Essays Social

Throughout his 25-year journalistic career, David Carr was noted for his sharp and fearless observations, his uncanny sense of fairness and justice, and his remarkable compassion and wit. His writing was informed both by his own hardships as an addict, and his intense love of the journalist's craft. His range - from media politics to national politics, from rock-n-roll celebrities to the unknown civil servants who make our daily lives function - was broad and often timeless.

"An excellent book by a genius”, said Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., of this now-classic exploration of the 1960s from the founder of New Journalism and author of such influential works as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and The Bonfire of the Vanities. Tom Wolfe explores the style and culture of the 1960s in this dynamic collection of essays - originally stand-alone pieces, many of which were published in Esquire magazine - written in his unique, free-flowing style.

This collection is an attempt to showcase the phenomenon of Hindu nationalism in terms of how it perceives itself. Many of the concerns that drive the Indian Right are located in the country's nationalist culture. In trying to locate some of the ideas, attitudes, and beliefs that define the Indian Right, Awakening Bharat Mata also seeks to identify the nature of Indian conservatism and identify its similarities and differences with political thought in the West.

Boldly claiming a space in which people with disabilities can be seen and heard as they are-not as others perceive them - About Us captures the voices of a community that has for too long been stereotyped and misrepresented. Speaking not only to those with disabilities, but also to their families, coworkers, and support networks, the authors in About Us offer intimate stories of how they navigate a world not built for them.

Too personal for an almanac, too sophisticated for a domestic history, and too funny and self-doubting for a literary journal, One Man's Meat can best be described as a primer of a countryman's lessons and a timeless recounting of experience that will never go out of style.

This collection of 20 essays and articles on mountaineering and adventure by David Roberts, selected from the published works of two decades, showcases one of the most highly regarded writers in the field. The articles are composed of three types: Adventures (Roberts' own climbs and outings), Profiles (other adventurers), and Reflections (meditative essays about the meaning of the whole business). Roberts ranges the globe (Africa, Alaska, New Guinea) and introduces unique personalities (Reinhold Messner, John Roskelly, Don Sheldon).

One of Barbara Ehrenreich's most classic and prophetic works, Fear of Falling closely examines the insecurities of the American middle class in an attempt to explain its turn to the right during the last two decades of the 20th century. Weaving finely-tuned expert analysis with her trademark voice, Ehrenreich traces the myths about the middle class to their roots, determines what led to the shrinking of what was once a healthy percentage of the population, and how, in its ambition and anxiety, that population has retreated from responsible leadership.

Iceland is home to only 330,000 people but more than 265 museums and public collections, ranging from the intensely physical, like the Icelandic Phallological Museum, which collects the penises of every mammal known to exist in Iceland, to the vaporously metaphysical, like the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, which poses a particularly Icelandic problem: how to display what can't be seen?

In a pulls-no-punches essay intended to provoke rational discussion, Stephen King sets down his thoughts about gun violence in America. Anger and grief in the wake of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School are palpable in this urgent piece of writing, but no less remarkable are King's keen thoughtfulness and composure as he explores the contours of the gun-control issue and constructs his argument for what can and should be done.

Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

Structured around the 40 questions Luiselli translates and asks undocumented Latin American children facing deportation, Tell Me How It Ends (an expansion of her 2016 Freeman's essay of the same name) humanizes these young migrants and highlights the contradiction between the idea of America as a fiction for immigrants and the reality of racism and fear - both here and back home.

Quintus Curtius is an attorney, writer, translator, and former marine officer. Expertly blending history, biography, philosophy, and the author's personal experience, this penetrating collection of essays achieves what one reviewer called "a perfect fluency in [a] dialogue with truth." The unifying theme is the nature of masculine identity and how that identity has been manifested. Drawing on examples from history and using sources in their original languages, Quintus Curtius' soaring vision combines lucid explanation with a passionate intensity like few other writers.

In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator.

Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you? That feeling of belonging remains with readers the rest of their lives - but not everyone regularly sees themselves on the pages of a book. In this timely anthology, Glory Edim brings together original essays by some of our best black women writers to shine a light on how important it is that we all - regardless of gender, race, religion, or ability - have the opportunity to find ourselves in literature.

Reinventándonos, los retos de la Covid-19 y la nueva normalidad reúne las visiones de diversos especialistas sobre el impacto generado y el cambio que nos espera en campos como la ciencia, la educación, el deporte, la cultura o incluso en las formas de protegernos contra la violencia. Pero reúne, además, ejemplos de cómo a pesar de todo, y del nulo apoyo del Estado, los peruanos, una vez más, nos reinventamos.

This book is for and about the women who kicked in doors, as pioneers of their craft or making politics central to their sound: those who offer a new way of thinking about the vast spectrum of women in music. In this radical departure from the historic narrative of music and music writing being written by men, for men, This Woman’s Work challenges the male dominance and sexism that have been hard-coded in the canons of music, literature, and film and has forced women to fight pigeon-holing or being side-lined by carving out their own space.

Hustvedt displays her expansive intellect and interdisciplinary knowledge in this collection that moves effortlessly between stories of her mother, grandmother, and daughter to artistic mothers, Jane Austen, Emily Brontë, and Louise Bourgeois, to the broader meanings of maternal in a culture shaped by misogyny and fantasies of paternal authority. Mothers, Fathers, and Others is a polymath’s journey into urgent questions about familial love and hate, human prejudice and cruelty, and the transformative power of art.

Leo Tolstoy wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These culminated in What Is Art?, published in 1898. Although Tolstoy perceived the question of art to be a religious one, he considered and rejected the idea that art reveals and reinvents through beauty. The works of Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Baudelaire, and even his own novels are condemned in the course of Tolstoy's impassioned and iconoclastic redefinition of art as a force for good; for the improvement of humankind.

What is it like to grow up Aboriginal in Australia? This anthology, compiled by award-winning author Anita Heiss, showcases many diverse voices, experiences and stories in order to answer that question. Accounts from well-known authors and high-profile identities sit alongside those from newly discovered writers of all ages. All of the contributors speak from the heart - sometimes calling for empathy, oftentimes challenging stereotypes, always demanding respect.