Download or read book Am rica s Dream written by Esmeralda Santiago and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: América Gonzalez is a hotel housekeeper on an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, cleaning up after wealthy foreigners who don't look her In the eye. Her alcoholic mother resents her; her married boyfriend, Correa, beats her; and their fourteen-year-old daughter thinks life would be better anywhere but with América. So when América is offered the chance to work as alive-in housekeeper and nanny for a family in Westchester County, New York, she takes it as a sign that a door to escape has been opened. Yet even as América revels in the comparative luxury of her new life, daring to care about a man other than Correa, she is faced with dramatic proof that no matter what she does, she can't get away from her past.
Download or read book Redesigning the American Dream written by Dolores Hayden and published by W. W. Norton. This book was released on 1986 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The noted feminist theorist argues for a new conception of architectural design and outlines housing plans that will support new patterns of nurturing and opportunity for a range of individuals and families
Download or read book Underwater written by Ryan Dezember and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-07-14 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Bruss Real Estate Book Award His assignment was to write about a real-estate frenzy lighting up the Redneck Riviera. So Ryan Dezember settled in and bought a home nearby himself. Then the market crashed, and he became one of the millions of Americans who suddenly owed more on their homes than they were worth. A flood of foreclosures made it impossible to sell. It didn't help that his quaint neighborhood fell into disrepair and drug-induced despair. He had no choice but to become a reluctant and wildly unprofitable landlord to move on. Meanwhile, his reporting showed how the speculative mania that caused the crash opened the U.S. housing market to a much larger breed of investors. In this deeply personal story, Dezember shows how decisions on Wall Street and in Washington played out on his street in a corner of the Sunbelt that was convulsed by the foreclosure crisis. Readers will witness the housing market collapse from Dezember’s perch as a newspaper reporter. First he’s in the boom-to-bust South where a hot-air balloonist named Bob Shallow becomes one of the world’s top selling real-estate agents arranging condo flips, developers flop in spectacular fashion and the law catches up with a beach-town mayor on the take. Later he’s in New York, among financiers like Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman who are building rental empires out of foreclosures, staking claim to the bastion of middle-class wealth: the single-family home. Through it all, Dezember is an underwater homeowner caught up in the mess. A cautionary tale of Wall Street's push to turn homes into assets, Underwater is a powerful, incisive story that chronicles the crash and its aftermath from a fresh perspective—the forgotten, middle-class homeowner.
Download or read book Eichler written by Paul Adamson and published by Gibbs Smith. This book was released on 2002-11 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Atriums, household conveniences, and sleek styling made Eichler Homes a standard-bearer for bringing the modern home design to middle-class America. Joseph Eichler was a pioneering developer who defied conventional wisdom by hiring progressive architects to design Modernist homes for the growing middle class of the 1950s. He was known for his innovations, including "built-ins" for streamlined kitchen work, for introducing a multipurpose room adjacent to the kitchen, and for the classic atrium that melded the indoors with the outdoors. For nearly twenty years, Eichler Homes built thousands of dwellings in California, acquiring national and international acclaim. Eichler: Modernism Rebuilds the American Dream examines Eichler's legacy as seen in his original homes and in the revival of the Modernist movement, which continues to grow today. The homes that Eichler built were modern in concept and expression, and yet comfortable for living. Eichler's work left a legacy of design integrity and set standards for housing developers that remain unparalleled in the history of American building. This book captures and illustrates that legacy with impressive detail, engaging history, firsthand recollections about Eichler and his vision, and 250 photographs of Eichler homes in their prime.
Download or read book Dream House written by Ulysses Grant Dietz and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recognizable to millions as a symbol of the American presidency, the White House was first an American home. From 1800 until 1960, it kept pace with changing ideals of the American house and garden. That ended when Jacqueline Kennedy redecorated the White House as a museum to upper-class taste. Today the Obamas are pulling it back to its role as an American home. This book looks at the president's house in the context of American house design and decoration. Hundreds of historic photographs, plans, and drawings compare it to other American houses, gardens, and interiors, showing the White House as it changed through decades of interior renovation, rebuilding, and landscaping.--From publisher description.
