What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorBetween the World and Me
Ta-Nehisi Coates · 155 pages
An Amazon Best Book of July 2015: Readers of his work in The Atlantic and elsewhere know Ta-Nehisi Coates for his thoughtful and influential writing on race in America. Written as a series of letters to his teenaged son, his new memoir, Between the World and Me, walks us through the course of his life, from the tough neighborhoods of Baltimore in his youth, to Howard University—which Coates dubs “
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.
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
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
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
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.
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
Sudhir Venkatesh · 448 pages
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
Erving Goffman, Sven Bergstrom · 255 pages
A notable contribution to our understanding of ourselves. This book explores the realm of human behavior in social situations and the way that we appear to others. Dr. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework. Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and control the impressions they form of him, and employs
Women in the Material World
Faith D'Aluisio, Peter Menzel · 256 pages
A collection of 375 full-color photographs, accompanied by candid first-person chronicles, statistics, and insights, reflect the status of women around the world, offering a rich portrait of the lives, aspirations, feelings, and beliefs of women from a wide range of cultures. 50,000 first printing.
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
Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
Sebastian Junger · 168 pages
Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, Tribe explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that-for many veterans as well as civilians-war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Tribe
The Death Class: A True Story About Life
Erika Hayasaki · 275 pages
A journalist details how Norma Bowe, the professor of a popular class on the stages of dying, death, and bereavement at Kean University in New Jersey, shows her students how to truly heal and live their lives through contemplating the end.
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 Elementary Forms of Religious Life
Emile Durkheim · 416 pages
Modern Romance
Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg · 288 pages
From NYU Wagner: At some point, every one of us embarks on a journey to find love. We meet people, date, get into and out of relationships, all with the hope of finding someone with whom we share a deep connection. This seems standard now, but it’s wildly different from what people did even just decades ago. Single people today have more romantic options than at any point in human history. Wit
Material World: A Global Family Portrait
Peter Menzel, Charles C. Mann · 255 pages
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.
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
Columbine
Dave Cullen · 417 pages
On April 20, 1999, two boys left an indelible stamp on the American psyche. Their goal was simple: to blow up their school, Oklahoma-City style, and to leave "a lasting impression on the world." Their bombs failed, but the ensuing shooting defined a new era of school violence-irrevocably branding every subsequent shooting "another Columbine." When we think of Columbine, we think of the Trench Coat
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).
Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
Kate Fox · 424 pages