Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Sociology

In Mother to Son, Jasmine Holmes shares a series of powerful letters to her young son. These are about her journey as an African American Christian and what she wants her son to know as he grows and approaches the world as a Black man. Holmes deals head-on with issues ranging from discipleship and marriage to biblical justice. She invites us to listen as she reminds Wynn that his identity is firmly planted in the person and work of Jesus Christ, even when the topic is one as emotionally charged as race in America.

Americans are understandably squeamish about official racial and ethnic classifications. Nevertheless, applying for a job, mortgage, university, citizenship, government contracts, and more involves checking a box stating whether one is Black, White, Asian, Hispanic, or Native American. In an increasingly diverse society with high rates of intergroup marriage, the American system of racial classification is getting even more absurd. Classified argues that the time has come to consider abolishing official racial classification and replace it with the separation of race and state.

Do teachers have a front-row seat to America’s decline? Jeremy S. Adams, a teacher at both the high school and college levels, thinks so. Adams has spent decades trying to instill wisdom, ambition, and a love of learning in his students. And yet, as he notes, when teachers get together, they often share an arresting conclusion: Something has gone terribly wrong. Something essential is missing in our young people. Their curiosity seems stunted, their reason undeveloped, their values uninformed, their knowledge lacking, and, most worrying of all, their humanity diminished.

The end of residency isn’t the utopia you might have imagined. You know what to do with the medical stuff, but what about navigating private practice, unfamiliar hospitals, and—patients! In this collection of absurd moments, practical advice, and humorous tales from the medical trenches, Dr. John Chase shares stories from his forty years as an orthopedic surgeon and offers insight into how to be successful, have fun, and take care of patients without missing out on what really matters in life.

Black Panther and Cuban exile, Assata Shakur, has inspired multiple generations of radical protest, including our contemporary Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing its title from one of America’s foremost revolutionaries, this collection of thought-provoking essays by award-winning Panther scholar Donna Murch explores how social protest is challenging our current system of state violence and mass incarceration. Assata Taught Me offers a fresh and much-needed historical perspective on the fifty years since the founding of the Black Panther Party.

In 1971, Eddie Conway, lieutenant of security for the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party, was convicted of murdering a police officer and sentenced to life plus 30 years. Paul Coates was a community worker at the time and didn’t know Eddie well, and the little he knew, he didn’t much like. But Paul was dead certain that Eddie’s charges were bogus. He vowed never to leave Eddie - and in so doing, changed the course of both their lives. For over 43 years, as he raised a family and started a business, Paul visited Eddie in prison, often taking his kids with him.

Once America’s capitalist dream town, Detroit is our country’s greatest urban failure, having fallen the longest and the farthest. But the city’s worst crisis yet (and that’s saying something) has managed to do the unthinkable: turn the end of days into a laboratory for the future. Urban planners, land speculators, neopastoral agriculturalists, and utopian environmentalists―all have been drawn to Detroit’s baroquely decaying frontier. With an eye for both the darkly absurd and the radically new Detroit-area native Mark Binelli has chronicled this convergence.

Eminent scholar Peter Irons makes a powerful and persuasive case that Blacks have always been held back by systemic racism in all major institutions that can hold power over them. Based on a wide range of sources, from the painful words of former slaves to test scores that reveal how our education system has failed Black children, this searing and sobering account of legal and extra-legal violence against Blacks peels away the fictions and myths expressed by White racists.

In recent years, we have gained unprecedented control over choices about our health. But these choices are hard and often full of psychological traps. As a result, we’re liable to misuse medication, fall for pseudoscientific cure-alls, and undergo needless procedures. In Your Life Depends on It, Talya Miron-Shatz explores the preventable ways we make bad choices about everything from nutrition to medication, from pregnancy to end-of-life care. 

Lighthearted, quirky, and upbeat, this book explores the portrayal of science and technology on both the big and little screen - and how Hollywood is actually doing a better job of getting it right than ever before. Grounded in the real-word, and often cutting-edge, science and technology that inspires fictional science, the authors survey Hollywood depictions of topics such as quantum mechanics, parallel universes, and alien worlds.

