Download or read book American Dream Dying written by Peter D. McClelland and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presents statistical information regarding long-term trends in standard of living, financial security, economic mobility, and economic mobility in relation to education, in order to demonstrate the author's view that the American Dream is becoming less attainable for a large group of the population.
Download or read book The American Dream Is Not Dead written by Michael R. Strain and published by Templeton Foundation Press. This book was released on 2020-02-25 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Populists on both sides of the political aisle routinely announce that the American Dream is dead. According to them, the game has been rigged by elites, workers can’t get ahead, wages have been stagnant for decades, and the middle class is dying. Michael R. Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, disputes this rhetoric as wrong and dangerous. In this succinctly argued volume, he shows that, on measures of economic opportunity and quality of life, there has never been a better time to be alive in America. He backs his argument with overwhelming—and underreported—data to show how the facts favor realistic optimism. He warns, however, that the false prophets of populism pose a serious danger to our current and future prosperity. Their policies would leave workers worse off. And their erroneous claim that the American Dream is dead could discourage people from taking advantage of real opportunities to better their lives. If enough people start to believe the Dream is dead, they could, in effect, kill it. To prevent this self-fulfilling prophecy, Strain’s book is urgent reading for anyone feeling the pull of the populists. E. J. Dionne and Henry Olsen provide spirited responses to Strain’s argument.
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 Transaction Man written by Nicholas Lemann and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Amazon Best History Book of 2019 "A splendid and beautifully written illustration of the tremendous importance public policy has for the daily lives of ordinary people." —Ryan Cooper, Washington Monthly Over the last generation, the United States has undergone seismic changes. Stable institutions have given way to frictionless transactions, which are celebrated no matter what collateral damage they generate. The concentration of great wealth has coincided with the fraying of social ties and the rise of inequality. How did all this come about? In Transaction Man, Nicholas Lemann explains the United States’—and the world’s—great transformation by examining three remarkable individuals who epitomized and helped create their eras. Adolf Berle, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s chief theorist of the economy, imagined a society dominated by large corporations, which a newly powerful federal government had forced to become benign and stable institutions, contributing to the public good by offering stable employment and generous pensions. By the 1970s, the corporations’ large stockholders grew restive under this regime, and their chief theoretician, Harvard Business School’s Michael Jensen, insisted that firms should maximize shareholder value, whatever the consequences. Today, Silicon Valley titans such as the LinkedIn cofounder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman hope “networks” can reknit our social fabric. Lemann interweaves these fresh and vivid profiles with a history of the Morgan Stanley investment bank from the 1930s through the financial crisis of 2008, while also tracking the rise and fall of a working-class Chicago neighborhood and the family-run car dealerships at its heart. Incisive and sweeping, Transaction Man is the definitive account of the reengineering of America and the enormous impact it has had on us all.
Download or read book Is the American Dream Dying written by Michael William Haga and published by Acclaim Publishing Company. This book was released on 1994-09-01 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Death of a Salesman written by Arthur Miller and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1998-05-01 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize-winning tragedy of a salesman’s deferred American dream Ever since it was first performed in 1949, Death of a Salesman has been recognized as a milestone of the American theater. In the person of Willy Loman, the aging, failing salesman who makes his living riding on a smile and a shoeshine, Arthur Miller redefined the tragic hero as a man whose dreams are at once insupportably vast and dangerously insubstantial. He has given us a figure whose name has become a symbol for a kind of majestic grandiosity—and a play that compresses epic extremes of humor and anguish, promise and loss, between the four walls of an American living room. "By common consent, this is one of the finest dramas in the whole range of the American theater." —Brooks Atkinson, The New York Times "So simple, central, and terrible that the run of playwrights would neither care nor dare to attempt it." —Time
Download or read book The Great Gatsby written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2023-10-04 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reproduction of the original. The publishing house Megali specialises in reproducing historical works in large print to make reading easier for people with impaired vision.
Download or read book A Time to Build written by Yuval Levin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2020-01-21 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading conservative intellectual argues that to renew America we must recommit to our institutions Americans are living through a social crisis. Our politics is polarized and bitterly divided. Culture wars rage on campus, in the media, social media, and other arenas of our common life. And for too many Americans, alienation can descend into despair, weakening families and communities and even driving an explosion of opioid abuse. Left and right alike have responded with populist anger at our institutions, and use only metaphors of destruction to describe the path forward: cleaning house, draining swamps. But, as Yuval Levin argues, this is a misguided prescription, rooted in a defective diagnosis. The social crisis we confront is defined not by an oppressive presence but by a debilitating absence of the forces that unite us and militate against alienation. As Levin argues, now is not a time to tear down, but rather to build and rebuild by committing ourselves to the institutions around us. From the military to churches, from families to schools, these institutions provide the forms and structures we need to be free. By taking concrete steps to help them be more trustworthy, we can renew the ties that bind Americans to one another.
