White Kids: Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America


Margaret A. Hagerman - 2018
    In this heated context, sociologist Margaret A. Hagerman zeroes in on affluent, white kids to observe how they make sense of privilege, unequal educational opportunities, and police violence. In fascinating detail, Hagerman considers the role that they and their families play in the reproduction of racism and racial inequality in America.White Kids, based on two years of research involving in-depth interviews with white kids and their families, is a clear-eyed and sometimes shocking account of how white kids learn about race. In doing so, this book explores questions such as, "How do white kids learn about race when they grow up in families that do not talk openly about race or acknowledge its impact?" and "What about children growing up in families with parents who consider themselves to be 'anti-racist'?"Featuring the actual voices of young, affluent white kids and what they think about race, racism, inequality, and privilege, White Kids illuminates how white racial socialization is much more dynamic, complex, and varied than previously recognized. It is a process that stretches beyond white parents' explicit conversations with their white children and includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the kids themselves.By interviewing kids who are growing up in different racial contexts--from racially segregated to meaningfully integrated and from politically progressive to conservative--this important book documents key differences in the outcomes of white racial socialization across families. And by observing families in their everyday lives, this book explores the extent to which white families, even those with anti-racist intentions, reproduce and reinforce the forms of inequality they say they reject.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism


Evgeny Morozov - 2013
    But how will these be affected once we delegate much of the responsibility for them to technology? The temptation of the digital age is to fix everything—from crime to corruption to pollution to obesity—by digitally quantifying, tracking, or gamifiying behavior. But when we change the motivations for our moral, ethical, and civic behavior, we may also change the very nature of that behavior itself. Technology, Evgeny Morozov proposes, can be a force for improvement—but only if we abandon the idea that it is necessarily revolutionary and instead genuinely interrogate what we are doing with it and what it is doing to us.From urging us to abandon monolithic ideas of “the Internet” to showing how to design more humane and democratic technological solutions, To Save Everything, Click Here is a dazzling tour of our technological future, and a searching investigation into the digital version of an enduring struggle: between man and his machines.

Three Years in the Klondike (1904)


Jeremiah Lynch - 1904
    He had, therefore, full opportunities of seeing the country and its life from various points of view. He has utilized his observations in an entertaining book. It is not — and does not pretend lo be — a scientific work, or technical in any sense. It gives, however, an excellent idea of conditions and ways of living in the Klondike at all seasons, and of the hardships which the pioneers had to undergo. Nothing but gold — the prospect of wealth — could induce men to live in such a climate, and to combat the many difficulties which it entails. Mr. Lynch, a Californian of means and position, arrived at Dawson in the summer of 1898. As the first discoveries of gold in the Klondike valley were made in August of 1896, Mr. Lynch found a mining town not two years old, unpaved and insanitary, crowded with adventurers of every nation, in fact still a typical “ tough" mining-camp, except that lawlessness and crime were sternly repressed by the vigilant Mounted Police. He spent the following winter in the town, making expeditions to the gold-bearing creeks, examining mines and studying the methods of working them. Early in the spring of 1899 he bought a claim which he believed would repay him and set himself at once to develop it thoroughly. During his stay he had seen Dawson transformed into a paved, sewaged, well built, well lighted city, and the streets, no longer thronged with rough-mannered miners and adventurers, had become the promenade of well dressed business men and ladies (real ladies !) intent on shopping. As one of the earliest of the new species of Klondike miner, he is able to give an account of the transition that took place, largely owing to the enterprise of men of his own stamp, and the book is an interesting addition to Klondike literature. Mr. Lynch's narrative is plainly written, in a way which leads one to believe in its substantial truth. It reads well, and brings out many points which will interest the miner, as well as the casual reader. He had confidence in the future of the country, and believed that it would hold a large population for many years, in spite of the drawbacks of climate.

Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty


Jay Gillen - 1900
    Schools filled with black and brown students have become plantations of social control, where the policing of behavior trumps the expanding of minds. Radical teachers and organizers in American public schools must help young people fashion an insurgency. That means, at the very least, seeing each student’s rebellion not as violation, but as communication.Jay Gillen writes with passion and compassion about the daily lives of poor students trapped in institutions that dismiss and degrade them. In the spirit of Paulo Freire, and using the historical models of slave rebellions and Civil Rights struggles as guides, Gillen explains what sort of insurgency is needed and how to create it: the tools and techniques required to build social, intellectual, and political power.This poetic manifesto of revolutionary “educational reform” belongs in the pocket of anyone who currently works in, suffers through, or simply cares about public schooling in this country.Jay Gillen teaches English in a Baltimore public school and has worked with the Baltimore Algebra Project since 1995, building math literacy among youth of color and youth experiencing poverty in US public schools.Bob Moses is an educator and Civil Rights activist. He founded the Algebra Project in 1982.In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.