Download or read book Building Home written by Eric John Abrahamson and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2013-02-28 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building Home is an innovative biography that weaves together three engrossing stories. It is one part corporate and industrial history, using the evolution of mortgage finance as a way to understand larger dynamics in the nation‘s political economy. It is another part urban history, since the extraordinary success of the savings and loan business in Los Angeles reflects much of the cultural and economic history of Southern California. Finally, it is a personal story, a biography of one of the nation‘s most successful entrepreneurs of the managed economy —Howard Fieldstad Ahmanson. Eric John Abrahamson deftly connects these three strands as he chronicles Ahmanson’s rise against the background of the postwar housing boom and the growth of L.A. during the same period. As a sun-tanned yachtsman and a cigar-smoking financier, the Omaha-born Ahmanson was both unique and representative of many of the business leaders of his era. He did not control a vast infrastructure like a railroad or an electrical utility. Nor did he build his wealth by pulling the financial levers that made possible these great corporate endeavors. Instead, he made a fortune by enabling the middle-class American dream. With his great wealth, he contributed substantially to the expansion of the cultural institutions in L.A. As we struggle to understand the current mortgage-led financial crisis, Ahmanson’s life offers powerful insights into an era when the widespread hope of homeownership was just beginning to take shape.
Download or read book Expanding the American Dream written by Barbara M. Kelly and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1993-02-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written about the housing policies of the Depression and the Postwar period. Much less has been written of the houses built as a result of these policies, or the lives of the families who lived in them. Using the houses of Levittown, Long Island, as cultural artifacts, this book examines the relationship between the government-sponsored, mass-produced housing built after World War II, the families who lived in it, and the society that fostered it. Beginning with the basic four-room, slab-based Cape Cods and Ranches, Levittown homeowners invested time and effort, barter and money in the expansion and redesign of their houses. The author shows how this gradual process has altered the socioeconomic nature of the community as well, bringing Levittown fully into the mainstream of middle-class America. This book works on several levels. For planners, it offers a reassessment of the housing policies of the 1940s and '50s, suggesting that important lessons remain to be learned from the Levittown experience. For historians, it offers new insights into the nature of the suburbanization process that followed World War II. And for those who wish to understand the subtle workings of their own domestic space within their lives, it offers food for speculation.
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 New American Dream written by James Gauer and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than just a how-to style guide, this book traces the history of home building in America and offers readers an understanding of how house sizes and costs have soared. In clear prose, Gauer lays out the virtues of living in small, skillfully designed dwellings, with chapters on proportion, scale, light, and modesty, among other topics.
Download or read book Who Stole the American Dream written by Hedrick Smith and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2013-08-27 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pulitzer Prize winner Hedrick Smith’s new book is an extraordinary achievement, an eye-opening account of how, over the past four decades, the American Dream has been dismantled and we became two Americas. In his bestselling The Russians, Smith took millions of readers inside the Soviet Union. In The Power Game, he took us inside Washington’s corridors of power. Now Smith takes us across America to show how seismic changes, sparked by a sequence of landmark political and economic decisions, have transformed America. As only a veteran reporter can, Smith fits the puzzle together, starting with Lewis Powell’s provocative memo that triggered a political rebellion that dramatically altered the landscape of power from then until today. This is a book full of surprises and revelations—the accidental beginnings of the 401(k) plan, with disastrous economic consequences for many; the major policy changes that began under Jimmy Carter; how the New Economy disrupted America’s engine of shared prosperity, the “virtuous circle” of growth, and how America lost the title of “Land of Opportunity.” Smith documents the transfer of $6 trillion in middle-class wealth from homeowners to banks even before the housing boom went bust, and how the U.S. policy tilt favoring the rich is stunting America’s economic growth. This book is essential reading for all of us who want to understand America today, or why average Americans are struggling to keep afloat. Smith reveals how pivotal laws and policies were altered while the public wasn’t looking, how Congress often ignores public opinion, why moderate politicians got shoved to the sidelines, and how Wall