Sixty Million Frenchmen Can't Be Wrong

La Seduction: How the French Play the Game of Life

Elaine Sciolino · 338 pages

Reveals the role of seduction in French culture while explaining how crucial the game of seduction is to understanding France, identifying seduction as a key ideology that shapes how the French conduct business, politics, and relationships.

The Almost Nearly Perfect People: Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia

Michael Booth · 406 pages

The whole world wants to learn the secrets of Nordic exceptionalism: Why are the Danes the happiest people in the world, despite having the highest taxes? If the Finns really have the best education system, how come they still think all Swedish men are gay? Are the Icelanders really feral? This book deals with these questions.

India Calling: An Intimate Portrait Of A Nation's Remaking

Anand Giridharadas

Factory Girls: Voices From The Heart Of Modern China

Leslie T. Chang · 425 pages

An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.China has 130 million migrant workers--the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women,

India: A Million Mutinies Now

V.S. Naipaul · 624 pages

The Undutchables: An Observation of the Netherlands: Its Culture and Its Inhabitants

Colin White, Laurie Boucke · 272 pages

Speelse karakterschets van de Nederlander door twee Amerikanen.

Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change

Angela Garbes · 256 pages

Killing Rage: Ending Racism

bell hooks · 277 pages

One of our country's premier cultural and social critics, the author of such powerful and influential books as Ain't I a Woman and Black Looks, Bell Hooks has always maintained that eradicating racism and eradicating sexism must be achieved hand in hand. But whereas many women have been recognized for their writing on gender politics, the female voice has been all but locked out of the public disc

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis

J.D. Vance · 272 pages

From a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, this book is a probing look at the struggles of America's white working class through the author's own story of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town. Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis - that of poor, white Americans. The disintegration of this group, a process that has been slowly occurring now for over fo

Yellow: Race In America Beyond Black And White

Frank H. Wu · 400 pages

In the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, Cornel West, and other public intellectuals who confronted the "color line" of the twentieth century, journalist, law professor, and activist Frank H. Wu offers a unique perspective on how changing ideas of racial identity will affect race relations in the new century.Often provocative and always thoughtful, this book addresses some of the most controversial c

The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home

Pico Iyer · 320 pages

"Pico Iyer has for many years described with keen perception and exacting wit the shifting textures of faraway lands anchored on a spinning globe that mixes and matches East and West. Now he casts a philosophical eye upon this curious state of floatingness.". "Using his own multicultural upbringing (Indian, American, British) as a point of departure, Iyer sets out on a quest, both physical and ps

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

Evan Osnos · 416 pages

I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America after Twenty Years Away

Bill Bryson · 381 pages

After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens--as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and improved America that boasts microwave pancakes, twenty-four-hour dental-floss

The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America

Amy Chua, Jed Rubenfeld · 336 pages

"It may be taboo to say, but some groups in America do better than others.Why do some groups rise? Drawing on groundbreaking original research and startling statistics, The Triple Package uncovers the secret to their success. A superiority complex, insecurity, impulse control--these are the elements of the Triple Package, the rare and potent cultural constellation that drives disproportionate grou

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Benedict Anderson · 240 pages

Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man's Education

Mychal Denzel Smith · 240 pages

"A prominent journalist and contributing writer to The Nation magazine describes his education and the experiences of black masculinity against a backdrop of the Obama administration, the death of Trayvon Martin, the career of LeBron James and other pivotal influences that have shaped race relations in today's America,"--NoveList. How do you learn to be a black man in America? For young black men

Gaysia: Adventures in the Queer East

Benjamin Law · 288 pages

How To Be Danish

Patrick Kingsley · 151 pages

Denmark is the country of the moment. Recently named the happiest nation in the world, it's the motherland of The Bridge, Borgen, and The Killing, and home to Noma, the world's best restaurant. But though we wear their jumpers and watch their thrillers, how much do we really know about the Danes themselves?

Bad Feminist

Roxane Gay · 360 pages

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay. "Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink, all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I'm not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once l

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

Tony Horwitz · 432 pages

Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. He joins "hardcore" reenactors; witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war; finds that Ande

The Italians

John Hooper · 317 pages

How can a nation that spawned the Renaissance have produced the Mafia? How could people concerned with bella figura (keeping up appearances) have elected Silvio Berlusconi as their leader, not once, but three times? Sublime and maddening, fascinating yet baffling, Italy is a country of seemingly unsolvable riddles. John Hooper's entertaining and perceptive new book is the ideal companion for anyon

India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India

Akash Kapur · 292 pages

"A portrait of incredible change and economic development, of social and national transformation told through individual lives. The son of an Indian father and an American mother, Akash Kapur spent his formative years in India and his early adulthood in the United States. In 2003, he returned to his birth country for good, eager to be part of its exciting growth and modernization. What he found w

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race

Clint Smith · 240 pages

Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America

Melissa V. Harris-Perry · 378 pages

Jezebel's sexual lasciviousness, Mammy's devotion, and Sapphire's outspoken anger -- these are among the most persistent stereotypes that black women encounter in contemporary American life. Hurtful and dishonest, such representations force African American women to navigate a virtual crooked room that shames them and shapes their experiences as citizens. Many respond by assuming a mantle of stren