A fiftieth anniversary edition of the trailblazing women's reference shares anecdotes and interviews that were originally collected in the early 1960s to inspire women to develop their intellectual capabilities and reclaim lives beyond period conventions. "A 50th-anniversary edition of the trailblazing book that changed women's lives, with a new introduction by Gail Collins. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic--these adjectives barely do justice to...

American author, critic, newspaper man, and iconoclast, H. L. Mencken maintained that women are smarter than men and cited numerous examples of the female's overwhelming skill and cunning to support his position. Originally published in 1922, this book considers topics that remain of vital interest to today's readers, including monogamy and polygamy, prostitution, the double standard, sexual harassment, and declining birth and marriage rates. Written...

The author examines the course of English social history from earliest times through the Roman and Norman invasions as well as the centuries of expansion and growth as world power.

A timely call to action for women's empowerment by the influential co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation identifies the link between women's equality and societal health, sharing uplifting insights by international advocates in the fight against gender bias. --Publisher

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together." To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it." To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have...

A Southern white writer, educator, and activist, Lillian Smith (1897-1966) spoke out all her life against injustice. In Killers of the Dream, her most influential book, she draws on memories of her childhood to describe the psychological and moral cost of the powerful, contradictory rules about sin, sex, and segregation-the intricate system of taboos-that undergirded Southern society. Published to wide controversy, it became the source (acknowledged...

Presents an assessment of the existential crisis in modern America that explores how increasing social isolation and the collapse of traditional community connections lead to tension and pessimism, arguing that the solution is a rediscovery of human connections.

Ehrenreich's second work of satirical commentary reflects on one of the cruelest decades in memory--the 2000's--in which she finds a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty

"This book-the first ethnography of water conservation on the Great Plains-provides an account of High Plains aquifer decline through an exploration of the different ways in which heartland residents inhabit and understand the imminent depletion of groundwater. This literary ethnography offers a vividly sketched look into the lives and stories of this community, based on interviews with members of the community such as fellow farmers and state regulators,...

Documents the trial of a man charged with dozens of counts of arson in a rural Virginia county, sharing insight into his struggles with addiction, his relationship with his accomplice girlfriend, and the impact of the fires on their community.