Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution


Dan Georgakas - 1975
    This new South End Press edition makes available the full text of this out-of-print classic--along with a new foreword by Manning Marable, interviews with participants in DRUM, and reflections on political developments over the past threee decades by Georgakas and Surkin.

How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide


Peter Boghossian - 2019
    Whether you're online, in a classroom, an office, a town hall—or just hoping to get through a family dinner with a stubborn relative—dialogue shuts down when perspectives clash. Heated debates often lead to insults and shaming, blocking any possibility of productive discourse. Everyone seems to be on a hair trigger.In How to Have Impossible Conversations, Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay guide you through the straightforward, practical, conversational techniques necessary for every successful conversation—whether the issue is climate change, religious faith, gender identity, race, poverty, immigration, or gun control. Boghossian and Lindsay teach the subtle art of instilling doubts and opening minds. They cover everything from learning the fundamentals for good conversations to achieving expert-level techniques to deal with hardliners and extremists. This book is the manual everyone needs to foster a climate of civility, connection, and empathy."This is a self-help book on how to argue effectively, conciliate, and gently persuade. The authors admit to getting it wrong in their own past conversations. One by one, I recognize the same mistakes in me. The world would be a better place if everyone read this book."  —Richard Dawkins, author of Science in the Soul and Outgrowing God

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity


Steve Silberman - 2015
      Along the way, he reveals the untold story of Hans Asperger, the father of Asperger’s syndrome, whose “little professors” were targeted by the darkest social-engineering experiment in human history; exposes the covert campaign by child psychiatrist Leo Kanner to suppress knowledge of the autism spectrum for fifty years; and casts light on the growing movement of "neurodiversity" activists seeking respect, support, technological innovation, accommodations in the workplace and in education, and the right to self-determination for those with cognitive differences.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work


Matthew B. Crawford - 2009
    On both economic and psychological grounds, author Matthew B. Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a "knowledge worker," based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing. Using his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford presents a wonderfully articulated call for self-reliance and a moving reflection on how we can live concretely in an ever more abstract world.

Take Control of the Noisy Class: Chaos to Calm in 15 Seconds (Super-effective classroom management strategies for teachers in today's toughest classrooms)


Rob Plevin - 2019
    Packed with powerful, fast-acting techniques – including a novel routine to get any class quiet in 15 seconds or less – this book helps teachers across all age groups connect and succeed with hard-to-reach, reluctant learners.  You’ll d iscover: The simple six-step plan to minimise & deal with classroom behaviour problems How to gain trust & respect from tough, hard-to-reach students How to put an end to power struggles & confrontation How to have students follow your instructions… with no need to repeat yourself The crucial importance of consistency (and how to achieve it) Quick and easy ways to raise engagement and enjoyment in your lessons The ‘Clean Slate’ – a step by step method you can use to ‘start over’ with that particularly difficult group of students who won’t do anything you say. Take Control of the Noisy Class provides hundreds of practical ideas and interventions to end your classroom management struggles & create a thoroughly enjoyable lesson climate for all concerned.

Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace


Nikil Saval - 2010
    From "Bartleby the Scrivener" to The Office, from the steno pool to the open-plan cubicle farm, Cubed is a fascinating, often funny, and sometimes disturbing anatomy of the white-collar world and how it came to be the way it is—and what it might become.In the mid-nineteenth century clerks worked in small, dank spaces called “counting-houses.” These were all-male enclaves, where work was just paperwork. Most Americans considered clerks to be questionable dandies, who didn’t do “real work.” But the joke was on them: as the great historical shifts from agricultural to industrial economies took place, and then from industrial to information economies, the organization of the workplace evolved along with them—and the clerks took over. Offices became rationalized, designed for both greater efficiency in the accomplishments of clerical work and the enhancement of worker productivity. Women entered the office by the millions, and revolutionized the social world from within. Skyscrapers filled with office space came to tower over cities everywhere. Cubed opens our eyes to what is a truly "secret history" of changes so obvious and ubiquitous that we've hardly noticed them. From the wood-paneled executive suite to the advent of the cubicles where 60% of Americans now work (and 93% of them dislike it) to a not-too-distant future where we might work anywhere at any time (and perhaps all the time), Cubed excavates from popular books, movies, comic strips (Dilbert!), and a vast amount of management literature and business history, the reasons why our workplaces are the way they are—and how they might be better.

