"I've been waiting for this book for a long time. Well, not this book, because I never imagined that the book I was waiting for would be so devastatingly smart and funny, so consistently entertaining and unflinchingly on target. In fact, I would like to have written it myself - if, that is, I had lived Linda Tirado's life and extracted all the hard lessons she has learned. I am the author of Nickel and Dimed, which tells the story of my own brief...

Controversial, scandalous and almost universally censored and criticized upon its first release in 1899, Kate Chopin's "The Awakening" is a pioneering novel of female independence and sexual exploration and was one of the earliest American works of fiction to examine the societal oppression that beset married women in the last 19th century. Set in the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, the plot centers around young Edna Pontellier, a married woman who is chafing...

"Tom Brokaw had led a lucky life--marrying his childhood sweetheart (they have been married for 51 years), rising to fame in the journalism world on the Today Show and as the NBC Nightly News anchor for 22 years, publishing the world-renowned book The Greatest Generation--when suddenly he took two inexplicable falls. Nagging back pain led him to the doctors at Mayo, who had shocking news: he had multiple myeloma, the treatable but incurable blood...

"From the author of The Fever, a wide-ranging inquiry into the origins of pandemics Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origins of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera-one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens-and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs. More than three hundred infectious diseases...

"The first full life--private; public; legal; philosophical--of the 107th Supreme Court Justice, one of the most profound and profoundly transformative legal minds of our time; a book fifteen years in work, written with the cooperation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself and based on many interviews with the Justice, her husband, her children, her friends, and associates. In this large, comprehensive, revelatory biography, Jane De Hart explores the central...

Victor Davis Hanson locates the cause of our immigration quagmire in the opportunistic coalition that stymies immigration reform and, even worse, stifles any honest discussion of the present crisis. Conservative corporations, contractors and agribusiness demand cheap wage labor from Mexico, whatever the social consequences. Meanwhile, "progressive" academics, journalists, government bureaucrats and La Raza advocates see illegal aliens as a vast new...

When Oliver began work as a school librarian she felt qualified for the job. What she learned was that librarians are expected to serve as mediators and mental-health-crisis-support professionals, customer service reps and administrators of overdose treatment, fierce loyalists to institutionalized mythology and enforced silence, and arms of state surveillance. Here she highlights the national problems that have existed in library since they were founded:...

One of the best-known books for half a century written by an African American, this autobiography "gave prominence for the first time to the voice of a group which had to pulliitself up from extreme adversity."-Cover.

At its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, Detroit's status as epicenter of the American auto industry made it a vibrant, populous, commercial hub and then the bottom fell out. Detroit: A Biography takes a long, unflinching look at the evolution of one of America's great cities and one of the nation's greatest urban failures. This authoritative yet accessible narrative seeks to explain how the city grew to become the heart of American industry and how...

"From the best-selling author of Into the Raging Sea comes a moving and eye-opening look at the story of manufacturing in America, whether it can ever successfully return to our shores, and why doing so is vital to our well-being as a nation, told through the experience of one young couple in Maine as they attempt to rebuild a lost industry, ethically. Ben and Whitney Waxman are two tireless idealists trying to do the impossible: make an American-made,...