Sociology
Showing all 27 results
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Stolen Pride
Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right$22.99 – $30.99In her first book since the widely acclaimed Strangers in Their Own Land, National Book Award finalist and bestselling author Arlie Russell Hochschild now ventures to Appalachia, uncovering the “pride paradox” that has given the right’s appeals such resonance.
A 2024 New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Pick
A New York Times Book Review Best Book of the Year
One of Barack Obama’s Favorite Books of 2024
Longlisted for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for NonfictionFor all the attempts to understand the state of American politics and the blue/red divide, we’ve ignored what economic and cultural loss can do to pride. What happens, Arlie Russell Hochschild asks, when a proud people in a hard-hit region suffer the deep loss of pride and are confronted with a powerful political appeal that makes it feel “stolen”?
Hochschild’s research drew her to Pikeville, Kentucky, in the heart of Appalachia, within the whitest and second-poorest congressional district in the nation, where the city was reeling: coal jobs had left, crushing poverty persisted, and a deadly drug crisis struck the region. Although Pikeville was in the political center thirty years ago, by 2016, 80 percent of the district’s population voted for Donald Trump. Her brilliant exploration of the town’s response to a white nationalist march in 2017 — a rehearsal for the deadly Unite the Right march that would soon take place in Charlottesville, Virginia — takes us deep inside a torn and suffering community.
Hochschild focuses on a group swept up in the shifting political landscape: blue-collar men. In small churches, hillside hollers, roadside diners, trailer parks, and Narcotics Anonymous meetings, Hochschild introduces us to unforgettable people, and offers an original lens through which to see them and the wider world. In Stolen Pride, Hochschild incisively explores our dangerous times, even as she also points a way forward.
“A piercing . . . impressive and nuanced assessment of a critical factor in American politics.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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Getting Me Cheap
How Low-Wage Work Traps Women and Girls in Poverty$27.99Two groundbreaking sociologists explore the way the American dream is built on the backs of working poor women
Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids.
Getting Me Cheap is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers—primarily women—who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without public aid. While these women tend to the needs of well-off families, their own children frequently step into premature adult roles, providing care for siblings and aging family members.
Based on years of in-depth field work and hundreds of eye-opening interviews, Getting Me Cheap explores how America traps millions of women and their children into lives of stunted opportunity and poverty in service of giving others of us the lives we seek. Destined to rank with works like Evicted and Nickle and Dimed for its revelatory glimpse into how our society functions behind the scenes, Getting Me Cheap also offers a way forward—with both policy solutions and a keen moral vision for organizing women across class lines.
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Social Stratification in the United States
The American Profile Poster of Who Owns What, Who Makes How Much, and Who Works Where$24.99 – $25.00The must-have new edition of the classic book-and-poster set, based on the most recent census data, depicting who owns what, who makes how much, who works where, and who lives with whom
Generations of teachers, union organizers, and activists have relied on this book-and-poster set, originally published in 1979, to illustrate the magnitude of America’s growing economic divide. Today, income inequality is at an all-time high, and this completely updated eighth edition, drawn from the 2020 Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census, brings together fresh primary data to provide a clear picture of the U.S. social structure and the considerable demographic and economic changes of the past four decades.
Folded inside the companion booklet, the removable poster depicts color-coded figures that make it possible to compare social groups at a glance and to understand how income distribution relates to race, sex, education, and occupation. With charts and careful explanations, the booklet contextualizes and expands on the poster.
Rose’s graphic depiction of the census data makes clear at a glance complex concepts, including the way recent economic growth has been skewed toward the wealthiest households, that a gender gap persists in the workplace, and that, on average, African Americans and Latinos still earn far less than other Americans. This new edition of a uniquely visual depiction of American society will be an essential resource and a touchstone for the current debates over education, inequality, poverty, and jobs in our country.
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Abandoned
America’s Lost Youth and the Crisis of Disconnection$25.99Winner of the 2020 Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice
A deeply affecting exposé of America’s hidden crisis of disconnected youth, in the tradition of Matthew Desmond and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
For the majority of young adults today, the transition to independence is a time of excitement and possibility. But 4.5 million young people—or a stunning 11.5 percent of youth aged sixteen to twenty-four—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.
