Download or read book Aspen and the American Dream written by Jenny Stuber and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2021-03-23 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How is it possible for a town to exist where the median household income is about $73,000, but the median home price is about $4,000,000? Boring into the "impossible" math of Aspen, Colorado, Stuber explores how middle-class people have found a way to live in this supergentrified town. Interviewing a range of residents, policymakers, and officials, Stuber shows that what resolves the math equation between incomes and home values in Aspen, Colorado—the X-factor that makes middle-class life possible—is the careful orchestration of diverse class interests within local politics and the community. She explores how this is achieved through a highly regulatory and extractive land use code that provides symbolic and material value to highly affluent investors and part-year residents, as well as less-affluent locals, many of whom benefit from an array of subsidies—including an extensive affordable housing program—that redistribute economic resources in ways that make it possible for middle-class residents to live there. Stuber further examines how Latinos, who provide much of the service work in Aspen and who tend to live outside the town, fit into the social geography of one of the most unequal places in the country. Overall, Stuber argues that the Aspen's ability to balance the interests of its diverse class constituencies is not a foregone conclusion; rather, it is the result of efforts by local stakeholders—citizens, government, developers, and vacationers—to preserve the town’s unique feel and value, and "keep Aspen, Aspen" in all its complex dynamics.
Download or read book Dream Hoarders written by Richard V. Reeves and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dream Hoarders sparked a national conversation on the dangerous separation between the upper middle class and everyone else. Now in paperback and newly updated for the age of Trump, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves is continuing to challenge the class system in America. In America, everyone knows that the top 1 percent are the villains. The rest of us, the 99 percent—we are the good guys. Not so, argues Reeves. The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else. The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities. There is a glass floor created for each affluent child helped by his or her wealthy, stable family. That glass floor is a glass ceiling for another child. Throughout Dream Hoarders, Reeves explores the creation and perpetuation of opportunity hoarding, and what should be done to stop it, including controversial solutions such as ending legacy admissions to school. He offers specific steps toward reducing inequality and asks the upper middle class to pay for it. Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believes they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren't the 1 percent. The national obsession with the super rich allows the upper middle class to convince themselves that they are just like the rest of America. In Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that in many ways, they are worse, and that changes in policy and social conscience are the only way to fix the broken system.
Download or read book Our Kids written by Robert D. Putnam and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-03-29 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The bestselling author of Bowling Alone offers [an] ... examination of the American Dream in crisis--how and why opportunities for upward mobility are diminishing, jeopardizing the prospects of an ever larger segment of Americans"--
Download or read book The True American Murder and Mercy in Texas written by Anand Giridharadas and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-05-05 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes how a Bangladeshi immigrant, shot in the Dallas mini mart where he worked in the days after September 11 in a revenge crime, forgave his assailant and petitioned the state of Texas to spare his attacker the death penalty.
Download or read book The Third Coast written by Thomas L. Dyja and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-04-18 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Chicago Tribune‘s 2013 Heartland Prize A critically acclaimed history of Chicago at mid-century, featuring many of the incredible personalities that shaped American culture Before air travel overtook trains, nearly every coast-to-coast journey included a stop in Chicago, and this flow of people and commodities made it the crucible for American culture and innovation. In luminous prose, Chicago native Thomas Dyja re-creates the story of the city in its postwar prime and explains its profound impact on modern America—from Chess Records to Playboy, McDonald’s to the University of Chicago. Populated with an incredible cast of characters, including Mahalia Jackson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Chuck Berry, Sun Ra, Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, Gwendolyn Brooks, Studs Turkel, and Mayor Richard J. Daley, The Third Coast recalls the prominence of the Windy City in all its grandeur.
Download or read book Saving Horatio Alger written by Richard V. Reeves and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2014-08-20 with total page 26 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE BROOKINGS ESSAY: In the spirit of its commitment to high-quality, independent research, the Brookings Institution has commissioned works on major topics of public policy by distinguished authors, including Brookings scholars. The Brookings Essay is a multi-platform product aimed to engage readers in open dialogue and debate. The views expressed, however, are solely those of the author. Available in ebook only.
Download or read book To Aspen and Back written by Peggy Clifford and published by . This book was released on 2022-07-04 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aspen, Colorado: elevation 7900 feet, resident population 6000; America's largest ski resort; site of the prestigious Aspen Music Festival and School and the Aspen Institute of Humanistic Studies. Home of leading pop singer John Denver, leading outlaw- journalist Hunter S. Thompson, leading best-selling novelist Leon Uris, leading comedian Steve Martin, leading man Jack Nicholson. Described by national media as "the place of the seventies."Like New York and Hollywood, Aspen describes a state of mind and a way of life. In its 100-year history, the town has staged the birth, death, and resurrection of the "American Dream." It is the legend of that attainable dream that Peggy Clifford illuminates in her story of the growth of this American town.We see the dream take root and flower silver when Aspen is founded by a group of prospectors on a mother vein forty miles wide; we see it wither and die some ten years later. We see it manifest again as a Chicago industrialist comes to town in the 1940s with a host of co-big daddies including Albert Schweitzer and Mortimer Adler, and goes about making a place where America can turn from things to ideas, aiming for a "total synthesis of human life."But the directions of dreams are not always consistent. The town-out-of-time attracted innocents, dreamers and fugitives from the Land of Plenty, but the town of art and sport they created attracted others smart enough to know a good and profitable thing. Ski facilities were expanded, boutiques appeared, a wall of condominiums separated town from mountain. Once out of step, Aspen is in vogue, and a more modern version of the dream motivates the place: pleasure is business, and business is a pleasure.
