Social Science
Showing all 11 results
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Burned by Billionaires
How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet$27.99An exposé of the hidden impact of America’s überwealthy on the country’s economy, environmental health, housing market, and political system
Even if you don’t begrudge the ultrarich their multiple vacation homes, yachts, and private jets, Burned by Billionaires chronicles how the actions of the top .01% have severe consequences for the rest of us. In chapters including “Road Map to Richistan” and “What Created So Many New Billionaires?,” upper-class traitor Chuck Collins takes down the “myth of meritocracy,” showing how the rich rig the game in their favor, resulting in an increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny (but growing) class of billionaires.
In a wholly original argument, Collins shows the impact the ultrawealthy have on the rest of us: increasing the tax burden on ordinary working people; reducing public funding for schools, roads, and other essential infrastructure; shrinking the pool of affordable housing; and accelerating climate change with outsize emissions from superpolluting yachts and private jets. Perhaps worst of all, the concentration of wealth and power is leading to political capture, undermining the democratic principle that our votes matter equally.
Lively chapters feature charts, graphs, political cartoons, and more. A final chapter on “An Agenda to Reduce Billionaire Power” offers concrete prescriptions for taking power back from the billionaire class.
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Thrive
How the Science of the Adolescent Brain Helps Us Imagine a Better Future for All Children$28.99A bold new argument for harnessing brain science to help young people realize their full potential, from the noted business and foundation leader
“In the last decade, a growing body of longitudinal neuroimaging research has demonstrated that adolescence is a period of continued brain growth and change, challenging longstanding assumptions that the brain was largely finished maturing by puberty.” —National Institutes of Health
Breakthroughs in adolescent brain science have made it clear that young people need stable relationships, meaningful opportunities and strong support to become thriving adults. Yet far too many grow up without access to these essentials. Whether it’s a young person trying to finish school and secure their first job, navigating the trauma of losing loved ones to violence or seeking connection after being placed in foster care, their experiences reveal how deeply our public systems are falling short—and how urgently we must act.
A major new book for parents, local leaders, and policymakers alike, Thrive argues that how we understand and address the unequal experiences of adolescence holds the key to ensuring that all children have an equal chance of becoming successful adults. Drawing on her deep experience working in business and alongside youth, nonprofit and public system leaders as head of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, author Lisa M. Lawson offers a powerful and accessible look at what the science of adolescent development tells us—and what it demands of us. With clarity and purpose, she reveals how our policies and practices too often fail young people, and how we can do better by creating the connections, opportunities and support they need to reach their full potential.
Arguing that we all have a shared stake in helping young people navigate the road to adulthood, Lawson lays out the ways that public systems, nonprofits, businesses and families can draw lessons from science—and take steps to help all young people thrive.
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Ask, Listen, Act
A New Model for Philanthropy$18.99A moving examination of poverty, its root causes, and how to end it through movement-building by a leading philanthropy executive
For the past two decades, the Marguerite Casey Foundation has dedicated its resources to building a movement of low-income families advocating on their own behalf. Now, founding president Luz Vega-Marquis offers a history of the foundation, intertwined with her own history as a Nicaraguan immigrant whose family was exiled, plunged into poverty, and forced to start over in the United States. Ask, Listen, Act is riveting in its description of the evolution of an iconoclastic foundation and of Vega-Marquis herself as she rises from a bookkeeper to become the first Latina to lead a major national foundation.
In a powerful counter to the blame-laden narrative we tell ourselves about poverty in this nation, Vega-Marquis explores how the foundation has worked to eliminate poverty through intensive listening, movement building, and the leadership of families who have experienced poverty firsthand. The founder of Hispanics in Philanthropy and a member of numerous philanthropic boards, Vega-Marquis offers a vivid look at the worlds of philanthropy, social change, and, most importantly, the families we are most likely to ignore.
Beautifully written and filled with moving stories, Ask, Listen, Act explores the world of philanthropy from the perspective of someone who is at once an insider and an outsider, offering illuminating insights for all.
Jacques Books is a bespoke imprint of The New Press, dedicated to publishing culturally significant books that might not otherwise garner the attention of a trade publisher.
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Al’ America
Travels Through America's Arab and Islamic Roots$16.95 – $25.95Four out of ten Americans say they dislike Muslims, according to a Gallup poll. “Muslims,” a blogger wrote on the Web site Free Republic, “don’t belong in America.” In a lively, funny, and revealing riposte to these sentiments, journalist Jonathan Curiel offers a fascinating tour through the little-known Islamic past, and present, of American culture.
From highbrow to pop, from lighthearted to profound, Al’ America reveals the Islamic and Arab influences before our eyes, under our noses, and ringing in our ears. Curiel demonstrates that many of America’s most celebrated places—including the Alamo in San Antonio, the French Quarter of New Orleans, and the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina—retain vestiges of Arab and Islamic culture. Likewise, some of America’s most recognizable music—the Delta Blues, the surf sounds of Dick Dale, the rock and psychedelia of Jim Morrison and the Doors—is indebted to Arab music. And some of America’s leading historical figures, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Elvis Presley, relied on Arab or Muslim culture for intellectual sustenance.
