Class Politics

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries.

When the sixth Earl Fitzwilliam died in 1902, he left behind the second largest estate in 20th-century England, valued at more than three billion dollars in today's money - a lifeline to the tens of thousands of people who worked either in the family's coal mines or on their expansive estate. The earl also left behind four sons, and the family line seemed assured. But was it?

The Anchor Hocking Glass Company, once the world's largest maker of glass tableware, was the base on which Lancaster's society was built. As Glass House unfolds, bankruptcy looms. With access to the company and its leaders, and Lancaster's citizens, Alexander shows how financial engineering took hold in the 1980s, accelerated in the 21st century, and wrecked the company.

As World War I drew to a close, change reverberated through the halls of England's country homes. As the sun set slowly on the British Empire, the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a thousand stately homes. In The Long Weekend, historian Adrian Tinniswood introduces us to the tumultuous, scandalous, and glamorous history of English country houses during the years between world wars.

In Left Behind, Collier examines how the assumption that any impoverished area will find a way to progress through market forces has devastated nations all over the world. With keen insight, he draws lessons from such disparate fields as behavioral psychology, evolutionary biology, and moral philosophy to explain how we can adapt to the needs of individual economies in order to build a brighter and fairer global future.

Urban universities play an outsized role in America’s cities. They bring diverse ideas and people together and they generate new innovations. But they also gentrify neighborhoods and exacerbate housing inequality in an effort to enrich their campuses and attract students. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower takes listeners from Hartford to Chicago and from Phoenix to Manhattan, revealing the increasingly parasitic relationship between universities and our cities.

Bustle editor Samantha Leach and her childhood best friend, Elissa, met as infants in the suburbs of Providence, Rhode Island, where they attended nursery, elementary school, and temple together. As seventh graders, they would steal drinks from bar mitzvahs and have boys over in Samantha’s basement—innocent, early acts of rebellion. But after one of their shared acts, Samantha was given a disciplinary warning by their private school while Elissa was dismissed altogether, and later sent away.

For a Dollar and a Dream shows how, in an era of stagnant upward mobility, millions of Americans turned to the lottery as their only chance at achieving the American Dream. Gamblers were not the only ones who bet on betting. As voters revolted against higher taxes in the late twentieth century, states saw legalized gambling as a panacea, a way of generating revenue without cutting services or raising taxes. Alongside stories of winners and losers, Jonathan Cohen charts the untold history of the nation's lottery system, revealing how players and policymakers alike got hooked.

From the bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace comes “an eye-opening, fully humanizing, deeply affecting look at the often-misunderstood juvenile justice system and its inhabitants—young people of earnestness, disappointment, hope, and resilience” (Booklist, starred review).

In 2018, Emily Flitter received a tip that Morgan Stanley had fired a Black employee without cause. Flitter had been searching for a way to investigate the deep-rooted racism in the American financial industry, and that one tip lit the sparkplug for a three-year journey through the shocking yet normalized corruption in our financial institutions. Examining local insurance agencies and corporate titans like JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock, and Wells Fargo and reveals the practices that have kept the racial wealth gap practically as wide as it was during the Jim Crow era.

Each of them is one in a million. They number 6,000 on a planet of six billion. They run our governments, our largest corporations, the powerhouses of international finance, the media, world religions, and, from the shadows, the world's most dangerous criminal and terrorist organizations. They are the global superclass, and they are shaping the history of our time.

From education to work to dating, this inspirational, honest and provocative book recognises and celebrates the strides black women have already made, while providing practical advice for those who want to do the same and forge a better, visible future. Illustrated with stories from best friends Elizabeth Uviebinené and Yomi Adegoke’s own lives, and using interviews with dozens of the most successful black women in Britain....

From the poisoned rivers, barren wells, and clear-cut forests, to the hundreds of thousands of farmers who have committed suicide to escape punishing debt, to the hundreds of millions of people who live on less than two dollars a day, there are ghosts nearly everywhere you look in India. India is a nation of 1.2 billion, but the country's 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of India’s gross domestic product.

Mary Prince's 1831 book is one of the earliest narratives that revealed the ugly facts about slavery in the West Indies. The book begins with a brief description of her childhood, before recounting her adult experiences as a slave. Her strong spirit enabled her to survive and to take up the abolitionist cause.

From Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Will Bunch, the epic untold story of college—the great political and cultural fault line of American life.

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was an American economist and sociologist. His most famous work, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899), is a treatise on economics and a social critique of consumption and of consumerism, based on the social stratification of people and the division of labor. This work is in the tradition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and is rightly considered a classic of economic theory and social history.

We've all heard that the American Dream is vanishing, and that the cause is rising income inequality. The rich are getting richer by rigging the system in their favor, leaving the rest of us to struggle just to keep our heads above water. To save the American Dream, we're told that we need to fight inequality through tax hikes, wealth redistribution schemes, and a far higher minimum wage.

The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban Blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. David Ansell has spent nearly four decades as a doctor at hospitals serving some of the poorest communities in Chicago, and has witnessed firsthand the lives behind these devastating statistics. In

The Death Gap, he gives a grim survey of these realities, drawn from observations and stories of his patients.

In Wall Street’s War on Workers, Les Leopold, co-founder of the Labor Institute, provides a clear lens with which we can see how healthy corporations in the United States have used mass layoffs and stock buybacks to enrich shareholders at the expense of employees. With detailed research and concise language, Leopold explains why mass layoffs occur and how our current laws and regulations allow companies to turn these layoffs into short-term financial gains.

El libro es una burla y una serie de sarcasmos bien documentados, pero también es una reflexión profunda del México violento, trágico y delirante donde reina la impunidad, la trampa, el desfalco, a pesar de tener seres humanos grandiosos en las ciencias y en las artes.