In America today, you can connect to your ethnic heritage in dozens of ways, or adopt an identity just for an evening. Our society is not a melting pot but a salad bar--a bazaar in which the purveyors of goods and services spend close to $2 billion a year marketing the foods, clothing, objects, vacations, and events that help people express their (and others') ethnic identities. This is a huge business, whose target groups are the "hyphenated Americans"--in other words, all of us.A...

Arriving in New England first as crew members of whaling vessels, Afro-Portuguese immigrants from Cape Verde later came as permanent settlers and took work in the cranberry industry, on the docks, and as domestic workers.Marilyn Halter combines oral history with analyses of ships' records to chart the history and adaptation patterns of the Cape Verdean Americans. Though identifying themselves in ethnic terms, Cape Verdeans found that their African-European ancestry led their new so...

African & American tells the story of the much overlooked experience of first and second generation West African immigrants and refugees in the United States during the last forty years. Interrogating the complex role of post-colonialism in the recent history of black America, Marilyn Halter and Violet Showers Johnson highlight the intricate patterns of emigrant work and family adaptation, the evolving global ties with Africa and Europe, and the translocal connections among the ...

Why is the Atlantic slowly filling with crude petroleum, threatening a millions-of-years-old ecological balance? Why did traders at prominent banks take high-risk gambles with the money entrusted to them by hundreds of thousands of clients around the world, expanding and leveraging their investments to the point that failure led to a global financial crisis that left millions of people jobless and hundreds of cities economically devastated? Why would the world’s most powerful military spen...

Poised to capitalize on renewed political interest following the federal election, the trade paperback edition of What’s Happened to Politics? is sure to be necessary reading for every concerned Canadian citizen.Segmented electorates. Political leaders avoiding debate and dialogue in favour of an endless repetition of sound bites and vanity videos with little substance. Billions of dollars spent on lobbying. It’s clear that Canadian politics is in a sorry ...

In this witty and bestselling look at the cultural consequences of the information age, David Brooks coins a new word, Bobo, to describe today’s upper class—those who have wed the bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture.Do you believe that spending $15,000 on a media center is vulgar, but that spending $15,000 on a slate shower stall is a sign that you are at one with the Zenlike rhythms of nature? Do yo...

Critics of President Obama have attacked him as a socialist, an African-American radical, a big government liberal. But somehow the critics have failed to reveal what's truly driving Barack Obama. Now bestselling author Dinesh D’Souza throws out these misplaced attacks in his new book, The Roots of Obama’s Rage. The reason, explains D'Souza, that Obama appears to be working to destroy America from within is found, as Obama himself admits, in "The Dreams of His Father": a deeply-ho...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERCNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria argues for a renewed commitment to the world’s most valuable educational tradition.**The liberal arts are under attack. The governors of Florida, Texas, and North Carolina have all pledged that they will not spend taxpayer money subsidizing the liberal arts, and they seem to have an unlikely ally in President Obama. While at a General Electric plant in early 2014, Obama remarked, "I promise ...

Feminist and social activist Judy Rebick brings decades of experience to her account of the Occupy movement in cities across North America. Linking Occupy to social movements of the past and exploring the courage and creativity of a new generation, Rebick argues that the Occupy movement and its counterparts around the globe represent a rise of people power at least as important as the 1960s. Inspired by the Arab Spring, informed by the Indignados (the "Indignant Ones" who protested austeri...

"Powerful and disturbing. No one who cares about the future of our public life can afford to ignore this book."—Jackson LearsA powerful sequel to Benjamin R. Barber's best-selling Jihad vs. McWorld, Consumed offers a vivid portrait of an overproducing global economy that targets children as consumers in a market where there are never enough shoppers and where the primary goal is no longer to manufacture goods but needs. To explain how and why this has come about, Barber br...

"Take[s] scenario planning to a new level, beyond the confines of business strategy, to deal with wider social and economic issues."—Vince Cable, former Secretary of State for Business, UKPeople who are trying to solve tough economic, social, and environmental problems often find themselves frustratingly stuck. They can't solve their problems in their current context, which is too unstable or unfair or unsustainable. They can't transform this context on their own—i...

Campaigning for president in 1980, Ronald Reagan told stories of Cadillac-driving "welfare queens" and "strapping young bucks" buying T-bone steaks with food stamps. In trumpeting these tales of welfare run amok, Reagan never needed to mention race, because he was blowing a dog whistle: sending a message about racial minorities inaudible on one level, but clearly heard on another. In doing so, he tapped into a long political tradition that started with George Wallace and Richard Nixon, and...