Class Politics

Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison's instruction: "Dream a little before you think."

Catherine Coleman Flowers grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama, a place that’s been called “Bloody Lowndes” because of its violent, racist history. Once the epicenter of the voting rights struggle, today it’s Ground Zero for a new movement that is Flowers’s life’s work. It’s a fight to ensure human dignity through a right most Americans take for granted: basic sanitation. Too many people, especially the rural poor, lack an affordable means of disposing cleanly of the waste from their toilets, and, as a consequence, live amid filth.

At 28, Stephanie Land's dreams of attending a university and becoming a writer quickly dissolved when a summer fling turned into an unplanned pregnancy. Before long, she found herself a single mother, scraping by as a housekeeper to make ends meet. Maid is an emotionally raw, masterful account of Stephanie's years spent in service to upper-middle-class America as a "nameless ghost" who quietly shared in her clients' triumphs, tragedies, and deepest secrets.

Since Alexis de Tocqueville, restlessness has been accepted as a signature American trait. Our willingness to move, take risks, and adapt to change have produced a dynamic economy and a tradition of innovation from Ben Franklin to Steve Jobs. The problem, according to legendary blogger, economist, and best-selling author Tyler Cowen, is that Americans today have broken from this tradition - we're working harder than ever to avoid change.

You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor treatment in the name of "being part of the family," all employees are pushed to make sacrifices for the privilege of being able to do what we love.

In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.

There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but in the last few decades what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Alarmingly, the greatest income gap is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but within the wealthiest 1 percent of our nation-as the merely wealthy are left behind by the rapidly expanding fortunes of the new global super-rich. Forget the 1 percent; Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at break-neck speed.

Aujourd'hui, en France, 354 personnes pèsent 1 000 milliards d'euros. Ce livre-enquête retrace les origines des plus grandes dynasties financières (Rothschild, Arnault, Bolloré, Wertheimer, Pinault, Rockefeller...). Il permet de comprendre à quel point elles ont influencé les transformations de nos sociétés. Oui, ces riches appartiennent à une élite planétaire qui se déplace en jet privé, collectionne les voitures de luxe, organise des fêtes somptueuses, multiplie les domiciliations aux quatre coins du monde, investit tous les marchés, domine tous les réseaux.

A wide-ranging cultural and political history that will forever redefine a misunderstood decade, Stayin' Alive is prize-winning historian Jefferson Cowie's remarkable account of how working-class America hit the rocks in the political and economic upheavals of the 1970s. In this edgy and incisive book, Cowie, with "an ear for the power and poetry of vernacular speech" (Cleveland Plain Dealer), reveals America's fascinating path from rising incomes and optimism of the New Deal to the widening economic inequalities and dampened expectations of the present.

Sparked by observing teachers struggle to implement rich mathematics tasks to engage students in deep thinking, Peter Liljedahl has translated his 15 years of research into this practical guide on how to move toward a thinking classroom. Building Thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, Grades K-12 helps teachers implement 14 optimal practices for thinking that create an ideal setting for deep mathematics learning to occur.

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life.

Written by one of its own graduates, Class 11: Inside the CIA's First Post-9/11 Spy Class is an insider's view of the first CIA training class after September 11, 2001 - a look at the most elite and secretive espionage training program in the country.

The world-renowned philosopher and author of the best-selling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good? World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgment it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life.

Getting in is only half the battle. The Privileged Poor reveals how - and why - disadvantaged students struggle at elite colleges and explains what schools can do differently if these students are to thrive. The Ivy League looks different than it used to. College presidents and deans of admission have opened their doors - and their coffers - to support a more diverse student body. But is it enough just to admit these students? In The Privileged Poor, Anthony Jack reveals that the struggles of less privileged students continue long after they've arrived on campus.

The United States, the richest country on earth, has more poverty than any other advanced democracy. Why? Why does this land of plenty allow one in every eight of its children to go without basic necessities, permit scores of its citizens to live and die on the streets, and authorize its corporations to pay poverty wages?

Upward mobility through the path of higher education has been an article of faith for generations of working-class, low-income, and immigrant college students. While we know this path usually entails financial sacrifices and hard work, very little attention has been paid to the deep personal compromises such students have to make as they enter worlds vastly different from their own.

Protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and across the United States following the death of Michael Brown revealed something far deeper than a passionate display of age-old racial frustrations; they unveiled a public chasm that has been growing for years, as America has consistently and intentionally denied significant segments of its population access to full freedom and prosperity.

Imagine a world in which you own nothing and rent everything. Most of the protein in your diet comes from bugs. You are not allowed to have more than one child, and your financial and medical data are instantly transferred to a centralized government database via a subdermal microchip. Controligarchs warns that this will be our existence if the supranational elites of the World Economic Forum get their way.

In her groundbreaking bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg upends history as we know it by taking on our comforting myths about equality and uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash.

Millions of Americans have lost confidence in our political and economic system. After years of stagnant wages, volatile job markets, and an unwillingness by those in power to deal with profound threats such as climate change, there is a mounting sense that the system is fixed, serving only those select few with enough money to secure a controlling stake. With the characteristic clarity and passion that has made him a central civil voice, Robert B. Reich shows how wealth and power have interacted to install an elite oligarchy, eviscerate the middle class, and undermine democracy.