Sociology Memoirs

Un ensayo muy bien documentado sobre una realidad oscura de Galicia.

Told with equal parts raw honesty and unbridled compassion, All Day recounts a year in Liza Jessie Peterson's classroom at Island Academy, the high school for inmates detained at New York City's Rikers Island. A poet and an actress who had done occasional workshops at the correctional facility, Peterson was ill prepared for a full-time stint teaching in the GED program for the incarcerated youths.

Acclaimed essayist Mark Edmundson reflects on his own rite of passage as a high school football player to get to larger truths about the ways America's Game shapes its men. Football teaches young men self-discipline and teamwork. But football celebrates violence. Football is a showcase for athletic beauty and physical excellence. But football damages young bodies and minds, sometimes permanently. Football inspires confidence and direction. But football instills cockiness, a false sense of superiority.

As a retired brain surgeon, Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. And Finally explores what happens when someone who has spent a lifetime on the frontline of life and death finds himself contemplating what might be his own death sentence. As he navigates the bewildering transition from doctor to patient, he is haunted by past failures and projects yet to be completed, and frustrated by the inconveniences of illness and old age.

You're going about your daily routine when you suddenly feel an odd squirming in your chest. You quickly realize that it is your heart, flopping around like a fish out of water. What do you do? You probably panic! Maybe you also experience dizziness, nausea, or shortness of breath, or maybe you have no other symptoms at all. But it's still very scary because...it's your heart!

Some say that the first hint that Bill Bryson was not of Planet Earth came when his mother sent him to school in lime-green Capri pants. Others think it all started with his discovery, at the age of six, of a woollen jersey of rare fineness. Across the moth-holed chest was a golden thunderbolt. It may have looked like an old college football sweater, but young Bryson knew better.

The Black River flows from Missouri into Arkansas, east of Branson and west of the Bootheel. It meanders where the foothills of the Ozarks begin to rise out of the Mississippi plain. The area was sparsely populated when E. R. Coleman was a young man. Like the population they served, businesses were modest, mostly small, and scattered. Arkansas was still the Bear State; slogans boasting that it was - or predicting that it would become - the "Land of Opportunity" were yet to be conceived.

Cuando Helena Maleno llegó a Marruecos en 2002 con su hijo, dos maletas y un proyecto laboral de tres meses no podía imaginar hasta qué punto aquel país y la lucha por los derechos de las poblaciones migrantes que lo atravesaban transformarían su vida para siempre. Ya instalada en Tánger de forma definitiva, Helena se adentró en los asentamientos provisionales de los bosques que rodean Ceuta y Melilla y empezó a denunciar sin descanso las violaciones de derechos de aquellos que buscan cruzar, por tierra o por mar, una frontera que les permita alcanzar Europa.

Grim Reaper sits on the heart surgeon's shoulder. A slip of the hand and life ebbs away. The balance between life and death is so delicate, and the heart surgeon walks that rope between the two. In the operating room, there is no time for doubt. It is flesh, blood, rib retractors and pumping the vital organ with your bare hand to squeeze the life back into it. An off day can have dire consequences - this job has a steep learning curve, and the cost is measured in human life. Cardiac surgery is not for the faint of heart.

Whit Fraser delivers a smart, touching and astute living history of five decades that transformed the North, a span he witnessed first as a longtime CBC reporter and then through his friendships and his work with Dene and Inuit activists and leaders. Whit had a front-row seat at the MacKenzie Valley Pipeline inquiry, the constitutional conferences and the land-claims negotiations that successfully reshaped the North. His vivid portraits of groundbreakers bring home their truly historic achievements, but they also give us a privileged glimpse of who they are, and who Whit Fraser is.

Dr Jalees Ansari, a doctor from Malegaon involved in 80 blasts, including some on railway tracks, was supposed to be a quiet, peace-loving medical professional. Fahmida Ansari, a housewife and mother of two from the Jogeshwari slums of Northwest Mumbai, physically planted the bombs herself in a bus and taxis and returned home as if nothing had happened. What drove them to such violent designs? What were their compulsions?

Told with humor and flair, this is the autobiography of one transsexual's wild ride from boyhood as Alfred Brevard ("Buddy") Crenshaw in rural Tennessee to voluptuous female entertainer in Hollywood. Aleshia Brevard, as she is now known, underwent transitional surgery in Los Angeles in 1962, one of the first such operations in the United States. (The famous sexual surgery pioneer Harry Benjamin himself broke the news to Brevard's parents.)

How I Became a Human Being is Mark O'Brien’s account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955 he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O'Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, and his adult life as an independent student and writer. Despite his physical limitations, O'Brien crafts a narrative that is as rich and vivid as the life he led.

At once disturbing and fascinating, Women Who Love Men Who Kill is a compelling psychological study of prison passion in the new millennium. Through extensive research and interviews with women who seek relationships with convicted killers through snail and email, and through conversations with psychiatrists, social workers, and prison officials, Isenberg sheds light on why these women are drawn into relationships with incarcerated outcasts.

Random House presents the audiobook edition of The Secret Footballer: What Goes on Tour by The Secret Footballer. Since his first book was published in 2012, The Secret Footballer has been able to take the listener behind the scenes of footballers' lives like no other player has been or will ever be able to do. Anonymity has been a potent weapon in revealing the real world of football stars, and five years on, he has now penned the work that all his fellow professionals have been urging him to do from the start: The Secret Footballer: What Goes on Tour.

In 1973, when Wenguang Huang was eight, his grandmother became obsessed with her own death. Fearing cremation, she appealed to her family to promise to bury her after she'd died. This was in Xi'an, a city in central China, at a time when a national ban on all traditional Chinese practices, including burials, was strictly enforced. But his grandmother was persistent, and two years later, Huang's father built her a coffin. Over the next 15 years, the whole family was consumed with planning Grandma's burial.

Coca, farlopa, perico, merca, Fariña. Nunca Galicia comercializó un producto con tanto éxito. Aunque ahora parezca una pesadilla lejana, en los años 90 el 80 por ciento de la cocaína desembarcaba en Europa por las costas gallegas. A través de testimonios directos de capos, pilotos de planeadoras, arrepentidos, jueces, policías, periodistas y madres de toxicómanos, Nacho Carretero retrata con minuciosidad este paisaje criminal. Fariña incluye, además, un repaso inédito por los clanes que siguen operando hoy en día.

Throughout her career, Carole Pope has blazed a trail for the diva and anti-diva in all of us, and here she offers a no-holds-barred look at her adventures in the music scene—on the concert stage, in the recording studio, and in the bedroom. Known for ushering Canada from the punk movement of the 1970s to the new wave sound of the 1980s with Rough Trade, she candidly shares her thoughts on AIDS, sexuality and sexual politics, and the new breed of music divas that dominates the charts today.

All hail Queen Elizabeth! She's a “queen" but not a monarch who's spent her life fighting to create a more equal society. Now one of the most recognizable women in politics, Warren took a winding road to become the badass senator from Massachusetts - the first woman senator ever elected from the state. Day-to-day struggle to make ends meet? Check. Single motherhood? Check. Law degree? Check. Tenured Harvard Law professor? You bet!

Sarah Forbes was in graduate school when she stumbled upon a museum dedicated to...sex. The anthropology student hesitated when her boyfriend suggested that she apply for a job, but apply she did, and it wasn't long before a part-time position at New York's Museum of Sex led to a gig as the museum's curator. That was over 12 years ago. Now Sarah - a married mother of two - proudly sports her title as Curator of Sex.