Sociology Memoirs

When Pauline Chen began medical school, she dreamed of saving lives. What she didn't count on was how much death would be a part of her work. Final Exam follows Chen over the course of her training, as she struggles to reconcile a shared humanity with her patients and to separate ideals about healing from a fierce desire to cure. Chen's transfixing and beautiful rumination on how doctors negotiate the ineluctable fact of death becomes, in the end, a brilliant questioning of how we should live.

All hail Queen Elizabeth! She's a “queen" but not a monarch who's spent her life fighting to create a more equal society. Now one of the most recognizable women in politics, Warren took a winding road to become the badass senator from Massachusetts - the first woman senator ever elected from the state. Day-to-day struggle to make ends meet? Check. Single motherhood? Check. Law degree? Check. Tenured Harvard Law professor? You bet!

The stunning popularity of the “New Atheist” movement - whose most famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens - speaks to both the growing ranks of atheists and the widespread, vehement disdain for religion among many of them. In Faitheist, Chris Stedman tells his own story to challenge the orthodoxies of this movement and make a passionate argument that atheists should engage religious diversity respectfully.

Intimate and honest essays on motherhood, marriage, love, and acceptance. Brown White Black is a portrait of Nishta J. Mehra's family: her wife, who is White; her adopted child, Shiv, who is Black; and their experiences dealing with America's rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Her clear-eyed and incisive writing on her family's daily struggle to make space for themselves amid racial intolerance and stereotypes personalizes some of America's most fraught issues.

Growing up on a council estate in East London, rapper Guvna B thought he knew everything he needed to know about what it means to be a man. But when a personal tragedy sent him reeling, he knew he had to face these assumptions head on if he was going to be able to overcome his grief. In this intimate, honest and unflinching memoir, Guvna B draws on his personal experiences to explore how toxic masculinity affects young men today. Exploring ideas of male identity, Unspoken is an inspirational account of Guvna’s journey.

Growing up, Robert Lipsyte was the smart-aleck fat kid, the bully magnet who went to the library instead of the ballpark. As the perpetual outsider, even into adulthood, Lipsyte's alienation from Jock Culture made him a rarity in the press box: the sportswriter who wasn't a sports fan. This feeling of otherness has colored Lipsyte's sports writing for fifty years, much of it spent as a columnist for the New York Times. He didn't follow particular athletes or teams; he wasn't awed by the access afforded by his press pass or his familiarity with the players in the locker room.

This is the extraordinary story of the South African boy whose bravery and fierce determination to make a difference despite being born with AIDS has made him the human symbol of the world's fight against the disease, told by the veteran American journalist whose life he changed.

On the morning of July 1, 1800, a surveyor and mapmaker named Cayetano Diaz opened the window of his study in Guatemala City to find a horrific sight: a pair of severed breasts. Offering a meticulously researched and evocative account of the quest to find the perpetrator and understand the motives behind such a brutal act, this volume pinpoints the sensational crime as a watershed moment in Guatemalan history that radically changed the nature of justice and the established social order.

Guilty Admissions weaves together the story of an unscrupulous college counselor named Rick Singer, and how he preyed on the desperation of some of the country's wealthiest families living in a world defined by fierce competition, who function under constant pressure to get into the "right" schools, starting with preschool; nonstop fundraising and donation demands in the form of multi-million-dollar galas and private parties; and a community of deeply insecure parents who will do anything to get their kids into name-brand colleges in order to maintain their own A-list status.

An extraordinary journey behind the scenes of Arlington National Cemetery, Senator Tom Cotton’s Sacred Duty offers an intimate and inspiring portrait of “The Old Guard”, the revered US Army unit whose mission is to honor our country’s fallen heroes on the most hallowed ground in America.

On October 12, 2005, a massive fire broke out in the Wines Central wine warehouse in Vallejo, California. Within hours, the flames had destroyed 4.5 million bottles of California's finest wine worth more than $250 million, making it the largest destruction of wine in history. The fire had been deliberately set by a passionate oenophile named Mark Anderson, a skilled con man and thief with storage space at the warehouse who needed to cover his tracks.

