Social Sciences
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Inmates of Texas’s Death Row live in 10 x 6.5 foot cells. In winter the temperatures plummet and officials delay turning on the heat so that the prisoners shiver in their cells. In summer it can get up to 120 degrees, yet air conditioners are left off for weeks. As the convicts await execution, every second of their day is controlled, from the food (usually cold and often inedible), to the number of stamps an inmate can buy, what they own, what they wear, who can visit, how much toilet paper...
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There is no doubt that we live in precarious times. Pick up the newspaper or turn on the television, and at least half a dozen news stories will be about man-made tragedies or natural disasters that cause the deaths of thousands. A Dangerous World is Dr. Mark Raven’s how-to book that informs readers about the various types of disasters that may occur and encourages them to prepare for these events so “they may survive and suffer a minimum of hardship.”
A...
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Judging from recent economic history, charity won’t soon be rendered obsolete. Too many people who’ve made the United States their home suffer from hunger, disease, loneliness, or neglect. Some are lucky enough to cross paths with those striving to make a difference in the lives of the less fortunate. Allison Silberberg has a name for these special people in her book, Visionaries in Our Midst.
Silberberg has collected the stories of eighteen charitable groups into a...
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Curtis White believes that it’s a mistake to blame the global environmental crisis on greedy corporations or self-interested polluters. In his provocative and intellectually acrobatic new book The Barbarian Heart, White—an essayist, novelist, English professor, and the author of The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Them-selves—argues that pointing fingers toward “powerful corporate evildoers” only leads us to “think in...
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If a single picture says a thousand words, then a book of carefully crafted photographs accompanied by written testimonials and personal accounts can convey a tremendous story.
Susan Lankford, author and professional photographer, rented an empty jail in a rundown section of San Diego for a commercial project. The neighborhood soon dominated her attention. Her camera, keen eye for detail, and receptive ear soon began to absorb and chronicle the lives of the curious local residents....
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In the wake of the financial crisis, many Americans have downsized their lives, taking scissors to their credit cards and bid-ding their debt-financed bling goodbye. Given this cultural context, the timing couldn’t be better for the arrival of Less Is More, a new anthology about the burgeoning “voluntary simplicity” movement. Edited by Cecile Andrews (author of Circle of Simplicity) and Wanda Urbanska (host of PBS’s Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska...
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Definition can be a wily beast, and from the outset of this compendium of essays, letters, and journals from gay men, editor David Bergman admits that creating the structure was challenging.
After all, some of the authors in the collection didn't live "out" as homosexuals, and never wrote about their experiences; also some, like Henry James, may have been born in America but spent most of their lives in other countries. Trickiest of all is the slippery meaning of...
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Readers who discreetly slip out the door when the economist rises to speak need have no concerns about John Wasik. Most reassuring on this score is the fact that Wasik writes a widely popular column in the Bloomberg News.
Or, go to his blog, dailywombat, where he identifies himself as a writer, journalist, speaker, teacher, poet, musician, and seeker of truth. He also says: "I believe in an eco-centric philosophy. All that we do is tied into the flow of the earth and cosmos. We...
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Some of the credit for Michael Montlacks lively, engaging collection has to go to Stevie Nicks-even though she and the editor havent met, and its possible that shell never read his ode to her power.
Thats beside the point, however. For nearly all of the essayists in My Diva-the ruminations on the charms, confidence, and beauty of the women who influenced them-arent for the women themselves. Rather, theyre a bright glimpse into the nature of diva-worship and how...
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After author and photographer Douglas McCulloh won the right to name a street in an about-to-be developed southern California suburb, he requested permission to make a photographic record of the project. The result is an indictment of the unscrupulous selling of the fabled "American Dream."
McCulloh made 20 x 24-inch gelatin silver prints of his photos, hoping that, "[p]erhaps focus and craft would help me make sense of what Id seen." His work places him in the lineage...
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Modern times have created soldiers in both the male and female variety. Both carry heavy guns. Both are involved in firefights. Both are wounded. Both are killed. But the female version, a growing percentage of the US armed forces, is sexually harassed and abused and occasionally raped by the male version. Isolated and belittled in a military culture that is hostile, many of the women who have served in Iraq have found that they must protect themselves not just from an angry population, but...
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“Images of badly abused slave children in Ivory Coast harvesting the cocoa beans that will be processed into the chocolates consumed by obese children in Los Angeles” will haunt the thoughts of everyone who reads this well-documented and deeply disturbing study of the disparate meanings of childhood around the world. Infanticide, child sacrifice, backbreaking labor, and child abuse have characterized human history, and even today, unwanted children remain on the margins of...
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A Native American Thought of It is an educational book written by Rocky Landon, an Ojibway band member and Native Studies consultant from Ontario, with children’s book author David MacDonald, A Native American Thought of It chronicles inventions and accomplishments of Native Americans across the Americas. Many of the significant inventions and accomplishments covered are a part of our daily lives. Landon discusses everything from moccasins to syringes, diapers and even...
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The blurb on the front cover of The Drum Calls Softly asserts that this illustrated book is of equal importance to children and adults—a blurb has never been so right. From the beautifully painted illustrations to the world-class musicianship of Northern Cree on the accompanying audio CD, The Drum is a powerfully narrated tale of spiritual belonging that transcends cultural barriers, whether you page through the book listening to the narration in Cree, or you follow the...
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America’s relationship with drugs has been marked by ambivalent attitudes, ranging from conceptualizing addiction as an illness to be treated with compassion, hard work, physical exercise and artistic expression to the current “War on Drugs” which regards addicts as criminal offenders deserving of incarceration with murderers and sex offenders.
The Narcotic Farm opened in 1935 through the joint efforts of the Public Health Service and the Bureau of... -
Devout Nigerian Muslims use practitioners of spirit possession on the sly when faced with problems they cannot solve; in an ostensibly Catholic town in Mexico, the cult of the Virgin comforts women as their husbands divide their time between them and “second wives”; in Kenya, Christians must still deal with their terror of witchcraft and the anger of their deceased ancestors; in Nepal, a saintly woman flees an arranged marriage to retain her personal freedom by becoming a...
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It doesn’t matter—Iraq War, drug war, culture war, gang war, race war, or Vietnam War—where there’s war there are both the wounded and the survivors who get to fight another day. Sager exhumes real people behind potent stereotypes, hopping from a Marine barracks for a regiment of wounded warriors to an island paradise owned by Marlon Brando to the filthy dog fighting pits of North Philadelphia to drug dens to high IQ societies to yoga sessions for the NAAFA (National...
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Photojournalist Susan Madden Lankford has, in her own words, “always been interested in incarceration and confinement,” but she found her true subject when a homeless man challenged her to learn from the homeless themselves what life is like on the streets and in jail. “No longer could I photograph the places without the people in them. I had to fill the image with society’s reality and not my imagination.” This book is the result of her intense two-year...
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Across America, “big box” stores rise like bland jewels in settings made just for them—huge parking lots and highways built or diverted to direct traffic flow. With the landscape so altered, what happens when a chain abandons a store to build a larger one nearby? Julie Christensen’s Big Box Reuse examines just that: adaptive reuse of Wal-Marts and K-Marts by communities, business people, and city councils.
In ten chapters, Christensen... -
School shootings, abuses of power in the workplace, and spousal or child abuse are results of what Dr. Julie Wambach calls “rankism,” or “the abuse of position within a hierarchy.” Wambach identifies “rankists” as individuals who “move to meet their personal needs while depriving others of their own. They treat humans as objects without concern for individual feelings or safety.” Rankist behaviors, whether exhibited by those considered “...