I have spent an entire career, via reading, research, and teaching, helping people realize their dreams. For me, it represents “paying it forward,” thanking those who helped a girl from an ethnic, working-class background become an internationally recognized scholar. Studying optimism and goal-seeking has taught me that dreaming and optimism are important—but they are simply not enough to move someone forward. Dreams must become projects motivated by mentoring, planning, and hard work. Not everyone has those resources available to them. The curse of social inequality can indeed destroy hopes and dreams in the very early lives of the socially disadvantaged—with devastating consequences for society as a whole.
We hear everyday voices telling us their true feelings, telling us whether they even dare to dream and whether they believe they can accomplish their dreams. We see first-hand how social inequality can, for some, destroy hopes and dreams for the future and replace those hopes and dreams with desperation and resentment.
This classic text addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. With the original 1987 publication of Ain't No Makin' It, Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights housing project where we met the 'Brothers' and the 'Hallway Hangers'. Their story of poverty, race, and defeatism moved readers and challenged ethnic stereotypes. MacLeod's return eight years later, and the resulting 1995 revision, revealed little improvement in the lives of these men as they struggled in the labor market and crime-ridden underground economy. The…
I think there’s a little voyeur in all of us, which is why we love reading memoirs. These stories typically are written by people who’ve wrestled with a life-changing event and emerged on the other side with wisdom to share. Whether they’ve grappled with a heartbreaking loss, a debilitating illness, or an unsettling change in circumstances that left them reeling, authors who temper their truth with humor are the ones who inspire me most. Finding hilarity in the midst of hardship is no easy feat, but it reminds us that humor is a great coping skill.
I adore Annabelle Gurwitch’s humor and keen observations. She never loses her trademark wit as she navigates midlife curveballs—divorce, empty nest, financial challenges, dating, and taking in roommates.
A finalist for The Thurber Prize, this memoir in essays made me laugh as I nodded along in commiseration. Reinventing yourself in midlife can be funny if you look at it right; Gurwitch reminded me just when I needed it most.
"In this surprisingly upbeat memoir, Annabelle Gurwitch writes about the financial curveballs that can hit you in midlife . . . Somehow, Ms. Gurwitch manages to find humor in these setbacks. Ultimately, this is a story about harnessing resilience and learning how life’s disappointments can teach you about the things that matter most." —Tara Parker-Pope, The New York Times
From the New York Times bestselling author of I See You Made an Effort comes a timely and hilarious chronicle of downward mobility, financial and emotional.
With signature "sharp wit" (NPR), Annabelle Gurwitch…
I am fascinated by historical figures who were deemed marginal, outcast, or eccentric and also by experiences (like sleep or madness) that usually fall beneath historical scrutiny. I am drawn to nineteenth-century literature and history because I find such a rich store of strange and poignant optimism and cultural experimentation dwelling alongside suffering, terror, and despair. As a writer, I feel a sense of responsibility when a great story falls into my hands. I try to be as respectful as I can to the life behind it, while seeking how it fits into a larger historical pattern. I am always on the lookout for books that do the same!
This 1834 novel written by a physician/writer from Philadelphia holds its own with anything Poe or Melville ever wrote in terms of weirdness, psychological complexity, and sheer literary panache.
It tells the story of a singularly unambitious young man who accidentally kills himself and then discovers that he has the power to reanimate the corpses of others who have just died. And so our hero finds himself living the lives of a rich man with terrible gout, a playboy, a misguided Quaker philanthropist, and – most shockingly – a rebel slave.
Through it all, Sheppard Lee still maintains a sense of his own identity, even as his spirit becomes something of a puppet for its new physical manifestations. Both philosophical and darkly comic, this recently rediscovered work should be a classic.
Sheppard Lee, Written By Himself is a work of dark satire from the early years of the American Republic. Published as an autobiography and praised by Edgar Allan Poe, this is the story of a young idler who goes in search of buried treasure and finds instead the power to transfer his soul into other men's bodies. What follows is one increasingly practiced body snatcher's picaresque journey through early American pursuits of happiness, as each new form Sheppard Lee assumes disappoints him anew while making him want more and more. When Lee's metempsychosis draws him into…
I grew up in the 1950s next door to Long Island’s iconic Levittown. All my aunts and uncles lived in similar modest suburbs, and I assumed everyone else did, too. Maybe that explains why America’s sharp economic U-turn in the 1970s so rubbed me the wrong way. We had become, in the mid-20th century, the first major nation where most people—after paying their monthly bills—had money left over. Today we rate as the world’s most unequal major nation. Our richest 0.1 percent hold as much wealth as our bottom 90 percent. I’ve been working with the Institute for Public Studies, as co-editor of Inequality.org, to change all that.
The British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have an American doctor friend who has a fascinating exercise for his first-year medical school students.
