Necessary Trouble

Author: Sarah Jaffe
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN: 1568585373
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
Necessary Trouble is the definitive book on the movements that are poised to permanently remake American politics. We are witnessing a moment of unprecedented political turmoil and social activism. Over the last few years, we've seen the growth of the Tea Party, a twenty-first-century black freedom struggle with BlackLivesMatter, Occupy Wall Street, and the grassroots networks supporting presidential candidates in defiance of the traditional party elites. Sarah Jaffe leads readers into the heart of these movements, explaining what has made ordinary Americans become activists. As Jaffe argues, the financial crisis in 2008 was the spark, the moment that crystallized that something was wrong. For years, Jaffe crisscrossed the country, asking people what they were angry about, and what they were doing to take power back. She attended a people's assembly in a church gymnasium in Ferguson, Missouri; walked a picket line at an Atlanta Burger King; rode a bus from New York to Ohio with student organizers; and went door-to-door in Queens days after Hurricane Sandy. From the successful fight for a 15 minimum wage in Seattle and New York to the halting of Shell's Arctic drilling program, Americans are discovering the effectiveness of making good, necessary trouble. Regardless of political alignment, they are boldly challenging who wields power in this country.

Down the Up Escalator

Author: Barbara Garson
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0307475980
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
One 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 challenges at almost all Americans save the super-affluent 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 painful 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 stagnation 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.

In These Times

Author: Jenny Uglow
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466828226
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Book Description
A beautifully observed history of the British home front during the Napoleonic Wars by a celebrated historian We know the thrilling, terrible stories of the battles of the Napoleonic Wars—but what of those left behind? The people on a Norfolk farm, in a Yorkshire mill, a Welsh iron foundry, an Irish village, a London bank, a Scottish mountain? The aristocrats and paupers, old and young, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers—how did the war touch their lives? Jenny Uglow, the prizewinning author of The Lunar Men and Nature's Engraver, follows the gripping back-and-forth of the first global war but turns the news upside down, seeing how it reached the people. Illustrated by the satires of Gillray and Rowlandson and the paintings of Turner and Constable, and combining the familiar voices of Austen, Wordsworth, Scott, and Byron with others lost in the crowd, In These Times delves into the archives to tell the moving story of how people lived and loved and sang and wrote, struggling through hard times and opening new horizons that would change their country for a century.

Refinery Town

Author: Steve Early
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807094277
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
The People vs. Big Oil—how a working-class company town harnessed the power of local politics to reclaim their community With a foreword by Bernie Sanders Home to one of the largest oil refineries in the state, Richmond, California, was once a typical company town, dominated by Chevron. This largely nonwhite, working-class city of 100,000 suffered from poverty, pollution, and poorly funded public services. It had one of the highest homicide rates per capita in the country and a jobless rate twice the national average. But when veteran labor reporter Steve Early moved from New England to Richmond in 2012, he discovered a city struggling to remake itself. In Refinery Town, Early chronicles the 15 years of successful community organizing that raised the local minimum wage, defeated a casino development project, challenged home foreclosures and evictions, and sought fair taxation of Big Oil. A short list of Richmond’s activist residents helps to propel this compelling chronicle: • 94 year old Betty Reid Soskin, the country’s oldest full-time national park ranger and witness to Richmond’s complex history • Gayle McLaughlin, the Green Party mayor who challenged Chevron and won • Police Chief Chris Magnus, who brought community policing to Richmond and is now one of America’s leading public safety reformers Part urban history, part call to action, Refinery Town shows how concerned citizens can harness the power of local politics to reclaim their community and make municipal government a source of much-needed policy innovation. “Refinery Town provides an inside look at how one American city has made radical and progressive change seem not only possible but sensible.”—David Helvarg, The Progressive

In These Times the Home Is a Tired Place

Author: Jessica Hollander
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
ISBN: 1574415239
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description
When an unwed pregnant woman is pressured to get married by her boyfriend, parents, and the entire culture around her, she sees a feverish intensity emanating from the path to domesticity, a “paved path shaded by thick-trunked trees, lined with trim grass and manicured mansions, where miniature houses play mailboxes and animals play lawn ornaments and people play happiness.” Jessica Hollander’s debut collection exposes a culture that glorifies and disparages traditional domesticity, where people’s confusion, apathy, and anxiety about the institutions of marriage and family often drive them to self-destruction. The world in Hollander’s nineteen stories appears at once familiar and vividly unsettling, with undercurrents of anger and violence attached to everyday objects and spaces: a pink room is “a woman exploded,” home smells “of laundered clothes and gas from the grill,” and the sun “is so bright the sky fills with over-exposure, wilting the corners to orange, to red, to black.” Here people adopt extreme and erratic behavior: hack at furniture, have affairs with high school students, fantasize about sex with “monsters,” laden flower bouquets with messages of hate; but these self-destructive acts and fantasies feel strangely like a form of growth or enlightenment, or at least the only form that’s available to them. As characters become girlfriends, wives, husbands, and mothers, they struggle within their roles, either fighting to escape them or struggling to “play” them correctly, but always concerned with the loss of individuality, of being swallowed up by society’s expectations and becoming “a mother” or “a wife” instead of remaining themselves. “Hollander’s debut collection effectively fuses the common (childhood adventures, unhappy adults) with the bizarre (a grandmother obsessed with buttons, a gym full of people refusing to wear clothes) to create an intriguing volume. . . . The details in these stories ring true and are recognizable amid the insanity. A potent work from a strong new literary voice.”—Publishers Weekly starred review

