From the influential and hugely popular "New York Times" columnist and bestselling author of "Bobos in Paradise" comes a landmark exploration of how human beings and communities succeed.

"A groundbreaking examination of the growing inequality gap from the bestselling author of Bowling Alone: why fewer Americans today have the opportunity for upward mobility. It's the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in--a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last twenty-five years we have seen a disturbing "opportunity...

How much of our fate is tied to the status of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe! While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favor of greater social equality, The Son Also Rises proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries. Using a novel technique -- tracking family names over generations to measure social mobility...

Get the Summary of David Brooks's The Social Animal in 20 minutes. Please note: This is a summary & not the original book. Original book introduction: With unequaled insight and brio, New York Times columnist David Brooks has long explored and explained the way we live. Now 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, told...

"A compelling debut novel about an ambitious woman who, after a lifetime of conning alongside her mother, wants to leave her dark past behind and marry the heir to one of the country's wealthiest families. Like any enterprising woman, Bea knows what she's worth and is determined to get all she deserves-it just so happens that what she deserves is to marry rich. After a lifetime of forced instruction in the art of swindling men by her mother, Bea wants...

What can you get with twenty-five dollars and a dream?
Adam Shepard graduated from college feeling disillusioned by the apathy around him and was then incensed after reading Barbara Ehrenreich's famous work Nickel and Dimed—a book that gave him a feeling of hopelessness about the working class in America. He set out to disprove Ehrenreich's theory—the notion that those who start at the bottom stay at the bottom—by making something...

American communities are facing chronic problems: fiscal stress, urban decline, environmental sprawl, mass incarceration, political isolation, disproportionate foreclosures and severe public health risks. In The Price of Paradise, David Troutt argues that it is a lack of mutuality in our local decision making that has led to this looming crisis facing cities and local governments. Arguing that there are structural flaws in the American dream, Troutt...

Argues that the solution to increasing income inequality in the United States is not to increase taxes on the rich, but to phase out welfare programs and create a culture of achievement. To save the American Dream we're told that we need to fight inequality through tax hikes, wealth redistribution schemes, and a far higher minimum wage. Watkins and Brook believe that the American Dream is under attack-- but that the real key to making America a freer,...

Queenan's deeply funny and affecting memoir about his great escape from a childhood of poverty in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s.

"A brilliant, funny, generation-defining memoir about the double bind of crafting perfect adversity narratives for highly selective institutions, while fumbling through the far murkier reality of actual life in foster care and inpatient mental health treatment As a child, Emi Nietfeld was caught between a hoarder mother who got her put on antipsychotic medication, but was also the only person to believe she was exceptional, and a state system exemplified...