Download or read book The New Better Off written by Courtney E. Martin and published by Seal Press. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are we living the good life—and what defines 'good', anyway? Americans today are constructing a completely different framework for success than their parents' generation, using new metrics that TEDWomen speaker and columnist Courtney Martin has termed collectively the "New Better Off". The New Better Offputs a name to the American phenomenon of rejecting the traditional dream of a 9-to-5 job, home ownership, and a nuclear family structure, illuminating the alternate ways Americans are seeking happiness and success. Including commentary on recent changes in how we view work, customs and community, marriage, rituals, money, living arrangements, and spirituality, The New Better Off uses personal stories and social analysis to explore the trends shaping our country today. Martin covers growing topics such as freelancing, collaborative consumption, communal living, and the breaking down of gender roles. The New Better Offis about the creative choices individuals are making in their vocational and personal lives, but it's also about the movements, formal and informal, that are coalescing around the "New Better Off" idea-people who are reinventing the social safety net and figuring out how to truly better their own communities.
Download or read book Mall Maker written by M. Jeffrey Hardwick and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The shopping mall is both the most visible and the most contentious symbol of American prosperity. Despite their convenience, malls are routinely criticized for representing much that is wrong in America—sprawl, conspicuous consumption, the loss of regional character, and the decline of Mom and Pop stores. So ubiquitous are malls that most people would be suprised to learn that they are the brainchild of a single person, architect Victor Gruen. An immigrant from Austria who fled the Nazis in 1938, Gruen based his idea for the mall on an idealized America: the dream of concentrated shops that would benefit the businessperson as well as the consumer and that would foster a sense of shared community. Modernist Philip Johnson applauded Gruen for creating a true civic art and architecture that enriched Americans' daily lives, and for decades he received praise from luminaries such as Lewis Mumford, Winthrop Rockefeller, and Lady Bird Johnson. Yet, in the end, Gruen returned to Europe, thoroughly disillusioned with his American dream. In Mall Maker, the first biography of this visionary spirit, M. Jeffrey Hardwick relates Gruen's successes and failures—his work at the 1939 World's Fair, his makeover of New York's Fifth Avenue boutiques, his rejected plans for reworking entire communities, such as Fort Worth, Texas, and his crowning achievement, the enclosed shopping mall. Throughout Hardwick illuminates the dramatic shifts in American culture during the mid-twentieth century, notably the rise of suburbia and automobiles, the death of downtown, and the effect these changes had on American life. Gruen championed the redesign of suburbs and cities through giant shopping malls, earnestly believing that he was promoting an American ideal, the ability to build a community. Yet, as malls began covering the landscape and downtowns became more depressed, Gruen became painfully aware that his dream of overcoming social problems through architecture and commerce was slipping away. By the tumultuous year of 1968, it had disappeared. Victor Gruen made America depend upon its shopping malls. While they did not provide an invigorated sense of community as he had hoped, they are enduring monuments to the lure of consumer culture.
Download or read book Raising the Floor written by Andy Stern and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2016-06-14 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raising the Floor confronts America's biggest economic challenge-the fundamental restructuring of the economy and the emerging disruptive technology that threaten secure jobs and income. Andy Stern convincingly shows why it is time to consider a universal basic income as the nation's twenty-first-century solution to increasing inequality. In 2010, troubled by watching families chase the now-elusive American Dream, Andy Stern began a five-year journey to investigate how technology will impact jobs and the future of work. Stern, formerly the head of the nation's most influential and fastest-growing union, the Service Employees International Union, investigated these issues with a wide range of CEOs, futurists, economists, workers, entrepreneurs, and investment bankers who are shaping the future. The sobering assessment that emerged from his research-across the political spectrum, from libertarians at the CATO Institute to the leaders of the progressive left-is that this time is different: there will be meager benefits that come with full-time work and fewer good jobs overall. Facing such a challenging moment, Stern's solution is fittingly bold: to establish a universal basic income by eliminating many current government programs and adding new resources. At once vivid, provocative, and pragmatic, Raising the Floor will spark a national conversation about creating the new American Dream.
