29 Best Social Classes Books
Social Classes is a popular category for many book lovers. Our team at Speechify has curated a list of the top Social Classes audiobooks everyone must read.
See the top 29 Social Classes audiobooks below.
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Discrimination and Disparities
- By: Thomas Sowell
- Narrator: Robertson Dean
- Length: 5 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
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4.48(3201 ratings)
4.48(3201 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.95 USDAn empirical examination of how economic and other disparities arise Economic and other outcomes differ vastly among individuals, groups, and nations. Many explanations have been offered for the differences. Some believe that those with lessAn empirical examination of how economic and other disparities arise
Economic and other outcomes differ vastly among individuals, groups, and nations. Many explanations have been offered for the differences. Some believe that those with less fortunate outcomes are victims of genetics. Others believe that those who are less fortunate are victims of the more fortunate.
Discrimination and Disparities gathers a wide array of empirical evidence to challenge the idea that different economic outcomes can be explained by any one factor, whether it be discrimination, exploitation, or genetics.
It is readable enough for people with no prior knowledge of economics. Yet the empirical evidence with which it backs up its analysis spans the globe and challenges beliefs across the ideological spectrum.
The point of Discrimination and Disparities is not to recommend some particular policy “fix” at the end but to clarify why so many policy fixes have turned out to be counterproductive–and to expose some seemingly invincible fallacies behind many counterproductive policies.
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Bending the Arc
- By: Keeda J. Haynes
- Narrator: Keeda J. Haynes
- Length: 8 hours 56 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 16, 2021
- Language: English
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4.47(63 ratings)
4.47(63 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0024.99 USDA searing expose of the profound failures in our justice system, told by a woman who has journeyed from wrongfully accused prisoner to acclaimed public defenderKeeda Haynes was a Girl Scout and a churchgoer, but after college graduation, she wasA searing expose of the profound failures in our justice system, told by a woman who has journeyed from wrongfully accused prisoner to acclaimed public defender
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Keeda Haynes was a Girl Scout and a churchgoer, but after college graduation, she was imprisoned for a crime she didn’t commit. Her boyfriend had asked her to sign for some packages–packages she did not know were filled with marijuana. As a young Black woman falsely accused, prosecuted, and ultimately imprisoned, Haynes suffered the abuses of our racist and sexist justice system. But rather than give in to despair, she decided to fight for change. After her release, she attended law school at night, became a public defender, and ultimately staged a highly publicized campaign for Congress. At every turn of her unlikely story, she gives unique insights into the inequities built into our institutions. In the end, despite the injustice she endured, she emerges convinced that ours can become a true second-chance culture. -
Break ‘Em Up
- By: Zephyr Teachout
- Narrator: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 9 hours 42 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: July 28, 2020
- Language: English
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4.36(408 ratings)
4.36(408 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0026.99 USD“[We need] a grassroots, bottom-up movement that understands the challenge in front of us, and then organizes against monopoly power in communities across this country. This book is a blueprint for that organizing. In these pages, you will“[We need] a grassroots, bottom-up movement that understands the challenge in front of us, and then organizes against monopoly power in communities across this country. This book is a blueprint for that organizing. In these pages, you will learn how monopolies and oligopolies have taken over almost every aspect of American life, and you will also learn about what can be done to stop that trend before it is too late.”
–From the foreword by Bernie Sanders.A passionate attack on the monopolies that are throttling American democracy.
Every facet of American life is being overtaken by big platform monopolists like Facebook, Google, and Bayer (which has merged with the former agricultural giant Monsanto), resulting in a greater concentration of wealth and power than we’ve seen since the Gilded Age. They are evolving into political entities that often have more influence than the actual government, bending state and federal legislatures to their will and even creating arbitration courts that circumvent the US justice system. How can we recover our freedom from these giants? Anti-corruption scholar and activist Zephyr Teachout has the answer: Break ‘Em Up.This audiobook is a clarion call for liberals and leftists looking to find a common cause. Teachout makes a compelling case that monopolies are the root cause of many of the issues that today’s progressives care about; they drive economic inequality, harm the planet, limit the political power of average citizens, and historically-disenfranchised groups bear the brunt of their shameful and irresponsible business practices. In order to build a better future, we must eradicate monopolies from the private sector and create new safeguards that prevent new ones from seizing power.
Through her expert analysis of monopolies in several sectors and their impact on courts, journalism, inequality, and politics, Teachout offers a concrete path toward thwarting these enemies of working Americans and reclaiming our democracy before it’s too late.
A Macmillan Audio production from All Points Books
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Rise of the Warrior Cop
- By: Radley Balko
- Narrator: Greg Baglia
- Length: 17 hours 30 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: June 01, 2021
- Language: English
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4.31(2778 ratings)
4.31(2778 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0038.99 USDThis groundbreaking history of how American police forces have been militarized is now revised and updated. Newly added material brings the story through 2020, including analysis of the Ferguson protests, the Obama and Trump administrations, and theThis groundbreaking history of how American police forces have been militarized is now revised and updated. Newly added material brings the story through 2020, including analysis of the Ferguson protests, the Obama and Trump administrations, and the George Floyd protests.
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The last days of colonialism taught America’s revolutionaries that soldiers in the streets bring conflict and tyranny. As a result, our country has generally worked to keep the military out of law enforcement. But over the last two centuries, America’s cops have increasingly come to resemble ground troops. The consequences have been dire: the home is no longer a place of sanctuary, the Fourth Amendment has been gutted, and police today have been conditioned to see the citizens they serve as enemies.
