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Being America
Author: Jedediah Purdy
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2007-12-18
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 0307424944
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Having risen to national attention with his first book, For Common Things, Jedediah Purdy now cements his claim to being one of the most arresting public intellectuals of his generation. In Being America, Purdy turns his erudition and unique perspective to America’s relationship with a world that both admires and hates it. Purdy has absorbed insights from people around the world: Westernized Egyptians who consider Osama bin Laden a hero, an urbane Indian who espouses gay rights and the most thuggish kind of Hindu nationalism, Cambodian sweat-shop workers, and others. Out of these conversations—and his inspired readings of political thinkers from Edmund Burke to James Madison—Purdy breathes new meaning into the American values of democracy, liberty, and free trade. Clear-thinking and far-sighted, Being America encourages America to strive to realize the potential it doesn’t always know it has.
When America Stopped Being Great
Author: Nick Bryant
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2021-03-04
Total Pages: 385
ISBN-13: 1472985494
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →'Nick Bryant is brilliant. He has a way of showing you what you've been missing from the whole story whilst never leaving you feeling stupid.' – Emily Maitlis 'Bryant is a genuine rarity, a Brit who understands America' – Washington Post In When America Stopped Being Great, veteran reporter and BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant reveals how America's decline paved the way for Donald Trump's rise, sowing division and leaving the country vulnerable to its greatest challenge of the modern era. Deftly sifting through almost four decades of American history, from post-Cold War optimism, through the scandal-wracked nineties and into the new millennium, Bryant unpacks the mistakes of past administrations, from Ronald Reagan's 'celebrity presidency' to Barack Obama's failure to adequately address income and racial inequality. He explains how the historical clues, unseen by many (including the media) paved the way for an outsider to take power and a country to slide towards disaster. As Bryant writes, 'rather than being an aberration, Trump's presidency marked the culmination of so much of what had been going wrong in the United States for decades – economically, racially, politically, culturally, technologically and constitutionally.' A personal elegy for an America lost, unafraid to criticise actors on both sides of the political divide, When America Stopped Being Great takes the long view, combining engaging storytelling with recent history to show how the country moved from the optimism of Reagan's 'Morning in America' to the darkness of Trump's 'American Carnage'. It concludes with some of the most dramatic events in recent memory, in an America torn apart by a bitterly polarised election, racial division, the national catastrophe of the coronavirus and the threat to US democracy evidenced by the storming of Capitol Hill.
Being Miss America
Author: Kate Shindle
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2014-09-01
Total Pages: 269
ISBN-13: 0292739214
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Recounts the author's experiences as Miss America 1998, providing a history of the pageant and profiling other former winners.
The Beiging of America, Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the 21st Century
Author: Cathy J. Schlund Vials
Publisher: 2Leaf Press
Published: 2017-07-08
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 1940939550
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →THE BEIGING OF AMERICA, BEING MIXED RACE IN THE 21ST CENTURY, takes on “race matters” and considers them through the firsthand accounts of mixed race people in the United States. Edited by mixed race scholars Cathy J. Schlund-Vials, Sean Frederick Forbes and Tara Betts, this collection consists of 39 poets, writers, teachers, professors, artists and activists, whose personal narratives articulate the complexities of interracial life. THE BEIGING OF AMERICA is an absorbing and thought-provoking collection of stories that explore racial identity, alienation, with people often forced to choose between races and cultures in their search for self-identity. While underscoring the complexity of the mixed race experience, these unadorned voices offer a genuine, poignant, enlightening and empowering message to all readers.
Conditional Citizens
Author: Laila Lalami
Publisher: Pantheon
Published: 2020-09-22
Total Pages: 209
ISBN-13: 1524747165
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →A New York Times Editors' Choice • Best Book of the Year: Time, NPR, Bookpage, L.A. Times What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of American rights, liberties, and protections. "Sharp, bracingly clear essays."—Entertainment Weekly Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today. Lalami poignantly illustrates how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation, with the result that a caste system is maintained that keeps the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top of the social hierarchy. Conditional citizens, she argues, are all the people with whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other. Brilliantly argued and deeply personal, Conditional Citizens weaves together Lalami’s own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.
