An unsparing, incisive, yet ultimately hopeful look at how we can shed the American obsession with self-reliance that has made us less healthy, less secure, and less fulfilledThe promise that you can “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is central to the story of the American Dream. It’s the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However, time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with its emphasis on...

"Vivid portraits" of individuals and subcultures by a writer who "unmasks the assumptions we make about what counts as normal" ( The New York Times).They are outsiders who seek to redefine fields from mental health to diplomacy to music. They push boundaries and transform ideas. They include filmmakers crowdsourcing their work, transgender and autistic activists, and Occupy Wall Street's "alternative bankers." These people create and package themselves in ...

"An eye-opening look at the forces that make it harder than ever for the middle class to survive" ( People ).One of TIME's Best New Books to Read This Summer"Brilliant—a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class's fall while also offering solutions and hope." —Barbara Ehrenrei...

A collection of compelling, hard-hitting first-person essays, poems, and photos that expose what our punitive social systems do to so many Americans.Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former Managing Director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich...

Generation Y has grown up in an age of the brand, bombarded by name products. In Branded, Alissa Quart illuminates the unsettling new reality of marketing to teenagers, as well as the quieter but no less worrisome forms of teen branding: the teen consultants who work for corporations in exchange for product; the girls obsessed with cosmetic surgery who will do anything to look like women on TV; and those teens simply obsessed with admission into a name-brand college. We also meet the pocke...

Going for Broke, edited by Alissa Quart, executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, and David Wallis, former managing director of EHRP, gives voice to a range of gifted writers for whom "economic precarity" is more than just another assignment. All illustrate what the late Barbara Ehrenreich, who conceived of EHRP, once described as "the real face of journalism today: not million dollar-a-year anchorpersons, but low-wage workers and downwardly spiraling profess...

An unsparing, incisive, yet ultimately hopeful look at how we can shed the American obsession with self-reliance that has made us less healthy, less secure, and less fulfilledThe promise that you can “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is central to the story of the American Dream. It’s the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will eventually succeed. However, time and again we have seen how this foundational myth, with its emphasis on...

“Brilliant—a keen, elegantly written, and scorching account of the American family today. Through vivid stories, sharp analysis and wit, Quart anatomizes the middle class’s fall while also offering solutions and hope.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and DimedFamilies today are squeezed on every side—from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular w...

“Unravel[s] the national psyche that brought our politics to this moment.” — Evan Osnos, The New YorkerA landmark book, from “one of the world’s most prominent psychiatrists” (The Atlantic): Allen Frances analyzes the nation, viewing the rise of Donald J. Trump as darkly symptomatic of a deeper societal distress that must be understood if we are to move forward. Equally challenging and profound, Twilight of American Sanity “joins a small ...

This program is read by the author.What Truth Sounds Like is a timely exploration of America's tortured racial politics that continues the conversation from Michael Eric Dyson's New York Times bestseller Tears We Cannot Stop.***President Barack Obama: "***Everybody who speaks after Michael Eric Dyson pales in comparison.”In 2015 BLM activist Julius Jones confronted Presidential candidate H...

A dramatic rethinking of the encounter between Montezuma and Hernando Cortés that completely overturns what we know about the Spanish conquest of the AmericasOn November 8, 1519, the Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés first met Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, at the entrance to the capital city of Tenochtitlan. This introduction—the prelude to the Spanish seizure of Mexico City and to European colonization of the mainland of the Americas—has long been the symbol of...

From Silk to Silicon tells the story of who these men and women were, what they did, how they did it, and how their achievements continue to shape our world today. They include:• Genghis Khan, who united east and west by conquest and by opening new trade routes built on groundbreaking transportation and management innovations.• Mayer Amschel Rothschild, who arose from oppression to establish the most powerful bank the world has seen.• Cyrus Field, who becam...