Gail Gutradt was at a crossroads in her life when she learned of the Wat Opot Children’s Community. Begun with just 50dollars in the pocket of Wayne Dale Matthysse, a former Marine Corps medic in Vietnam, Wat Opot, a temple complex nestled among Cambodia’s verdant rice paddies, was once a haunted scrubland that became a place of healing and respite where children with or orphaned by HIV/AIDS could live outside of fear or judgment, and find a new family—a place that Gutradt calls “a workshop for souls.”

On June 17, 2015, at 9:05 p.m., a young man with a handgun opened fire on a prayer meeting at the Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine members of the congregation. The captured shooter, 21-year-old Dylan Roof, a white supremacist, was charged with their murders. Two days after the shooting, while Roof's court hearing was held on videoconference, the families of his nine victims, one by one, appeared on the screen - forgiving the killer.

As a girl, Katy accidentally discovers her mother is earning money as a sex worker at the family home, rupturing their bond. As an adult, Katy contends with grief and mental health challenges before she and her mother attempt to heal their relationship. From Canada, to Leeds and Jamaica, and exploring shame, immigration and class, the pair shares their stories but struggles to understand each other’s choices in a fast-changing world. By revealing their truths, can these two strong women call a truce on their hostilities and overcome the oppressive ghosts of the past?

I am writing about my experience in the hope that it can be helpful to other patients who are still suffering from the effects of a stroke. Many are unable to communicate their feelings and needs to their families, therapists, and doctors. Although these helpers have much knowledge, they seldom have the intimate understanding that comes with first-hand experience. I have been very blessed to have regained my strength and speech and clear thinking.

Like Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun and Alexander Masters’ Stuart, this is a tour de force of narrative reportage - an intimate portrait of an invisible man. Mohammed Ashraf studied biology in college, and after college he learned how to repair television sets, cut suit lengths, and slice chicken. He has lived in Mumbai, Calcutta, Hyderabad, Surat, and Patna, but this evening he is stoned on a street in Sadar Bazaar, in North Delhi. The morning shall bring hangovers, whiskey breakfasts, and possibly answers to the lingering questions that haunt Ashraf.

Cuando Helena Maleno llegó a Marruecos en 2002 con su hijo, dos maletas y un proyecto laboral de tres meses no podía imaginar hasta qué punto aquel país y la lucha por los derechos de las poblaciones migrantes que lo atravesaban transformarían su vida para siempre. Ya instalada en Tánger de forma definitiva, Helena se adentró en los asentamientos provisionales de los bosques que rodean Ceuta y Melilla y empezó a denunciar sin descanso las violaciones de derechos de aquellos que buscan cruzar, por tierra o por mar, una frontera que les permita alcanzar Europa.

For two decades, the water in the taps and wells of Mingo County didn’t look, smell, or taste right. Could the water be the root of the health problems - from kidney stones to cancer - in this Appalachian community? Environmental lawyer Kevin Thompson certainly thought so. For seven years, Thompson waged an epic legal battle against Massey Energy, West Virginia’s most powerful coal company, helmed by CEO Don Blankenship. Working with fellow lawyers and a crew of young activists, Thompson would uncover the ruthless shortcuts that put the community’s drinking water at risk.

How I Became a Human Being is Mark O'Brien’s account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955 he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O'Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, and his adult life as an independent student and writer. Despite his physical limitations, O'Brien crafts a narrative that is as rich and vivid as the life he led.

Journalist Kathleen McLaughlin knew she’d found a treatment that worked on her rare autoimmune disorder. She had no idea it had been drawn from the veins of America’s most vulnerable. So begins McLaughlin’s ten-year investigation researching and reporting on the $20-billion-a year business she found at the other end of her medication, revealing a “vampiric real-life story of modern-day greed” (Leah Sottile, host of Bundyville).