American Like Me
Author: America Ferrera
Publisher: Gallery Books
Published: 2019-09-03
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 1501180924
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From award-winning actress and political activist America Ferrera comes a vibrant and varied collection of first-person accounts from prominent figures about the experience of growing up between cultures. America Ferrera has always felt wholly American, and yet, her identity is inextricably linked to her parents’ homeland and Honduran culture. Speaking Spanish at home, having Saturday-morning-salsa-dance-parties in the kitchen, and eating tamales alongside apple pie at Christmas never seemed at odds with her American identity. Still, she yearned to see that identity reflected in the larger American narrative. Now, in American Like Me, America invites thirty-one of her friends, peers, and heroes to share their stories about life between cultures. We know them as actors, comedians, athletes, politicians, artists, and writers. However, they are also immigrants, children or grandchildren of immigrants, indigenous people, or people who otherwise grew up with deep and personal connections to more than one culture. Each of them struggled to establish a sense of self, find belonging, and feel seen. And they call themselves American enthusiastically, reluctantly, or not at all. Ranging from the heartfelt to the hilarious, their stories shine a light on a quintessentially American experience and will appeal to anyone with a complicated relationship to family, culture, and growing up.
Learn about the United States
Author: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services
Publisher: Government Printing Office
Published: 2009
Total Pages: 36
ISBN-13: 9780160831188
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Learn About the United States" is intended to help permanent residents gain a deeper understanding of U.S. history and government as they prepare to become citizens. The product presents 96 short lessons, based on the sample questions from which the civics portion of the naturalization test is drawn. An audio CD that allows students to listen to the questions, answers, and civics lessons read aloud is also included. For immigrants preparing to naturalize, the chance to learn more about the history and government of the United States will make their journey toward citizenship a more meaningful one.
Why Survive?
Author: Robert N. Butler
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2003-02-01
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780801874253
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"Butler questions the value of long life for its own sake; modern medicine, he says, has ironically created 'a huge group of people for whom survival is possible but satisfaction in living elusive.' He proposes sweeping policy reforms to redefine and restructure the institutions responsible for what he calls 'the tragedy of old age in America.'" -New York Times Book Review "Crammed with facts that explode old myths." -Boston Globe "Heavily documented, highly readable . . . jammed with recommendations for constructive change in every area." -Science "I commend it for clarity and lucidity, unpretentiousness and comprehensiveness . . . I think it is a classic." -Karl Menninger M.D.
The Next America
Author: Paul Taylor
Publisher: Hachette UK
Published: 2016-01-26
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 1610396685
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The America of the near future will look nothing like the America of the recent past. America is in the throes of a demographic overhaul. Huge generation gaps have opened up in our political and social values, our economic well-being, our family structure, our racial and ethnic identity, our gender norms, our religious affiliation, and our technology use. Today's Millennials -- well-educated, tech savvy, underemployed twenty-somethings -- are at risk of becoming the first generation in American history to have a lower standard of living than their parents. Meantime, more than 10,000 Baby Boomers are retiring every single day, most of them not as well prepared financially as they'd hoped. This graying of our population has helped polarize our politics, put stresses on our social safety net, and presented our elected leaders with a daunting challenge: How to keep faith with the old without bankrupting the young and starving the future. Every aspect of our demography is being fundamentally transformed. By mid-century, the population of the United States will be majority non-white and our median age will edge above 40 -- both unprecedented milestones. But other rapidly-aging economic powers like China, Germany, and Japan will have populations that are much older. With our heavy immigration flows, the US is poised to remain relatively young. If we can get our spending priorities and generational equities in order, we can keep our economy second to none. But doing so means we have to rebalance the social compact that binds young and old. In tomorrow's world, yesterday's math will not add up. Drawing on Pew Research Center's extensive archive of public opinion surveys and demographic data, The Next America is a rich portrait of where we are as a nation and where we're headed -- toward a future marked by the most striking social, racial, and economic shifts the country has seen in a century.
