Public toilets determine who gets everyday dignity, freedom of movement, and civic belonging—and who doesn’t.Americans have nowhere to go. Nationwide, countless public spaces lack one crucial thing: bathrooms, never mind ones that are safe and functional. Yet in the past, political leaders celebrated the opening of public bathrooms with boisterous press conferences and showy ribbon-cutting ceremonies.For Customers Only is the first book to tell the...

Everything but the Coffee casts a fresh eye on the world's most famous coffee company, looking beyond baristas, movie cameos, and Paul McCartney CDs to understand what Starbucks can tell us about America. Bryant Simon visited hundreds of Starbucks around the world to ask, Why did Starbucks take hold so quickly with consumers? What did it seem to provide over and above a decent cup of coffee? Why at the moment of Starbucks' profit-generating peak did the company lose its way, leavi...

In this book, Bryant Simon brings to life the politics of white South Carolina millhands during the first half of the twentieth century. His revealing and moving account explores how this group of southern laborers thought about and participated in politics and public power.Taking a broad view of politics, Simon looks at laborers as they engaged in political activity in many venues — at the polling station, on front porches, and on the shop floor — and examines their political invo...

For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses in search of cheap labor and almost no oversight. Imperial Food Products was one of those businesses. The company set up shop in Hamlet in the 1980s. Workers who complained about low pay and hazardous working conditions at the plant were silenced or fired. But jobs were scarce in town, so workers kept coming back, ...

White supremacy shaped all aspects of post-Civil War southern life, yet its power was never complete or total. The form of segregation and subjection nicknamed Jim Crow constantly had to remake itself over time even as white southern politicians struggled to extend its grip. Here, some of the most innovative scholars of southern history question Jim Crow's sway, evolution, and methods over the course of a century. These essays bring to life the southern men and women--some heroic and decen...

Grounded in the work of Roland Barthes, Bruno Latour, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault, this exciting book uses food as a lens to examine agency and the political, economic, social, and cultural power which underlies every choice of food and every act of eating.The book is divided into three parts - National Characters; Anthropological Situations; Health – with each of the eight chapters exploring the power of food as well as the power relationships reflected and refracted thro...

During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet ...

Isadora Tattlin is the American wife of a European energy consultant posted to Havana in the 1990s. Wisely, the witty Mrs. Tattlin began a diary the day her husband informed her of their new assignment. One of the first entries is her shopping list of things to take, including six gallons of shampoo. For although the Tattlins were provided with a wonderful, big house in Havana, complete with a staff of seven, there wasn't much else money could buy in a country whose shelves are nearly bare...

Margarita Nights is a cozy with grit -- serving Jack Daniels instead of tea.In a small Florida beach town, Sherri Travis is a bartender with attitude and a woman with an inconveniently murdered husband who turns out to be as much trouble to her dead as he was alive.Sifting through the debris of Jimmy's life, Sherri finds more than a few people who wanted her lying, scheming, scam artist husband gone -- but which one actually did the deed?

What if the best morning of your life suddenly turned into your worst nightmare? Sam Case is about to find out. Saving Rachel is the story of what happens when killers force a man to choose between his wife and his mistress...and the one he rejects must die. "If Dean Koontz collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock at the circus, this would be their brain child." –Vintage DM Book Reviews

Jacob and Macon dont have anything in common. He's a thirteen-year-old city boy trying to find his place in the world and she's his little country cousin the prodigy painter who hardly speaks. When Jacob is sent to stay with his Aunt and Uncle for the summer and falls ill he's exiled to the attic - the sickroom - and discovers his love of art in the paintings he finds there. Turning his back on his troubles back home Jacob launches himself into a friendship with the younger cousin he alway...

In his fierce search for a new case, Detective Harry Bosch discovers a killer hiding behind suspicious DNA evidence—and a political conspiracy that could destroy the Los Angeles Police Department.DNA from a 1989 rape and murder matches a 29-year-old convicted rapist. Was he an eight-year-old killer or has something gone terribly wrong in the new Regional Crime Lab? The latter possibility could compromise all of the lab's DNA cases currently in court.Then Bo...