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Material World: A Global Family Portrait
Peter Menzel, Charles C. Mann · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHow the Other Half Lives
Jacob A. Riis · 246 pages
A photographic collection exposing social conditions and daily life in the slums of late 19th century New York City. The title of the book is a reference to a sentence by French writer and philosopher François Rabelais, who famously wrote in his Pantagruel : "one half of the world does not know how the other half lives" ("la moitié du monde ne sait pas comment l'autre vit").
Sidewalk
Mitchell Duneier · 383 pages
"In Sidewalk, Mitchell Duneier takes us back to the streets of the Village, but finds a scene very different from the one Jacobs described. Much of the architecture remains, and many people live the way Jacobs suggested, but there is another population in the Village today - poor black men who make their livelihoods on the sidewalks by selling secondhand goods, panhandling, and scavenging books a
Hungry Planet
Peter Menzel, Faith D'Aluisio · 288 pages
"A photographic collection exploring what the world eats featuring portraits of thirty families from twenty-four countries surrounded by a week's worth of food"--Provided by publisher.
The Mole People: Life in the Tunnels Beneath New York City
Jennifer Toth · 267 pages
Thousands of people live in the subway, railroad, and sewage tunnels that form the bowels of New York City. This book is about them, the so-called "mole people" living alone and in communities, in the frescoed waiting rooms of long-forgotten subway tunnels and in pick-axed compartments below busway platforms. It is about how and why people move undergraound, who they are, and what they have to say
Girl Culture
Lauren Greenfield · 155 pages
"The body has become a primary expression of individual identity for girls in contemporary American culture. Girl Culture investigates girls’ relationships to their bodies and the ways in which they use body projects to establish their identities. The photographs explore the relationship between girls’ inner lives and emotional development, and the material world and popular culture. They also rev
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
Sudhir Venkatesh · 448 pages
Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies: Migrant Farmworkers in the United States
Seth Holmes · 264 pages
"Based on five years of research in the field (including berry-picking and traveling with migrants back and forth from Oaxaca up the West Coast), Holmes, an anthropologist and MD in the mold of Paul Farmer and Didier Fassin, uncovers how market forces, anti-immigrant sentiment, and racism undermine health and health care."--
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Riane Eisler · 261 pages
"In prehistorical times, Eisler argues, women and men lived together in egalitarian communities devoted to nurturance; with the imposition of male domination, female values gave way to creeds of hierarchy, aggression, power, obedience. Eisler, a futurist, posits a new society based on the recovery of more humane values."--Library journal (6/1/85).
Primates of Park Avenue
Wednesday Martin · 256 pages
Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City
Alice Goffman · 287 pages
"Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America's most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance techniques criminalize entire blocks, and transform the very associations that should stabilize young lives--family, relationships, jobs--into liab
Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil
Nancy Scheper-Hughes · 621 pages
"When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When people are assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the celebrated parched lands of Northeast Brazil, Death Without Weeping is a luminously written, "womanly hearted" account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness, and death that centers on the lives of the women and children of a
On Photography
Susan Sontag · 207 pages
On Photography is a 1977 collection of essays by Susan Sontag. It originally appeared as a series of essays in the New York Review of Books between 1973 and 1977. In the book, Sontag expresses her views on the history and present-day role of photography in capitalist societies as of the 1970s. Sontag discusses many examples of modern photography, among these, she contrasts Diane Arbus's work with
Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture
Carol Padden, Tom Humphries · 134 pages
Refusing to accept the limitations others have placed on the deaf, the authors -- themselves deaf -- argue for a deaf culture, one united by and expressed through the American Sign Language.
The Underground Girls of Kabul
Jenny Nordberg · 350 pages
An award-winning foreign correspondent who contributed to a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times series reveals the secret Afghan custom of disguising girls as boys to improve their prospects, discussing its political and social significance as well as the experiences of its practitioners.
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
Friedrich Engels · 216 pages
The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling Love and Saving Dreams in Pakistan's Pleasure District
Louise Brown · 328 pages
The dancing girls of Lahore inhabit the Diamond Market in the shadow of a great mosque. The twenty-first century goes on outside the walls of this ancient quarter but scarcely registers within. Though their trade can be described with accuracy as prostitution, the dancing girls have an illustrious history: Beloved by emperors and nawabs, their sophisticated art encompassed the best of Mughal cultu
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Jared Diamond · 592 pages
"In his Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now, Diamond probes the other side of the equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates?" "As in Guns, G
Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat: Why It's So Hard to Think Straight About Animals
Hal Herzog · 334 pages
Does living with a pet really make people happier and healthier? What can we learn from biomedical research with mice? Who enjoys a better quality of life -- the chicken destined for your dinner plate or the rooster in a Saturday night cockfight? Why is it wrong to eat the family dog? Drawing on more than two decades of research into the emerging field of anthrozoology, the science of human–animal
May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India
Elisabeth Bumiller · 306 pages
Reveals the lives of India's women of all social classes, the Indian women's movement, population control and other issues affecting womens' lives.
The Human Zoo: A Zoologist's Study of the Urban Animal
Desmond Morris · 256 pages
Morris looks closely at the human species under the stresses and pressures of urban living.This study concerns the city dweller. Morris finds remarkable similarities with captive zoo animals and looks closely at the aggressive, sexual and parental behaviour of the human species under the stresses and pressures of urban living.
The Sociology of an English Village: Gosforth
W. M. Williams · 218 pages
This is Volume XI of thirteen in a collection on the Urban and Regional Sociology. Initially published in 1956, the subject of this work is Gosforth in the North West with its long history and because it contained both a village and scattered farms. The field-work took place between July 1950 and February 1952, and further field-work was carried out in the summer of 1953.
Handbook of Death and Dying
Clifton D. Bryant · 1,146 pages
Dying is a social as well as physiological phenomenon. Each society characterizes and, consequently, treats death and dying in its own individual ways—ways that differ markedly. These particular patterns of death and dying engender modal cultural responses, and such institutionalized behavior has familiar, economical, educational, religious, and political implications. The Handbook of Death and Dy
Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture
Johan Huizinga · 227 pages
Ein klassischer Essay der Kulturgeschichte und Anthropologie Ein grundlegendes Element unserer Kultur ist das Spiel. Der Mensch ist ein Spieler – und ohne seine Lust und Fähigkeit zum Spielen hätten sich ganze Bereiche seiner Kultur nicht entwickelt: die Dichtung, das Recht, die Wissenschaft, die bildende Kunst, die Philosophie und viele andere. Johan Huizinga, der große holländische Historiker u