In Rise of the Warrior Cop, Balko shows how politicians’ ill-considered policies and relentless declarations of war against vague enemies like crime, drugs, and terror have blurred the distinction between cop and soldier. His fascinating, frightening narrative that spans from America’s earliest days through today shows how a creeping battlefield mentality has isolated and alienated American police officers and put them on a collision course with the values of a free society. -
Three Girls from Bronzeville
- By: Dawn Turner
- Narrator: Janina Edwards
- Length: 11 hours 46 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2021
- Language: English
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4.3(2758 ratings)
4.3(2758 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USDA New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book A Best Book of 2021 by BuzzFeed and Real Simple An “unmissable” (Vogue), “exceptional” (The Washington Post), and “evocative” (Chicago Tribune) memoir about threeA New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book
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A Best Book of 2021 by BuzzFeed and Real Simple
An “unmissable” (Vogue), “exceptional” (The Washington Post), and “evocative” (Chicago Tribune) memoir about three Black girls from the storied Bronzeville section of Chicago that offers a penetrating exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the powerful forces at work that allow some to flourish…and others to falter.
They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong as they come; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded–fervently and intensely in that unique way of little girls–as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South.
These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, in the warm glow of the recent civil rights movement. It has offered them a promise, albeit nascent and fragile, that they will have more opportunities, rights, and freedoms than any generation of Black Americans in history. Their working-class, striving parents are eager for them to realize this hard-fought potential. But the girls have much more immediate concerns: hiding under the dining room table and eavesdropping on grown folks’ business; collecting secret treasures; and daydreaming about their futures–Dawn and Debra, doctors, Kim a teacher. For a brief, wondrous moment the girls are all giggles and dreams and promises of “friends forever.” And then fate intervenes, first slowly and then dramatically, sending them careening in wildly different directions. There’s heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why?
In the vein of The Other Wes Moore and The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Three Girls from Bronzeville is a “deeply personal” (Real Simple) memoir that chronicles Dawn’s attempt to find answers. It’s at once a celebration of sisterhood and friendship, a testimony to the unique struggles of Black women, and a tour-de-force about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption. -
How We Can Win
- By: Kimberly Jones
- Narrator: Kimberly Jones
- Length: 6 hours 9 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: January 18, 2022
- Language: English
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4.3(315 ratings)
4.3(315 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USDA breakdown of the economic and social injustices facing Black people and other marginalized citizens inspired by political activist Kimberly Jones’ viral video, “How Can We Win.” “So if I played four hundred rounds ofA breakdown of the economic and social injustices facing Black people and other marginalized citizens inspired by political activist Kimberly Jones’ viral video, “How Can We Win.”
“So if I played four hundred rounds of Monopoly with you and I had to play and give you every dime that I made, and then for fifty years, every time that I played, if you didn’t like what I did, you got to burn it like they did in Tulsa and like they did in Rosewood, how can you win? How can you win?”
When Kimberly Jones declared these words amid the protests spurred by the murder of George Floyd, she gave a history lesson that in just over six minutes captured the economic struggles of Black people in America. Within days the video had been viewed by millions of people around the world, riveted by Jones’s damning–and stunningly succinct–analysis of the enduring disparities Black Americans face.
In How We Can Win, Jones delves into the impacts of systemic racism and reveals how her formative years in Chicago gave birth to a lifelong devotion to justice. Here, in a vital expansion of her declaration, she calls for Reconstruction 2.0, a multilayered plan to reclaim economic and social restitutions–those restitutions promised with emancipation but blocked, again and again, for more than 150 years. And, most of all, Jones delivers strategies for how we can effect change as citizens and allies while nurturing ourselves–the most valuable asset we have–in the fight against a system that is still rigged.
A Macmillan Audio production from Henry Holt and Company
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On the Line
- By: Daisy Pitkin
- Length: 9 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: March 29, 2022
- Language: English
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4.28(141 ratings)
4.28(141 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0027.99 USD“Riveting and intimate. It is hard to imagine a more humanizing portrait of the American labor movement. A remarkable debut.” –Francisco Cantu, New York Times bestselling author of The Line Becomes a River On the Line takes“Riveting and intimate. It is hard to imagine a more humanizing portrait of the American labor movement. A remarkable debut.”... Read more
–Francisco Cantu, New York Times bestselling author of The Line Becomes a River
On the Line takes readers inside a bold five-year campaign to bring a union to the dangerous industrial laundry factories of Phoenix, Arizona. Workers here wash hospital, hotel, and restaurant linens and face harsh conditions: routine exposure to biohazardous waste, injuries from surgical tools left in hospital sheets, and burns from overheated machinery. Broken U.S. labor law makes it nearly impossible for them to fight back.
The drive to unionize is led by two women: author Daisy Pitkin, a young labor organizer, who addresses this exhilarating narrative to Alma Gomez Garcia, a second-shift immigrant worker, who risks her livelihood to join the struggle and convinces her fellow workers to take a stand.
Forged in the flames of a grueling legal battle and the company’s vicious anti-union crusade, including the retaliatory firing of Alma, the relationships that grow between Daisy, Alma, and the rest of the factory workers show how a union, at its best, can reach beyond the workplace and form a solidarity so powerful that it can transcend friendship and transform communities. But when political strife divides the union, and her friendship with Alma along with it, Daisy must reflect on her own position of privilege and the complicated nature of union hierarchies and top-down organizing.
Daisy Pitkin looks back to uncover the forgotten roles immigrant women have played in the U.S. labor movement and points the way forward. As we experience one of the largest labor upheavals in decades, On the Line shows how difficult it is to bring about social change, and why we can’t afford to stop trying. -
Fight Like Hell
- By: Kim Kelly
- Narrator: Em Grosland
- Length: 12 hours 11 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4.25(598 ratings)
4.25(598 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USDA 2022 New Yorker Best Book of the Year A 2022 Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A 2022 BuzzFeed Book You’ll Love A 2022 LitHub Favorite Book of the Year “Kelly unearths the stories of the people-farm laborers, domestic workers,A 2022 New Yorker Best Book of the Year
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A 2022 Esquire Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
A 2022 BuzzFeed Book You’ll Love
A 2022 LitHub Favorite Book of the Year
“Kelly unearths the stories of the people-farm laborers, domestic workers, factory employees–behind some of the labor movement’s biggest successes.” —The New York Times
A revelatory, inclusive history of the American labor movement, from independent journalist and Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly.
Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the working-class heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.
The names and faces of countless silenced, misrepresented, or forgotten leaders have been erased by time as a privileged few decide which stories get cut from the final copy: those of women, people of color, LGBTQIA people, disabled people, sex workers, prisoners, and the poor. In this assiduously researched work of journalism, Teen Vogue columnist and independent labor reporter Kim Kelly excavates that history and shows how the rights the American worker has today–the forty-hour workweek, workplace-safety standards, restrictions on child labor, protection from harassment and discrimination on the job–were earned with literal blood, sweat, and tears.
Fight Like Hell comes at a time of economic reckoning in America. From Amazon’s warehouses to Starbucks cafes, Appalachian coal mines to the sex workers of Portland’s Stripper Strike, interest in organized labor is at a fever pitch not seen since the early 1960s.
Inspirational, intersectional, and full of crucial lessons from the past, Fight Like Hell shows what is possible when the working class demands the dignity it has always deserved. -
The Viral Underclass
- By: Steven W. Thrasher
- Narrator: Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl
- Length: 9 hours 26 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: August 02, 2022
- Language: English
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4.24(425 ratings)
4.24(425 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0026.99 USDThis program is read by the author with a foreword written and read by Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl.“An irresistibly readable and humane exploration of the barbarities of class…readers are gifted that most precious of things in these muddledThis program is read by the author with a foreword written and read by Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl.
“An irresistibly readable and humane exploration of the barbarities of class…readers are gifted that most precious of things in these muddled times: a clear lens through which to see the world.”
–Naomi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of This Changes Everything and The Shock Doctrine
From preeminent LGBTQ scholar, social critic, and journalist Steven W. Thrasher comes a powerful and crucial exploration of one of the most pressing issues of our times: how viruses expose the fault lines of society.Having spent a ground-breaking career studying the racialization, policing, and criminalization of HIV, Dr. Thrasher has come to understand a deeper truth at the heart of our society: that there are vast inequalities in who is able to survive viruses and that the ways in which viruses spread, kill, and take their toll are much more dependent on social structures than they are on biology alone.
Told through the heart-rending stories of friends, activists, and teachers navigating the novel coronavirus, HIV, and other viruses, Dr. Thrasher brings the listener with him as he delves into the viral underclass and lays bare its inner workings. In the tradition of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, The Viral Underclass helps us understand the world more deeply by showing the fraught relationship between privilege and survival.
A Macmillan Audio production from Celadon Books.
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Good Economics for Hard Times
- By: Abhijit V. Banerjee
- Narrator: James Lurie
- Length: 14 hours 45 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 12, 2019
- Language: English
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4.24(9053 ratings)
4.24(9053 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0027.98 USDThe winners of the Nobel Prize show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day. Figuring out how to deal with today’s critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge ofThe winners of the Nobel Prize show how economics, when done right, can help us solve the thorniest social and political problems of our day.
Figuring out how to deal with today’s critical economic problems is perhaps the great challenge of our time. Much greater than space travel or perhaps even the next revolutionary medical breakthrough, what is at stake is the whole idea of the good life as we have known it.
Immigration and inequality, globalization and technological disruption, slowing growth and accelerating climate change–these are sources of great anxiety across the world, from New Delhi and Dakar to Paris and Washington, DC. The resources to address these challenges are there–what we lack are ideas that will help us jump the wall of disagreement and distrust that divides us. If we succeed, history will remember our era with gratitude; if we fail, the potential losses are incalculable.
In this revolutionary book, renowned MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo take on this challenge, building on cutting-edge research in economics explained with lucidity and grace. Original, provocative, and urgent, Good Economics for Hard Times makes a persuasive case for an intelligent interventionism and a society built on compassion and respect. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that shines a light to help us appreciate and understand our precariously balanced world.
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Halfway Home
- By: Reuben Jonathan Miller
- Narrator: Cary Hite
- Length: 8 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: February 02, 2021
- Language: English
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4.22(715 ratings)
4.22(715 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0024.99 USDA “persuasive and essential” (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller’s “stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation’s carceral system”A “persuasive and essential” (Matthew Desmond) work that will forever change how we look at life after prison in America through Miller’s “stunning, and deeply painful reckoning with our nation’s carceral system” (Heather Ann Thompson).
Each year, more than half a million Americans are released from prison and join a population of twenty million people who live with a felony record.
Reuben Miller, a chaplain at the Cook County Jail in Chicago and now a sociologist studying mass incarceration, spent years alongside prisoners, ex-prisoners, their friends, and their families to understand the lifelong burden that even a single arrest can entail. What his work revealed is a simple, if overlooked truth: life after incarceration is its own form of prison. The idea that one can serve their debt and return to life as a full-fledge member of society is one of America’s most nefarious myths. Recently released individuals are faced with jobs that are off-limits, apartments that cannot be occupied and votes that cannot be cast.
As The Color of Law exposed about our understanding of housing segregation, Halfway Home shows that the American justice system was not created to rehabilitate. Parole is structured to keep classes of Americans impoverished, unstable, and disenfranchised long after they’ve paid their debt to society.
Informed by Miller’s experience as the son and brother of incarcerated men, captures the stories of the men, women, and communities fighting against a system that is designed for them to fail. It is a poignant and eye-opening call to arms that reveals how laws, rules, and regulations extract a tangible cost not only from those working to rebuild their lives, but also our democracy. As Miller searchingly explores, America must acknowledge and value the lives of its formerly imprisoned citizens.