Author Anne Kim skillfully weaves heart-rending stories of young people navigating early adulthood alone, in communities where poverty is endemic and opportunities almost nonexistent. She then describes a growing awareness—including new research from the field of adolescent brain science—that “emerging adulthood” is just as crucial a developmental period as early childhood, and she profiles an array of unheralded programs that provide young people with the supports they need to achieve self-sufficiency.
A major work of deeply reported narrative nonfiction, Abandoned joins the small shelf of books that change the way we see our society and point to a different path forward.
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Money Rock
A Family’s Story of Cocaine, Race, and Ambition in the New South$26.99“An ambitious look at the cost of urban gentrification.”
—Atlanta-Journal Constitution
“Kelley could have written a fine book about Charlotte’s drug trade in the ’80s and ’90s, filled with shoot-outs and flashy jewelry. What she accomplishes with Money Rock, however, is far more laudable.”
—Charlotte Magazine“Pam Kelley knows a good story when she sees one—and Money Rock is a hell of a story. . . like a New South version of The Wire.”
—Shelf Awareness
Meet Money Rock—young, charismatic, and Charlotte’s flashiest coke dealer—in a riveting social history with echoes of Ghettoside and Random FamilyMeet Money Rock. He’s young. He’s charismatic. He’s generous, often to a fault. He’s one of Charlotte’s most successful cocaine dealers, and that’s what first prompted veteran reporter Pam Kelley to craft this riveting social history—by turns action-packed, uplifting, and tragic—of a striving African American family, swept up and transformed by the 1980s cocaine epidemic.
The saga begins in 1963 when a budding civil rights activist named Carrie gives birth to Belton Lamont Platt, eventually known as Money Rock, in a newly integrated North Carolina hospital. Pam Kelley takes readers through a shootout that shocks the city, a botched FBI sting, and a trial with a judge known as “Maximum Bob.” When the story concludes more than a half century later, Belton has redeemed himself. But three of his sons have met violent deaths and his oldest, fresh from prison, struggles to make a new life in a world where the odds are stacked against him.
This gripping tale, populated with characters both big-hearted and flawed, shows how social forces and public policies—racism, segregation, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration—help shape individual destinies. Money Rock is a deeply American story, one that will leave readers reflecting on the near impossibility of making lasting change, in our lives and as a society, until we reckon with the sins of our past.
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Strangers in Their Own Land
Anger and Mourning on the American Right$20.00 – $30.00The National Book Award Finalist and New York Times bestseller that became a guide and balm for a country struggling to understand the election of Donald Trump
“A generous but disconcerting look at the Tea Party. . . . This is a smart, respectful and compelling book.”
—Jason DeParle, The New York Times Book ReviewWhen Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, a bewildered nation turned to Strangers in Their Own Land to understand what Trump voters were thinking when they cast their ballots. Arlie Hochschild, one of the most influential sociologists of her generation, had spent the preceding five years immersed in the community around Lake Charles, Louisiana, a Tea Party stronghold. As Jedediah Purdy put it in the New Republic, “Hochschild is fascinated by how people make sense of their lives. . . . [Her] attentive, detailed portraits . . . reveal a gulf between Hochchild’s ‘strangers in their own land’ and a new elite.” Already a favorite common read book in communities and on campuses across the country and called “humble and important” by David Brooks and “masterly” by Atul Gawande, Hochschild’s book has been lauded by Noam Chomsky, New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and countless others.
The paperback edition features a new afterword by the author reflecting on the election of Donald Trump and the other events that have unfolded both in Louisiana and around the country since the hardcover edition was published, and also includes a readers’ group guide at the back of the book.
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Black Stats
African Americans by the Numbers in the Twenty-first Century$14.95 – $49.00An essential handbook of eye-opening—and frequently myth-busting—facts and figures about the real lives of Black Americans today
There’s no defeating white supremacist myths without data—real data. Black Stats is a compact and useful guide that offers up-to-date figures on Black life in the United States today, avoiding jargon and assumptions and providing critical analyses and information.
Monique Couvson, author of the acclaimed Pushout, has compiled statistics from a broad spectrum of telling categories that illustrate the quality of life and the possibility of (and barriers to) advancement for a group at the heart of American society. With fascinating information on everything from disease trends, incarceration rates, and lending practices to voting habits, green jobs, and educational achievement, the material in this book will enrich and inform a range of public debates while challenging commonly held yet often misguided perceptions.
