Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Tennessee

In a perfect joining of subject and writer, cultural historian Frederick Brown, author of acclaimed biographies of Zola and Flaubert, gives us an ambitious and revealing portrait of fin de siecle France, an era of upheaval and uncertainty that helped to shape the first half of the twentieth century.
Brown examines the events leading up to the twilight years of the nineteenth century when, defeated in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, France was forced to cede the border states of Alsace and Lorraine. In the subsequent civil war, Napoleon III was toppled, the Paris Commune was crushed, and a zealous nationalism gripped the republic, setting the stage for the Dreyfus affair. The author describes how postwar France was rent by a bitter debate between those who believed in science as the only way for the nation to regain its stature on the world stage, and those who believed in the singular ability of God to save their country. And he makes clear that the conflicts that began thirty years before Dreyfus became the festering points that led to France's surrender to Hitler in 1940, and to Marshal Petain, head of the collaborationist Vichy government, being heralded, at the time, as France's savior.
An essential book of French cultural history.

For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus

72f6084e-8ac7-48d6-b67c-aff83b18bb3e-1

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Massachusetts

The Seductive Promise of Microfinance

We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky (ARC)

7083b4cc-8478-49d3-8541-84f3dbc9a836-0

David Brooks

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Pennsylvania

The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement

With unequaled insight and brio, David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise, has long explored and explained the way we live. Now, with the intellectual curiosity and emotional wisdom that make his columns among the most read in the nation, Brooks turns to the building blocks of human flourishing in a multilayered, profoundly illuminating work grounded in everyday life.

This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica--how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred--we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind--not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain's work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made. The natural habitat of The Social Animal.
 
Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; from the "odyssey years" that have come to define young adulthood to the high walls of poverty; from the nature of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective leadership. He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes conventional definitions of success while looking toward a culture based on trust and humility.

The Social Animal is a moving and nuanced intellectual adventure, a story of achievement and a defense of progress. Impossible to put down, it is an essential book for our time, one that will have broad social impact and will change the way we see ourselves and the world.

The Social Animal

c2ce12e6-c073-4b56-a1eb-74c4fe4f0192-1

Katharine Scholes

Sierra Club Books

Old library book. Shows shelf wear, but completely clean and in tact. Please see images for details. Several library stickers are present.

Texas

Explains, in simple terms, the concept of peace, why conflicts occur, how they can be resolved in positive ways, and how to protect peace.

Peace Begins with You

b8627ac6-a553-4eb6-bdc3-153718fb7ab8-1

Jacqueline Rose

Arkansas

A blazingly insightful, provocative study of violence against women from the peerless feminist critic.

Why has violence, and especially violence against women, become so much more prominent and visible across the world? To explore this question, Jacqueline Rose tracks the multiple forms of today's violence - historic and intimate, public and private - as they spread throughout our social fabric, offering a new, provocative account of violence in our time.

From trans rights and #MeToo to the sexual harassment of migrant women, from the trial of Oscar Pistorius to domestic violence in lockdown, from the writing of Roxanne Gay to Hisham Mitar and Han Kang, she casts her net wide. What obscene pleasure in violence do so many male leaders of the Western world unleash in their supporters? Is violence always gendered and if so, always in the same way? What is required of the human mind when it grants itself permission to do violence?

On Violence and On Violence Against Women is a timely and urgent agitation against injustice, a challenge to radical feminism and a meaningful call to action.

On Violence and on Violence Against Women

02a3a5a5-94d5-4095-983e-1381e2fbd5eb-1

#hardcover #nonfiction #medical #political #science #economics #sociology #culture #society 

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Oregon

COVID-19 is speeding up history, but how? What is the shape of the world to come?

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

94ead513-4b16-4777-86d3-3ff3e6a596b6-1

Katherine Boo

Excellent minus small flaw on top of cover. See photos. Rest of the book is beautiful. 