PEN America 2022 John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist
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Winner of the 2022 PROSE Award for Excellence in Social Sciences
2022 PROSE Awards Finalist
2022 PROSE Awards Category Winner for Cultural Anthropology and Sociology
An NPR Selected 2021 Books We Love
As heard on NPR’s Fresh Air -
Money
- By: Jacob Goldstein
- Narrator: Jacob Goldstein
- Length: 5 hours 37 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: September 08, 2020
- Language: English
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4.2(3473 ratings)
4.2(3473 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0025.98 USDThe co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity’s changing needs.Money only works because we all... Read moreThe co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity’s changing needs.Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century.At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country’s economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin.One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn’t) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad.Lively, accessible, and full of interesting details (like the 43-pound copper coins that 17th-century Swedes carried strapped to their backs), Money is the story of the choices that gave us money as we know it today. -
How the Other Half Eats
- By: Priya Fielding-Singh
- Narrator: Priya Fielding-Singh
- Length: 11 hours 35 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: November 16, 2021
- Language: English
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4.18(962 ratings)
4.18(962 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0027.99 USDA “deeply empathetic” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and “eye-opening” (Kirkus Review ) look at dietary differences along class lines, revealing that lack of access to healthy food is far from the primary driver ofA “deeply empathetic” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) and “eye-opening” (Kirkus Review ) look at dietary differences along class lines, revealing that lack of access to healthy food is far from the primary driver of nutritional inequality in America.
Inequality in America manifests in many ways, but perhaps nowhere more than in how we eat. From her years of field research, sociologist and ethnographer Priya Fielding-Singh brings us into the kitchens of dozens of families from varied educational, economic, and ethnoracial backgrounds to explore how–and why–we eat the way we do. We get to know four families intimately: the Bakers, a Black family living below the federal poverty line; the Williamses, a working-class white family just above it; the Ortegas, a middle-class Latinx family; and the Cains, an affluent white family.
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Whether it’s worrying about how far pantry provisions can stretch or whether there’s enough time to get dinner on the table before soccer practice, all families have unique experiences that reveal their particular dietary constraints and challenges. By diving into the nuances of these families’ lives, Fielding-Singh lays bare the limits of efforts narrowly focused on improving families’ food access. Instead, she reveals how being rich or poor in America impacts something even more fundamental than the food families can afford: these experiences impact the very meaning of food itself.
Packed with lyrical storytelling and groundbreaking research, as well as Fielding-Singh’s personal experiences with food as a biracial, South Asian American woman, How the Other Half Eats illuminates exactly how inequality starts on the dinner plate. Once you’ve taken a seat at tables across America, you’ll never think about class, food, and public health the same way again. -
Talking to My Daughter About the Economy
- By: Yanis Varoufakis
- Narrator: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 4 hours 51 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: May 08, 2018
- Language: English
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4.12(6423 ratings)
4.12(6423 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USDIn Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, activist Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister and the author of the international bestseller Adults in the Room, pens a series of letters to his young daughter, educating her about theIn Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, activist Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister and the author of the international bestseller Adults in the Room, pens a series of letters to his young daughter, educating her about the business, politics, and corruption of world economics.
Yanis Varoufakis has appeared before heads of nations, assemblies of experts, and countless students around the world. Now, he faces his most important–and difficult–audience yet. Using clear language and vivid examples, Varoufakis offers a series of letters to his young daughter about the economy: how it operates, where it came from, how it benefits some while impoverishing others. Taking bankers and politicians to task, he explains the historical origins of inequality among and within nations, questions the pervasive notion that everything has its price, and shows why economic instability is a chronic risk. Finally, he discusses the inability of market-driven policies to address the rapidly declining health of the planet his daughter’s generation stands to inherit.
Throughout this audiobook, Varoufakis wears his expertise lightly. He writes as a parent whose aim is to instruct his daughter on the fundamental questions of our age–and through that knowledge, to equip her against the failures and obfuscations of our current system and point the way toward a more democratic alternative.
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Elite Capture
- By: Olufemi O. Taiwo
- Narrator: Jaime Lincoln Smth
- Length: 3 hours 17 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2022
- Language: English
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4.09(837 ratings)
4.09(837 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0014.95 USDA powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to serve their own ends “Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom. But theA powerful indictment of the ways elites have co-opted radical critiques of racial capitalism to serve their own ends
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom. But the “identity politics” so compulsively referenced bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, “identity politics” is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.
But the trouble, Olufemi O. Taiwo deftly argues, is not with “identity politics” itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition, Taiwo identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and become the victim of elite capture–deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.
Taiwo’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.
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Dopesick
- By: Beth Macy
- Narrator: Beth Macy
- Length: 10 hours 16 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: August 07, 2018
- Language: English
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4.09(27197 ratings)
4.09(27197 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0025.98 USDA Hulu limited series inspired by the New York Times bestselling book by Beth Macy.Journalist Beth Macy’s definitive account of America’s opioid epidemic “masterfully interlaces stories of communities in crisis with dark historiesA Hulu limited series inspired by the New York Times bestselling book by Beth Macy.
Journalist Beth Macy’s definitive account of America’s opioid epidemic “masterfully interlaces stories of communities in crisis with dark histories of corporate greed and regulatory indifference” (New York Times) — from the boardroom to the courtroom and into the living rooms of Americans.
Beginning with a single dealer who lands in a small Virginia town and sets about turning high school football stars into heroin overdose statistics, Macy sets out to answer a grieving mother’s question-why her only son died-and comes away with a gripping, unputdownable story of greed and need. From the introduction of OxyContin in 1996, Macy investigates the powerful forces that led America’s doctors and patients to embrace a medical culture where overtreatment with painkillers became the norm. In some of the same communities featured in her bestselling book Factory Man, the unemployed use painkillers both to numb the pain of joblessness and pay their bills, while privileged teens trade pills in cul-de-sacs, and even high school standouts fall prey to prostitution, jail, and death.
