, geography, or political successions, Eduardo Galeano has organized the various facets of Latin American history according to the patterns of five centuries of exploitation. Thus he is concerned with gold and silver, cacao and cotton, rubber and coffee, fruit, hides and wool, petroleum, iron, nickel, manganese, copper, aluminum ore, nitrates, and tin. These are the veins which he traces through the body of the entire continent, up to the Rio Grande and throughout the Caribbean, and all the way to their open ends where they empty into the coffers of wealth in the United States and Europe.Weaving fact and imagery into a rich tap… More >>
Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent
January 22nd, 2011 § 0
Product Description
It’s not an exaggeration to say that middle-class Americans are an endangered species and that the American Dream of a secure, comfortable standard of living has become as outdated as an Edsel with an eight-track player. That the United States of America is in danger of becoming a third world nation.
The evidence is all around us:
Our industrial base is vanishing, taking with it the kind of jobs that have formed the backbone of our economy for more than a century; our education system is in shambles, making it harder for tomorrow’s workforce to acquire the information and training it needs to land good twenty-first century jobs; our infrastructure—our roads, our bridges, our sewage and water, our transportation and electrical systems—is crumbling; our economic system has been reduced to recurring episodes of Corporations Gone Wild; our political system is broken, in thrall to a small financial elite using the power of the checkb… More >>
November 16th, 2010 § 0
Product Description
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
A Businessweek Best Business Book of the Year
A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
In this brilliant, essential book, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Thomas L. Friedman speaks to America’s urgent need for national renewal and explains how a green revolution can bring about both a sustainable environment and a sustainable America. Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the expansion of the world’s middle class through globalization have produced a dangerously unstable planet–one that is “hot, flat, and crowded.” In this Release 2.0 edition, he also shows how the very habits that led us to ravage the natural world led to the meltdown of the financial markets and the Great Recession. The challenge of a sustainable way of life presents the United States with an opportunity not only to rebuild its… More >>
Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America
October 11th, 2010 § 16
Product Description
From an award-winning historian, a stirring (and timely) narrative history of American labor from the dawn of the industrial age to the present day.
From the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, the first real factories in America, to the triumph of unions in the twentieth century and their waning influence today, the contest between labor and capital for their share of American bounty has shaped our national experience. Philip Dray’s ambition is to show us the vital accomplishments of organized labor in that time and illuminate its central role in our social, political, economic, and cultural evolution. There Is Power in a Union is an epic, character-driven narrative that locates this struggle for security and dignity in all its various settings: on picket lines and in union halls, jails, assembly lines, corporate boardrooms, the courts, the halls of Congress, and the White House. The author demonstrates, viscerally and dramatically… More >>
There is Power in a Union: The Epic Story of Labor in America