Black Stats simultaneously highlights measures of incredible progress, conveys the disparate impacts of social policies and practices, and surprises with revelations that span subjects including the entertainment industry, military service, and marriage trends. An essential tool for advocates, educators, and anyone seeking racial justice, Black Stats is an affordable guidebook for anyone seeking to understand the complex state of our nation.
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The Moral Underground
How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy$17.95 – $17.99A “fascinating” look at the disconnect between corporate policies and workers’ real lives—and the everyday heroes who try to help (Publishers Weekly).
For the poor, there are challenges every day that they don’t have extra money to solve: a sick kid, car trouble, an unexpected dentist bill. The obstacles can make it harder to hold on to a job—but a job loss would be catastrophic. However, there are countless unsung heroes who bend or break the rules to help those millions of Americans with impossible schedules, paychecks, and lives make it from paycheck to paycheck. This book tells their stories.
Whether it’s a nurse choosing to treat an uninsured child, a supervisor deciding to overlook infractions, or a restaurant manager sneaking food to a worker’s children, middle-class Americans are secretly refusing to be complicit in a fundamentally unfair system that puts a decent life beyond the reach of the working poor.
In this tale of a kind of economic disobedience—told in whispers to Lisa Dodson over the course of eight years of research across the country—hundreds of supervisors, teachers, and health care professionals describe intentional acts of defiance that together tell the story of a quiet revolt, of a moral underground that has grown in response to an immoral economy. It documents a whole new phenomenon—people reaching across America’s economic fault line—and provides an account of the human consequences and lives behind the business-page headlines.
“If only this book had been published in 2007. Then the hundreds of people interviewed by Lisa Dodson would have been able to pass along an important piece of advice: What’s good for business is not necessarily good for America.” —Time -
Sociology is a Martial Art
Political Writings by Pierre Bourdieu$21.95Sociology is a Martial Art is an accessible survey of Pierre Bourdieu’s most influential writings. It includes the full text of his short books Acts of Resistance, Firing Back, and On Television, in addition to key articles, interviews, and speeches, all of which introduce the reader to Bourdieu’s innovative approach to sociology as a mode of political intervention. Edited and with an introduction by noted French sociologist Gisèle Sapiro, Sociology Is a Martial Art will become this generation’s indispensable introduction to Bourdieu’s work. -
Getting Ghost
Two Young Lives and the Struggle for the Soul of an American City$27.95When doing research inside Detroit’s downtown juvenile detention facility, Luke Bergmann befriended Dude Freeman and Rodney Phelps—both petty drug dealers facing profoundly uncertain futures, living difficult lives in which chaos is always around the corner. Bergmann would end up living three years among the abandoned houses and desolate vacant lots of one of Detroit’s most notorious neighborhoods.
In telling their stories and those of their families, Bergmann brilliantly explores the complex contradictions of Detroit’s status as a “chocolate city,” proudly and uniquely claimed by its predominantly black residents, where African Americans firmly hold municipal power but also suffer the legacy of lost manufacturing jobs and white flight. For young men like Dude and Rodney who strive to find ways toward “legal” jobs and straight lives, “getting ghost” is a rich metaphor—for leaving a scene, for quitting the trade, and for their own mortality.
A tour de force of original analysis and powerful storytelling reminiscent of Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s bestselling Random Family and Sudhir Venkatesh’s Off the Books, Getting Ghost paints an unforgettable portrait of two young men and of the troubled city they call home.
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Evil Paradises
Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism$18.95 – $26.95Evil Paradises, edited by Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk, is a global guidebook to phantasmagoric but real places—alternate realities being constructed as “utopias” in a capitalist era unfettered by unions and state regulation. These developments—in cities, deserts, and in the middle of the sea—are worlds where consumption and inequality surpass our worst nightmares.
Although they read like science fiction, the case studies are shockingly real. In Dubai, where child slavery existed until very recently, a gilded archipelago of private islands known as “The World” is literally being added to the ocean. In Medellín and Kabul, drug lords—in many ways textbook capitalists—are redefining conspicuous consumption in fortified palaces. In Hong Kong, Cairo, and even the Iranian desert, burgeoning communities of nouveaux riches have taken shelter in fantasy Californias, complete with Mickey Mouse statues, while their maids sleep in rooftop chicken coops. Meanwhile, Ted Turner rides herd over his bison in 2 million acres of private parkland.