Nebraska

Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE “Inspiring . . . extraordinary . . . [Katherine Boo] shows us how people in the most desperate circumstances can find the resilience to hang on to their humanity. Just as important, she makes us care.”—People “A tour de force of social justice reportage and a literary masterpiece.”—Judges, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Washington Post • O: The Oprah Magazine • USA Today • New York • The Miami Herald • San Francisco Chronicle • Newsday In this breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi’s “most-everything girl,” might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds—and into the hearts of families impossible to forget. WINNER OF: The PEN Nonfiction Award • The Los Angeles Times Book Prize • The American Academy of Arts and Letters Award • The New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New Yorker • People • Entertainment Weekly • The Wall Street Journal • The Boston Globe • The Economist • Financial Times • Foreign Policy • The Seattle Times • The Nation • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Denver Post • Minneapolis Star Tribune • The Week • Kansas City Star • Slate • Publishers Weekly

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

36f632a4-8e5e-4ad1-9636-a4793e5a45ad-1

Scarlett Curtis

Colorado

Amazing Women on What the F-Word Means to Them

"A collection of writing, from Hollywood actresses to teenage activists, each telling the story of her personal relationship with feminism"--

Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies

8f79db57-8c71-4705-867f-8bc1177f0a65-1

Michigan

HC with dust jacket. One top edge lightly dented in. 

California

The Dancing Girls of Lahore 

Oversized Hardcover (4 to 6 lbs)

Kentucky

Social Studies

The Study of Human Relations

Sociology

b9256900-7c35-40c6-aadb-7bcb46855c8c-1

Book is in good condition with no markings or tears and dust jacket intact 

Maryland

Jill Leovy

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Missouri

A True Story of Murder in America

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE, USA TODAY, AND CHICAGO TRIBUNE • A masterly work of literary journalism about a senseless murder, a relentless detective, and the great plague of homicide in America NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • The Boston Globe • The Economist • The Globe and Mail • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews On a warm spring evening in South Los Angeles, a young man is shot and killed on a sidewalk minutes away from his home, one of the thousands of black Americans murdered that year. His assailant runs down the street, jumps into an SUV, and vanishes, hoping to join the scores of killers in American cities who are never arrested for their crimes. But as soon as the case is assigned to Detective John Skaggs, the odds shift. Here is the kaleidoscopic story of the quintessential, but mostly ignored, American murder—a “ghettoside” killing, one young black man slaying another—and a brilliant and driven cadre of detectives whose creed is to pursue justice for forgotten victims at all costs. Ghettoside is a fast-paced narrative of a devastating crime, an intimate portrait of detectives and a community bonded in tragedy, and a surprising new lens into the great subject of why murder happens in our cities—and how the epidemic of killings might yet be stopped. Praise for Ghettoside “A serious and kaleidoscopic achievement . . . [Jill Leovy is] a crisp writer with a crisp mind and the ability to boil entire skies of information into hard journalistic rain.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Masterful . . . gritty reporting that matches the police work behind it.”—Los Angeles Times “Moving and engrossing.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Penetrating and heartbreaking . . . Ghettoside points out how relatively little America has cared even as recently as the last decade about the value of young black men’s lives.”—USA Today “Functions both as a snappy police procedural and—more significantly—as a searing indictment of legal neglect . . . Leovy’s powerful testimony demands respectful attention.”—The Boston Globe