Informative, entertaining, and upbeat, this audiobook continues Grazier and Cass’ exploration of how technology, science, and scientists are portrayed in Hollywood productions. Both big and small-screen productions are featured and their science content illuminated - first by the authors and subsequently by a range of experts from science and the film world. Starring roles in this volume are played by, among other things, computers (human and mechanical), artificial intelligences, robots, and spacecraft.

In this thoughtful coming-of-age memoir, a young sociologist reflects on her Moroccan immigrant parents, their journey to France, and how growing up an outsider shaped her identity. Imbued with tenderness for her family and a critical view of the challenges facing French North African immigrants, Kaoutar Harchi’s probing account illustrates the deeply personal effects of political issues. Mixed with happy memories of her childhood home in eastern France are ever-present reminders of the dangers from which her parents sought to shield her.

When did America become obsessed with racial differences? After decades of progress healing real-world prejudices and anger, we suddenly live in an America where we’re expected to view every single thing through the lens of race. Children are taught the politics of racial resentment and fear in schools. Films, novels, and even comic books are judged by the color of their protagonists — and their adherence to the latest “woke” messaging. 

For all of the energy that the far right has demonstrated - and for all of the support that they receive from institutional conservatives in the GOP and affiliated organizations - the United States is experiencing an upsurge in left-wing social movements unlike any other in the past half-century, with roots not in the Democratic Party but Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. Drawing on his original reporting as well as archival research, O’Connor investigates how the capitalist class and the radical right mobilize racism to defend their interests....

Look down as you buzz across America, and Oklahoma looks like another “flyover state.” A closer inspection, however, reveals one of the most tragic, fascinating, and unpredictable places in the United States In this book, Russell Cobb tells the story of a state rich in natural resources and artistic talent, yet near the bottom in education and social welfare. Raised in Tulsa, Cobb engages Oklahomans across the boundaries of race and class to hear their troubles, anxieties, and aspirations and delves deep to understand their contradictory and often stridently independent attitudes.

This is the story of Clarence Henderson, a wrongfully accused Black sharecropper, who was sentenced to die three different times for a murder he didn’t commit, and of the prosecution desperate to pin the crime on him despite scant evidence. His first trial lasted only a day and featured a lackluster public defense.

The dangerous decline in vaccinations in many developed countries is at the heart of a lively debate that confirms how important the subject is today. Vaccinations are among mankind’s most important scientific discoveries, yet they continue to be viewed with suspicion by part of the public - the victims of disinformation campaigns, instrumentalization, and unfounded fears. There is, however, also an evolutionary explanation for these irrational beliefs, and countering the growing social opposition will be extremely difficult without grasping it.

America’s suburbs are not the homogenous places we sometimes take them for. Today’s suburbs are racially, ethnically, and economically diverse, with as many Democratic as Republican voters, a growing population of renters, and rising poverty. The cliche of white picket fences is well past its expiration date. The history of suburbia is equally surprising: American suburbs were once fertile ground for utopian planning, communal living, socially conscious design, and integrated housing. We have forgotten that we built suburbs like these....

In January of 1950, Mary Church Terrell, an 86-year-old charter member of the NAACP, headed into Thompson’s Restaurant, just a few blocks from the White House, and requested to be served. She and her companions were informed by the manager that they could not eat in his establishment, because they were “colored.” Terrell, a former suffragette and one of the country’s first college-educated African-American women, took the matter to court. Three years later, the Supreme Court vindicated her outrage: District of Columbia v. John R. Thompson Co., Inc. was decided in 1953.

The renewed focus on class, race, and equality in the workplace and beyond is making an indelible mark on society. This clarion call for change is sweeping inequality from every corner of the nation, including law enforcement, schools, and businesses. What’s Your Zip Code Story? helps clarify the intersection of class bias and racial disparity in the workplace and arms organizations with the knowledge to not only have productive discussions, but also adopt effective solutions.