Posts filed under ‘cultural studies’
Charles Murray, Author of Coming Apart, Examines Demographic Shifts In This New Decade
Random House is currently giving away free versions of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart (Crown Forum, January 2013), which has been adopted for Common Reading at Stonehill College, Georgetown University and Florida State University. Please email rhacademic@randomhouse.com to request a complimentary copy. Coming Apart offers a thought-provoking commentary on class in contemporary America. Drawing on five decades of statistics and research, the book demonstrates that a new upper class, who live in hyper-wealthy zip codes called SuperZIPS, and a new lower class have diverged so far in core behaviors and values that they barely recognize their underlying American kinship—divergence that has nothing to do with income inequality and that has grown during good economic times and bad. In the below essay, Murray discusses trends that have occurred since 2010.
I began the discussion of the SuperZips with a promise to update the results in later editions of Coming Apart when the 2010 census results became available. Those results were published from December 2011 through the spring of 2012. This is the story they tell: (more…)
Eckerd College’s All Senior Reads: Boo, Frayn and Kidder
![978-0-385-72079-3[1]](http://makemerequiredreading.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/978-0-385-72079-31.jpg?w=97&h=150)
Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida has adopted Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, and Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains for use in their fall 2013 course, Quest for Meaning. The class, which is required for all seniors, will have approximately 400 students. The course will be divided into 20 sections.
Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers was the winner of the National Book Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen, winner of the 2000 Tony Award for Best Play, has been selected for Common Reading at 10 schools including The Ohio State University, Lehigh University, The University of Pennsylvania, and Cleveland State University.
Mountains Beyond Mountains, by Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy Kidder, is a New York Times and ALA Notable Book. It has been selected for Common Reading at over 100 institutions of higher learning including Boston College, Dartmouth College and University of Connecticut, as well as numerous high schools. (more…)
Now in Paperback, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
Watch Susan Cain’s 2012 TED Talk at www.thepowerofintroverts.com
Science and psychology is beginning to recognize how dramatically the introvert-extrovert spectrum shapes culture every bit as profoundly as gender or race. In a new paradigm-shifting book, Quiet, author Susan Cain highlights how misunderstood and and undervalued introverts often are, and gives introverts the tools to take full advantage of their personalities, while showing extroverts how they can learn from them. Passionately argued, superbly researched, and filled with stories of real people, Quiet shows why the world will depend on the strengths of introverts in the decades to come.
Quiet has been selected for common reading at Case Western Reserve University and is now being used in several courses at these following colleges:
Bucknell University; Colby-Sawyer College; Queens University Of Charlotte; University Of North Dakota Main Campus; University Of North Florida; and Wheaton College
Here is a Message from Susan Cain: (more…)
Generation Roe: A Perspective On The Current Pro-Choice Landscape And What The Future Holds
By Sarah Erdreich, author of Generation Roe (Seven Stories Press, March 2013). 
In the spring of 2008, I was living in Washington, D.C. and working as a freelance editor. I enjoyed the work, but missed having someone besides my dog to talk with during the day. So when I came across a job posting for part-time work on the National Abortion Federation’s hotline, I jumped at the opportunity.
I had never worked in the reproductive rights field, but I had always believed that women should have the right to choose: I grew up in a politically liberal town (Ann Arbor) in a politically liberal family, where I took lots of rights for granted.
And I thought that I knew plenty about abortion before I began working on the NAF hotline: the legendary court cases, the anti-choice violence, the reasons that a woman would make this choice. But working on the hotline was a real eye-opener. Every day, I heard from women of all racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds that were unable to access a legal medical service because of their income, their lack of reliable transportation, or the restrictions their state placed on abortion care. (more…)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: The Top Common Reading Book of 2011 and 2012
Winner of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, and Institute of Medicine’s Communication Award for Best Book
Winner of the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Nonfiction
Winner of the Wellcome Trust Book Prize
Named by more than 60 critics as one of the best books of 2010, including: Best Book of the Year at: O, The Oprah Magazine, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Bookmarks Magazine, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly, East Bay Express, and Kansas City Star, A Discover Magazine 2010 Must Read, National Public Radio, Best of the Bestsellers
In 1951, an African American woman named Henrietta Lacks, stricken with cervical cancer, became an involuntary donor of cells from her cancerous tumor, which were propagated by scientist George Otto Gey to create an immortal cell line for medical research. These cells are now known worldwide as HeLa. In The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, award-winning science writer Rebecca Skloot brilliantly weaves together the Lacks’s story–past and present–with the story of the birth of bioethics, the story of HeLa cells, and the dark history of experimentation on African Americans. Important, powerful, and compassionate, this is a remarkable work of science and social journalism. (more…)
Two Colleges Choose Behind the Beautiful Forevers for Fall courses
The University of Arkansas’s Department of Journalism and Vassar College’s Sociology Department have chosen Behind the Beautiful Forevers for their fall courses.