Better Times Than These

Author: Winston Groom
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 0671522663
Category : Vietnam War, 1961-1975
Languages : en
Pages : 467

Book Description
Frank Holden and other soldiers from varying backgrounds find their lives radically changed in Vietnam by a war that they find difficult to understand or support.

The Death and Life of American Labor

Author: Stanley Aronowitz
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784783005
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
The decline of the American union movement—and how it can revive, by a leading analyst of labor Union membership in the United States has fallen below 11 percent, the lowest rate since before the New Deal. Labor activist and scholar of the American labor movement Stanley Aronowitz argues that the movement as we have known it for the last 100 years is effectively dead. And he explains how this death has been a long time coming—the organizing and political principles adopted by US unions at mid-century have taken a terrible toll. In the 1950s, Aronowitz was a factory metalworker. In the ’50s and ’60s, he directed organizing with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers. In 1963, he coordinated the labor participation for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Ten years later, the publication of his book False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness was a landmark in the study of the US working-class and workers’ movements. Aronowitz draws on this long personal history, reflecting on his continuing involvement in labor organizing, with groups such as the Professional Staff Congress of the City University. He brings a historian’s understanding of American workers’ struggles in taking the long view of the labor movement. Then, in a survey of current initiatives, strikes, organizations, and allies, Aronowitz analyzes the possibilities of labor’s rebirth, and sets out a program for a new, broad, radical workers’ movement.

Only One Thing Can Save Us

Author: Thomas Geoghegan
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1595588361
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Is labor's day over or is this the big moment? Acclaimed author Geoghegan asserts that only a new kind of labor movement can help the country switch course toward a future that is fair and prosperous for all Americans.

We Were Made for These Times

Author: Kaira Jewel Lingo
Publisher: Parallax Press
ISBN: 1952692202
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 150

Book Description
In ten concise chapters, you'll learn powerful ways to meet life's challenges with wisdom, resilience, and ease. We all go through times when it feels like the ground is being pulled out from under us. What we relied on as steady and solid may change or even appear to vanish. In this era of global disruption, threats to our individual, social, and planetary safety abound, and at times life can feel overwhelming. Not only are loss and separation painful, but even positive changes can cause great stress. Yet life is full of change: birth, death, marriage, divorce; a new relationship; losing or starting a job; beginning a new phase in life or ending one. Change is stressful, even when it is much desired or anticipated—the unknown can feel scary and threatening. In We Were Made for These Times, the extraordinary mindfulness teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo imparts accessible advice on navigating difficult times of transition, drawing on Buddhist teachings on impermanence to help you establish equanimity and resilience. Each chapter in We Were Made for These Times holds an essential teaching and meditation, unfolding a step-by-step process to nurture deeper freedom and stability in daily life. Time-honored teachings will help you develop ease, presence, and self-compassion, supporting you to release the fear and doubt that hold you back.

Made for These Times

Author: Justin Zoradi
Publisher: Zondervan
ISBN: 0310351103
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 224

Book Description
In fearful, uncertain times, how can we find significance in something greater than ourselves? Award-winning social entrepreneur Justin Zoradi was once haunted by this question as a young person daunted by the world's needs, yet wanting to make a difference. But when some friends from across the world invited him to join them, Justin said yes - and felt a small spark ignite within. That spark led to the founding of These Numbers Have Faces, a social enterprise investing in the next generation of African leaders. Made For These Times is a field guide to help you find your own spark as you remember who you were made to be. Through 26 power-packed microchapters, you will learn how to bolster ambition with character, dig deep to find your grit, and rise up to the challenges of today. Along the way, Justin weaves together compelling narrative, historical anecdotes, practical tips, and a six-part road map to equip you to join God in the work he is already doing. The result is a hope-filled blueprint for fighting back against fear and building a life of purpose. A life of significance isn't about what you are doing, it's about who you are becoming. In these trying times, God is calling you to be brave. Made For These Times is a rallying declaration that we cannot rely on the heroes of the past to engage the challenges of today. It's your turn – let this book be the spark you’ve been waiting for.