Through unsparing, compelling, and unforgettably humane portraits of families and first responders determined to ameliorate this epidemic, each facet of the crisis comes into focus. In these politically fragmented times, Beth Macy shows that one thing uniting Americans across geographic, partisan, and class lines is opioid drug abuse. But even in the midst of twin crises in drug abuse and healthcare, Macy finds reason to hope and ample signs of the spirit and tenacity that are helping the countless ordinary people ensnared by addiction build a better future for themselves, their families, and their communities.
“An impressive feat of journalism, monumental in scope and urgent in its implications.” — Jennifer Latson, The Boston Globe ... Read more -
Blood and Money
- By: David McNally
- Narrator: Tim Getman
- Length: 11 hours 59 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2020
- Language: English
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4.08(86 ratings)
4.08(86 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0022.95 USDBlood and Money tells the story of money as a history of violence and human bondage. In most accounts of the origins of money we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In thisBlood and Money tells the story of money as a history of violence and human bondage.
In most accounts of the origins of money we are offered pleasant tales in which it arises to the mutual benefit of all parties as a result of barter. In this groundbreaking study David McNally reveals the true story of money’s origins and development as one of violence and human bondage. Money’s emergence and its transformation are shown to be intimately connected to the buying and selling of slaves and the waging of war. Blood and Money demonstrates the ways that money has “internalized” its violent origins, making clear that it has become a concentrated force of social power and domination. Where Adam Smith observed that monetary wealth represents “command over labor,” this paradigm shifting book amends his view to define money as comprising the command over persons and their bodies.
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Sunbelt Blues
- By: Andrew Ross
- Narrator: Ramon de Ocampo
- Length: 8 hours 13 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: October 26, 2021
- Language: English
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4.04(182 ratings)
4.04(182 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USD“De Ocampo’s performance is admirable. It is well paced, and he employs voices and strategic pauses to good effect. In sum, both the writing and narration are first-class.” – AudioFile Magazine An eye-opening investigation of“De Ocampo’s performance is admirable. It is well paced, and he employs voices and strategic pauses to good effect. In sum, both the writing and narration are first-class.” – AudioFile Magazine
An eye-opening investigation of America’s rural and suburban housing crisis, told through a searing portrait of precarious living in Disney World’s backyard.
Today, a minimum-wage earner can afford a one-bedroom apartment in only 145 out of 3,143 counties in America. One of the very worst places in the United States to look for affordable housing is Osceola County, Florida.
Once the main approach to Disney World, where vacationers found lodging on their way to the Magic Kingdom, the fifteen-mile Route 192 corridor in Osceola has become a site of shocking contrasts. At one end, global investors snatch up foreclosed properties and park their capital in extravagant vacation homes for affluent visitors, eliminating the county’s affordable housing in the process. At the other, underpaid tourist industry workers, displaced families, and disabled and elderly people subsisting on government checks cram themselves into dilapidated, roach-infested motels, or move into tent camps in the woods.
Through visceral, frontline reporting from the motels and encampments dotting central Florida, renowned social analyst Andrew Ross exposes the overlooked housing crisis sweeping America’s suburbs and rural areas, where residents suffer ongoing trauma, poverty, and nihilism. As millions of renters face down evictions and foreclosures in the midst of the COVID-19 recession, Andrew Ross reveals how ineffective government planning, property market speculation, and poverty wages have combined to create this catastrophe. Urgent and incisive, Sunbelt Blues offers original insight into what is quickly becoming a full-blown national emergency.
A Macmillan Audio production from Metropolitan Books.
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Ride the Tiger
- By: Julius Evola
- Narrator: Andy Rick
- Length: 10 hours 43 minutes
- Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
- Publish date: January 01, 2020
- Language: English
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4.04(1092 ratings)
4.04(1092 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USDJulius Evola’s final major work, which examines the prototype of the human being who can give absolute meaning to his or her life in a world of dissolution* Presents a powerful criticism of the idols, structures, theories, and illusions of ourJulius Evola’s final major work, which examines the prototype of the human being who can give absolute meaning to his or her life in a world of dissolution
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* Presents a powerful criticism of the idols, structures, theories, and illusions of our modern age
* Reveals how to transform destructive processes into inner liberation
The organizations and institutions that, in a traditional civilization and society, would have allowed an individual to realize himself completely, to defend the principal values he recognizes as his own, and to structure his life in a clear and unambiguous way, no longer exist in the contemporary world. Everything that has come to predominate in the modern world is the direct antithesis of the world of Tradition, in which a society is ruled by principles that transcend the merely human and transitory.
Ride the Tiger presents an implacable criticism of the idols, structures, theories, and illusions of our dissolute age examined in the light of the inner teachings of indestructible Tradition. Evola identifies the type of human capable of “riding the tiger,” who may transform destructive processes into inner liberation. He offers hope for those who wish to reembrace Traditionalism. -
Davos Man
- By: Peter S. Goodman
- Narrator: Michael David Axtell
- Length: 13 hours 34 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: January 18, 2022
- Language: English
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3.94(620 ratings)
3.94(620 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0031.99 USDA San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller * An NPR Best Book of the Year The New York Times‘s Global Economics Correspondent masterfully reveals how billionaires’ systematic plunder of the world–brazenly accelerated during theA San Francisco Chronicle Bestseller * An NPR Best Book of the Year
The New York Times‘s Global Economics Correspondent masterfully reveals how billionaires’ systematic plunder of the world–brazenly accelerated during the pandemic–has transformed 21st-century life and dangerously destabilized democracy.
“Davos Man will be read a hundred years from now as a warning.” –Evan Osnos
“Excellent. A powerful, fiery book, and it could well be an essential one.” –NPR.org
The history of the last half century in America, Europe, and other major economies is in large part the story of wealth flowing upward. The most affluent people emerged from capitalism’s triumph in the Cold War to loot the peace, depriving governments of the resources needed to serve their people, and leaving them tragically unprepared for the worst pandemic in a century.
