Book picks similar to
Not Yet a Placeless Land: Tracking an Evolving American Geography by Wilbur Zelinsky
non-fiction
preservation
work
building-habitation
Nursing School Thrive Guide
Maureen Osuna - 2014
Learn what the different types of classes are like, how to thrive in your clinical rotations, master test-taking strategies and discover the author's own unique system for approaching patient care. With The Nursing School Thrive Guide, you'll start the semester ahead of the curve, with the tools you need to hit the ground running when classes start. Follow the system outlined in this book, and you'll be an organized, confident nursing student...guaranteed. Maureen Osuna is a critical care nurse with a passion (more like obsession) for mentoring nursing students and is owner of the website www.straightanursingstudent.com.
Tip of the Iceberg: My 3,000-Mile Journey Around Wild Alaska, the Last Great American Frontier
Mark Adams - 2018
Harriman organized a most unusual summer voyage to the wilds of Alaska: He converted a steamship into a luxury "floating university," populated by some of America's best and brightest scientists and writers, including the anti-capitalist eco-prophet John Muir. Those aboard encountered a land of immeasurable beauty and impending environmental calamity. More than a hundred years later, Alaska is still America's most sublime wilderness, both the lure that draws a million tourists annually on Inside Passage cruises and a natural resources larder waiting to be raided. As ever, it remains a magnet for weirdos and dreamers.Armed with Dramamine and an industrial-strength mosquito net, Mark Adams sets out to retrace the 1899 expedition. Using the state's intricate public ferry system, the Alaska Marine Highway System, Adams travels three thousand miles, following the George W. Elder's itinerary north through Wrangell, Juneau, and Glacier Bay, then continuing west into the colder and stranger regions of the Aleutians and the Arctic Circle. Along the way, he encounters dozens of unusual characters (and a couple of very hungry bears) and investigates how lessons learned in 1899 might relate to Alaska's current struggles in adapting to climate change.
US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man
Charlie LeDuff - 2007
Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff scours the country, tossing back whiskey with the seedy, the dreamy, and the strange in search of the soul of the American male. No one knows life's underbelly better than "New York Times" reporter Charlie LeDuff. Christened the "bibulous scribe of the working class" by his peers, he's made a career chronicling, with dead-on feel for character and idiom, the gritty lives of the drifters, the forgotten, and the strange-people washed up and washed out on alcohol, broken dreams, lifetimes of hard living. Willing to follow his subjects where no respectable white-collared man would dare go, he is clearly-and admittedly-a writer "not for people who have doormen, but for doormen." And while his wholly original coverage of this beat has brought him acclaim as a journalist, it has also made him something of a working-class hero. Who better, then, to examine what it means to be a man in modern-day America? "US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man" is LeDuff's equally intoxicated and intoxicating journey across the country in search of the heart and soul of today's American male. With characteristic audacity, compassion, and humor, he takes part in a Bacchanalian Burning Man festival in Nevada, clad in a Mohawk and little else; trains with the sadhearted Russian clown of a traveling circus; leads a cavalry charge down the Little Bighorn River with war reenactors; joins a C-level professional football team; infiltrates a West Oakland bike gang that holds fight parties; travels with Appalachian snake handlers and tent revivalists; and covers a cowboy love story at a gay rodeo ("Not like the movie. Life is never like the movies. Life is messy and complicated and self-loathing and funny"). At each juncture LeDuff faithfully records their religion and sins and racism, their freaks and misfits, their search for the American dream, and the sweetness they find in living it out, if only for a moment.
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature
William Cronon - 1995
Among the ironies and entanglements resulting from this goal are the sale of nature in our malls through the Nature Company, and the disputes between working people and environmentalists over spotted owls and other objects of species preservation.The problem is that we haven't learned to live responsibly in nature. The environmentalist aim of legislating humans out of the wilderness is no solution. People, Cronon argues, are inextricably tied to nature, whether they live in cities or countryside. Rather than attempt to exclude humans, environmental advocates should help us learn to live in some sustainable relationship with nature. It is our home.
Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America
Gary Laderman - 2003
But how did the funeral home come to hold such a position? What is its history? And is it guilty of the charges sometimes leveled against it? In Rest in Peace, Gary Laderman traces the origins of American funeral rituals, from the evolution of embalming techniques during and after the Civil War and the shift from home funerals to funeral homes at the turn of the century, to the increasing subordination of priests, ministers, and other religious figures to the funeral director throughout the twentieth century. In doing so he shows that far from manipulating vulnerable mourners, as Jessica Mitford claimed in her best-selling The American Way of Death (1963), funeral directors are highly respected figures whose services reflect the community's deepest needs and wishes. Indeed, Laderman shows that funeral directors generally give the people what they want when it is time to bury our dead. He reveals, for example, that the open casket, often criticized as barbaric, provides a deeply meaningful moment for friends and family who must say goodbye to their loved one. But he also shows how the dead often come back to life in the popular imagination to disturb the peace of the living. Drawing upon interviews with funeral directors, major historical events like the funerals of John F. Kennedy and Rudolf Valentino, films, television, newspaper reports, proposals for funeral reform, and other primary sources, Rest in Peace cuts through the rhetoric to show us the reality--and the real cultural value--of the American funeral.
The Ruins Of Detroit
Yves Marchand - 2010
city. Its buildings were monuments to its success and vitality in the first half of the twentieth century. At the start of the twenty-first century, those same monuments are now ruins: the United Artists Theater, the Whitney Building, the Farwell Building and the once ravishing Michigan Central Station (unused since 1988) today look as if a bomb had dropped on Motor City, leaving behind the ruins of a once great civilization. In a series of weekly photographic bulletins for Time magazine called "Detroit's Beautiful, Horrible Decline," photographers Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre have been revealing to an astonished America the scale of decay in Detroit. "The state of ruin is essentially a temporary situation that happens at some point, the volatile result of change of era and the fall of empires," write Marchand and Meffre. "Photography appeared to us as a modest way to keep a little bit of this ephemeral state." As Detroit's white middle class continues to abandon the city center for its dispersed suburbs, and its downtown high-rises empty out, these astounding images, which convey both the imperious grandeur of the city's architecture and its genuinely shocking decline, preserve a moment that warns us all of the transience of great epochs.
Cultural Intelligence: Living and Working Globally
David C. Thomas - 2009
But it's impossible to learn the customs and traits of every single culture. David Thomas and Kerr Inkson present a universal set of techniques and people skills that will allow you to adapt quickly to, and thrive in, any cultural environment. You'll learn to discard your own culturally based assumptions and pay careful attention, in a mindful and creative way, to cues in cross-cultural situations. The authors show how to apply cultural intelligence in a series of specific situations: making decisions; communicating, negotiating, and resolving conflicts; leading and motivating others; and designing, managing, and contributing to multicultural groups and teams.This extensively revised third edition has been updated with new stories showing cultural intelligence in action. Thomas and Inkson have broadened the focus beyond business to include organizations of all kinds--nonprofits, governments, educational institutions, and more. And they include a reliable and valid measure of cultural intelligence based on a decade of research by an international team of scholars.
In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio
Philippe Bourgois - 1995
For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods--East Harlem. This new edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the seven years since the first edition. In a new epilogue Bourgois brings up to date the stories of the people--Primo, Caesat, Luis, Tony, Candy--who readers come to know in this remarkable window onto the world of the inner city drug trade. Philippe Bourgois is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He has conducted fieldwork in Central America on ethnicity and social unrest and is the author of Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). He is writing a book on homeless heroin addicts in San Francisco. 1/e hb ISBN (1996) 0-521-43518-8 1/e pb ISBN (1996) 0-521-57460-9
The Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry: A History of Misery and Medicine
J.P. Webster - 2013
Webster as he explores the fascinating and complex history of the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry.The Quaker City and its hospitals were pioneers in the field of mental health. Yet by the end of the nineteenth century, its institutions were crowded and patients lived in shocking conditions. The mentally ill were quartered with the dangerously criminal. By 1906, the city had purchased a vast acreage of farmland incorporated into the city, and the Philadelphia Hospital dubbed its new venture Byberry City Farms. From the start, its history was riddled with corruption and committees, investigations and inquests, appropriations and abuse. Yet it is also a story of reform and redemption, of heroes and human dignity--many dedicated staff members did their best to help patients whose mental illnesses were little understood and were stigmatized by society.
Physician Suicide Letters Answered
Pamela Wible - 2016
Wible exposes the pervasive and largely hidden medical culture of bullying, hazing, and abuse that claims the lives of countless medical students, doctors, and patients. Now—for the first time released to the public—here are private letters and last words from our doctors who could no longer bear the pain of an abusive medical system. What you don’t know about medical training and culture can kill you. Dr. Wible takes you behind the white coat and into the mind, heart, and soul of our doctors—and provides answers.
