A surprising and revealing look at how today’s elite view their wealth and place in society From TV’s “real housewives” to The Wolf of Wall Street, our popular culture portrays the wealthy as materialistic and entitled. But what do we really know about those who live on “easy street”? In this penetrating book, Rachel Sherman draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with fifty affluent New Yorkers—from hedge fund financiers and artists to stay-at-home mothers—to examine their lifestyle choices and understanding of privilege. Sherman upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing social advantages for themselves and their children. Instead, these liberal elites, who believe in diversity and meritocracy, feel conflicted about their position in a highly unequal society. As the distance between rich and poor widens, Uneasy Street not only explores the lives of those at the top but also sheds light on how extreme inequality comes to seem ordinary and acceptable to the rest of us.

It departs from the scholarship produced on Sri Lanka, and re-introduces the neo-Marxist approaches through the works of Antonio Gramsci.

In this major interpretive history of the reform era, Barry Karl presents an imaginative and thoughtful perspective on America's quest for political, economic, and cultural nationalism. Challenging accepted interpretations, he argues that the two world wars and the depression did not successfully unite the country so that a national managerial state could emerge as it did in other industrial nations. Karl draws on an impressive array of sources to support his position, offering insightful comments on popular culture—movies, novels, comic strips, and detective stories—and brilliant analyses of technological change and its impact. Karl shows how Americans approached the central dilemmas of modern life, such as the clash between planned efficiency and autonomous individualism, which they managed to patch over but never fully resolve. Above all, he finds that America's commitment to the autonomous individual is both an aspiration and a curse.

"If we continue, we grow old, and this is how it could be for us," writes Renée Rose Shield in her candid and sympathetic account of life in one American nursing home. Drawing on anthropological methods and theory to illuminate institutional life, she probes the sources of the profound sense of unease she found at the place she calls "The Franklin Nursing Home."For fourteen months Shield participated in life at a nursing home in the northeastern United States. She got to know many of the people associated with the home—doctors, nurses, custodians, kitchen workers, administrators, social workers, visiting relatives, and above all, the residents, who emerge in this book as the individuals they are. Sections in which the residents speak poignantly in their own voices are woven throughout her richly detailed observations of everyday routines and events. We see them using guile and humor to get by, struggling to approach the end of their lives with a measure of autonomy and dignity, and we meet an often conscientious and caring staff constrained by conflicting professional perspectives and by the bureaucratic structure in which they work.There are no villains here. Rather, Shield explains how conditions in the nursing home create a difficult and uncomfortable "liminality"—the transition from an accustomed role to a new one-for the residents. In characterizing nursing-home existence, she goes beyond Erving Goffman's classic definition of the "total institution" to show how residents pass from adulthood to death without the comfort of ritual or community support common in rites of passage. In addition to the isolation created by this solitary passage, she finds restrictions on "reciprocity"—the old people are always recipients whose need and obligation to repay are seen as unnecessary and difficult to satisfy. The system encourages their passivity, which deepens their dependency and helps to explain why they are often perceived as children. Offering concrete suggestions for improving the quality of nursing-home life, Uneasy Endings will find a broad audience among those who work with the aged.

Tracing the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) diagnosis from its mid-century origins through the late 1900s, Rest Uneasy investigates the processes by which SIDS became both a discrete medical enigma and a source of social anxiety construed differently over time and according to varying perspectives. American medicine reinterpreted and reconceived of the problem of sudden infant death multiple times over the course of the twentieth century. Its various approaches linked sudden infant deaths to all kinds of different causes—biological, anatomical, environmental, and social. In the context of a nation increasingly skeptical, yet increasingly expectant, of medicine, Americans struggled to cope with the paradoxes of sudden infant death; they worked to admit their powerlessness to prevent SIDS even while they tried to overcome it. Brittany Cowgill chronicles and assesses Americans’ fraught but consequential efforts to explain and conquer SIDS, illuminating how and why SIDS has continued to cast a shadow over doctors and parents.

From the late ’90s to the mid-2010s, American cities experienced an astonishing drop in violent crime, dramatically changing urban life. In many cases, places once characterized by decay and abandonment are now thriving, the fear of death by gunshot wound replaced by concern about skyrocketing rents. In Uneasy Peace, Patrick Sharkey, “the leading young scholar of urban crime and concentrated poverty” (Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and The New Urban Crisis) reveals the striking effects: improved school test scores, because children are better able to learn when not traumatized by nearby violence; better chances that poor children will rise into the middle class; and a marked increase in the life expectancy of African American men. Some of the forces that brought about safer streets—such as the intensive efforts made by local organizations to confront violence in their own communities—have been positive, Sharkey explains. But the drop in violent crime has also come at the high cost of aggressive policing and mass incarceration. From Harlem to South Los Angeles, Sharkey draws on original data and textured accounts of neighborhoods across the country to document the most successful proven strategies for combating violent crime and to lay out innovative and necessary approaches to the problem of violence. At a time when crime is rising again, the issue of police brutality has taken center stage, and powerful political forces seek to disinvest in cities, the insights in this book are indispensable.

How coalitions of citizens and experts have been effective in promoting environmental justice in Louisiana's Chemical Corridor.

"Uneasy listening tells the story of the epic battle over five listener-supported radio stations that rocked the American Left and raised difficult questions about public broadcasting in the United States that have yet to be answered"--P. [4] of cover.

"Barbara M. Hobson . . . makes a compelling case for the reform of prostitution policy in . . . Uneasy Virtue. [This volume] demonstrates an effective analytical approach to understanding public policy and its impact on prostitution policy. . . .Uneasy Virtue proves particularly relevant today as right wing groups begin to guide discourse and influence policy around reproductive rights, sexuality and the future of gender equality. As Hobson proposes, the reform of prostitution polciy must be viewed in the broader context of the political and economic struggles to emancipate women and thereby create a more rational society."—Samuel Suchowlecky, Commentaries

Buried ceremoniously, high in a cave on the Rock of Gibraltar, lies the skeleton of a human woman, clutching the skeleton of a part-human, part-Neanderthal child. Fascinated, Professor Oliver jumps at the chance to visit the site. But two deaths, possibly murders, have rocked Gibraltar. As Oliver tries to piece things together, he's about to fall for some deadly tricks. After all, unlike the Gibraltar Boy, he's only human.