While environmental disputes and conflicts over fossil fuel extraction have grown in recent years, few issues have been as contentious in the twenty-first century as those surrounding the impacts of unconventional natural gas and oil development using hydraulic drilling and fracturing techniques—more commonly known as “fracking”—on local communities. In Fractured Communities, Anthony E. Ladd and other leading environmental sociologists present a set of crucial case studies analyzi...

A girl walks home from school. She's tall for her age. She's wearing her winter coat. Her headphones are in. She's hurrying. She never makes it home. In the aftermath, while law enforcement tries to justify the response, one fact remains: a police officer has shot and killed an unarmed thirteen-year-old girl. The community is thrown into upheaval, leading to unrest, a growing movement to protest the senseless taking of black lives, and the arrival of white supremacist counter demonstrators...

When Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s art critic and the leading art writer of his generation, published his eye-opening autobiographical essay, “The Art of Dying,” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and had been given six months of life. Fortunately, his treatment was showing some improvement, and so, he wrote, “These extra months are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.”And he did. The Art of Dying begins with that essay and collects all forty-six pi...

Russia's nuclear first strike against an unprepared United States has turned the land of the free into the home of brutal hordes of Soviet invaders intent on enslaving all who survived the atomic holocaust. But out of the radioactive rubble emerges a heroic leader of American rebels who choose to fight for freedom's cause or die in the attempt. He is the ultimate soldier of survival, the Doomsday Warrior himself, Ted Rockson.After years of hard-fought resistance against the hated R...