Drawing on decades of experience covering the global economy, award-winning journalist Peter S. Goodman profiles five representative “Davos Men”–members of the billionaire class–chronicling how their shocking exploitation of the global pandemic has hastened a fifty-year trend of wealth centralization. Alongside this reporting, Goodman delivers textured portraits of those caught in Davos Man’s wake, including a former steelworker in the American Midwest, a Bangladeshi migrant in Qatar, a Seattle doctor on the front lines of the fight against COVID, blue-collar workers in the tenements of Buenos Aires, an African immigrant in Sweden, a textile manufacturer in Italy, an Amazon warehouse employee in New York City, and more.
Goodman’s revelatory expose of the global billionaire class reveals their hidden impact on nearly every aspect of modern society: widening wealth inequality, the rise of anti-democratic nationalism, the shrinking opportunity to earn a livable wage, the vulnerabilities of our health-care systems, access to affordable housing, unequal taxation, and even the quality of the shirt on your back. Meticulously reported yet compulsively readable, Davos Man is an essential read for anyone concerned about economic justice, the capacity of societies to grapple with their greatest challenges, and the sanctity of representative government.
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The Riches of This Land
- By: Jim Tankersley
- Narrator: Jim Tankersley
- Length: 9 hours 14 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: August 11, 2020
- Language: English
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3.88(177 ratings)
3.88(177 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0025.98 USDA vivid character-driven narrative, fused with important new economic and political reporting and research, that busts the myths about middle class decline and points the way to its revival.For over a decade, Jim Tankersley has been on a journey toA vivid character-driven narrative, fused with important new economic and political reporting and research, that busts the myths about middle class decline and points the way to its revival.
For over a decade, Jim Tankersley has been on a journey to understand what the hell happened to the world’s greatest middle-class success story — the post-World-War-II boom that faded into decades of stagnation and frustration for American workers. In The Riches of This Land, Tankersley fuses the story of forgotten Americans– struggling women and men who he met on his journey into the travails of the middle class– with important new economic and political research, providing fresh understanding how to create a more widespread prosperity. He begins by unraveling the real mystery of the American economy since the 1970s – not where did the jobs go, but why haven’t new and better ones been created to replace them.His analysis begins with the revelation that women and minorities played a far more crucial role in building the post-war middle class than today’s politicians typically acknowledge, and policies that have done nothing to address the structural shifts of the American economy have enabled a privileged few to capture nearly all the benefits of America’s growing prosperity. Meanwhile, the “angry white men of Ohio” have been sold by Trump and his ilk a theory of the economy that is dangerously backward, one that pits them against immigrants, minorities, and women who should be their allies.At the culmination of his journey, Tankersley lays out specific policy prescriptions and social undertakings that can begin moving the needle in the effort to make new and better jobs appear. By fostering an economy that opens new pathways for all workers to reach their full potential — men and women, immigrant or native-born, regardless of race — America can once again restore the upward flow of talent that can power growth and prosperity.... Read more -
Power, Inc.
- By: David Rothkopf
- Narrator: William Hughes
- Length: 16 hours 33 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2012
- Language: English
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3.88(176 ratings)
3.88(176 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0029.95 USDThe world’s largest company, Wal-Mart Stores, has revenues higher than the gross domestic product of all but twenty-five of the world’s countries. Its employees outnumber the populations of almost one hundred nations. The world’sThe world’s largest company, Wal-Mart Stores, has revenues higher than the gross domestic product of all but twenty-five of the world’s countries. Its employees outnumber the populations of almost one hundred nations. The world’s largest asset manager, a New York company called BlackRock, controls assets greater than the national reserves of any country on the planet. A private philanthropy, the Gates Foundation, spends as much worldwide on health care as the World Health Organization. The rise of private power may be the most important and least understood trend of our time. Power, Inc. provides a fresh, timely look at how we have reached a point where thousands of companies have greater power than all but a handful of states. Beginning with the story of an inquisitive Swedish goat wandering off from his master and inadvertently triggering the birth of the oldest company still in existence, Power, Inc. follows the rise and fall of kings and empires, the making of great fortunes, and the chaos of bloody revolutions. A fast-paced tale in which champions of liberty are revealed to be paid pamphleteers of moneyed interests and greedy scoundrels trigger changes that have lifted billions from deprivation, Power, Inc. traces the bruising jockeying for influence right up to today’s financial crises, growing inequality, broken international system, and battles over the proper role of government and markets. Rothkopf argues that these recent developments, coupled with the rise of powers like China and India, may not lead to the triumph of American capitalism that was celebrated just a few years ago. Instead, he considers an unexpected scenario, a contest among competing capitalisms offering different visions for how the world should work, a global ideological struggle in which European and Asian models may have important advantages. An important look at the power struggle that is defining our times, Power, Inc. also offers critical insights into how to succeed in the years ahead.
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Only the Rich Can Play
- By: David Wessel
- Narrator: Fred Berman
- Length: 8 hours 51 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: October 05, 2021
- Language: English
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3.76(59 ratings)
3.76(59 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0024.99 USDIn a Winners Take All meets This Town narrative, a New York Times bestselling author tells the story of the creation of a massive tax break, in which political and economic elites attend to the care and feeding of the super-rich, and inequality... Read moreIn a Winners Take All meets This Town narrative, a New York Times bestselling author tells the story of the creation of a massive tax break, in which political and economic elites attend to the care and feeding of the super-rich, and inequality compounds.
David Wessel’s incredible tale of how Washington works-and why the rich keep getting richer-starts when a Silicon Valley entrepreneur develops an idea intended as a way to help poor people that will save rich people money on their taxes. He organizes and pays for an effective lobbying effort that pushes his idea into law with little scrutiny or fine-tuning by congressional or Treasury tax experts-and few safeguards against abuse. With an unbeatable pair of high-profile sponsors, bumper-sticker simplicity and deft political marketing, the Opportunity Zone became an unnoticed part of the 2017 Trump tax bill.