A City Owned


O.J. Modjeska - 2018
     Police begin to suspect that their target is a rogue operator who has emerged from their own ranks. And then, all hell breaks loose in Los Angeles… An arrest in the strangling murders of two co-eds across state lines finally leads to a break in the case, but the mild-mannered suspect remembers nothing about the crime of which he is accused. His attorney and a team of psychiatrists are convinced this is no lust murderer, but a mentally ill man tormented by an evil alter personality, the terrifyingly malevolent sexual sadist “Steve”. But what if Steve is the final triumphant act in a psychopath’s lifelong career in deception? None are prepared for the dark journey through the mazes of the human mind it will take to unlock the door to justice. From the author of the aviation disaster ebook bestseller “Gone: Catastrophe in Paradise”, “A City Owned” is the first installment of the two-part series “Murder by Increments”, the true story of the worst case of serial sex homicide in American history.

Treatise on Tolerance and Other Writings


Voltaire - 2000
    Originating in Voltaire's campaign to exonerate Jean Calas, they are works of polemical brilliance, informed by his deism and humanism and by Enlightenment values and ideals more generally. The issues that they raise, concerning questions of tolerance and human dignity, are still highly relevant to our own times.

The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality


Bhaskar Sunkara - 2019
    With the stunning popularity of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Americans are embracing the class politics of socialism. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system in America look like? The editor of Jacobin magazine, Sunkara shows that socialism, though often seen primarily as an economic system, in fact offers the means to fight all forms of oppression, including racism and sexism. The ultimate goal is not Soviet-style planning, but to win rights to healthcare, education, and housing, and to create new democratic institutions in workplaces and communities. A primer on socialism for the 21st century, this is a book for anyone seeking an end to the vast inequities of our age.

An Introduction to Group Work Practice


Ronald W. Toseland - 1984
    Students will receive a grounding in areas that vary from treatment to organizational and community settings. This edition also includes of new case studies, practice examples and guiding principles.

Education's End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life


Anthony T. Kronman - 2007
    Yet under the influence of the modern research ideal, our colleges and universities have expelled this question from their classrooms, judging it unfit for organized study. In this eloquent and carefully considered book, Tony Kronman explores why this has happened and calls for the restoration of life’s most important question to an honored place in higher education.The author contrasts an earlier era in American education, when the question of the meaning of life was at the center of instruction, with our own times, when this question has been largely abandoned by college and university teachers.  In particular, teachers of the humanities, who once felt a special responsibility to guide their students in exploring the question of what living is for, have lost confidence in their authority to do so. And they have lost sight of the question itself in the blinding fog of political correctness that has dominated their disciplines for the past forty years.Yet Kronman sees a readiness for change--a longing among teachers as well as students to engage questions of ultimate meaning. He urges a revival of the humanities’ lost tradition of studying the meaning of life through the careful but critical reading of great works of literary and philosophical imagination. And he offers here the charter document of that revival.

Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy


Max Van Manen - 1990
    Rather than relying on abstract generalizations and theories, van Manen offers an alternative that taps the unique nature of each human situation.The book offers detailed methodological explications and practical examples of hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry. It shows how to orient oneself to human experience in education and how to construct a textual question which evokes a fundamental sense of wonder, and it provides a broad and systematic set of approaches for gaining experiential material that forms the basis for textual reflections.Van Manen also discusses the part played by language in educational research, and the importance of pursuing human science research critically as a semiotic writing practice. He focuses on the methodological function of anecdotal narrative in human science research, and offers methods for structuring the research text in relation to the particular kinds of questions being studied. Finally, van Manen argues that the choice of research method is itself a pedagogic commitment and that it shows how one stands in life as an educator.

Man Up: How to Cut the Bullshit and Kick Ass in Business (and in Life)


Bedros Keuilian - 2018
    . ." "There's no way . . ." "It's impossible . . ." Enough. Get off your ass make your "someday" goals a priority—today. After years of coaching and consulting hundreds of startup rookies as well as seasoned entrepreneurs, executives, and CEOs, Bedros Keuilian realized that most people who want to start a business, grow an existing business, author a book, make more money, or make a bigger impact usually take the long, slow, painful way to get there . . . and more than 80 percent of entrepreneurs never get to their desired destination or achieve their full potential in business. They treat their dream as if it were merely a hobby and dip their toes in the water, but they never commit to diving in—you get the idea. It's time to cut the bullshit excuses. Everyone has a gift, a purpose. It's your duty to figure out what your gift is and how you're going to share it with the world. Man Up: How to Cut the Bullshit and Kick Ass in Business (and in Life) is your guide to doing exactly that. Keuilian, founder and CEO of Fit Body Boot Camp and known as the "hidden genius" behind many of the most successful brands and businesses throughout multiple industries, will show you how to break out of the sea of mediocrity, get singularly focused on your purpose, and do what it takes—not only to achieve but dominate your goals. With Keuilian's no-nonsense approach in both business and personal spheres, you'll be able to define your purpose and have clarity of vision—and a plan—to make the quantum leap. Whether it's creating and growing a company, leaving a legacy, making a difference, or launching a new brand, you will discover how to use your passion, purpose, and sheer grit to overcome any adversity that attempts to derail your progress. If there's an area of your life in which you need to man up, this book will get you there.

