Showing titles in Social Classes & Economic Disparity

Sophie Lyons was a “thief from the cradle”, as one Chief of Police said; at the early age of six years she had already been trained by her stepmother to be a pickpocket and a shoplifter. A beautiful child with engaging manners, she was sent out every day into the stores and among the crowds of shoppers, and was soundly whipped if she came out of a shop with less than three pocketbooks. “I did not know it was wrong to steal; nobody ever taught me that,” Sophie Lyons writes.

From the bestselling author of Saving Capitalism and The Common Good, comes an urgent analysis of how the "rigged" systems of American politics and power operate, how this status quo came to be, and how average citizens can enact change. There is a mounting sense that our political-economic...

For millenniums, the elites have had access to knowledge that was out of bounds from the common folk. The knowledge was only known by those at the top of ruling hierarchy and was passed down to the next generation only. This knowledge enabled them to continue being at the top of hierarchy and rule those who are beneath them, establishing their stronghold over positions of power and influence. Ninety percent did not know anything about them and speculated about their lives and ideologies. They pondered and thought of conspiracy theories.

For most of us, the idea of life inside the golden triad of Park Avenue, Sagaponack, and St. Barths is just as exotic as the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. Luckily, Richard Kirshenbaum has a VIP pass to the Upper East Side and is willing to share the wealth - of gossip. His New York Observer column on uptown social life provides a fascinating glimpse behind the gilded curtain into the swanky restaurants and eye-popping vacation destinations where the one percent gathers.

In 2018, Bri Lee's brilliant young friend Damian was named a Rhodes Scholar, an apex of academic achievement. When she goes to visit him and takes a tour of Oxford and Rhodes House, she begins questioning her belief in a system she has previously revered, as she learns the truth behind what Virginia Woolf described almost a century earlier as the 'stream of gold and silver' that flows through elite institutions and dictates decisions about who deserves to be educated there.

A critical examination of how inequality and cultural inertia hinder meaningful climate action. The challenges of climate change, like so many issues today, are not evenly distributed across social and economic lines. In this sobering exploration of the interconnected crises of climate change and social inequality, William M. Epstein examines how entrenched cultural values and systemic inequities thwart meaningful climate action, driving humanity closer to catastrophic consequences.

Drawing on a vast array of archival sources from around the hemisphere and world, The Fate of the Americas demonstrates that even at the brink of destruction, Latin Americans played active roles in global politics and inter-American relations.

Mary Prince's 1831 book is one of the earliest narratives that revealed the ugly facts about slavery in the West Indies. The book begins with a brief description of her childhood, before recounting her adult experiences as a slave. Her strong spirit enabled her to survive and to take up the abolitionist cause.

A leading educational thinker argues that the American university is stuck in the past -- and shows how we can revolutionize it for our era of constant change Our current system of higher education dates to the period from 1865 to 1925. It was in those decades that the nation's new universities...

A visually striking exploration of money—and the lack of it—in America told through the lives of ten individuals, from a Pulitzer Prize–winning data journalist and artist Anna has a comfortable life in a mansion in Maine thanks to her husband (well, his parents, really) until he suddenly...

In the early 1970s, with the raging Vietnam War, oppression of civil and human rights, and the environment under relentless destruction, young people of America wanted major change—and they got to work. This is the true story of a group of independent, free-spirited youth who rebelled against the system and built a new way to live, creating community and celebrating life while supporting themselves in unique and unconventional ways.

A New York Times bestselling historian confronts the myth of American meritocracy and our enduring reverence for the über-rich—and how that feedback loop corrodes democracy Americans are taught to see aristocracy as everything we are not. Yet from the Revolution forward, the nation has...

From award-winning journalist and writer Rick Morton comes Mean Streak, a gripping and horrifying account of how, over the course of four and a half years, Australia's government turned on its most vulnerable citizens. Winner of the 2025 Walkley Book Award Winner of the Prime Minister's Literary...

Americans are in the midst of a world-historic drug binge. Opiates, amphetamines, benzodiazepines, marijuana, antidepressants, antipsychotics—across the board, consumption has shot up in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the United States is home to the largest prison system in the world, justified in part by a now zombified "war" on drugs. How did we get here?

Based on firsthand experiences from six years of professional work as a librarian in high-poverty neighborhoods of Washington, DC, as well as interviews and research, Overdue begins with Oliver's first day at an "unusual" branch: Northwest One. Using her experience at this branch allows Oliver to highlight the national problems that have existed in libraries since they were founded: racism, segregation, and class inequalities.

In this fascinating audiobook, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes argues that the best way to fight income inequality is with a radically simple idea: a guaranteed income for working people, paid for by the one percent. The first half of Chris Hughes’s life played like a movie reel right out of...

In The Progress Paradox, Gregg Easterbrook draws upon three decades of wide-ranging research and thinking to make the persuasive assertion that almost all aspects of Western life have vastly improved in the past century--and yet today, most men and women feel less happy than in previous...

From an author of the best-selling women’s health classic Our Bodies, Ourselves comes a bracingly forthright memoir about a sixty-year friendship across racial and class divides. Sanford, who is white, explores her formation in a narrow world of privilege, lifts up the writings and social movements that changed her life, and reveals realities of domestic service rarely acknowledged by white employers.

Just six years after the Racial Reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, we are witnessing a full-scale assault on equality in America unparalleled since the overthrow of Reconstruction. Building on the urgency and clarity of his New York Times and Washington Post bestseller Brown Is the New White and his "spirited and persuasive" (Publishers Weekly) How We Win the Civil War, Steve Phillips now calls on the nation to go back on the offensive in the fight for racial justice.

Imagine: You are designing a society, but you don't know who you'll be within it—rich or poor, man or woman, gay or straight. What would you want that society to look like? This is the revolutionary thought experiment proposed by the twentieth century's greatest political philosopher, John...