Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal

by Eric Schlosser

To a degree both engrossing and alarming, the story of fast food is the story of postwar America. Schlosser, a National Magazine Award-winning journalist, charts the fast food industry's enormous impact on our health, landscape, economy, politics and culture as he transforms the way America thinks about what it eats.

see all copies from $2.20!

first editions

The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-Year Friendship

by Jeffrey Zaslow

From the co-author of the bestselling "The Last Lecture" comes a moving tribute to female friendships, with the inspiring story of 11 girls and the women they became.

see all copies from $20.80!

first editions

Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community

by Robert D Putnam

Based on a 25-year research project, this book documents a significant downward spike in the ways that Americans gather in social groups--and recommends new ways that people can come together for the common good.

see all copies from $13.59!

first editions

Sin in the Second City: Madams, Ministers, Playboys, and the Battle for America's Soul

by Karen Abbott

Step into the perfumed parlors of the Everleigh Club, the most famous brothel in American history. Culminating in a dramatic last stand between brothel keepers and crusading reformers, this book presents a vivid snapshot of Americas journey from Victorian-era propriety to 20th-century modernity.

see all copies from $13.50!

signed copies | first editions

The Chalice and the Blade-Our History, Our Future

by Riane Tennenhaus Eisler

This thought-provoking book looks to the origins of culture as a means of assessing the current state of civilization and the direction in which it is heading. Drawing from art, archaeology, religion, social science, and history, the author concerns himself with the cruelty and inequality that has been a mark of human civilization since the dawn ...

see all copies from $17.06!

signed copies | first editions

American Sports: From the Age of Folk Games to the Age of Televised Sports

by Benjamin G Rader

For courses in American Sport History and History of Sport. Completely updated and revised, this text sets sports in a social-cultural historical context. The Fifth Edition of this highly-acclaimed text offers a reflective, analytical history of American sports from the colonial era to the present. With a focus on the historical relationship ...

see all copies from $97.92!

first editions

Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920's

by Frederick Lewis Allen

Written in 1931, this new installment in the Wiley Investment Classics series offers a well-written historical and anecdotal account of the volatile stock market of the 1920s. It traces the rise of post World War I prosperity up to the crash of 1929 before a colorful backdrop that includes Al Capone, Prohibition, the first radio, and the rise and ...

see all copies from $11.70!

signed copies | first editions

A History of World Societies

by John P McKay

With unparalleled coverage of social history, A History of World Societies explores the lives of peoples of the world within a political framework. The text is known for its readability, integration of strong scholarship, and new historical interpretations. A range of technology resources, including Houghton Mifflin's Eduspace online learning tool ...

see all copies from $13.30!

first editions

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

by Peter L Bernstein

The story of the group of scientists who pioneered the modern techniques of risk management.

see all copies from $18.45!

signed copies | first editions

The Ecology of Commerce

by Paul Hawken

Provides a visionary blueprint for a marketplace where businesses and environmentalists work together, showing companies how to redesign and manufacture products in innovative ways, reeducate customers, and work closely with government toward a profitable, productive, and ecologically sound future.

see all copies from $16.19!

first editions

A Rake's Vow

by Stephanie Laurens

With both of her parents gone, Patience Debbington is accustomed to managing her own affairs, and those of her teenage brother Gerrard. To her love is dangerous, men uninteresting and faithless. Gerrard needs a suitable mentor, but when tall, elegant Vane Cynster rides into her life, Patience sees nothing but an arrogant, presumptuous dandy--a man ...

see all copies from $7.99!

first editions

The Jesus Mysteries: Was the "Original Jesus" a Pagan God?

by Timothy Freke, Peter Gandy

An extreme alternative to the received wisdom regarding the advent of the Christian faith, this book explores the connection between early Christianity and Gnostic beliefs and concludes that the Christian founders pirated the origination myths of pagans.

see all copies from $13.46!

first editions

The cosmic serpent, DNA and the origins of knowledge

by Jeremy Narby

This is an adventure in science and imagination which tracks a young French anthropologist through the Amazonian rain forests, the libraries of Europe and the world's most arcane scientific journals, following strange clues, intuitions and extraordinary coincidences, to reveal scientific data. The beginning of Narby's exploration lay with the ...

see all copies from $13.46!

first editions

The Social Transformation of American Medicine

by Paul Starr

Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History, this is a landmark history of how the entire American health care system of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries."The definitive social history of the medical profession in America....A monumental achievement." ...

see all copies from $32.34!

signed copies

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Techno Logy

by Lawrence Weschler

"New Yorker" staff writer Weschler explores an odd museum and its eccentric curator to expand on the "slight slippage" he finds between pure wonder and skeptical confusion. Includes b&w drawings.

see all copies from $13.46!

signed copies | first editions

The great transformation

by Karl Polanyi

One of the twentieth century's most thorough and discerning historians, Karl Polanyi sheds "new illumination on . . . the social implications of a particular economic system, the market economy that grew into full stature in the nineteenth century." -R. M. MacIver

see all copies from $28.80!

Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World

by Nicholas Ostler

Noted linguist Nicholas Ostler brings together the tales of the world's languages in all their glorious variety in this unusual and authoritative "natural history of languages," offering a unique perspective on civilization through the ages. Maps. Charts.

see all copies from $16.19!

first editions

For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English

The authors present provocative new perspectives on female history, the history of American medicine and psychology, and the history of child-rearing unlike any other.

see all copies from $11.96!

The City of Falling Angels

by John Berendt

A murder in Savannah inspired John Berendt's previous book, the blockbuster bestseller MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL. This time, the location is Venice, and the 1996 inferno which destroyed Venice's beloved opera house, La Fenice, serves as the touchstone for John Berendt's quirky exploration of the city and its most colorful inhabitants ...

see all copies from $1.99!

signed copies | first editions

From Poor Law to Welfare State, 6th Edition: A History of Social Welfare in America

by Walter I Trattner

Originally published in 1974, this highly regarded text -- the only comprehensive account of American social welfare history from the colonial period to the present -- has been updated to include the latest events and scholarship on the subject. Topics new to this sixth edition include President Clinton's health-care reform and its failure; his ...

see all copies from $17.95!

Pedagogy of the oppressed

by Paulo Freire

This is Paolo Freire's classic text on education and liberation.

see all copies from $19.25!

first editions

Down & Out in Paris & London

by George Orwell

'You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them'. George Orwell's vivid memoir of his time among the desperately poor and destitute in London and Paris is a moving tour of the underworld of society. Here he painstakingly documents a world of unrelenting drudgery and squalor - sleeping in bug ...

see all copies from $3.50!

first editions

Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class

by Lawrence Otis Graham

The controversial book that exposed the black upper class and became a national bestseller was called "a must read" ("Publishers Weekly") and "a major contribution" ("The New York Times"). 16-page photo insert.

see all copies from $13.49!

signed copies | first editions

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

by Edwin R Black

Genetics is in the news. What is not in the news are its origins in a racist twentieth century pseudoscience called eugenics, which was based on selective breeding. In 1904, the United States launched a large-scale eugenics movement that was championed by the medical, political and religious elite. History has recorded the horrors of ethnic ...

see all copies from $24.98!

first editions

Grandmother's Secrets: The Ancient Rituals and Healing Power of Belly Dancing

by Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi, Monique Arav (Translator)

This is a personal memoir, a how-to guide, and a philosophical reflection about bellydance as an art form for women. Rosina-Fawzia Al-Rawi describes the secret language of bellydance choreography, explains the significance of movements from head to toe, and discusses the many dances used to celebrate various stages in a woman's life, such as ...

see all copies from $13.50!

first editions