The Art of Being Middle Class

Author: Not Actual Size
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1780338430
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Book Description
Middle-class Brits are embarrassed, awkward, and charmingly insecure in their tastes. The Art of Being Middle-Class, based on stories from cult blog The Middle Class Handbook, is here to help. What are the essential topics to cover when talking about other couples? What do you do about the awkward bag on the seat moment? How do you subtly boast about your summer holiday destination? What does your cooker hood say about you? With tips on taste and etiquette, a conspiratorial cheer here and there, and a kick up the bum when necessary, this book sets out to help our marvellous British MCs be the best they can be. Praise for The Middle Class Handbook: "Indispensable... whether you're middle class or pretending not to be." GQ magazine. "Hilarious... we laughed our organic, brushed cotton socks off." Grazia. "The Middle Class Handbook skewers the middle classes, and then dissects them with ruthless comical accuracy." Esquire.

Represent

Author: Patricia A. Banks
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135177953
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Patricia A. Banks traverses the New York and Atlanta art worlds to uncover how black identities are cultivated through black art patronage. Drawing on over 100 in-depth interviews, observations at arts events, and photographs of art displayed in homes, Banks elaborates a racial identity theory of consumption that highlights how upper-middle class blacks forge black identities for themselves and their children through the consumption of black visual art. She not only challenges common assumptions about elite cultural participation, but also contributes to the heated debate about the significance of race for elite blacks, and illuminates recent art world developments. In doing so, Banks documents how the salience of race extends into the cultural life of even the most socioeconomically successful blacks.

The Art of Being Middle Class

Author: Not Actual Size
Publisher: Constable
ISBN: 1780338430
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 154

Art and the Victorian Middle Class

Author: Dianne Sachko Macleod
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780521550901
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 530

Book Description
A look at Victorian art from the perspective of the middle-class patron.

The Art of Being

Author: Erich Fromm
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 148040196X
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 222

Book Description
A guide to well-being from the renowned social psychologist and New York Times–bestselling author of The Art of Loving and Escape from Freedom. Though laptops, smartphones, and TVs have in many ways made life more convenient, they have also disconnected us from the real world. Days are spent going from screen to machine, machine to screen. In The Art of Being, renowned humanist philosopher and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm draws from sources as varied as Sigmund Freud, Buddha, and Karl Marx to find a new, centered path to self-knowledge and well-being. In order to truly live, Fromm argues, we must first understand our purpose, and the places where we lost it. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Erich Fromm including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

The Fashioning of Middle-class America

Author: Heidi L. Nichols
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 188

Book Description
Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art, a Philadelphia periodical published monthly from 1849 to 1852, appealed to a quickly growing American middle-class readership through its rich variety of contents. In addition to providing a general history of this relatively unexplored antebellum periodical, this book argues that Sartain's sought to shape a distinctly American and middle-class culture through its literary offerings, engravings, and columns on art, music, flowers, architecture, and fashion. It explores the periodical's religious and moral messages and their relationship to the development of American middle-class culture. It also highlights the role of women in its publication, as particularly evident in its co-editorship by Caroline Kirkland and its contributions by numerous women writers.

Money, Morals, & Manners

Author: Michèle Lamont
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226922596
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Drawing on remarkably frank, in-depth interviews with 160 successful men in the United States and France, Michèle Lamont provides a rare and revealing collective portrait of the upper-middle class—the managers, professionals, entrepreneurs, and experts at the center of power in society. Her book is a subtle, textured description of how these men define the values and attitudes they consider essential in separating themselves—and their class—from everyone else. Money, Morals, and Manners is an ambitious and sophisticated attempt to illuminate the nature of social class in modern society. For all those who downplay the importance of unequal social groups, it will be a revelation. "A powerful, cogent study that will provide an elevated basis for debates in the sociology of culture for years to come."—David Gartman, American Journal of Sociology "A major accomplishment! Combining cultural analysis and comparative approach with a splendid literary style, this book significantly broadens the understanding of stratification and inequality. . . . This book will provoke debate, inspire research, and serve as a model for many years to come."—R. Granfield, Choice "This is an exceptionally fine piece of work, a splendid example of the sociologist's craft."—Lewis Coser, Boston College

The Vanishing Middle Class, new epilogue

Author: Peter Temin
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262535297
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Why the United States has developed an economy divided between rich and poor and how racism helped bring this about. The United States is becoming a nation of rich and poor, with few families in the middle. In this book, MIT economist Peter Temin offers an illuminating way to look at the vanishing middle class. Temin argues that American history and politics, particularly slavery and its aftermath, play an important part in the widening gap between rich and poor. Temin employs a well-known, simple model of a dual economy to examine the dynamics of the rich/poor divide in America, and outlines ways to work toward greater equality so that America will no longer have one economy for the rich and one for the poor. Many poorer Americans live in conditions resembling those of a developing country—substandard education, dilapidated housing, and few stable employment opportunities. And although almost half of black Americans are poor, most poor people are not black. Conservative white politicians still appeal to the racism of poor white voters to get support for policies that harm low-income people as a whole, casting recipients of social programs as the Other—black, Latino, not like "us." Politicians also use mass incarceration as a tool to keep black and Latino Americans from participating fully in society. Money goes to a vast entrenched prison system rather than to education. In the dual justice system, the rich pay fines and the poor go to jail.

The Sinking Middle Class

Author: David Roediger
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1642597279
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Book Description
The Sinking Middle Class challenges the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled. Today’s highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class. The idea of the US as a middle class place required nurturing. Those doing that ideological work—from the business press, to pollsters, to intellectuals celebrating the results of free enterprise—gained little traction until the Depression and Cold War expanded the middle class brand. Much later, the book’s sections on liberal strategist Stanley Greenberg detail, “saving the middle class” entered presidential politics. Both parties soon defined the middle class to include over 90% of the population, precluding intelligent attention to the poor and the very rich. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling, and having to sell one’s personality at work that misery defines a middle class existence as much as fulfillment.

Dream Hoarders

Author: Richard V. Reeves
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815735499
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

Book Description
Dream Hoarders sparked a national conversation on the dangerous separation between the upper middle class and everyone else. Now in paperback and newly updated for the age of Trump, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves is continuing to challenge the class system in America. In America, everyone knows that the top 1 percent are the villains. The rest of us, the 99 percent—we are the good guys. Not so, argues Reeves. The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else. The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities. There is a glass floor created for each affluent child helped by his or her wealthy, stable family. That glass floor is a glass ceiling for another child. Throughout Dream Hoarders, Reeves explores the creation and perpetuation of opportunity hoarding, and what should be done to stop it, including controversial solutions such as ending legacy admissions to school. He offers specific steps toward reducing inequality and asks the upper middle class to pay for it. Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believes they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren't the 1 percent. The national obsession with the super rich allows the upper middle class to convince themselves that they are just like the rest of America. In Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that in many ways, they are worse, and that changes in policy and social conscience are the only way to fix the broken system.