Ghettoside

92ebace2-000f-4d56-94ca-92567b1f2878-1

Ben Wilson

A History of the City, Humankind's Greatest Invention

In a captivating tour of cities famous and forgotten, acclaimed historian Ben Wilson tells the glorious, millennia-spanning story how urban living sparked humankind's greatest innovations. “A towering achievement. . . . Reading this book is like visiting an exhilarating city for the first time—dazzling.” —The Wall Street Journal During the two hundred millennia of humanity’s existence, nothing has shaped us more profoundly than the city. From their very beginnings, cities created such a flourishing of human endeavor—new professions, new forms of art, worship and trade—that they kick-started civilization. Guiding us through the centuries, Wilson reveals the innovations nurtured by the inimitable energy of human beings together: civics in the agora of Athens, global trade in ninth-century Baghdad, finance in the coffeehouses of London, domestic comforts in the heart of Amsterdam, peacocking in Belle Époque Paris. In the modern age, the skyscrapers of New York City inspired utopian visions of community design, while the trees of twenty-first-century Seattle and Shanghai point to a sustainable future in the age of climate change. Page-turning, irresistible, and rich with engrossing detail, Metropolis is a brilliant demonstration that the story of human civilization is the story of cities.

Metropolis

7d777665-dd06-49a5-bcf9-3ea5c0219fb7-1

New Jersey

How Deviant Organisms Came to Define Us

We Are All Monsters 

adc48a36-f7d3-434a-8ba0-04d7e59baaa4-1

Sarah Smarsh

A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

*Finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize*
*Instant New York Times Bestseller*
*Named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, The New York Post, BuzzFeed, Shelf Awareness, Bustle, and Publishers Weekly*

An essential read for our times: an eye-opening memoir of working-class poverty in America that will deepen our understanding of the ways in which class shapes our country.

Sarah Smarsh was born a fifth generation Kansas wheat farmer on her paternal side, and the product of generations of teen mothers on her maternal side. Through her experiences growing up on a farm thirty miles west of Wichita, we are given a unique and essential look into the lives of poor and working class Americans living in the heartland.

During Sarah's turbulent childhood in Kansas in the 1980s and 1990s, she enjoyed the freedom of a country childhood, but observed the painful challenges of the poverty around her; untreated medical conditions for lack of insurance or consistent care, unsafe job conditions, abusive relationships, and limited resources and information that would provide for the upward mobility that is the American Dream. By telling the story of her life and the lives of the people she loves with clarity and precision but without judgement, Smarsh challenges us to look more closely at the class divide in our country.

A beautifully written memoir that combines personal narrative with powerful analysis and cultural commentary, Heartland examines the myths about people thought to be less because they earn less.

"A deeply humane memoir that crackles with clarifying insight, Heartland is one of a growing number of important works--including Matthew Desmond's Evicted and Amy Goldstein's Janesville--that together merit their own section in nonfiction aisles across the country: America's postindustrial decline...Smarsh shows how the false promise of the 'American dream' was used to subjugate the poor. It's a powerful mantra" (The New York Times Book Review).

Heartland

0055b46f-1244-4bad-b81d-065921e5ff30-1

Inequality and Opportunity in Silicon Valley

An inside account of gender and racial discrimination in the high-tech industry

Why is being a computer "geek" still perceived to be a masculine occupation? Why do men continue to greatly outnumber women in the high-technology industry? Since 2014, a growing number of employment discrimination lawsuits has called attention to a persistent pattern of gender discrimination in the tech world. Much has been written about the industry's failure to adequately address gender and racial inequalities, yet rarely have we gotten an intimate look inside these companies. In Geek Girls, France Winddance Twine provides the first book by a sociologist that "lifts the Silicon veil" to provide firsthand accounts of inequality and opportunity in the tech ecosystem. This work draws on close to a hundred interviews with male and female technology workers of diverse racial, ethnic, and educational backgrounds who are currently employed at tech firms such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, and at various start-ups in the San Francisco Bay area. Geek Girls captures what it is like to work as a technically skilled woman in Silicon Valley.

With a sharp eye for detail and compelling testimonials from industry insiders, Twine shows how the technology industry remains rigged against women, and especially Black, Latinx, and Native American women from working class backgrounds. From recruitment and hiring practices that give priority to those with family, friends, and classmates employed in the industry, to social and educational segregation, to academic prestige hierarchies, Twine reveals how women are blocked from entering this industry. Women who do not belong to the dominant ethnic groups in the industry are denied employment opportunities, and even actively pushed out, despite their technical skills and qualifications.

