Book picks similar to
Stealing Fire: The Atomic Bomb As Symbolic Body by Peter C. Reynolds


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american-history

Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion


Edward J. Larson - 1997
    Yet despite its influence on the 20th century, there are no modern histories of the trial and its aftermath. This book fills that void not only by skillfully narrating the trial's events, but also by framing it in a broader social context, showing how its influence has cut across religious, cultural, educational and political lines. With new material from both the prosecution and the defense, along with the author's astute historical and legal analysis, "Summer for the Gods" is destined to become a new classic about a pivotal milestone in American history.

The Harrad Experiment


Robert H. Rimmer - 1966
    This social experiment encourages premarital living arrangements and is totally committed - not mere lip-service or public-relations hype - to getting young men and women to think and act for themselves.What do they think about? Everything that interests the author, Bob Rimmer: human relations, sex, history, philosophy, anatomy, existentialism, art, music, Zen, politics - and, once more, sex.Four Harrad students record their thoughts regularly for four years. Their diaries include large chunks of college "action," conversation, and portraits of fellow students, so the reader is swept into the lives of these young adults trying to sort out the jumbled mores of America's Sixties.Stanley Kolasukas, a bright, good-looking youth from a poor Polish family finds himself a roommate of Sheila Grove, the introspective daughter of an oil millionaire. Harry Schacht, a brilliant but ungainly medical student from an Orthodox Jewish background, lives with Beth Hillyer, a girl with enough drive to be a better doctor and enough sensuality to need many men in her life. Jack Dawes, imaginative and enthusiastic, lives with Valerie Latrobe, a dominant girl who believes she can better any man at anything.The original Harrad Experiment sold more than three million copies. This 25th anniversary edition includes a new epilogue describing the startling "Harrad/Premar Solution," a fully up-to-date and annotated bibliography of books that support the daring, joyfully subversive premises outlined in Harrad, and Robert Rimmer's candid, controversial autobiography. When you have read this book, you will find yourself entertaining the question of whether a real-life Harrad Experiment could - or should - be going on somewhere today, turning out a very special group of young men and women with the potential to utterly change America's ways of living, thinking, and loving in the 21st century.

Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal


Aviva Chomsky - 2014
    With a focus on US policy, she probes how people, especially Mexican and Central Americans, have been assigned this status—and to what ends. Blending history with human drama, Chomsky explores what it means to be undocumented in a legal, social, economic, and historical context. The result is a powerful testament of the complex, contradictory, and ever-shifting nature of status in America.

When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the US-Mexico Borderlands


Shaylih Muehlmann - 2013
    In particular, the book explores a crucial tension at the heart of the war on drugs: despite the violence and suffering brought on by drug cartels, for the rural poor in Mexico’s north, narcotrafficking offers one of the few paths to upward mobility and is a powerful source of cultural meanings and local prestige. In the borderlands, traces of the drug trade are everywhere: from gang violence in cities to drug addiction in rural villages, from the vibrant folklore popularized in the narco-corridos of Norteña music to the icon of Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of narcos, tucked beneath the shirts of local people. In When I Wear My Alligator Boots, the author explores the everyday reality of the drug trade by living alongside its low-level workers, who live at the edges of the violence generated by the militarization of the war on drugs. Rather than telling the story of the powerful cartel leaders, the book focuses on the women who occasionally make their sandwiches, the low-level businessmen who launder their money, the addicts who consume their products, the mules who carry their money and drugs across borders, and the men and women who serve out prison sentences when their bosses' operations go awry.

I Am the Grand Canyon: The Story of the Havasupai People


Stephen Hirst - 2007
    From their origins among the first group of Indians to arrive in North America some 20,000 years ago to their epic struggle to regain traditional lands taken from them in the nineteenth century, the Havasupai have a long and colorful history. The story of this tiny tribe once confined to a toosmall reservation depicts a people with deep cultural ties to the land, both on their former reservation below the rim of the Grand Canyon and on the surrounding plateaus. In the spring of 1971, the federal government proposed incorporating still more Havasupai land into Grand Canyon National Park. At hearings that spring, Havasupai Tribal Chairman Lee Marshall rose to speak. “I heard all you people talking about the Grand Canyon,” he said. “Well, you’re looking at it. I am the Grand Canyon!” Marshall made it clear that Havasu Canyon and the surrounding plateau were critical to the survival of his people; his speech laid the foundation for the return of thousands of acres of Havasupai land in 1975. I Am the Grand Canyon is the story of a heroic people who refused to back down when facing overwhelming odds. They won, and today the Havasupai way of life quietly continues in the Grand Canyon and on the surrounding plateaus.

Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War


Joe Bageant - 2007
    Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not have high school diplomas. Nearly everyone over fifty has serious health problems, and many have no health care. Credit ratings are low or nonexistent, and alcohol, overeating, and Jesus are the preferred avenues of escape.A raucous mix of storytelling and political commentary, Deer Hunting with Jesus is Bageant's report on what he learned by coming home. He writes of his childhood friends who work at factory jobs that are constantly on the verge of being outsourced; the mortgage and credit card rackets that saddle the working poor with debt, i.e., white trashonomics; the ubiquitous gun culture”and why the left doesn't get it; Scots Irish culture and how it played out in the young life of Lynddie England; and the blinkered magical thinking of the Christian right. (Bageant's brother is a Baptist pastor who casts out demons.) What it adds up to, he asserts, is an unacknowledged class war. By turns brutal, tender, incendiary, and seriously funny, this book is a call to arms for fellow progressives with little real understanding of the great beery, NASCAR-loving, church-going, gun-owning America that has never set foot in a Starbucks.Deer Hunting with Jesus is a potent antidote to what Bageant dubs the "American hologram" the televised, corporatized virtual reality that distracts us from the insidious realities of American life.

American Overdose: The Opioid Tragedy in Three Acts


Chris McGreal - 2018
    But American Overdose exposes the powerful forces they were up against, including the pharmaceutical industry's coopting of the Food and Drug Administration and Congress in the drive to push painkillers--resulting in the resurgence of heroin cartels in the American heartland. McGreal tells the story, in terms both broad and intimate, of people hit by a catastrophe they never saw coming. Years in the making, its ruinous consequences will stretch years into the future.

Under the Influence: Unauthorized Story of the Anheuser-Busch Dynasty


Peter Hernon - 1991
    Reprint.

Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area


Harry M. Caudill - 1963
    Today it details Appalachia's difficult past, and at the same time, presents an accurate historical backdrop for a contemporary understanding of the Appalachian region.

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt


Chris Hedges - 2012
    They wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like in places where the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is the searing account of their travels.The book starts in the western plains, where Native Americans were sacrificed in the giddy race for land and empire. It moves to the old manufacturing centers and coal fields that fueled the industrial revolution, but now lie depleted and in decay. It follows the steady downward spiral of American labor into the nation's produce fields and ends in Zuccotti Park where a new generation revolts against a corporate state that has handed to the young an economic, political, cultural and environmental catastrophe.

Daughters of the Earth


Carolyn Niethammer - 1995
    She built houses and ground corn, wove blankets and painted pottery, played field hockey and rode racehorses. Frequently she enjoyed an open and joyous sexuality before marriage; if her marriage didn't work out she could divorce her husband by the mere act of returning to her parents. She mourned her dead by tearing her clothes and covering herself with ashes, and when she herself died was often shrouded in her wedding dress. She was our native sister, the American Indian woman, and it is of her life and lore that Carolyn Niethammer writes in this rich tapestry of America's past and present. Here, as it unfolded, is the chronology of the Native American woman's life. Here are the birth rites of Caddo women from the Mississippi-Arkansas border, who bore their children alone by the banks of rivers and then immersed themselves and their babies in river water; here are Apache puberty ceremonies that are still carried on today, when the cost for the celebrations can run anywhere from one to six thousand dollars. Here are songs from the Night Dances of the Sioux, where girls clustered on one side of the lodge and boys congregated on the other; here is the Shawnee legend of the Corn Person and of Our Grandmother, the two female deities who ruled the earth. Far from the submissive, downtrodden “squaw” of popular myth, the Native American woman emerges as a proud, sometimes stoic, always human individual from whom those who came after can learn much. At a time when many contemporary American women are seeking alternatives to a lifestyle and role they have outgrown, Daughters of the Earth offers us an absorbing—and illuminating—legacy of dignity and purpose.

A History of Women in America


Carol Hymowitz - 1978
    Against the backdrop of major historical events and movements, the authors examine the issues that changed the roles and lives of women in our society. Includes photographs.

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart


Bill Bishop - 2008
    This social transformation didn't happen by accident. We’ve built a country where we can all choose the neighborhood -- and religion and news show -- most compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. And we are living with the consequences of this way-of-life segregation. Our country has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred, that people don’t know and can’t understand those who live just a few miles away. The reason for this situation, and the dire implications for our country, is the subject of this groundbreaking work.In 2004, the journalist Bill Bishop, armed with original and startling demographic data, made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves over the past three decades into alarmingly homogeneous communities -- not by region or by red state or blue state, but by city and even neighborhood. In The Big Sort, Bishop deepens his analysis in a brilliantly reported book that makes its case from the ground up, starting with stories about how we live today and then drawing on history, economics, and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.The Big Sort will draw comparisons to Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class and will redefine the way Americans think about themselves for decades to come.

American Cosmic: UFOs, Religion, Technology


Diana Walsh Pasulka - 2019
    This level of belief rivals that of belief in God. American Cosmic examines the mechanisms at work behind the thriving belief system in extraterrestrial life, a system that is changing and even supplanting traditional religions.Over the course of a six-year ethnographic study, D.W. Pasulka interviewed successful and influential scientists, professionals, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who believe in extraterrestrial intelligence, thereby disproving the common misconception that only fringe members of society believe in UFOs. She argues that widespread belief in aliens is due to a number of factors including their ubiquity in modern media like The X-Files, which can influence memory, and the believability lent to that media by the search for planets that might support life. American Cosmic explores the intriguing question of how people interpret unexplainable experiences, and argues that the media is replacing religion as a cultural authority that offers believers answers about non-human intelligent life.

Thirty-One Years on the Plains and in the Mountains


William F. Drannan - 1903
    You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.