The gold rush followed immediately thereafter.
David Wessel follows the money to see who profited from this plan that was supposed to spur development of blighted areas and help people out of poverty: the Las Vegas strip, the Portland (Oregon) Ritz-Carlton, the Mall of America, and self-storage facilities-lucrative areas where the one percent can park money profitably and avoid capital gains taxes. And the best part: unlike other provisions for eliminating capital gains taxes (inheritance, for example) you don’t have to die to take advantage of this one.
Wessel provides vivid portraits of the proselytizers, political influencers, motivational speakers, consultants, real estate dealmakers, and individual money-seekers looking to take advantage of this twenty-first century bonanza. He looks at places for which Opportunity Zones were supposedly designed (Baltimore, for example) and how little money they’ve drawn. And he finds a couple of places (Erie, PA) where zones are actually doing what they were supposed to, a lesson on how a better designed program might have helped more left-behind places. But what Wessel reveals is the gritty reality: The dark underbelly of a system tilted in favor of the few, with the many left out in the cold
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The Forgotten
- By: Ben Bradlee Jr.
- Narrator: Kiff VandenHeuvel
- Length: 7 hours 16 minutes
- Publisher: Hachette Audio
- Publish date: October 02, 2018
- Language: English
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3.69(186 ratings)
3.69(186 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0025.98 USDThe people of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania voted Democratic for decades, until Donald Trump flipped it in 2016. What happened? Named one of the “juiciest political books to come in 2018” by Entertainment Weekly. In The Forgotten, BenThe people of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania voted Democratic for decades, until Donald Trump flipped it in 2016. What happened?... Read moreNamed one of the “juiciest political books to come in 2018” by Entertainment Weekly.
In The Forgotten, Ben Bradlee Jr. reports on how voters in Luzerne County, a pivotal county in a crucial swing state, came to feel like strangers in their own land – marginalized by flat or falling wages, rapid demographic change, and a liberal culture that mocks their faith and patriotism.
Fundamentally rural and struggling with changing demographics and limited opportunity, Luzerne County can be seen as a microcosm of the nation. In The Forgotten, Trump voters speak for themselves, explaining how they felt others were ‘cutting in line’ and that the federal government was taking too much money from the employed and giving it to the idle. The loss of breadwinner status, and more importantly, the loss of dignity, primed them for a candidate like Donald Trump.
The political facts of a divided America are stark, but the stories of the men, women and families in The Forgotten offer a kaleidoscopic and fascinating portrait of the complex on-the-ground political reality of America today.
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Down the Up Escalator
- By: Barbara Garson
- Narrator: Jeanine Kane
- Length: 8 hours 8 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2013
- Language: English
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3.63(122 ratings)
3.63(122 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0025.95 USDOne of our most incisive and committed journalists–author of the classic All the Livelong Day–shows us the real human cost of our economic follies. The Great Recession has thrown huge economic chal+!lenges at almost all Americans saveOne of our most incisive and committed journalists–author of the classic All the Livelong Day–shows us the real human cost of our economic follies.
The Great Recession has thrown huge economic chal+!lenges at almost all Americans save the superaffluent few, and we are only now beginning to reckon up the human toll it is taking. Down the Up Escalator is an urgent dispatch from the front lines of our vast collective struggle to keep our heads above water and maybe even–someday–get ahead. Garson has interviewed an economically and geographically wide variety of Americans to show the pain+!ful waste in all this loss and insecurity, and describe how individuals are coping. Her broader historical focus, though, is on the causes and consequences of the long stag+!nation of wages and how it has resulted in an increasingly desperate reliance on credit and a series of ever-larger bubbles–stocks, technology, real estate. This is no way to run an economy, or a democracy.
From the members of the Pink Slip Club in New York, to a California home health-care aide on the eve of eviction, to a subprime mortgage broker who still thinks it could have worked, Down the Up Escalator presents a sobering picture of what happens to a society when it becomes economically organized to benefit only the very rich and the quick-buck speculators. But it also demonstrates the wit and resilience of ordinary Americans–and why they deserve so much bet+!ter than the hand they’ve been dealt.
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Ok Boomer, Let’s Talk
- By: Jill Filipovic
- Narrator: Emily Tremaine
- Length: 9 hours 8 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2020
- Language: English
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3.61(260 ratings)
3.61(260 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USD“Particularly relevant in an election year…This book is full of data–on the economy, technology, and more–that will help millennials articulate their generational rage and help boomers understand where they’re coming“Particularly relevant in an election year…This book is full of data–on the economy, technology, and more–that will help millennials articulate their generational rage and help boomers understand where they’re coming from.” —The Washington Post
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“Jill Filipovic cuts through the noise with characteristic clarity and nuance. Behind the meme is a thoughtfully reported book that greatly contributes to our understanding of generational change.” –Irin Carmon, coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Notorious RBG
Baby Boomers are the most prosperous generation in American history, but their kids are screwed. In this eye-opening book, journalist Jill Filipovic breaks down the massive problems facing Millennials including climate, money, housing, and healthcare.
In Ok Boomer, Let’s Talk, journalist (and Millenial) Jill Filipovic tells the definitive story of her generation. Talking to gig workers, economists, policy makers, and dozens of struggling Millennials drowning in debt on a planet quite literally in flames, Filipovic paints a shocking and nuanced portrait of a generation being left behind:
-Millennials are the most educated generation in American history–and also the most broke.
-Millennials hold just 3 percent of American wealth. When they were the same age, Boomers held 21 percent.
-The average older Millennial has $15,000 in student loan debt. The average Boomer at the same age? Just $2,300 in today’s dollars.
-Millennials are paying almost 40 percent more for their first homes than Boomers did.
-American families spend twice as much on healthcare now than they did when Boomers were young parents.