Davis and Monk have assembled an extraordinary group of urbanists, architects, historians, and visionary thinkers to reflect upon the trajectory of a civilization whose deepest ethos seems to be to consume all the resources of the earth within a single lifetime.
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All Alone in the World
Children of the Incarcerated$16.95 – $25.95A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. “An urgent invitation to care for all children as our own.” —Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, author of Random Family
In this “moving condemnation of the U.S. penal system and its effect on families”, award-winning journalist Nell Bernstein takes an intimate look at parents and children—over two million of them—torn apart by our current incarceration policy (Parents’ Press). Described as “meticulously reported and sensitively written” by Salon, the book is “brimming with compelling case studies . . . and recommendations for change” (Orlando Sentinel).
Our Weekly Los Angeles calls it “a must-read for lawmakers as well as for lawbreakers.”
“In terms of elegance, breadth and persuasiveness, All Alone in the World deserves to be placed alongside other classics of the genre such as Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities, Alex Kotlowitz’s There Are No Children Here and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family. But to praise the book’s considerable literary or sociological merit seems beside the point. This book belongs not only on shelves but also in the hands of judges and lawmakers.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Well researched and smoothly written, Bernstein’s book pumps up awareness of the problems, provides a checklist for what needs to be done and also cites organizations like the Osborne Society that provide parenting and literacy classes, counseling and support. The message is clear: taking family connections into account ‘holds particular promise for restoring a social fabric rent by both crime and punishment.’” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
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The Autonomy Myth
A Theory Of Dependency$22.99 – $25.95A brilliant exposé of the contradiction between the American myth of self-reliance and the reality of an interdependent society.With the controversy over gay marriages grabbing national headlines, traditional conceptions of family in American society have become subject to increasingly fierce debate. In The Autonomy Myth, influential and always-provocative legal theorist Martha Albertson Fineman expands the terms of the debate even further to argue for public policy that reflects the realities of how we live together.
As Fineman points out, those charged with administering U.S. social policy have long considered the marital family household as both separate and self-sufficient, often at the cost of the well-being of many families and their members, especially children. Vigorously taking issue with this approach, Fineman makes the compelling case that the sexually affiliated couple is not the appropriate building block for contemporary families. Instead, she argues, society should be organized around “caretaking relationships,” particularly those involving children or elderly dependents. In this paradigm-shifting book Fineman insists that, because each of us is “inevitably dependent” at various stages in our lives, it makes far more sense for us to recognize from the outset that society as a whole has a vital role to play in providing assistance.
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Unfinished Work
$21.95 – $65.00 -
The Essential Gunnar Myrdal
$23.00 – $60.00Nobel Prize winner Gunnar Myrdal is best known for his book An American Dilemma, a classic study of America’s racial problems that was chosen as one of The Modern Library’s top 100 nonfiction books of the twentieth century.
The Essential Gunnar Myrdal covers the full range of Myrdal’s writing, much of which has never been published in book form. It includes his early essays on economics, his thoughts on the population explosion, his discussions of the question of value in the social sciences, and excerpts from Asian Drama, his monumental study of the development of Asia.
The newest edition in The New Press’s Essential series, the book includes extensive commentary by the editors as well as an introduction by Sissela Bok, who is Myrdal’s daughter and author of the acclaimed Lying and Secrets.
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Firing Back
Against the Tyranny of the Market 2$16.95Pierre Bourdieu, described by The Nation as “worthy of the militant mantle of Sartre and Foucault,” here continues the themes advanced so successfully in his previous book Acts of Resistance. Firing Back is an eloquent dissection of globalization’s intellectual and cultural role throughout the world, and a discussion of the ways in which effective opposition to it can be mounted. Bourdieu examines Europe’s potential as a counterweight to America’s globalizing policy and discusses how intellectuals and those working in the cultural sphere can create meaningful alternatives. He also raises challenging questions about the depoliticization of the academic world, arguing that scholars can no longer maintain that their research is objective or value free.
In a preface written for this edition, Bourdieu directly addresses American readers about the role they can play in the burgeoning antiglobalization movement.
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Gender on Planet Earth
$27.95In Gender on Planet Earth, Oakley argues that the persistence of traditional gender values prevents people from leading more ethical and humane lives. Drawing from a broad array of literature, she combines personal narrative with social commentary and eye-opening statistics to provide a provocative account of gender today.
