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Author: Richard O. Davies
Publisher: Cengage Learning
Published: 1994
Total Pages: 298
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The author examines sports as a microcosm of national life, from the use of sports seasons to mark time (i.e. football, baseball and basketball as opposed to spring, summer and autumn) to the propensity for starving our educational system while dumping millions into stadium and high-school athletic programs.
Author: Jennifer Terry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1999-12-15
Total Pages: 560
ISBN-13: 9780226793665
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Jennifer Terry has written a nuanced and textured history of how the century-old obsession with homosexuality is deeply tied to changing American anxieties about social and sexual order in the modern age.
Author: Roger L. Martin
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
Published: 2020-09-29
Total Pages: 206
ISBN-13: 1647820073
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →American democratic capitalism is in danger. How can we save it? For its first two hundred years, the American economy exhibited truly impressive performance. The combination of democratically elected governments and a capitalist system worked, with ever-increasing levels of efficiency spurred by division of labor, international trade, and scientific management of companies. By the nation's bicentennial celebration in 1976, the American economy was the envy of the world. But since then, outcomes have changed dramatically. Growth in the economic prosperity of the average American family has slowed to a crawl, while the wealth of the richest Americans has skyrocketed. This imbalance threatens the American democratic capitalist system and our way of life. In this bracing yet constructive book, world-renowned business thinker Roger Martin starkly outlines the fundamental problem: We have treated the economy as a machine, pursuing ever-greater efficiency as an inherent good. But efficiency has become too much of a good thing. Our obsession with it has inadvertently shifted the shape of our economy, from a large middle class and smaller numbers of rich and poor (think of a bell-shaped curve) to a greater share of benefits accruing to a thin tail of already-rich Americans (a Pareto distribution). With lucid analysis and engaging anecdotes, Martin argues that we must stop treating the economy as a perfectible machine and shift toward viewing it as a complex adaptive system in which we seek a fundamental balance of efficiency with resilience. To achieve this, we need to keep in mind the whole while working on the component parts; pursue improvement, not perfection; and relentlessly tweak instead of attempting to find permanent solutions. Filled with keen economic insight and advice for citizens, executives, policy makers, and educators, When More Is Not Better is the must-read guide for saving democratic capitalism.
Author: Alison Stewart
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 2016-04-01
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 1613730586
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →When journalist and author Alison Stewart was confronted with emptying her late parents' overloaded basement, a job that dragged on for months, it got her thinking: How did it come to this? Why do smart, successful people hold on to old Christmas bows, chipped knick-knacks, and books they will likely never reread? Junk details Stewart's three-year investigation into America's stuff. Stewart rides along with junk removal teams like Trash Daddy, Annie Haul, and Junk Vets. She goes backstage at Antiques Roadshow, and learns what makes for compelling junk-based television with the executive producer of Pawn Stars. And she even investigates the growing problem of space junk—23,000 pieces of manmade debris orbiting the planet at 17,500 mph, threatening both satellites and human space exploration. But it's not all dire. Readers will also learn that there are creative solutions to America's crushing consumer culture. The author visits with Deron Beal, founder of FreeCyle, an online community of people who would rather give away than throw away their no-longer-needed possessions. She spends a day at a Repair Café, where volunteer tinkerers bring new life to broken appliances, toys, and just about anything. Junk is a delightful journey through 250-mile-long yard sales, resale shops, and packrat dens, both human and rodent, that for most readers will look surprisingly familiar.
Author: Francesco Duina
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-08-25
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 0691159645
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Why winning doesn’t always lead to happiness Most of us are taught from a young age to be winners and avoid being losers. But what does it mean to win or lose? And why do we care so much? Does winning make us happy? Winning undertakes an unprecedented investigation of winning and losing in American society, what we are really after as we struggle to win, our collective beliefs about winners and losers, and much more. Francesco Duina argues that victory and loss are not endpoints or final destinations but gateways to something of immense importance to us: the affirmation of our place in the world. But Duina also shows that competition is unlikely to provide us with the answers we need. Winning and losing are artificial and logically flawed concepts that put us at odds with the world around us and, ultimately, ourselves. Duina explores the social and psychological effects of the language of competition in American culture. Primarily concerned with our shared obsessions about winning and losing, Winning proposes a new mind-set for how we can pursue our dreams, and, in a more satisfying way, find our proper place in the world.