Download or read book Fear and Loathing in America written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-09-27 with total page 1116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the king of “Gonzo” journalism and bestselling author who brought you Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas comes another astonishing volume of letters by Hunter S. Thompson. Brazen, incisive, and outrageous as ever, this second volume of Thompson’s private correspondence is the highly anticipated follow-up to The Proud Highway. When that first book of letters appeared in 1997, Time pronounced it "deliriously entertaining"; Rolling Stone called it "brilliant beyond description"; and The New York Times celebrated its "wicked humor and bracing political conviction." Spanning the years between 1968 and 1976, these never-before-published letters show Thompson building his legend: running for sheriff in Aspen, Colorado; creating the seminal road book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas; twisting political reporting to new heights for Rolling Stone; and making sense of it all in the landmark Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. To read Thompson's dispatches from these years—addressed to the author's friends, enemies, editors, and creditors, and such notables as Jimmy Carter, Tom Wolfe, and Kurt Vonnegut—is to read a raw, revolutionary eyewitness account of one of the most exciting and pivotal eras in American history.
Download or read book Madison Park written by Eric L. Motley and published by HarperChristian + ORM. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this inspiring memoir, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush recounts the lessons he learned from his small Southern hometown. Welcome to Madison Park, a small community in Alabama founded by freed slaves in 1880. Eric Motley came of age in this remarkable place, where lessons in self-determination, hope, and an unceasing belief in the American dream taught him everything he needed for his life’s journey—a journey that led him to the Oval Office as a Special Assistant to President George W. Bush. Eric grew up among people who believed in giving and never turning away from a neighbor’s need. There was Aunt Shine, the goodly matriarch who cared so much about young Motley’s schooling that she would stand up in a crowded church and announce Eric’s progress—or shortcomings; Old Man Salery, who secretly siphoned gasoline from his beat-up car into the Motleys’ tank at night; Motley’s grandparents, who spent the last of their seed money on books for Eric; and Reverend Brinkley, a man of enormous faith and simple living. It was said that whenever the Reverend came your way, light abounded. Life in Madison Park wasn’t always easy or fair, and Motley reveals personal and heartbreaking stories of racial injustice and segregation. But Eric shows how the community taught him everything he needed to know about love and faith.
Download or read book The American dream written by Peter Bruck and published by Ernst Klett Sprachen. This book was released on 1995 with total page 49 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Songs of the Doomed written by Hunter S. Thompson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-12 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of essays by Hunter Thompson that chart the high and low moments of his thirty-year career as a journalist
Download or read book A Chinaman s Chance written by Eric Liu and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2014-07-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Tony Hsieh to Amy Chua to Jeremy Lin, Chinese Americans are now arriving at the highest levels of American business, civic life, and culture. But what makes this story of immigrant ascent unique is that Chinese Americans are emerging at just the same moment when China has emerged -- and indeed may displace America -- at the center of the global scene. What does it mean to be Chinese American in this moment? And how does exploring that question alter our notions of just what an American is and will be? In many ways, Chinese Americans today are exemplars of the American Dream: during a crowded century and a half, this community has gone from indentured servitude, second-class status and outright exclusion to economic and social integration and achievement. But this narrative obscures too much: the Chinese Americans still left behind, the erosion of the American Dream in general, the emergence -- perhaps -- of a Chinese Dream, and how other Americans will look at their countrymen of Chinese descent if China and America ever become adversaries. As Chinese Americans reconcile competing beliefs about what constitutes success, virtue, power, and purpose, they hold a mirror up to their country in a time of deep flux. In searching, often personal essays that range from the meaning of Confucius to the role of Chinese Americans in shaping how we read the Constitution to why he hates the hyphen in "Chinese-American," Eric Liu pieces together a sense of the Chinese American identity in these auspicious years for both countries. He considers his own public career in American media and government; his daughter's efforts to hold and release aspects of her Chinese inheritance; and the still-recent history that made anyone Chinese in America seem foreign and disloyal until proven otherwise. Provocative, often playful but always thoughtful, Liu breaks down his vast subject into bite-sized chunks, along the way providing insights into universal matters: identity, nationalism, family, and more.
Download or read book The American Dream written by J. Derek Harrison and published by . This book was released on 19?? with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Twelve by Twelve written by Bill Powers and published by New World Library. This book was released on 2010 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why would a successful American physician choose to live in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cabin without running water or electricity? To find out, writer and activist William Powers visited Dr. Jackie Benton in rural North Carolina. No Name Creek gurgled through Benton’s permaculture farm, and she stroked honeybees’ wings as she shared her wildcrafter philosophy of living on a planet in crisis. Powers, just back from a decade of international aid work, then accepted Benton’s offer to stay at the cabin for a season while she traveled. There, he befriended her eclectic neighbors — organic farmers, biofuel brewers, eco-developers — and discovered a sustainable but imperiled way of life. In these pages, Powers not only explores this small patch of community but draws on his international experiences with other pockets of resistance. This engrossing tale of Powers’s struggle for a meaningful life with a smaller footprint proposes a paradigm shift to an elusive “Soft World” with clues to personal happiness and global healing.