From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.
In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.
Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.” (more…)
Jay-Z now a Course Taught at Georgetown: “Sociology of Hip-Hop: Jay-Z”
This fall, Georgetown University has announced that noted educator, Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, will be teaching a course revolving around hip hop mogul Jay Z and his book Decoded. For the millions who know him as the greatest rapper alive and an unparalleled cultural and business icon, Decoded is the story of the legendary Jay-Z, told through lyrics, images, and a powerful and surprising personal narrative. This is an intimate, first-person portrait of the life and art of Jay-Z, organized around a “decoding” of his most famous and provocative lyrics.
Prof. Dyson describes the course as follows: “We look at his incredible body of work, we look at his own understanding of his work, we look at others who reflect upon him, and then we ask the students to engage in critical analysis of Jay-Z himself.” For more information on the course, see video at: http://rapfix.mtv.com/2011/10/10/michael-eric-dyson-on-jay-z-georgetown-university-course/
“Compelling. . . . Part autobiography, part lavishly illustrated commentary on the author’s own work, Decoded gives the reader a harrowing portrait of the rough worlds Jay-Z navigated in his youth, while at the same time deconstructing his lyrics. . . . [P]rovocative, evocative. . . .” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times (more…)
Raritan Valley Community College’s English Dept. Assigns The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates
Two boys named Wes Moore were born in the same neighborhood of the same American city only a year apart. One grew up to be a Rhodes Scholar, army officer, White House Fellow, and a top young business leader—the other is serving a life sentence in prison. Through an unlikely friendship, the two Wes’s discovered all of the similarities in their stories, and also the dramatic points of inflection—involving incidents of sudden violence, luck, uninformed choices, and powerful mentors—where their stories fatefully diverged. Here is their dramatic twinned story, set against the larger story of the persistent challenges— and new possibilities—facing young men in America.
“Moving and inspiring, The Other Wes Moore is a story for our times.”—Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here (more…)
A Nuanced Narrative: SOMALIS IN MAINE
SOMALIS IN MAINE
Below is a note from, Kimberly A. Huisman, one of the co-editors of the new book Somalis in Maine.
Somalis are among those refugees who have witnessed many horrors and suffered great losses. Despite their relatively small numbers as refugees and immigrants, Somalis have attracted media attention nearly everywhere the global diaspora has taken them. Many of these media stories about Somalia are replete with images of starving women and children, the violence of the civil war, the lawlessness of piracy off the Somali coast, and alleged links to al-Qaeda. The media reports about Somali immigrants to North America have centered on social problems involving race, religion, and economic tensions in cities, schools, and work settings. Lewiston, Maine, for example, was a site of national and international media attention in 2002 when the mayor of Lewiston published a letter in the local newspaper asking Somalis to please stop moving to Maine. These powerful and monolithic portrayals of Somalis—as either victims or social problems—have left little room in our public imagination for more nuanced narratives about the lives and experiences of Somali immigrants.
University of California, Santa Barbara Picks the Acclaimed Book Apollo’s Angels
Finalist, 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
(winner to be announced March 10th, 2011)
Named one of “The 10 Best Books of 2010” by the editors of the New York Times Book Review
“It has never been done before, what Jennifer Homans has done in Apollo’s Angels. She has written the only truly definitive history of the most impossibly fantastic art form, ballet…Homans accomplishment is akin to setting the most delicate and beautiful of all the imperial Faberge eggs into a fissure high on Mount Rushmore and tracking its unlikely survival…Inspired…The story of Balanchine has been told before, and at greater lengths, but never better…An eloquent and lasting elegy to an unlasting art.”—Cover Review, The New York Times Book Review
University of California, Santa Barbara selects Apollo’s Angels for its History of Modern Dance course this winter. (more…)
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