Author: Mika Brzezinski
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Published: 2013-05-07
Total Pages: 258
ISBN-13: 1602861765
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The New York Times best-selling author and cohost of MSNBC's Morning Joe describes her own struggles with food and body image and offers insights from notable people in all fields to discuss their successes with food and diet.
Author: Jamal Greene
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 2021
Total Pages: 341
ISBN-13: 1328518116
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An eminent constitutional scholar reveals how our approach to rights is dividing America, and shows how we can build a better system of justice.
Author: Jess McHugh
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2021-06-01
Total Pages: 432
ISBN-13: 1524746657
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“An elegant, meticulously researched, and eminently readable history of the books that define us as Americans. For history buffs and book-lovers alike, McHugh offers us a precious gift.”—Jake Halpern, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author “With her usual eye for detail and knack for smart storytelling, Jess McHugh takes a savvy and sensitive look at the 'secret origins' of the books that made and defined us. . . . You won't want to miss a one moment of it.”—Brian Jay Jones, author of Becoming Dr. Seuss and the New York Times bestselling Jim Henson The true, fascinating, and remarkable history of thirteen books that defined a nation Surprising and delightfully engrossing, Americanon explores the true history of thirteen of the nation’s most popular books. Overlooked for centuries, our simple dictionaries, spellers, almanacs, and how-to manuals are the unexamined touchstones for American cultures and customs. These books sold tens of millions of copies and set out specific archetypes for the ideal American, from the self-made entrepreneur to the humble farmer. Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Webster's Dictionary, Emily Post’s Etiquette: Americanon looks at how these ubiquitous books have updated and reemphasized potent American ideals—about meritocracy, patriotism, or individualism—at crucial moments in history. Old favorites like the Old Farmer’s Almanac and Betty Crocker’s Picture Cook Book are seen in this new way—not just as popular books but as foundational texts that shaped our understanding of the American story. Taken together, these books help us understand how their authors, most of them part of a powerful minority, attempted to construct meaning for the majority. Their beliefs and quirks—as well as personal interests, prejudices, and often strange personalities—informed the values and habits of millions of Americans, woven into our cultural DNA over generations of reading and dog-earing. Yet their influence remains uninvestigated--until now. What better way to understand a people than to look at the books they consumed most, the ones they returned to repeatedly, with questions about everything from spelling to social mobility to sex. This fresh and engaging book is American history as you’ve never encountered it before.
Author: Ruth Whippman
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2016-10-04
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 1250071526
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The author embarks on a pilgrimage to investigate how the national obessession with happiness infiltrates all areas of life, from religion to parenting, from the workplace to academia. She attends a Landmark Forum self-help course, visits Zappos headquarters in Las Vegas (a "happiness city"), looks into the academic "positive psychology movement" and spends time in Utah with Mormons, officially America's happiest people.
Author: César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2023-10-03
Total Pages: 152
ISBN-13: 1620978350
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →NATIONAL BESTSELLER A powerful, in-depth look at the imprisonment of immigrants, addressing the intersection of immigration and the criminal justice system, with a new epilogue by the author “Argues compellingly that immigrant advocates shouldn’t content themselves with debates about how many thousands of immigrants to lock up, or other minor tweaks.” —Gus Bova, Texas Observer For most of America’s history, we simply did not lock people up for migrating here. Yet over the last thirty years, the federal and state governments have increasingly tapped their powers to incarcerate people accused of violating immigration laws. Migrating to Prison takes a hard look at the immigration prison system’s origins, how it currently operates, and why. A leading voice for immigration reform, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández explores the emergence of immigration imprisonment in the mid-1980s and looks at both the outsized presence of private prisons and how those on the political right continue, disingenuously, to link immigration imprisonment with national security risks and threats to the rule of law. Now with an epilogue that brings it into the Biden administration, Migrating to Prison is an urgent call for the abolition of immigration prisons and a radical reimagining of who belongs in the United States.