Filipovic shows that Millennials are not the avocado-toast-eating snowflakes of Boomer outrage fantasies. But they are the first American generation that will do worse than their parents. “OK, Boomer” isn’t just a sarcastic dismissal–it’s a recognition that Millennials are in crisis, and that Boomer voters, bankers, and policy makers are responsible. Filipovic goes beyond the meme, upending dated assumptions with revelatory data and revealing portraits of young people delaying adulthood to pay down debt, obsessed with “wellness” because they can’t afford real healthcare, and struggling to #hustle in the precarious gig economy.
Ok Boomer, Let’s Talk is at once an explainer and an extended olive branch that will finally allow these two generations to truly understand each other. -
Gigged
- By: Sarah Kessler
- Narrator: Hillary Huber
- Length: 7 hours 15 minutes
- Publisher: Macmillan Audio
- Publish date: June 12, 2018
- Language: English
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3.61(476 ratings)
3.61(476 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0019.99 USD“With deep reporting and graceful storytelling, Sarah Kessler reveals the ground truth of a key part of the American workforce. Her analysis is both astute and nuanced, making GIGGED essential reading for anyone interested in the future of“With deep reporting and graceful storytelling, Sarah Kessler reveals the ground truth of a key part of the American workforce. Her analysis is both astute and nuanced, making GIGGED essential reading for anyone interested in the future of work.” –Daniel H. Pink, author of WHEN and DRIVE
The full-time job is disappearing–is landing the right gig the new American Dream?
One in three American workers is now a freelancer. This “gig economy”–one that provides neither the guarantee of steady hours nor benefits–emerged out of the digital era and has revolutionized the way we do business. High-profile tech start-ups such as Uber and Airbnb are constantly making headlines for the disruption they cause to the industries they overturn. But what are the effects of this disruption, from Wall Street down to Main Street? What challenges do employees and job-seekers face at every level of professional experience?
In the tradition of the great business narratives of our time, Gigged offers deeply-sourced, up-close-and-personal accounts of our new economy. From the computer programmer who chooses exactly which hours he works each week, to the Uber driver who starts a union, to the charity worker who believes freelance gigs might just transform a declining rural town, journalist Sarah Kessler follows a wide range of individuals from across the country to provide a nuanced look at how the gig economy is playing out in real-time.
Kessler wades through the hype and hyperbole to tackle the big questions: What does the future of work look like? Will the millennial generation do as well as their parents? How can we all find meaningful, well-paid work?
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The Left Behind
- By: Robert Wuthnow
- Narrator: Grover Gardner
- Length: 5 hours 26 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2018
- Language: English
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3.55(411 ratings)
3.55(411 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0016.95 USDHow a fraying social fabric is fueling the outrage of rural Americans What is fueling rural America’s outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And, beyond economic and demographicHow a fraying social fabric is fueling the outrage of rural Americans
What is fueling rural America’s outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And, beyond economic and demographic decline, is there a more nuanced explanation for the growing rural-urban divide? Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into America’s small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order–the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities–underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans’ anger, their culture must be explored more fully.
We hear from farmers who want government out of their business, factory workers who believe in working hard to support their families, town managers who find the federal government unresponsive to their communities’ needs, and clergy who say the moral climate is being undermined. Wuthnow argues that rural America’s fury stems less from specific economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening to the social fabric of small towns. Rural dwellers are especially troubled by Washington’s seeming lack of empathy for such small-town norms as personal responsibility, frugality, cooperation, and common sense. Wuthnow also shows that while these communities may not be as discriminatory as critics claim, racism and misogyny remain embedded in rural patterns of life.
Moving beyond simplistic depictions of the residents of America’s heartland, The Left Behind offers a clearer picture of how this important population will influence the nation’s political future.
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Promised Land
- By: David Stebenne
- Narrator: Jacques Roy
- Length: 10 hours 46 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2020
- Language: English
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3.5(28 ratings)
3.5(28 ratings)Regular Price:Try for $0.0023.99 USDA groundbreaking work of history about the American middle class–its rise, why it faltered, and who truly benefited from its dominance.In Promised Land, David Stebenne “invites us to remember those decades in which both the middle classA groundbreaking work of history about the American middle class–its rise, why it faltered, and who truly benefited from its dominance.
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In Promised Land, David Stebenne “invites us to remember those decades in which both the middle class and the Democratic Party were ascendant” (The Wall Street Journal). The story begins with the pervasive income and wealth inequality of the pre-New Deal period. What followed began a great leveling. World War II brought transformative elements that also helped expand the middle class. For decades, economic policies and cultural practices strengthened the trend, and by the 1960s the middle class dictated American tastes from books to TV shows to housing to food, creating a powerful political constituency with shared interests and ideals.
The disruptive events of 1968, however, signaled the end of this expansion. The cultural clashes and political protests of that era turned a spotlight on how the policies and practices of the middle-class era had privileged white men over women, people of color, and other marginalized groups, as well as military force over diplomacy and economic growth over environmental protection. These conflicts, along with shifts in policy and economic stagnation, started shrinking that vast middle class and challenging its values, trends that continue to the present day.
Now, as the so-called “end of the middle class” dominates the news cycle and politicians talk endlessly about how to revive it, Stebenne’s vivid history of a social revolution that produced a new and influential way of life reveals the fascinating story of how it was achieved and the considerable costs incurred along the way. “Well-researched, evenhanded…this concise, lucid account offers a solid overview of mid-20th-century social history” (Publishers Weekly) and shines more than a little light on our possible future.
Cliff Weitzman
Cliff Weitzman is a dyslexia advocate and the CEO and founder of Speechify, the #1 text-to-speech app in the world, totaling over 100,000 5-star reviews and ranking first place in the App Store for the News & Magazines category. In 2017, Weitzman was named to the Forbes 30 under 30 list for his work making the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Cliff Weitzman has been featured in EdSurge, Inc., PC Mag, Entrepreneur, Mashable, among other leading outlets.
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