For years, the boys and their legendary coach gave fans in central Kentucky, deep in the heart of basketball country, just what they wanted: state titles, national rankings, and countless trips to Kentucky's one-of-a-kind state tournament, where winning and losing can change a young man's life.But in 2009, with the economy sputtering, anger rising, and Scott County mired in a two-year drought, fans had begun to lose faith in the boys. They weren't the heroes of Scott County anymore; they were "mini-athlete gods," haunted by dreams, burdened by expectations, and desperate to escape through the only means they knew: basketball.In Outside Shot, Keith O'Brien takes us on an epic journey, from the bluegrass hills and broken homes of rural America, to inner-city Lexington, to Kentucky's most hallowed hall: Rupp Arena, where high school tournament games are known to draw twenty-thousand people, and where, for the players and their fans, it feels like anything is possible.The narrative follows four of the team's top seniors and their coach as they struggle to redeem themselves in the face of impossible odds: once-loyal fans now turned against them, parents who demand athletic greatness, and scouts who weigh their every move. It delves deep inside the lives of the boys, their families, and their community---divided along lines of race, politics, religion, and sports. And it chronicles not only the high-stakes world of Kentucky basketball, but the battle for the soul of small-town America.A story of inspiration and poignancy, filled with moments of drama on and off the court, Outside Shot shows that if it's hard to win basketball games, it can be even harder to win at life itself.

    In this book, Mari Grinde Arntzen asks how and why this is—how can fashion simultaneously attract us to its glamour and repel us with its superficiality and how being called “fashionable” can be at once a compliment and an insult. Arntzen guides us through the major figures and brands of today’s fashion industry, showing how they shape us and in turn why we love to be shaped by them. She examines both everyday, affordable “fast fashion” brands, as well as the luxury market, to show how fashion commands a powerful influence on every socioeconomic level of our society. Stepping into our closets with us, she thinks about what happens when we get dressed: why fashion can make us feel powerful, beautiful, and original at the same time that it forces us into conformity. Stripping off the layers of the world’s fifth largest industry, garment by garment, she holds fashion up as a phenomenon, business, and art, exploring the questions it forces us to ask about the body, image, celebrity, and self-obsession. Ultimately, Arntzen asks the most direct question: what is fashion? How has it taken such a powerful hold on the world, forever propelling us toward its concepts of beauty?

    The Social Movements Reader, Second Edition, provides the most important and readable articles and book selections on recent social movements from around the world.With selected readings and editorial material this book combines the strengths of a reader and a textbookReflects new developments in the study of social movements, both empirical and theoreticalProvides original texts, many of them classics in the field of social movements, which have been edited for the non-technical readerSidebars offer concise definitions of key terms as well as biographies of famous activists and chronologies of several key movementsRequires no prior knowledge about social movements or theories of social movements

    Mike Davis charts the expected global urbanization explosion over the next 30 years and points out that outside China most of the rest of the world's urban growth will be without industrialization or development, rather a 'peverse' urban boom in spite of stagnant or negative urban economic growth.

    Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the political-economic story of where neoliberalization came from and how it proliferated on the world stage. Through critical engagement with this history, he constructs a framework, not only for analyzing the political and economic dangers that now surround us, but also for assessing the prospects for the more socially just alternatives being advocated by many oppositional movements.

    In this fascinating and revealing study, Thomas Frank shows how the youthful revolutionaries were joined—and even anticipated —by such unlikely allies as the advertising industry and the men's clothing business."[Thomas Frank is] perhaps the most provocative young cultural critic of the moment."—Gerald Marzorati, New York Times Book Review"An indispensable survival guide for any modern consumer."—Publishers Weekly, starred review"Frank makes an ironclad case not only that the advertising industry cunningly turned the countercultural rhetoric of revolution into a rallying cry to buy more stuff, but that the process itself actually predated any actual counterculture to exploit."—Geoff Pevere, Toronto Globe and Mail"The Conquest of Cool helps us understand why, throughout the last third of the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly confused gentility with conformity, irony with protest, and an extended middle finger with a populist manifesto. . . . His voice is an exciting addition to the soporific public discourse of the late twentieth century."—T. J. Jackson Lears, In These Times"An invaluable argument for anyone who has ever scoffed at hand-me-down counterculture from the '60s. A spirited and exhaustive analysis of the era's advertising."—Brad Wieners, Wired Magazine"Tom Frank is . . . not only old-fashioned, he's anti-fashion, with a place in his heart for that ultimate social faux pas, leftist politics."—Roger Trilling, Details

    Kevin Bales's disturbing story of contemporary slavery reaches from Pakistan's brick kilns and Thailand's brothels to various multinational corporations. His investigations reveal how the tragic emergence of a "new slavery" is inextricably linked to the global economy. This completely revised edition includes a new preface.All of the author's royalties from this book go to fund antislavery projects around the world.

    Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class is in the tradition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, yet it provides a surprisingly contemporary look at American economics and society.Establishing such terms as "conspicuous consumption" and "pecuniary emulation," Veblen's most famous work has become an archetype not only of economic theory, but of historical and sociological thought as well. As sociologist Alan Wolfe writes in his Introduction, Veblen "skillfully . . . wrote a book that will be read so long as the rich are different from the rest of us; which, if the future is anything like the past, they always will be."

    It has crippled the country’s economy for a long time to come. In this book, Arun Kumar, the country’s leading authority on the black economy, tells us why Modi’s gambit failed. He shows us the way in which the problem can be rooted out, provided the government has the political will and determination to act.Today, the black economy is estimated to be 62 per cent of GDP—or about `93 lakh crore ($1.4 trillion). Corrupt businessmen, corrupt politicians, and corrupt members of the executive (bureaucrats, police and the judiciary) are responsible for controlling the black economy and enabling its growth. If the black economy were to be dismantled and turned into a part of the ‘white’ economy, the country’s rate of growth would be 12 per cent. If it had not grown the way it has since the 1970s, India’s per capita income today would be approximately `7 lakh per annum ($11,000) and India would become the second largest economy in the world. If the black economy were taxed at current rates, it would generate `37 lakh crore in additional taxes and the union budget would show a surplus of `31 lakh crore instead of a deficit.The failure of successive governments to tackle the problem effectively has been the single biggest obstacle to eradicating poverty. It is the cause of both widespread policy failure and the inability of the nation to improve its living conditions rapidly.

    With ruthless honesty and deadpan humor, the author observes the effect of weed upon every aspect of her life: marriage, motherhood, friendship, work, sport, sex. Phillip Lopate, Nonfiction Director of Columbia University's MFA Writing Program, lauds JUST SAY YES: "This funny, wry and very candid memoir purports to be a Confession of an American Pot-Smoker but is really a cultural/personal history of the past fifty years. The narrative progresses backward and not only the past but innocence itself is recaptured." John Updike wrote about Hiller's short story collection, SKIN, this is "good, brave and joyful writing." For more reviews of JUST SAY YES, please see the Kindle page and www.marijuanamemoir.com.

    Hayek's book, first published in 1960, urges us to clarify our beliefs in today's struggle of political ideologies.

    Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality.Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness to vying accounts of current research in sedimentary geology. He looks at the issue of child abuse--very much a reality, though the idea of child abuse is a social product. He also cautiously examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the "culture wars" in anthropology, in particular a spat between leading ethnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook. Written with generosity and gentle wit by one of our most distinguished philosophers of science, this wise book brings a much needed measure of clarity to current arguments about the nature of knowledge.

    James Montague travelled there for three years, observing the region's cultures and politics through the prism of football and interviewing all the major teams along the way. He soon realised that to understand the game there is to understand its people. For as much as football forms an unlikely common thread between different countries, the sport also reflects what is unique in the national characters of those who play, support and organise it.When Friday Comes is an insightful and humorous account of Montague's journey, during which he gets stoned with the Yemeni FA, harangues Iran's Deputy President at the World Cup, has a gun pulled on him by genocidal Lebanese football fans, encounters a rioting group of fanatical young Jews singing 'I'm West Ham 'til I Die' in mockney English and was made to strip and then dance for the Iraqi national team.This is a compelling travel memoir that will enlighten, surprise and entertain football fans everywhere.

    - help is finally at hand. That help comes in the comfortingly accessible form of Stephen Trombley's Short History of Western Thought, which outlines the 2,500-year history of European ideas from the philosophers of Classical Antiquity to the thinkers of today, No major representative of any significant strand of Western thought escapes Trombley's attention: the Christian Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages, the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, the German idealists from Kant to Hegel; the utilitarians Bentham and Mill; the transcendentalists Emerson and Thoreau; Kierkegaard and the existentialists; the analytic philosophers Russell, Moore, Whitehead and Wittgenstein; and - last but not least - the four shapers-in-chief of our modern world: the philosopher, historian and political theorist Karl Marx; the naturalist Charles Darwin, proposer of the theory of evolution; Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; and the theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, begetter of the special and general theories of relativity and founder of post-Newtonian physics.

    When it first appeared the New English Weekly predicted that 'for the next five to ten years it will cetainly remain a work with which no one who professes any degree of information on sociology or economics can afford to be unacquainted.' Fifty years on, this prediction seems a little understated.Why has the work endured so well? Schumpeter's contention that the seeds of capitalism's decline were internal, and his equal and opposite hostility to centralist socialism have perplexed, engaged and infuriated readers since the book's publication. By refusing to become an advocate for either position Schumpeter was able both to make his own great and original contribution and to clear the way for a more balanced consideration of the most important social movements of his and our time.