From the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Arab and Jew" comes a new book that presents a searing, intimate portrait of working American families struggling against insurmountable odds to escape poverty.
From the bestselling author of "The Palace Thief" comes a stunning novel, set in a small town during the Nixon era and today, about America and family, politics and tragedy, and the impact of fate on a young man's life.
A national treasure, radio legend Studs Terkel first made his name in his home town of Chicago, conducting tens of thousands of radio interviews over several decades. (He even interviewed Bob Dylan in the early '60s.) In WORKING, Terkel lets the tape roll as people talk about their jobs--an oral history approach which, though he did not invent it, ...
In Richard Russo's lengthy fifth novel--this one set in a small Maine town--the Empire Grill provides the focus for the town's inhabitants, who include Miles Roby, who manages the place; Francine Whiting, the wealthy woman who owns it; Jimmy the cop; and Miles's large, eccentric, and often comic extended family. Many plots intertwine as the ...
For nearly a century, the original version of Upton Sinclair's classic novel has remained almost entirely unknown. When it was published in serial form in 1905, it was a full third longer than the censored, commercial edition published in book form the following year. That expurgated commercial edition edited out much of the ethnic flavor of the ...
Drawing on interviews with dismissed IBM executives in New York, bakers in a Boston bakery, a barmaid turned advertising executive, and countless other workers, Sennett studies the effects of the new capitalism throughout the world.
Based very closely on D.H. Lawrence's own life, SONS AND LOVERS (1913) tells the story of young Paul Morel, son of the troubled union of an educated, upwardly mobile mother and an ill-tempered, unlettered coal miner father who speaks in a broad dialect. Although in later life Lawrence regretted his brutal portrait of his father, the hero of the ...
This book examines how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s. We follow Chicago workers as they make choices about whether to attend ethnic benefit society meetings or to go to the movies, whether to shop in local neighborhood stores or ...
"Who Built America?" explores fundamental conflicts in United States history by placing working peoples' struggle for social and economic justice at center stage. Unique among U.S. history survey textbooks for its clear point of view, "Who Built America" is a joint effort of Bedford/St. Martin's and the American Social History Project, based at ...
"Half Slave and Half Free" is a powerful treatment of the basic issues and social transformations that precipitated the Civil War. In a succinct, persuasive narrative, Bruce Levine succeeds in showing how a popular basis for the Civil War developed out of the far-reaching and divisive changes in American life after the incomplete Revolution of ...
Hailed by the New Society as the "best book on male working class youth," this classic work, first published in 1977, has been translated into several foreign languages and remains the authority in ethnographical studies.
A national treasure, radio legend Studs Terkel first made his name in his home town of Chicago, conducting tens of thousands of radio interviews over several decades. (He even interviewed Bob Dylan in the early '60s.) In WORKING, Terkel lets the tape roll as people talk about their jobs--an oral history approach which, though he did not invent it, ...
"Amazing . . . a gem of a book that uses only the strength of the human voice to tell an American story -- sometimes dark, always fascinating." -- "USA Today" "The accounts are wonderfully revealing, with gritty and almost shockingly honest detail. For all their variety, they weave a cohesive, passion-filled story of what people bring to their ...
Have the poor fared best by participating in conventional electoral politics or by engaging in mass defiance and disruption? The authors of the classic Regulating The Poor assess the successes and failures of these two strategies as they examine, in this provocative study, four protest movements of lower-class groups in 20th century America: -- ...
"Who Built America?" explores fundamental conflicts in United States history by placing working peoples' struggle for social and economic justice at center stage. Unique among U.S. history survey textbooks for its clear point of view, "Who Built America" is a joint effort of Bedford/St. Martin's and the American Social History Project, based at ...
This urgent examination of the lives of millions of hardworking Americans--neither poor nor middle class, but who live without a safety net--gives voice to the 57 million Americans who are sandwiched between the poor and middle classes.
Winner of the 1996 Booker Prize, and now a major new film starring Bob Hoskins, Helen Mirren and Michael Caine. Four men once close to Jack Dodds, a London butcher, meet to carry out his peculiar last wish: to have his ashes scattered into the sea. For reasons best known to herself, Jack's widow, Amy, declines to join them. On the surface the tale ...
"The Big Squeeze" takes a probing, sometimes shocking look at the stresses faced by an alarming number of American workers--white- and blue-collar, middle- and low-income--as wages have stagnated, health and pension benefits have grown stingier, and job security has shriveled.
Second edition of the classic study that delivers a passionate plea for teachers, parents, and community organizers to give workingclass children the same type of empowering education and powerful literacy skills that the children of upper and middleclass people receive.
Blending history, analysis, and fresh, often controversial recommendations, the authors argue that it is time to move beyond the Reagan legacy and the mindset of the current Republican power structure.
When fifteen-year-old Cissie Brodie loses her parents to cholera, she is forced out of the family cottage and left to raise her nine siblings alone. Although desperately poor, the strong-willed Cissie determines to build a new home for the Brodies. It is only a rough stone shelter, but to Cissie and her family it is enough to keep them from the ...
E. P. Thompson examines the period from 1870 to 1932, when historical forces and processes, including the Industrial Revolution, brought about the working class as a separate and identifiable group in England.
The title story in this collection of short stories tells of Smith, a defiant young rebel, inhabiting a no-man's land of institutionalized Borstal. As his steady jog-trot rhythm transports him over an unrelenting, frost-bitten earth, he wonders why, for whom and for what he is running.
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