The Technological Society


Jacques Ellul - 1954
    No conversation about the dangers of technology and its unavoidable effects on society can begin without a careful reading of this book."A magnificent book . . . He goes through one human activity after another and shows how it has been technicized, rendered efficient, and diminished in the process."-Harper's"One of the most important books of the second half of the twentieth-century. In it, Jacques Ellul convincingly demonstrates that technology, which we continue to conceptualize as the servant of man, will overthrow everything that prevents the internal logic of its development, including humanity itself-unless we take necessary steps to move human society out of the environment that 'technique' is creating to meet its own needs."-The Nation"A description of the way in which technology has become completely autonomous and is in the process of taking over the traditional values of every society without exception, subverting and suppressing these values to produce at last a monolithic world culture in which all non-technological difference and variety are mere appearance."-Los Angeles Free Press

Break 'em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money


Zephyr Teachout - 2020
    This book is a blueprint for that organizing. In these pages, you will learn how monopolies and oligopolies have taken over almost every aspect of American life, and you will also learn about what can be done to stop that trend before it is too late." —From the foreword by Bernie Sanders.A passionate attack on the monopolies that are throttling American democracy.Every facet of American life is being overtaken by big platform monopolists like Facebook, Google, and Bayer (which has merged with the former agricultural giant Monsanto), resulting in a greater concentration of wealth and power than we've seen since the Gilded Age. They are evolving into political entities that often have more influence than the actual government, bending state and federal legislatures to their will and even creating arbitration courts that circumvent the US justice system. How can we recover our freedom from these giants? Anti-corruption scholar and activist Zephyr Teachout has the answer: Break 'Em Up.This book is a clarion call for liberals and leftists looking to find a common cause. Teachout makes a compelling case that monopolies are the root cause of many of the issues that today's progressives care about; they drive economic inequality, harm the planet, limit the political power of average citizens, and historically-disenfranchised groups bear the brunt of their shameful and irresponsible business practices. In order to build a better future, we must eradicate monopolies from the private sector and create new safeguards that prevent new ones from seizing power.Through her expert analysis of monopolies in several sectors and their impact on courts, journalism, inequality, and politics, Teachout offers a concrete path toward thwarting these enemies of working Americans and reclaiming our democracy before it’s too late.

The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America


Daniel J. Boorstin - 1961
    Boorstin’s prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any reader who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.Cover design by Matt Dorfman.

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments


Theodor W. Adorno - 1944
    Written during the Second World War and circulated privately, it appeared in a printed edition in Amsterdam in 1947. "What we had set out to do," the authors write in the Preface, "was nothing less than to explain why humanity, instead of entering a truly human state, is sinking into a new kind of barbarism."Yet the work goes far beyond a mere critique of contemporary events. Historically remote developments, indeed, the birth of Western history and of subjectivity itself out of the struggle against natural forces, as represented in myths, are connected in a wide arch to the most threatening experiences of the present. The book consists in five chapters, at first glance unconnected, together with a number of shorter notes. The various analyses concern such phenomena as the detachment of science from practical life, formalized morality, the manipulative nature of entertainment culture, and a paranoid behavioral structure, expressed in aggressive anti-Semitism, that marks the limits of enlightenment. The authors perceive a common element in these phenomena, the tendency toward self-destruction of the guiding criteria inherent in enlightenment thought from the beginning. Using historical analyses to elucidate the present, they show, against the background of a prehistory of subjectivity, why the National Socialist terror was not an aberration of modern history but was rooted deeply in the fundamental characteristics of Western civilization.Adorno and Horkheimer see the self-destruction of Western reason as grounded in a historical and fateful dialectic between the domination of external nature and society. They trace enlightenment, which split these spheres apart, back to its mythical roots. Enlightenment and myth, therefore, are not irreconcilable opposites, but dialectically mediated qualities of both real and intellectual life. "Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology." This paradox is the fundamental thesis of the book.This new translation, based on the text in the complete edition of the works of Max Horkheimer, contains textual variants, commentary upon them, and an editorial discussion of the position of this work in the development of Critical Theory.