Books with category 👁 Sociology
Displaying 5 books

Doppelganger

2023

by Naomi Klein

From the award-winning, bestselling author of No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein presents a revelatory analysis of the collapsed meanings, blurred identities, and uncertain realities of the mirror world.

Naomi Klein takes a more personal turn, braiding together elements of tragicomic memoir, chilling political reportage, and cobweb-clearing cultural analysis, as she dives deep into what she calls the Mirror World—our destabilized present rife with doubles and confusion, where far right movements playact solidarity with the working class, AI-generated content blurs the line between genuine and spurious, New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers further scramble our familiar political allegiances, and so many of us project our own carefully curated digital doubles out into the social media sphere.

Klein begins this richly nuanced intellectual adventure story by grappling with her own doppelganger—a fellow author and public intellectual whose views are antithetical to Klein’s own, but whose name and public persona are sufficiently similar that many people have confused the two over the years. From there, she turns her gaze both inward to our psychic landscapes—drawing on the work of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks—and outward, to our intersecting economic, environmental, medical, and political crises.

Ultimately seeking to escape the Mirror World and chart a path beyond confusion and despair, Klein delivers a treatment of the way many of us think and feel now, offering an intellectual adventure story for our times.

When Crack Was King: A People's History Of A Misunderstood Era

When Crack Was King offers an account of the crack cocaine era and a community's resilience, told through a cast of characters whose lives illuminate the rise and fall of the epidemic. Journalist Donovan X. Ramsey provides an exacting analysis beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan's war on drugs.

The book follows four individuals: Elgin Swift, who represents American industry and ambition and is the son of a crack-addicted father; Lennie Woodley, a former crack addict and sex worker; Kurt Schmoke, the longtime mayor of Baltimore and an advocate of decriminalization; and Shawn McCray, community activist and a founding member of Newark's most legendary group of drug traffickers.

With riveting research and the voices of survivors, this book is a crucial reevaluation of the era and a powerful argument for providing historically violated communities with the resources they deserve.

Our Migrant Souls

2023

by HĂ©ctor Tobar

Our Migrant Souls is a defining exploration of the Latino identity in the United States by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer HĂ©ctor Tobar. The term "Latino" is one of the most rapidly growing but loosely defined major race categories in the country.

Composed as a direct address to young people who identify or are classified as "Latino," this book stands as the first account of the historical and social forces shaping Latino identity. Tobar examines the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, media, and pop culture, decoding the meaning of "Latino" as a racial and ethnic identity in contemporary America.

Our Migrant Souls gives voice to the frustrations and aspirations of young Latinos who have witnessed the transformation of Latinidad into negative stereotypes and have faced insult and division. Tobar shares his experiences as a journalist, novelist, mentor, leader, and educator, intertwining his personal narrative and his parents' migration from Guatemala with his journey across the country to uncover a narrative that is expansive, inspiring, and alive.

Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother

A historian explores the complicated relationship between womanhood and motherhood in this timely, refreshingly open-hearted study of the choices women make and the cards they’re dealt.


In an era of falling births, it’s often said that millennials invented the idea of not having kids. But history is full of women without children: some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others—the vast majority, then and now—who fell somewhere in between. Modern women considering how and if children fit into their lives are products of their political, ecological, and cultural moment. But history also tells them that they are not alone.


Drawing on deep research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O’Donnell Heffington shows that many of the reasons women are not having children today are ones they share with women in the past: a lack of support, their jobs or finances, environmental concerns, infertility, and the desire to live different kinds of lives. Understanding this history—how normal it has always been to not have children, and how hard society has worked to make it seem abnormal—is key, she writes, to rebuilding kinship between mothers and non-mothers, and to building a better world for us all.

Poverty, By America

2023

by Matthew Desmond

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Evicted reimagines the debate on poverty, making a “provocative and compelling” (NPR) argument about why it persists in America: because the rest of us benefit from it. “Urgent and accessible . . . Its moral force is a gut punch.”—The New Yorker

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

In this landmark book, acclaimed sociologist Matthew Desmond draws on history, research, and original reporting to show how affluent Americans knowingly and unknowingly keep poor people poor. Those of us who are financially secure exploit the poor, driving down their wages while forcing them to overpay for housing and access to cash and credit. We prioritize the subsidization of our wealth over the alleviation of poverty, designing a welfare state that gives the most to those who need the least. And we stockpile opportunity in exclusive communities, creating zones of concentrated riches alongside those of concentrated despair. Some lives are made small so that others may grow.

Elegantly written and fiercely argued, this compassionate book gives us new ways of thinking about a morally urgent problem. It also helps us imagine solutions. Desmond builds a startlingly original and ambitious case for ending poverty. He calls on us all to become poverty abolitionists, engaged in a politics of collective belonging to usher in a new age of shared prosperity and, at last, true freedom.

Are you sure you want to delete this?