Sociology Memoirs

In 2003, fresh out of NYU, Daniel Genis was working in publishing as his writer father had always expected. But he was also hiding a serious heroin addiction that led him into debt and burglary. After he was arrested for robbing people at knifepoint in 2003, Daniel Genis was nicknamed the "apologetic bandit" in the press, given his habit of apologizing to his victims as he took their cash. He was sentenced to 12 years (10 with good behavior).

It takes courage to love the things of this world when all of them, without fail, are fleeting. Yet when everything you have been and done and meant to the world is being prised from your grasp, human connections are the vital medicine. It is other people who make the difference. Rachel Clarke grew up spellbound by her father's stories of practising medicine. Then, as a doctor herself, one who specialised in palliative medicine, she found herself contemplating all her training had taught her in the face of her own beloved father's mortality.

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?

Into the maelstrom of unprecedented contemporary debates about immigrants in the United States, this perfectly timed book gives us a portrait of what the new immigrant experience in America is really like. Written as a "guide" for the newly arrived, and providing "practical information and advice", Roya Hakakian, an immigrant herself, reveals what those who settle here love about the country, what they miss about their homes, the cruelty of some Americans, and the unceasing generosity of others.

It wasn’t surprising when the first abandoned bicycles were found along the dirt roads and farmland just across the border from Tijuana, but before long they were arriving in droves. The bikes went from curiosity, to nuisance, to phenomenon. But until they caught the eye of journalist Kimball Taylor, only a small cadre of human smugglers - coyotes - and migrants could say how or why they’d gotten there. This is the story of 7,000 bikes that made an incredible journey and one young man from Oaxaca who arrived at the border with nothing, built a small empire, and then vanished.

Texas businessman Mike Fechner had it all. Money. Investments. Prestige. Until he did the unthinkable. He sold his company and poured his life's earnings into a ministry for the poor. With a strong faith in God at his core, this millionaire turned missionary envisioned a long future serving the urban Dallas poor and the people of poverty-stricken Africa.

When Nina Sharma meets Quincy while hitching a ride to a friend’s Fourth of July barbecue, she spots a favorite book, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, in the back seat of his cramped car, and senses a sadness from him that’s all too familiar to her. She is immediately intrigued—who is this man? In The Way You Make Me Feel, Sharma chronicles her and Quincy’s love story, and in doing so, examines how their Black and Asian relationship becomes the lens through which she moves through and understands the world.

How ordinary Americans suffer when the rich and powerful use tax doges or break the law to get richer and more powerful - and how we can stop it. There is an elite crime spree happening in America, and the privileged perps are getting away with it. Selling loose cigarettes on a city sidewalk can lead to a choke-hold arrest, and death, if you are not among the top one percent.

Hockey culture: it’s a commonly used phrase inside the game, glorifying sacrifice, toughness, loyalty, and a sense of identity. Justin Davis viewed this culture as something he was lucky enough to experience. After all, he’d won a Memorial Cup after leading the tournament in scoring, and he’d been drafted by the Washington Capitals. “In my mind,” he says, “I was the normal one.” Unfortunately, after stepping outside the game, he began to recognize the racism, sexual abuse and bullying that was so deeply ingrained in the sport.

Uma cidade em convulsão na imprensa, na literatura, na música popular, na ópera, no teatro, nas artes plásticas, no cinema, na caricatura, na praia, na ciência, na arquitetura, no futebol, na luta das mulheres, nos costumes, no sexo e nas drogas. Se o Brasil dos anos 20 ainda engatinhava rumo à modernização, o Rio de Janeiro tinha vida própria e já era sinônimo de arrojo e vanguarda. É essa capital fervilhante o cenário e a protagonista do novo livro de Ruy Castro.

In this first biography of Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. in more than 30 years, Chuck McFadden explores the unique persona of one of the most idiosyncratic politicians in California history. The son of California political royalty who forged his own political style against the tumultuous backdrop of a huge, balkanized state - and shoved to and fro by complex currents - Jerry Brown pursued visionary impulses as well as his grandiose ambitions.

The stunning popularity of the “New Atheist” movement - whose most famous spokesmen include Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens - speaks to both the growing ranks of atheists and the widespread, vehement disdain for religion among many of them. In Faitheist, Chris Stedman tells his own story to challenge the orthodoxies of this movement and make a passionate argument that atheists should engage religious diversity respectfully.

In 2010, just as the Indian government was stepping up its counterinsurgency operations in the country's Naxal-affected areas, Alpa Shah set out on a seven-night march with a guerrilla platoon across 250 kilometres of the same territory. An anthropology professor, she wanted to understand why, against the backdrop of a shiny new India, the country's poor had shunned the world's largest democracy and united with revolutionary ideologues.

In 2013 Jaivet Ealom fled Myanmar's brutal regime, where Rohingya like him were being persecuted and killed, and boarded a boat of asylum seekers bound for Australia. Instead of finding refuge, he was transported to Australia's infamous Manus Regional Processing Centre. Blistering hot days spent in shipping containers on the island melted into weeks, then years . . . until, finally, facing either jail in Papua New Guinea or being returned to almost certain death in Myanmar, he took matters into his own hands.

The Afterlife Confessional follows Bill's journey for answers as he looks through the dizzying kaleidoscope of his clients' lives - the widower who escaped an aged-care trap to take her husband's ashes on the road trip of a lifetime; the man who spent his life paying it forward to try to make up for one shameful act; the closet dominatrix who quietly confronts her husband's infidelity by comforting those truly in need; the devoted couple who insist on going hand-in-hand into the afterlife.

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

Silicon Valley technology is transforming the way we work, and Uber is leading the charge. Upending our understanding of work in the digital age, Uberland paints a future where any of us might be managed by a faceless boss. Based on award-winning technology ethnographer Alex Rosenblat's experience of riding over 5,000 miles with Uber drivers, daily visits to online forums, and face-to-face discussions with senior Uber employees, Uberland goes beyond the headlines to reveal the complicated politics of popular technologies that are manipulating both workers and consumers.

El 19 de febrero de 2020 se celebra en Milán el encuentro de ida de octavos de final de la Champions League, en el que se enfrentan Atalanta y Valencia. Una noche que expertos y autoridades han señalado como una bomba biológica en la propagación de la COVID-19 en Italia y España. De esa propagación formó parte, sin saberlo, el periodista deportivo Kike Mateu, que se convirtió a su vuelta en el primer infectado por coronavirus en Valencia: el paciente cero.

This audiobook is the window into the underground world of cheating at the highest levels, which set off a frenzy of activity and hand-wringing in the offices of Major League Baseball and Congress. Through the authors' pursuit of sources and documents, they were able to open for public view a world in which elite athletes trade money and risk their health for the edge that will allow them to run faster, hit harder, and compete longer, and then cash in on the fame and wealth.

Intimate and honest essays on motherhood, marriage, love, and acceptance. Brown White Black is a portrait of Nishta J. Mehra's family: her wife, who is White; her adopted child, Shiv, who is Black; and their experiences dealing with America's rigid ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Her clear-eyed and incisive writing on her family's daily struggle to make space for themselves amid racial intolerance and stereotypes personalizes some of America's most fraught issues.