Scotland (Kindle Single)
Gary Greenberg - 2014
Two registered sex offenders had come to live in the small town Greenberg had called home for thirty years, and his fellow citizens, terrified and enraged, had come out to pin the blame on him. In this riveting memoir about a modern-day witch hunt, Greenberg recounts with his trademark acerbic humor what it is like to be the target of an entire town's wrath. As he describes his Hawthornian moment, he vividly sketches the characters and landscapes that make up a classic New England village and reflects on sex, panic, betrayal, and the sometimes beautiful, sometimes terrible ties that bind communities together.Gary Greenberg is the author of four books, most recently The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry, which will be out in paperback this fall. His features and essays have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Harper's, where he is a contributing editor. He is the recipient of the Erik Erikson Institute Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media. A practicing psychotherapist, he lives with his family in Connecticut.Cover design by Kristen Radtke.
Raven's Witness: The Alaska Life of Richard K. Nelson
Hank Lentfer - 2020
Nelson was the host of the national public radio series, "Encounters" Nelson was an anthropologist who lived with Alaska Native tribes and spoke both Inupiag and Koyukon Based on Nelson's journals and interviews with Gary Snyder, Barry Lopez, Rick Bass, and others "He listened to his [Native Alaskan] teachers, immersed himself in their landscapes as a naturalist, and became, without intending to, a great teacher himself." --Barry Lopez, from the forewordBefore his death in 2019, cultural anthropologist, author, and radio producer Richard K. Nelson's work focused primarily on the indigenous cultures of Alaska and, more generally, on the relationships between people and nature. Nelson lived for extended periods in Athabaskan and Alaskan Eskimo villages, experiences which inspired his earliest written works, including Hunters of the Northern Ice In Raven's Witness, Lentfer tells Nelson's story--from his midwestern childhood to his first experiences with Native culture in Alaska through his own lifelong passion for the land where he so belonged. Nelson was the author of the bestselling The Island Within and Heart and Blood. The recipient of multiple honorary degrees and numerous literary awards, he regularly packed auditoriums when he spoke. His depth of experience allowed him to become an intermediary between worlds. This is his story.
Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States
Bill Bryson - 1994
Yankee Doodle called his feathered cap "Macaroni."
Summary - Hillbilly Elegy: By James David Vance - A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
e-Summary - 2016
The book is written by JD (James David by author's full name) Vance and in it the author tries to describe the overall life and struggles of people in post-industrial time in the United States. This book deals with the problems of white working-class and the book is not just some book where the author tries to describe lives of ordinary white people. The book is actually a memento and a message to the readers; in it Vance describes his life and his starts, especially growing up while being poor in Ohio. We can find out about this when we find out that Vance's family is of Scottish-Irish descent and that his ancestors have longer history of poverty and hard work that they need to endure in order to survive the hard times that were at hand. We also find out that since the 18th century many Scottish-Irish people were working as plantation workers, as miners and/or as millworkers. Because these people worked only the hardest jobs that hardly anyone else would take many people belittled them. Words like 'white trash, redneck' and/or 'hillbilly' were unfortunately a common everyday word for those people. Hillbilly Elegy is a fascinating work, not because it was written based on a true story but because it was written from a man who lived 'through' his story. The fact that the entire book contains a message is, of course, welcoming plus and something we want from literature of this genre. Here Is A Preview Of What You Will Get: In Hillbilly Elegy, you will get a summarized version of the book.In Hillbilly Elegy, you will find the book analyzed to further strengthen your knowledge.In Hillbilly Elegy, you will get some fun multiple choice quizzes, along with answers to help you learn about the book.Get a copy, and learn everything about Hillbilly Elegy.
Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space
Michael Sorkin - 1992
A new Kind of urbanism--manipulative, dispersed, and hostile to traditional public space--is emerging both at the heart and at the edge of town in megamalls, corporate enclaves, gentrified zones, and psuedo-historic marketplaces. If anything can be described as a paradigm for these places, it's the theme park, an apparently benign environment in which all is structured to achieve maximum control and in which the idea of authentic interaction among citizens has been thoroughly purged. In this bold collection, eight of our leading urbanists and architectural critics explore the emblematic sites of this new cityscape--from Silicon Valley to Epcot Center, South Street Seaport to downtown Los Angeles--and reveal their disturbing implications for American public life.