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 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.

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 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.

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.

War on the Middle Class

Author: Lou Dobbs
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101218754
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
Lou Dobbs's bestselling exposé of the silent assault on the living standards of ordinary Americans Millions of TV viewers have known Lou Dobbs for years as the Walter Cronkite of economics coverage, and now the anchor has become the preeminent champion of the common man and the good of the national interest, who tells uncomfortable truths in a voice that can't be ignored. In this incendiary book, he presents a frontline report on the betrayal of America's middle class by interests that range from rapacious corporations to an out-of-touch political elite. The result is not only lost jobs but also dysfunctional schools and unaffordable health care. But War on the Middle Class also outlines a bold program for change. As essential as it is infuriating, this book furnishes the talking points for the national debate on income and class.

Plutocrats

Author: Chrystia Freeland
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101595949
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
A Financial Times Best Book of the Year Shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize There has always been some gap between rich and poor in this country, but recently what it means to be rich has changed dramatically. Forget the 1 percent—Plutocrats proves that it is the wealthiest 0.1 percent who are outpacing the rest of us at breakneck speed. Most of these new fortunes are not inherited, amassed instead by perceptive businesspeople who see themselves as deserving victors in a cutthroat international competition. With empathy and intelligence, Plutocrats reveals the consequences of concentrating the world’s wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Propelled by fascinating original interviews with the plutocrats themselves, Plutocrats is a tour de force of social and economic history, the definitive examination of inequality in our time.