This doctor asks his students to write a speech detailing why the USA has the world’s best health. The students eagerly set about collecting all the relevant data and quickly find themselves absolutely shocked. Among major developed nations, the USA turns out to have the worsthealth.
Americans also turn out to be up to ten times more likely than people in other developed nations to get murdered or become drug addicts. What’s going on here? Inequality!
The more wealth concentrates at a society’s summit, Wilkinson and Pickett vividly show in this 2009 classic, the worse that society performs on the yardsticks that define basic health and decency.
Groundbreaking analysis showing that greater economic equality-not greater wealth-is the mark of the most successful societies, and offering new ways to achieve it.
"Get your hands on this book."-Bill Moyers
This groundbreaking book, based on thirty years' research, demonstrates that more unequal societies are bad for almost everyone within them-the well-off and the poor. The remarkable data the book lays out and the measures it uses are like a spirit level which we can hold up to compare different societies. The differences revealed, even between rich market democracies, are striking. Almost every modern social and environmental problem-ill health, lack of…
I advise private and public sector clients on the unlocking of value from public assets.
After a few years in investment banking in Asia and Europe, I was asked to lead the comprehensive restructuring of Sweden’s USD70bn national portfolio of commercial assets—the first attempt by a European government to systematically address the ownership and management of government enterprises and real estate. This experience has allowed me to work in over thirty countries and serve as a Non-Executive Director. Ultimately sharing the collective experience in two books written together with Stefan Fölster—The Public Wealth of Nations—which was awarded The Economist and Financial Time’s best book of the year, as well as The Public Wealth of Cities.
Would you rather that your local football team or even the national team was selected through family ties or political connections? How did meritocracy—the idea that people should be advanced according to their talents rather than their birth—become the world's ruling ideology? Why is meritocracy now under attack from both right and left? Adrian Wooldridge shows what transformative effects it has had everywhere it has been adopted, especially once women were brought into the meritocratic system. He also shows how meritocracy has now become corrupted and argues that the recent stalling of social mobility is the result of the failure to complete the meritocratic revolution. Rather than abandoning meritocracy, he says, we should call for its renewal.
'This unique and fascinating history explains why the blame now being piled upon meritocracy for many social ills is misplaced-and that assigning responsibilities to the people best able to discharge them really is better than the time-honoured customs of corruption, patronage, nepotism and hereditary castes. Wooldridge upends many common assumptions and provides an indispensable back story to this fraught and pressing issue.' Steven Pinker
'The Aristocracy of Talent provides an important and needed corrective to contemporary critiques of meritocracy. It puts meritocracy in an illuminating historical and cross-cultural perspective that shows how crucial the…
My father’s side of our family is from North Carolina, and I’ve always felt the magic of these mountains, especially within the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I yearned to understand how the people lived and raised children, created an entire community, lived off the land, and handled sickness, despair, and celebrations. I wanted to bring their stories to life and honor and preserve their unique history. We can all learn something from these brave men and women who staked out the land, built, grew, and hunted everything they needed, and created a community full of family, resilience, and perseverance. I proudly honor their stories within my historical fiction novels.
I especially loved this book on Appalachia because it told the truth. Sure, it was from one man’s perspective, but it resonated with me because it made sense.
This book also reminded me of my previous recommendation, Demon Copperhead. I like choosing a subject–say, Appalachia–and then reading multiple books about said subject.
This book was about choices, but it also rang true because the author’s own background, growing up amongst poverty and minimal options, lent credibility to the words, which I really liked.
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
Coming November 2020 as a major motion picture from Netflix starring Amy Adams and Glenn Close
'The political book of the year' Sunday Times
'A frank, unsentimental, harrowing memoir ... A superb book' New York Post
'I bought this to try to better understand Trump's appeal ... but the memoir is so much more than that. A gripping, unputdownable page-turner' India Knight, Evening Standard
J. D. Vance grew up in the hills of Kentucky. His family and friends were the people most of the world calls rednecks, hillbillies or white trash.
I never believed the idea that creativity was for a gifted few. Throughout my life, as a teenage fishing guide, an entrepreneur and college professor, novelist, and creativity guide, the folks I’ve met are rich with creative and entrepreneurial qualities. My calling is to help you appreciate your creative genius so that it appreciates in value for you. Growing your creatively entrepreneurial genius is the best way to prepare for a future of unknowable unknowns, the best way to build careers we desire, the best way to fully appreciate life. I offer various perspectiveS on core creative and entrepreneurial concepts so you can construct the best path to your personal renewal and growth.