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A Different Shade of Gray
$19.95 – $26.95 -
Help Wanted
Tales from the First Job Front$16.95 – $25.00Help Wanted is a collection of candid first-person accounts by young people from across the nation, who talk about their first forays into the real world of work. The Chicago Tribune called author Sydney Lewis “the legitimate heir to Studs Terkel,” and Terkel himself said, “Sydney Lewis is a natural to do this book. She’s on the same wavelength as the young people recounting their first jobs. In its honesty and innocence, it’s a strongly moving as well as revealing work.”
Help Wanted discusses everything from difficult coworkers, tough bosses, and criticism to stringent deadlines, dress codes, and harassment and is a testament to how young people are prepared—or not prepared—for their entry into the workforce. It also offers tips for surviving the first months on the job and other advice not found in typical career guides.
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Experiments in Knowing
Gender and Method in the Social Sciences$31.00Ann Oakley came to widespread attention as part of the new school of British feminists to emerge in the 1960s, and has since earned a reputation as one of the most innovative feminist thinkers and social scientists writing today. In Experiments in Knowing, a major new work, Oakley integrates her personal and professional thinking to examine the historical development of methodology in the social and natural sciences, demonstrating how both fields have been subject to a process of “gendering.” Oakley not only reconciles the long-standing opposition between the quantitative and the qualitative methods but shows that the experimental and intuitive approaches must be used in tandem to provide a full understanding of any subject of scientific inquiry.
Written in accessible language, Experiments in Knowing addresses themes of common interest across such diverse fields as social policy, education, health, and women’s studies. Certain to generate considerable debate, it is both a fascinating history of the practice of social science from a feminist perspective, as well as an argument for a new way of thinking about our ways of knowing.
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Guests and Aliens
$17.95Guests and Aliens presents a comprehensive analysis of worldwide immigration by one of the world’s leading experts on globalization. Putting the current “crisis” of immigration into a historical context for the first time, Sassen suggests that the American experience represents only one phase in a history of global border crossing. She describes the mass migrations of Italians and Eastern European Jews during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the international dislocations—particularly after the end of World War II—that have engendered the “refugee” concept. Using these examples, Sassen explores the causes of immigration that have resulted in nations’ welcoming incomers as “guests” or disparaging them as “aliens,” and outlines an “enlightened approach” (Publishers Weekly) to improving US and European immigration policies.
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The Essential Wallerstein
$45.00Immanuel Wallerstein is one of the most innovative social scientists of his generation. Past president of the International Sociological Association, he has had a major influence on the development of social thought throughout the world, and his books are translated into every major language. The Essential Wallerstein brings together for the first time the full range of his scholarship.This comprehensive collection of essays offers a unique overview of this seminal thinker’s work, showing the development of his thought: from his groundbreaking research on contemporary African politics and social change, to his study of the modern world-system, to his current essays on the new structures of knowledge emerging from the crisis of the capitalist world-economy. His singular focus on the way in which change in one part of the globe affects the whole is all the more relevant as the world grows increasingly interdependent. The Essential Wallerstein is an ideal introduction to the extensive body of work from a thinker who helped introduce globally sensitive thinking to the field of social science.
This is the first in a series of Readers bringing together the key works of major figures in the social sciences.
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42 Up
$17.95A richly illustrated companion volume to the acclaimed 7 Up film series, this book is based on Michael Apted s award-winning documentaries which cover the lives of 14 British children from age seven until they turn 42. 100 photos.
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Knowledges
Culture, Counterculture, Subculture$19.95Called “a classic study” by Booklist, this engaging inquiry into the nature of knowledge shows that “Western science” and “primitive beliefs” may not be so far apart as they seem. Renowned anthropologist and sociologist Peter Worsley begins Knowledges with his ongoing investigation of Australian aboriginal approaches to science and the natural world, and goes on to shatter conventional distinctions between science and culture, knowledge and belief. On the way, Worsley treats us to a lively and accessible examination of pre-European navigation of the Pacific, Western medicine, sub- and countercultures, nationalism, religion, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the iconology of Disneyland. -
On Television
$15.95An unremitting assault on the impact and pretensions of television [that] demolishes conventional arguments .
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Acts of Resistance
$14.95A devastating critique of free-market politics from distinguished sociologist Pierre Bourdieu.
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The Breaking of the American Social Compact
$19.95
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