Development Sociology

In 21st-century India, tradition is colliding with Western culture, a clash that touches the lives of everyday Indians from the wealthiest to the poorest. While ethnicity, class, and religion are influencing the nation's development, so too are pop culture and technology - an uneasy fusion whose impact is most evident in the institution of marriage. The Heart Is a Shifting Sea introduces three couples whose relationships illuminate these sweeping cultural shifts in dramatic ways.

When he became an undertaker, Rupert Callender undertook to deal with the dead for the sake of the living. This book is his brilliant, unforgettable story—the life and work of the world’s first punk undertaker—but it's also about ordinary, everyday humanity and our capacity to face death with courage and compassion, to say goodbye to the people we love in our own way.

Do you want to improve your leadership skills and learn how to bring out the best in your employees, co-workers, or students? Then The Art of Supportive Leadership can help you! Large and small companies of every kind (from well-established industrial corporations to sparkling new tech firms) are using this proven approach to leadership with great success. It has become equally indispensable to the non-profit organizations, schools, and military personnel who also use it.

In the fall of 1952, a courageous 18-year-old Roberta boarded a Greyhound bus in Missouri to start her new adventure to train as a nurse in Oklahoma. While in training, she falls in love with and marries a World War II soldier. The new couple moves to his cotton farm in rural Oklahoma and starts their life as a family. As the story develops, it proves how Roberta-Mama's early years in Missouri influenced her Oklahoma life and how it helped bond her family together.

When did “parenting” become a verb? Why is it so hard to parent, and so rife with the possibility of failure? Sitcom families of the past—the Cleavers, the Bradys, the Conners—didn’t seem to lose any sleep about their parenting methods. Today, parents are likely to be up late, doomscrolling on parenting websites. In Long Days, Short Years, Andrew Bomback—physician, writer, and father of three young children—looks at why it can be so much fun to be a parent but, at the same time, so frustrating and difficult to parent.

How do we make sense of our relationships - successes and failures, preferences and challenges, past and present? And after we make sense of them all, what do we do to increase the successes that we are striving to attain? Annette Kussin provides us with a guide to navigating this important aspect of our lives. In It’s Attachment! Kussin offers us a comprehensive overview of this dominant theory of human development and relationships in a way that gives us both understanding and practical ideas for constructive changes.

Heralded as the most significant technological innovation since the smartphone, virtual reality is poised to transform our very notions of life and humanity. Though this tech is still in its infancy, to those on the inside, it is the future. VR will change how we work, how we experience entertainment, how we feel pleasure and other emotions, how we see ourselves, and most importantly, how we relate to each other in the real world. And we will never be the same. Peter Rubin, senior culture editor for Wired and the industry's go-to authority on the subject, calls it an "intimacy engine".

It's time to invite death out of the closet! The impending or actual death of someone close to you can be devastating. It doesn't matter if you knew it was coming, or if it was a total shock-you'll never be the same. There is no right way to grieve, and no appropriate time frame. It's different for everyone. Author and therapist gone rogue, Becky Aud-Jennison, the creator of The Death Dialogues Project and podcast, has sewn together threads from people's shared personal stories and her own experiences.

¿Qué implica que dos personas hablen simultáneamente o se interrumpan con frecuencia? ¿De qué modo podemos expresarnos asertivamente o defendernos de las agresiones verbales? ¿Las formas comunicativas tecnológicas amplían las ventajas del hablar cara a cara? La conversación es algo extremadamente habitual en nuestras vidas: desde que abrimos los ojos hasta que nos entregamos al sueño, nuestro día a día está lleno de intercambios comunicativos que tejen nuestras relaciones y construyen nuestra imagen en los distintos grupos a los que pertenecemos.

Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.

This amusing and thought-provoking book contains a huge collection of marriage quotes from Ann Landers, Dr. Suess, Zig Ziglar, Jerry Seinfeld, Mark Twain, Oprah Winfrey, and many more. It is intended for anyone looking for laughs or words of wisdom regarding their engagement, wedding, anniversary, or divorce. Words from comedians, religious leaders, celebrities, politicians, and the Bible make up this diverse assortment of 519 memorable, bite-sized quotations about weddings, divorce, and happily ever after.

In its history since Independence, India has seen widely different economic experiments: from Jawharlal Nehru's pragmatism to the rigid state socialism of Indira Gandhi to the brisk liberalization of the 1990s. So which strategy best addresses India's, and by extension the world's, greatest moral challenge: lifting a great number of extremely poor people out of poverty? Bhagwati and Panagariya argue forcefully that only one strategy will help the poor to any significant effect: economic growth, led by markets overseen and encouraged by liberal state policies.

In the American ideal, family life is a sacred and private sphere, distinct from the outside world. But in our hypercompetitive times, Feeney shows, parents have become increasingly willing to let the inner life of the family be colonized by outside forces that promise better futures for their kids: prestigious preschools, "educational" technologies, youth sports leagues, a multitude of enrichment activities, and - most of all - college. A provocative, eye-opening book for any parent who suspects their kids' stuffed schedules are not serving their best interests....

By the end of World War I, the skyrocketing divorce rate in the United States had generated a deep-seated anxiety about marriage. This fear drove middle-class couples to seek advice, both professional and popular, in order to strengthen their relationships. In Making Marriage Work, historian Kristin Celello offers an insightful and wide-ranging account of marriage and divorce in America in the 20th century, focusing on the development of the idea of marriage as "work."

For a mother who’s accustomed to having been number one in her son’s life, the arrival of a girlfriend, fiancé, or wife can be a complicated, confusing, and emotionally challenging event. Likewise, coexisting harmoniously with the mother of her partner can be an overwhelming challenge for any woman. Sons, often caught in the middle, are sometimes understandably reluctant to take sides.

Football teams create playbooks, in which they draw up the plays they will use on the field. Playbooks are how teams work and why they win. This book is about a different kind of playbook: The one coaches, teams, universities, police, communities, the media, and fans seem to follow whenever a college football player is accused of sexual assault. It’s a deep dive into how different institutions - the NCAA, athletic departments, universities, the media - run the same plays over and over again when these stories break.

Every year, tens of thousands of children write to Highlights magazine, sharing their hopes and dreams, worries and concerns, as if they were writing to a trusted friend. From the beginning, the editors at Highlights have answered every child individually. Longtime editor in chief Christine French Cully has curated a collection of this remarkable correspondence (letters, emails, and poems) in Dear Highlights - revealing an intimate and inspiring 75-year conversation between America’s children and its leading children’s magazine.

Overwhelmed is a map of the stresses that have ripped our leisure to shreds, and a look at how to put the pieces back together. Schulte speaks to neuroscientists, sociologists, and hundreds of working parents to tease out the factors contributing to our collective sense of being overwhelmed, seeking insights, answers, and inspiration.

New York Times #1 best-selling authors Richard and Linda Eyre's new audiobook The Turning: Why the State of the Family Matters and What the World Can Do about It contends that the social and economic challenges faced not only in the United States, but throughout the world, are the direct result of an unprecedented and widespread turning away from family. The negative effects of this turning are apparent in the youth of the world today

The #MeToo movement has revealed sexual abuse and assault in every sphere of society, including the church. But victims are routinely ignored by fellow Christians who deny their accounts and fail to bring accountability to the perpetrators. All too often, churches have been complicit in protecting abusers, reinforcing patriarchal power dynamics, and creating cultures of secrecy, shame, and silence.