Class Politics

Prize-winning poet and journalist Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity is an expose on how fracking shattered a rural Pennsylvania town, and how one lifelong resident brought the story into the national spotlight. This is an incredible true account of investigative journalism and a devastating indictment of energy politics in America.

We hear it all the time: “Sorry, it was just an accident.” And we’ve been deeply conditioned to just accept that explanation and move on. But as Jessie Singer argues convincingly: There are no such things as accidents. The vast majority of mishaps are not random but predictable and preventable. Singer uncovers just how the term accident itself protects those in power and leaves the most vulnerable in harm’s way, preventing investigations, pushing off debts, blaming the victims, diluting anger, and even sparking empathy for the perpetrators. to account.

Sixty percent of humanity - some four-point-three billion people - live in debilitating poverty. The standard development narrative suggests that alleviating poverty in poor countries is a matter of getting the internal policies right, combined with aid from rich countries. But anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that this approach misses the broader political forces at play. Global poverty - and the growing divide between "developing" and "developed" countries - has to do with how the global economy has been designed over the course of 500 years. Global inequality doesn't just exist; it has been created.

Ben orders daily room service while living in a five-star hotel. Olivia collects luxury-brand sneakers worn by celebrities. Dakota jets off to Rome when she needs to avoid drama at school. Welcome to the inner circle of New York’s richest families, where academia is an obsession, wealth does nothing to soothe status anxiety and parents will try just about anything to gain a competitive edge in the college admissions rat race.

Over the past decade, Americans watched in bafflement and rage as one institution after another - from Wall Street to Congress, the Catholic Church to corporate America, even Major League Baseball - imploded under the weight of corruption and incompetence. In the wake of the Fail Decade, Americans have historically low levels of trust in their institutions; the social contract between ordinary citizens and elites lies in tatters. How did we get here? Christopher Hayes offers a radically novel answer.

Capital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else.

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” This phrase, arguably Thomas Edison’s most famous quote, has been drilled into the minds of generations of Americans. A fairly straightforward iteration of the idea that innovation, discovery, and ingenuity are the result of drive and grit above all, it has also come to represent much darker myths: that hard work always leads to success and that achievement is the product of individuals and not communities.

We all know that the very rich have gotten a lot richer these past few decades while most Americans haven't. In fact, the exorbitantly paid have continued to thrive during the current economic crisis, even as the rest of Americans have fallen behind. Why do the "have-it-alls" have so much more? Lots of so-called experts claim to have solved this great mystery, but no one has really gotten to the bottom of it---until now.

This sensitive picture of the constant and circumspect struggle waged by peasants materially and ideologically against their oppressors shows that techniques of evasion and resistance may represent the most significant and effective means of class struggle in the long run.

This audiobook has a simple message for business leaders: your primary goal must be to serve and raise the poor. The poor need to enter the economic system to buy products, put money in banks, and move into the middle class. This is the only approach that can possibly save the American Dream. John Hope Bryant, successful self-made businessman and founder of the nonprofit Operation HOPE, says business and political leaders are ignoring the one force that could truly re-energize the stalled American economy: the poor.

As a clairaudient and angelic channel with over 30 years of experience, Linda West is a best-selling author and expert in the science of frequencies, manifesting, and the law of attraction. In her latest audiobook, she helps lovers of “the secret” to actually use the science of the law of attraction. It is full of real magic and real secrets, and you will get the practical and simple steps for using the law of attraction.

Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of great wealth has coincided with the fraying of social ties and the rise of inequality. How did all this come about? In Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explains the United States’ - and the world’s - great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras

This classic text addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. With the original 1987 publication of Ain’t No Makin’ It Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights housing project where we met the "Brothers" and the "Hallway Hangers". Their story of poverty, race, and defeatism moved listeners and challenged ethnic stereotypes.

Harry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was just beginning to feel the real hurt of the Great Depression but it had been living in Bacon County for years.” Yet what he conveys in this moving, brutal autobiography of his first six years of life is an elegiac sense of community and roots from a rural South that had rarely been represented in this way.

From the immense staff running a lavish Edwardian estate and the lonely maid-of-all-work cooking in a cramped middle-class house to the poor child doing chores in a slightly less poor household, servants were essential to the British way of life. They were hired not only for their skills but also to demonstrate the social standing of their employers - even as they were required to tread softly and blend into the background. More than simply the laboring class serving the upper crust - as popular culture would have us believe - they were a diverse group that shaped and witnessed major changes in the modern home, family, and social order.

In The Genetic Lottery, Harden introduces listeners to the latest genetic science, dismantling dangerous ideas about racial superiority and challenging us to grapple with what equality really means in a world where people are born different. Weaving together personal stories with scientific evidence, Harden shows why our refusal to recognize the power of DNA perpetuates the myth of meritocracy, and argues that we must acknowledge the role of genetic luck if we are ever to create a fair society.

Home Fires is the powerful saga of the Gordon family--real people, names unchanged. Spanning nearly five decades, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, their story has the scope, depth, wealth of incident, and emotional intensity of a great novel, and an abundance of humor, scandal, warmth, and trauma--the recognizable components of family life. This is also a masterful chronicle of the turbulent postwar era, illuminating the interplay between private life and profound cultural changes.

Beyond race or class, our lives are defined by a powerful, unspoken system of divisions. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson gives an astounding portrait of this hidden phenomenon. Linking America, India and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson reveals how our world has been shaped by caste - and how its rigid, arbitrary hierarchies still divide us today. With clear-sighted rigour, Wilkerson unearths the eight pillars that connect caste systems across civilisations and demonstrates how our own era of intensifying conflict and upheaval has arisen as a consequence of caste.

The Housekeeper's Tale reveals the personal sacrifices, bitter disputes and driving ambition that shaped these women's careers. Using secret diaries, unpublished letters, and the neglected service archives of our stately homes, Tessa Boase tells the extraordinary stories of five working women who ran some of Britain's most prominent households.

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. 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.