A Framework for Understanding Poverty


Ruby K. Payne - 1995
    The reality of being poor brings out a survival mentality, and turns attention away from opportunities taken for granted by everyone else. If you work with people from poverty, some understanding of how different their world is from yours will be invaluable. Whether you're an educator--or a social, health, or legal services professional--this breakthrough book gives you practical, real-world support and guidance to improve your effectiveness in working with people from all socioeconomic backgrounds. Since 1995 A Framework for Understanding Poverty has guided hundreds of thousands of educators and other professionals through the pitfalls and barriers faced by all classes, especially the poor. Carefully researched and packed with charts, tables, and questionnaires, Framework not only documents the facts of poverty, it provides practical yet compassionate strategies for addressing its impact on people's lives.

Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take On the Global Factory


Miriam Ching Yoon Louie - 2001
    While public outrage over sweatshops builds in intensity, this book shows us who these workers really are and how they are leading campaigns to fight for their rights.In-depth, accessible analyses of the immigration, labor, and trade policies, which together have forced these women into the most dangerous, poorly paid jobs, dovetail with vivid portraits of the women themselves. Louie, a longtime writer/activist and well-known figure in feminist, immigrant, and labor circles, is uniquely poised to make her case: that the labor of immigrant women worker-activists not only sustains families and communities, but the vibrant social activism that undergirds democracy itself.With chapters on successful campaigns against Levi-Strauss, Donna Karan, and restaurants in Los Angeles; Koreatown, among others.Miriam Ching Yoon Louie is a longtime writer/activist in campaigns to organize women of color. She is national campaign media director of Fuerza Unida, a board member of the Women of Color Resource Center, and former media director of Asian Immigrant Women Advocates. Her essays and articles on immigrant women and labor issues have been widely anthologized, including in the 1997 collection Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (South End Press) and she speaks at public events internationally. She is the co-author, with Linda Burnham, of Women’s Education in the Global Economy (Women of Color Resource Center, 2000).

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment


Daniel Kahneman - 2021
    Suppose that different food inspectors give different ratings to indistinguishable restaurants — or that when a company is handling customer complaints, the resolution depends on who happens to be handling the particular complaint. Now imagine that the same doctor, the same judge, the same inspector, or the same company official makes different decisions, depending on whether it is morning or afternoon, or Monday rather than Wednesday. These are examples of noise: variability in judgments that should be identical.   In Noise, Daniel Kahneman, Cass R. Sunstein, and Olivier Sibony show how noise contributes significantly to errors in all fields, including medicine, law, economic forecasting, police behavior, food safety, bail, security checks at airports, strategy, and personnel selection. And although noise can be found wherever people make judgments and decisions, individuals and organizations alike are commonly oblivious to the role of chance in their judgments and in their actions.   Drawing on the latest findings in psychology and behavioral economics, and the same kind of diligent, insightful research that made Thinking, Fast and Slow and Nudge groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers, Noise explains how and why humans are so susceptible to noise in judgment — and what we can do about it.

Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility


James P. Carse - 1986
    Infinite games are more mysterious -- and ultimately more rewarding. They are unscripted and unpredictable; they are the source of true freedom.In this elegant and compelling work, James Carse explores what these games mean, and what they can mean to you. He offers stunning new insights into the nature of property and power, of culture and community, of sexuality and self-discovery, opening the door to a world of infinite delight and possibility."An extraordinary little book . . . a wise and intimate companion, an elegant reminder of the real."-- Brain/Mind Bulletin

Companions of the Prophet - Book 1


Abdulwahid Hamid - 1995
    Here the trials and triumphs of the early Muslims as individuals are well-portrayed. Their various paths to Islam - sometimes direct, sometimes long and tortuous, their devotion to the noble Prophet, their endeavours in peace time and their exploits in war - all serve to cast them in a heroic mould. This is the first of two (formerly published as a series of three) books based on original Arabic sources and written in a style that is lively and often gripping. The lives of the Sahabah or Companions of the Prophet, may God bless him and grant him peace, is a rich storehouse of knowledge, guidance and inspiration. The men and women whose stories are told here helped to lay the foundations of a new world order, and it is only fitting that they should be more widely known.

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience


Brené Brown - 2021
    As she maps the necessary skills and an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances—a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with one another in a way that builds connection. Over the past two decades, Brown’s extensive research into the experiences that make us who we are has shaped the cultural conversation and helped define what it means to be courageous with our lives. Atlas of the Heart draws on this research, as well as on Brown’s singular skills as a storyteller, to show us how accurately naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding, meaning, and choice. Brown shares, “I want this book to be an atlas for all of us, because I believe that, with an adventurous heart and the right maps, we can travel anywhere and never fear losing ourselves.”

Scalia's Court: A Legacy of Landmark Opinions and Dissents


Antonin Scalia - 2016
    After almost thirty years on the Supreme Court, Scalia had become as integral to the institution as the hallowed room in which he sat. His wisecracking interruptions during oral arguments, his unmatched legal wisdom, his unwavering dedication to the Constitution, and his blistering dissents defined his leadership role on the court and inspired new generations of policymakers and legal minds.Now, as Republicans and Democrats wage war over Scalia’s lamentably empty Supreme Court seat, Kevin Ring, former counsel to the U.S. Senate’s Constitution Subcommittee, has taken a close look at the cases that best illustrate Scalia’s character, philosophy, and legacy. In Scalia’s Court: A Legacy of Landmark Opinions and Dissents, Ring collects Scalia’s most memorable opinions on free speech, separation of powers, race, religious freedom, the rights of the accused, abortion, and more; and intersperses Scalia's own words with an analysis of his legal reasoning and his lasting impact on American jurisprudence.“I don’t worry about my legacy,” Scalia once told an audience at the National Archives. “Just do your job right, and who cares?”Now that "the lion of American law has left the stage,” as the U.S. Attorney General put it, it is for the rest of America to worry about his legacy—and to care.

Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage


Paul Ekman - 1985
    From the deception strategies of international public figures, such as Adolf Hitler and Richard Nixon, to the deceitful behavior of private individuals, including adulterers and petty criminals, Ekman shows that a successful liar most often depends on a willfully innocent dupe. His study describes how lies vary in form and can differ from other types of misinformation, as well as how a person's body language, voice, and facial expressions can give away a lie but still escape the detection of professional lie hunters—judges, police officers, drug enforcement agents, Secret Service agents, and others.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads


Tim Wu - 2016
    In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of messaging, advertising enticements, branding, sponsored social media, and other efforts to harvest our attention. Few moments or spaces of our day remain uncultivated by the "attention merchants," contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this condition is not simply the byproduct of recent technological innovations but the result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of advertising to the explosion of the mobile web; from AOL and the invention of email to the attention monopolies of Google and Facebook; from Ed Sullivan to celebritypower brandslike Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, the basic business model of "attention merchants" has never changed: free diversion in exchange for a moment of your consideration, sold in turn to the highest-bidding advertiser. Wu describes the revolts that have risen against the relentless siege of our awareness, from the remote control to the creation of public broadcasting to Apple's ad-blocking OS. But he makes clear that attention merchants are always growing new heads, even as their means of getting inside our heads are changing our very nature--cognitive, social, political and otherwise--in ways unimaginable even a generation ago.