Part travelogue, part cultural history, Al’ America confirms a continuous pattern of give-and-take between America and the Arab Muslim world.
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A People’s History of Sports in the United States
$18.95 – $26.95From author and sportswriter Zirin comes a rollicking, rebellious, myth-busting history of sports in America that puts politics in the ring with pop culture.
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The Tribes of America
Journalistic Discoveries of Our People and Their Cultures$16.95First published in 1979 and long out of print, The Tribes of America is an overlooked classic—a prescient and deeply empathetic work based on seven years of reporting from the front lines of the culture wars that continue to divide America. Long before Tom Frank asked, ”What’s the matter with Kansas?” Village Voice reporter and civil rights activist Paul Cowan set out to “to cross the sound barrier of dogma and test [his] beliefs against the realities of American life” by investigating what he called the “professional, religious, ethnic, and racial tribes—the Tribes of America.” From reporting on a vicious battle over school textbooks in West Virginia, the school busing crisis in Boston, and the miners’ strike in Harlan County, Kentucky, to the fight over low-income housing in Forest Hills, Queens, and the 1972 conspiracy trial of Eqbal Ahmad, Father Philip Berrigan, and others, Cowan journeyed deep into misunderstood communities across the nation to depict American struggles, prejudices, and hopes.
In his introduction, Rick Perlstein writes that Cowan’s “agonized sensitivity to battlefields then barely emergent makes for one of the most remarkable books I have ever read by any journalist.” The Tribes of America is a powerful model for engaged journalism and an enormously illuminating portrait of a nation at war with itself. -
Chinese America
The Untold Story of America's Oldest New Community$21.95 – $29.95From award-winning author Peter Kwong and Dušanka Mišcevic comes a definitive portrait of Chinese Americans, one of the oldest immigrant groups and fastest-growing communities in the United States. Beginning with stories of Chinese frontiersmen who came to the West Coast by the thousands in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to the high-tech transnationals who have helped spark the development of today’s booming Chinese American “ethnoburbs,” this engrossing narrative recounts stories of extraordinary hardship, discrimination, and success.
Chinese America is a landmark analysis that draws on firsthand reporting in Asia and the U.S. Offering a new picture of the country’s development, Kwong and Miscevic provide the first comprehensive report on the suburban immigrant communities that are transforming America. Urban ghettos continue to host some of the country’s poorest immigrants, but Chinese Americans now live in the suburbs in similar proportions to whites—and have brought with them Chinese supermarket chains, language schools, and growing clout in America and Asia. Exploring the burgeoning trade—and underlying conflicts—between China and the U.S., Chinese America reveals the complex connections between immigration, globalization, and foreign policy in our time.
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America by the Numbers
A Field Guide to the U.S. Population$20.95Is demography destiny? Corporate marketers and government agencies act as if it is, producing mountains of statistics about Americans—most always remarkably inaccessible and dry. Now, America by the Numbers puts the power of demography back in the people’s hands, collecting and clearly explaining a vast amount of population data in easy-to-read, informative tables and graphs. From the new immigration to the aging of America, this guide reveals how the ebb and flow of population shapes every public and private decision we make.
In an engaging and accessible form, America by the Numbers ranges across the U.S. landscape as it offers the latest facts about racial conflict, class division, health, schooling, family life, crime, and political participation. The most recent in The New Press’s highly successful popular guides to politics and economics—including Field Guide to the U.S. Economy and Social Stratification in the United States—America by the Numbers is both a practical reference on U.S. population trends and a probing examination of the roots of America’s most pressing problems.
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What’s Love Got to Do with It?
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“A Totally Alien Life-Form”
$15.95At last, teenagers are allowed to speak their minds about subjects other than sex, drugs, and violence. Long-time Studs Terkel associate Sydney Lewis interviewed young people from 13 to 19 from all over the country. For this book, they discussed fears, plans, ambitions, and nostalgia for the simplicity of childhood. Their stories tell us not only about their lives, but about ourselves and the legacy we are leaving them.
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The Skull Measurer’s Mistake
And Other Portraits of Men and Women Who Spoke Out Against Racism$17.99 – $22.00Enlightening stories of courageous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century men and women who defied the racial prejudices of their communities
In this unique book, Sven Lindqvist, author of the acclaimed “Exterminate All the Brutes,” shows why the history of antiracist work must not be limited only to the study of racists. Here we have the inspiring stories of more than twenty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century men and women who struggled and fought against ignorance and animus, often going against the times to expose the many facets of racism and hate.
Well-documented and rich in anecdote, The Skull Measurer’s Mistake recounts the antiracist efforts of Benjamin Franklin, Helen Hunt, Joseph Conrad, and Alexis de Tocqueville, as well as others whose names are perhaps forgotten but whose important work lives on. Lindqvist—whose writing, Adam Hochschild has said, “leaves you changed”—shows how racist arguments emerged, and reemerged, over time. At a time when conversations about racial justice are occurring in every corner of society, knowledge of past antiracists can help us defeat racism today.
Showing all 11 results