Street often wins politically by hiring over 1,400 former government officials as lobbyists. Smith talks to a wide range of people, telling the stories of Americans high and low. From political leaders such as Bill Clinton, Newt Gingrich, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to CEOs such as Al Dunlap, Bob Galvin, and Andy Grove, to heartland Middle Americans such as airline mechanic Pat O’Neill, software systems manager Kristine Serrano, small businessman John Terboss, and subcontractor Eliseo Guardado, Smith puts a human face on how middle-class America and the American Dream have been undermined. This magnificent work of history and reportage is filled with the penetrating insights, provocative discoveries, and the great empathy of a master journalist. Finally, Smith offers ideas for restoring America’s great promise and reclaiming the American Dream. Praise for Who Stole the American Dream? “[A] sweeping, authoritative examination of the last four decades of the American economic experience.”—The Huffington Post “Some fine work has been done in explaining the mess we’re in. . . . But no book goes to the headwaters with the precision, detail and accessibility of Smith.”—The Seattle Times “Sweeping in scope . . . [Smith] posits some steps that could alleviate the problems of the United States.”—USA Today “Brilliant . . . [a] remarkably comprehensive and coherent analysis of and prescriptions for America’s contemporary economic malaise.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) “Smith enlivens his narrative with portraits of the people caught up in events, humanizing complex subjects often rendered sterile in economic analysis. . . . The human face of the story is inseparable from the history.”—Reuters
Download or read book Brave New Home written by Diana Lind and published by Bold Type Books. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This smart, provocative look at how the American Dream of single-family homes, white picket fences, and two-car garages became a lonely, overpriced nightmare explores how new trends in housing can help us live better. Over the past century, American demographics and social norms have shifted dramatically. More people are living alone, marrying later in life, and having smaller families. At the same time, their lifestyles are changing, whether by choice or by force, to become more virtual, more mobile, and less stable. But despite the ways that today's America is different and more diverse, housing still looks stuck in the 1950s. In Brave New Home, Diana Lind shows why a country full of single-family houses is bad for us and our planet, and details the new efforts underway that better reflect the way we live now, to ensure that the way we live next is both less lonely and more affordable. Lind takes readers into the homes and communities that are seeking alternatives to the American norm, from multi-generational living, in-law suites, and co-living to microapartments, tiny houses, and new rural communities. Drawing on Lind's expertise and the stories of Americans caught in or forging their own paths outside of our cookie-cutter housing trap, Brave New Home offers a diagnosis of the current American housing crisis and a radical re-imagining of future possibilities.
Download or read book In the Dream House written by Carmen Maria Machado and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.
Download or read book I Was Their American Dream written by Malaka Gharib and published by Clarkson Potter. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A portrait of growing up in America, and a portrait of family, that pulls off the feat of being both intimately specific and deeply universal at the same time. I adored this book.”—Jonny Sun “[A] high-spirited graphical memoir . . . Gharib’s wisdom about the power and limits of racial identity is evident in the way she draws.”—NPR WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid. Malaka Gharib's triumphant graphic memoir brings to life her teenage antics and illuminates earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised. Malaka's story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream. Praise for I Was Their American Dream “In this time when immigration is such a hot topic, Malaka Gharib puts an engaging human face on the issue. . . . The push and pull first-generation kids feel is portrayed with humor and love, especially humor. . . . Gharib pokes fun at all of the cultures she lives in, able to see each of them with an outsider’s wry eye, while appreciating them with an insider’s close experience. . . . The question of ‘What are you?’ has never been answered with so much charm.”—Marissa Moss, New York Journal of Books “Forthright and funny, Gharib fiercely claims her own American dream.”—Booklist “Thoughtful and relatable, this touching account should be shared across generations.”– Library Journal “This charming graphic memoir riffs on the joys and challenges of developing a unique ethnic identity.”– Publishers Weekly
Download or read book The Best of American Dream Homes written by Lisa S. Siglag and published by Home Planners, LLC. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From mountain retreats to New York contemporaries, today's dream homes span the gamut. This striking book takes readers coast to coast to see 30 of America's most exquisite houses representing different architectural styles inspired by homes dating from the 1600s to the present.
