Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...

"Indispensable introduction to Brazil for students and general readers includes short scholarly articles, interviews, documents, photographs, and many autobiographical pieces. Begins with precontact indigenous peoples, but about half deals with Brazil since 1945. Topics include indigenous peoples, slavery, Vargas and labor, political protest, women, race relations, marginal groups, and popular culture. Overarching themes are mobility and repression"--Handbook...

"Gregory vividly depicts how Southwesterners brought with them on their journey west an allegiance to evangelical Protestantism, "plain-folk American" values, and a love of country music. These values gave Okies an expanding cultural presence their new home. In their neighborhoods, often called "Little Oklahomas," they created a community of churches and saloons, of church-goers and good-old-boys, mixing stern-minded religious thinking with hard-drinking...

America's most widely read and most influential commentator casts his gimlet eye on our singular nation. Moving far beyond the strict confines of politics, George F. Will offers a fascinating look at the people, stories, and events--often unheralded--that make the American drama so endlessly entertaining and instructive. With Will's signature erudition and wry wit always on display, One Man's America chronicles a spectacular, eclectic procession of...

In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history. Dalio himself has appeared on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater's exceptionally effective culture, which...

The creative accomplishments of the Andean people of the highland region of South America are prominent among folk art legacies of the world. This wide-ranging publication, examining over 850 works, is the first to present an overview of the religious, textile, costume, utilitarian, and festival folk arts made in the Andes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, after the Andeans were free from Spanish colonial rule. The author offers an understanding...

"Murder: a dark, shameful deed, the last resort of the desperate or a vile tool of the greedy--and a very strange, very English obsession. But where did this fixation develop? And what does it tell us about ourselves? In The Art of the English Murder, Lucy Worsley explores this phenomenon in forensic detail, revisiting notorious crimes like the Ratcliff Highway Murders, which caused a nationwide panic in the early nineteenth century, and the case...

The first comprehensive, fully documented history of a uniquely American art form, exploring all aspects of the intricate musical and social exchange that evolved from Afro-Irish percussive step dances like the jig, gioube, buck-and-wing, and juba to the work of such contemporary tap luminaries as Gregory Hines, Brenda Bufalino, Dianne Walker, and Savion Glover.

Echoing Edward Said's belief that "Western humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism, " renowned critic Clive James presents here his life's work. Containing over one hundred original essays, organized by quotations from A to Z, this book illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twentieth century. In discussing, among others, Louis...

"In the spirit of A SHORT HISTORY OF NEARLY EVERYTHING, an energetic and wide-ranging book of discovery and discoverers, of exploitation and celebration, and of superstition and science, all in search of the ways the chemical elements are woven into our culture, history, and language." --Provided by publisher.