While the technology firms strongly embrace the rhetoric of diversity and oppose discrimination in the workplace, Twine argues that closed social networks and routine hiring practices described by employees reinforce the status quo and reproduce inequality. The myth of meritocracy and gender stereotypes operate in tandem to produce a culture where the use of race-, color-, and power-evasive language makes it difficult for individuals to name the micro-aggressions and forms of discrimination that they experience.

Twine offers concrete insights into how the technology industry can address ongoing racial and gender disparities, create more transparency and empower women from underrepresented groups, who continued to be denied opportunities.

Geek Girls

a050b15d-d810-4690-96b1-73a06344a83b-1

Susan Cain

The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Demonstrates how introverted people are misunderstood and undervalued in modern culture, charting the rise of extrovert ideology while sharing anecdotal examples of how to use introvert talents to adapt to various situations.

Quiet

509c2e3a-85f0-43ad-b682-ab05f6ed097c-1

Wisconsin

The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys

He’s Just Not That Into You—based on a popular episode of Sex and the City—is tough love advice for otherwise smart women on how to tell when a guy just doesn’t like them enough, so they can stop wasting time making excuses for a dead-end relationship. It’s the best relationship advice you’ll ever receive. For ages, women have come together over coffee, cocktails, or late-night phone chats to analyze the puzzling behavior of men. He’s afraid to get hurt again. Maybe he doesn’t want to ruin the friendship. Maybe he’s intimidated by me. He just got out of a relationship. Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo are here to say that—despite good intentions—you’re wasting your time. Men are not complicated, although they’d like you to think they are. And there are no mixed messages. The truth may be, He’s just not that into you. Unfortunately, guys are too terrified to ever directly tell a woman, “You're not the one.” But their actions absolutely show how they feel. Reexamining familiar scenarios and classic mindsets that keep us in unsatisfying relationships, Behrendt and Tuccillo’s wise and wry understanding of the sexes spares women hours of waiting by the phone, obsessing over the details with sympathetic girlfriends, and hoping his mixed messages really mean, “I’m in love with you and want to be with you.” He’s Just Not That Into You is provocative, hilarious, and, above all, intoxicatingly liberating. It deserves a place on every woman’s night table. It knows you’re a beautiful, smart, funny woman who deserves better. The next time you feel the need to start “figuring him out,” consider the glorious thought that maybe, He’s just not that into you. And then set yourself loose to go find the one who is. This NEWLY EXPANDED EDITION includes: a new foreword from Greg Behrendt; a new chapter—providing an honest look at the stages of life after He's Just Not That Into You, according to Liz, including exaltation, loneliness, temptation, and balance; and Greg and Liz address the most frequently asked reader questions.

Browse by categories

Save this search

Frederick Brown

For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus

Mara Kardas-Nelson

We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky (ARC)

David Brooks

The Social Animal

Katharine Scholes; Sierra Club Books

Peace Begins with You

Jacqueline Rose

On Violence and on Violence Against Women

Fareed Zakaria

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Scarlett Curtis

Feminists Don't Wear Pink and Other Lies

Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Louise Brown

The Dancing Girls of Lahore

Kenneth W. Thomas; Holt, Rinehart and Winston Staff (Prepared for Publication by)

Sociology

Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Jill Leovy

Ghettoside

Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Ben Wilson

Metropolis

Andrew Mangham

We Are All Monsters

Sarah Smarsh

Heartland

France Winddance Twine

Geek Girls

Susan Cain

Quiet

Greg Behrendt; Liz Tuccillo; Lauren Monchik (Designed by)

He's Just Not That into You

Greg Behrendt; Liz Tuccillo; Lauren Monchik (Designed by)

He's Just Not That into You

Peter L Berger

Invitation to Sociology

Graydon Carter

The Great Hangover

Eric Hoffer

First Things, Last Things