Download or read book A Cuban Refugee s Journey to the American Dream written by Gerardo M. González and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A touching memoir recounting the journey of a young Cuban immigrant to the US who went on to become a professor and university dean. In February 1962, three years into Fidel Castro’s rule of their Cuban homeland, the González family—an auto mechanic, his wife, and two young children—landed in Miami with a few personal possessions and two bottles of Cuban rum. As his parents struggled to find work, eleven-year-old Gerardo struggled to fit in at school, where a teacher intimidated him and school authorities placed him on a vocational track. Inspired by a close friend, Gerardo decided to go to college. He not only graduated but, with hard work and determination, placed himself on a path through higher education that brought him to a deanship at the Indiana University School of Education. In this deeply moving memoir, González recounts his remarkable personal and professional journey. The memoir begins with Gerardo’s childhood in Cuba and recounts the family’s emigration to the United States and struggles to find work and assimilate, and González’s upward track through higher education. It demonstrates the transformative power that access to education can have on one person’s life. Gerardo’s journey came full circle when he returned to Cuba fifty years after he left, no longer the scared, disheartened refugee but rather proud, educated, and determined to speak out against those who wished to silence others. It includes treasured photographs and documents from González’s life in Cuba and the US. His is the story of one immigrant attaining the American Dream, told at a time when the fate of millions of refugees throughout the world, and Hispanics in the United States, especially his fellow Cubans, has never been more uncertain. “Author and educator Gerardo M. González brilliantly illustrates the joys and struggles of the refugee experience, and the inarguable role of education as an open door to opportunity. This is a delightful read, and one that will inspire you to achieve greatness regardless of the odds.” —Dr. Eduardo J. Padrón, President, Miami Dade College “There can be no more persuasive testimony to the power of intelligence, commitment, and inspiration than Gerardo M. González’s memoir. The contribution of immigrants to America’s prosperity and national achievements is undeniably impressive. Yet, this transformational story of challenge and achievement, while individually exceptional, is nonetheless emblematic of the experience of countless immigrants who have made America better than it could otherwise have been. No finer antidote to the simplistic sloganeering of the immigration debate exists.” —John V. Lombardi, President Emeritus, University of Florida, and author of How Universities Work
Download or read book The End of the Suburbs written by Leigh Gallagher and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in hardcover in 2013.
Download or read book The House on Lemon Street written by Mark Rawitsch and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2012-06-15 with total page 685 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1915, Jukichi and Ken Harada purchased a house on Lemon Street in Riverside, California. Close to their restaurant, church, and children’s school, the house should have been a safe and healthy family home. Before the purchase, white neighbors objected because of the Haradas’ Japanese ancestry, and the California Alien Land Law denied them real-estate ownership because they were not citizens. To bypass the law Mr. Harada bought the house in the names of his three youngest children, who were American-born citizens. Neighbors protested again, and the first Japanese American court test of the California Alien Land Law of 1913—The People of the State of California v. Jukichi Harada—was the result. Bringing this little-known story to light, The House on Lemon Street details the Haradas’ decision to fight for the American dream. Chronicling their experiences from their immigration to the United States through their legal battle over their home, their incarceration during World War II, and their lives after the war, this book tells the story of the family’s participation in the struggle for human and civil rights, social justice, property and legal rights, and fair treatment of immigrants in the United States. The Harada family’s quest for acceptance illuminates the deep underpinnings of anti-Asian animus, which set the stage for Executive Order 9066, and recognizes fundamental elements of our nation’s anti-immigrant history that continue to shape the American story. It will be worthwhile for anyone interested in the Japanese American experience in the twentieth century, immigration history, public history, and law.