I used this book in class for three semesters. The students were fans; I stopped using it only because I re-designed my classes regularly. It’s a deep dive into hundreds of social science and neuroscience research projects about how we relate to each other, how we want to engage with each other, and why. It first appeared to be an unusual pick for a class on creatively entrepreneurial growth but students agreed it made sense when reminded that most creative work is done in collaborative teams so understanding each other is of great creative benefit. Brooks uses fictional characters, a man and a woman, and tells their life stories, illuminating them with insights rooted in research; we see the deep human truths behind behaviors and are entertained along the way.
With unequaled insight and brio, New York Times columnist David Brooks has long explored and explained the way we live. Now Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life. This is the story of how success happens, told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to old age, illustrating a fundamental new understanding of human nature along the way: The unconscious mind, it…
Nobody’s Magicbegan, not as the series of novellas it became, but as a collection of stories I couldn’t stop telling. And it wasn’t just my characters’ comings and goings that enthralled me. It was the way they demanded I let them tell their own stories. I enjoy reading and writing novellas because they allow space for action, voice, and reflection, and they can tackle manifold themes and conversations in a space that is both large and small. At the same time, they demand endings that are neither predictable nor neat, but rather force the reader to speculate on what becomes of these characters they’ve come to know and love.
Every time someone asks me whether I, a Black woman with albinism, would have ever considered passing for white, I think of the unnamed protagonist of this book and his conflicting desires to uplift his own race while also escaping the dangers of being a Black man at the height of America’s obsession with lynching. (And let’s be honest, he also enjoys the social privilege and upward mobility that come with being mistaken for white.) Of course, the title tells us which choice he’s going to make long before we read it for ourselves, but I was still unprepared for the gutting last lines of this book. It is a master class in telling the story of the backward glance, and in what one loses by trying to save himself.
James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man is a powerful, trailblazing novel that exposes the intricate relationship between race and class in late nineteenth-century America.
Complete & Unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by Dr Sam Halliday.
After losing his mother at a very young age, the narrator is thrust from his comfortable, middle-class environment, afforded by his distant but aristocratic father, into the wider world.…
I have an unusual personal history. I majored in math in college and aspired to a life as a scientist. However, the civil rights movement and other events of the 1960s and 1970s inspired me to switch and earn a doctorate in sociology. (Which considers itself a science.) My first faculty position, at Yale beginning in 1972, involved a joint appointment in the Sociology Department and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, which focused on public policy. During the remainder of my career I have worked and published together with economists and sought to do research that uses the perspectives of both fields.
This book, by three sociologists, examines the life chances of children from low-income families living in public housing in Baltimore.
It builds on prior research by both economists and sociologists, and has both a quantitative and an intense qualitative aspect from in-depth interviews. The authors seem to have discovered a mechanism that can help these children succeed. It is to have an “identity project” that gives meaning and goals to their lives.
Recent research on inequality and poverty has shown that those born into low-income families, especially African Americans, still have difficulty entering the middle class, in part because of the disadvantages they experience living in more dangerous neighborhoods, going to inferior public schools, and persistent racial inequality. Coming of Age in the Other America shows that despite overwhelming odds, some disadvantaged urban youth do achieve upward mobility. Drawing from ten years of fieldwork with parents and children who resided in Baltimore public housing, sociologists Stefanie DeLuca, Susan Clampet-Lundquist, and Kathryn Edin highlight the remarkable resiliency of some of the youth who…
I became an economist because I realized that economics was a powerful tool that would help society solve vexing problems. While economics has limits, it has so much to offer in terms of better policy design for tackling everything from climate change to economic inequality. My life’s work has been devoted to both economic research and helping others understand the insights of economics. I spent many years in academia teaching economics and writing papers, and I authored Open in an attempt to make the complexities of international economics more transparent. I’ve also had the chance to work firsthand on some of these issues in the early part of the Biden Administration at the US Treasury.
Ed Kleinbard was a treasured colleague, a brilliant commentator, and a giant in the field of tax policy. In his final year of life, perhaps fittingly, Kleinbard devoted himself to a book on the roleof luck in economic outcomes, which opens with a quote from Stendhal. “Waiting for God toreveal himself, I believe that his prime minister, Chance, governs this sad world just as well.”The book argues that luck, and particularly existential luck (to whom and in what circumstancesyou are born), are paramount in determining economic outcomes. Within that context, Kleinbardmakes a strong case for the role of public insurance in areas like health care, education, andchildcare; he also emphasizes the importance of a progressive income tax system.
The American dream of equal opportunity is in peril. America's economic inequality is shocking, poverty threatens to become a heritable condition, and our healthcare system is crumbling despite ever increasing costs.
In this thought-provoking book, Edward D. Kleinbard demonstrates how the failure to acknowledge the force of brute luck in our material lives exacerbates these crises - leading to warped policy choices that impede genuine equality of opportunity for many Americans. What's Luck Got to Do with It? combines insights from economics, philosophy, and social psychology to argue for government's proper role in addressing the inequity of brute luck. Kleinbard…