Download or read book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism written by Anne Case and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-03-02 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Bestseller A Wall Street Journal Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year A New Statesman Book to Read From economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, a groundbreaking account of how the flaws in capitalism are fatal for America's working class Deaths of despair from suicide, drug overdose, and alcoholism are rising dramatically in the United States, claiming hundreds of thousands of American lives. Anne Case and Angus Deaton explain the overwhelming surge in these deaths and shed light on the social and economic forces that are making life harder for the working class. As the college educated become healthier and wealthier, adults without a degree are literally dying from pain and despair. Case and Deaton tie the crisis to the weakening position of labor, the growing power of corporations, and a rapacious health-care sector that redistributes working-class wages into the pockets of the wealthy. This critically important book paints a troubling portrait of the American dream in decline, and provides solutions that can rein in capitalism's excesses and make it work for everyone.
Download or read book Dying for the American Dream written by Matthias Igbarumah and published by . This book was released on 2006-03 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David John, an illegal alien pursuing the American dream in breach of U.S. immigration law is involved in a controversial murder that ends in his own murder. David comes to the United States from Africa to head the New York office of an African based television company. But when the project is crippled by lack of finance, he decides to stay on even after the expiration of his visa. David's lifelong desire for the American dream inspires him to believe that somehow providence would provide a way out of his illegal status. He joins the millions of illegal aliens living in the shadows of the U.S. immigration law. But when David gets his first job in a gas station, he chokes a teenage robber to death by accident. A terrified David, sees his American dream disappearing into the prison walls of death. He becomes a fugitive offender on the run from the law. He seeks refuge with a long lost childhood friend and soccer star, Segun Idemudia, in Newark, New Jersey, hundreds of miles away from the scene of his crime in Arlington, Texas. In Newark, David begins a new life, keeping close to his chest the untold secret of his past. He falls in love and marries Jennifer Tomson, an American woman, who bears him a daughter. But a relentless manhunt by the police leads to his arrest two years after the murder in Texas. An explosive murder trial ends with his acquittal. David is not to savor life in his American oasis of dreams after his freedom. Peeved by the court verdict, Patrick Donover, an Iraqi war hero and elder brother of the murdered teenager decides to take the law into his hands. He unloads the fatal bullets that cut short David's life.
Download or read book Dying for the American Dream written by David Brown and published by AuthorHouse. This book was released on 2006-06 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confrontations between nations, which were previously seen as wars on open battlefields, changed dramatically during the Twentieth Century. With "volunteer" units appearing to aid the participants on both sides of the fray. These units varied from the AEF in England prior to the US entry into World War II, and the Flying Tigers fighting the Japanese in China, to the Chinese divisions aiding the North Koreans during the Korean war. Suddenly the line between nations at war and those at peace became blurred, and at times indistinguishable. The true nature of the conflict was contained in the diplomat's pouch. Such confrontations required brilliant and unorthodox solutions to eliminate the threat from hostile governments. While this is a work of fiction, set in the 1951 Korean conflict, it illustrates the lengths to which governments will go to find acceptable resolutions. Belly Of The Dragon is about military personnel "detached" to the CIA and trained as agents. These "civilians" are to destroy a military objective, a jet engine factory deep in the heart of China. The real story emerges after the successful destruction of the target. Two men, of the nine who started, are alive. One, now suffering from a severe head wound, becomes part time brutishly insane, part time childish coward. Strong hatred on one side and deep resentment on the other seethes under the surface as the two must temporarily put aside their differences in order to survive the five hundred-mile trek to the coast. Both are wounded and sick, tall white men in a country of small yellow people. Stolen trucks, stolen motorcycles, and stolen boats are their modes of travel, always accompanied by their fear. Living off the land, they travel by night, in darkened vehicles on unknown roads and trails. Unable to steal enough food, even unable to keep themselves clean. Raiding a herbalist's shop in a small village, they find, by smell, medicine they remember having used as a child. Caught in the act by the "herbalist", they struggle, and accidentally set fire to the village, which burns like tinder bringing all the villagers out of their houses threatening to block their escape. Capture is inevitable, and a river patrol comes upon them as they sleep. Beaten and humiliated, they are being transported to the patrol headquarters, but luck and savage resistance allows them to overpower their captors and steal the boat. An early October winter storm adds to their peril, as the temperature plummets and blinding snow and freezing rain obscures their passage. Their wounds have become worse to the point that neither is able to go on, and the will to live or fight is fast ebbing away. Recklessly, John forces the boat forward, in spite of the weather, and his actions lead to a crash on the rocks of mighty rapids. The boat is destroyed, and they are stranded on the rocks far from the shore. One is trapped inside the boat rubble. The other decides to leave him, assuming he is dead, but what if he is only wounded, the Marine code of honor won't allow him to walk away. Finally, they are assisted by people who have been mistreated by the "New Government of the People." But it is still a long way to the coast and rescue, too far to make it by the time the pick-up team arrives, unless the wounded man is left behind. "Who would ever know?" But, it may be a moot point. In Washington, the President, who knows the mission has been successful, begins to hope that there are no survivors. Survivors could become an embarrassment to the administration, if word of the raid into neutral territory, is discovered by the UN or the opposing political party. Director Dolly of the CIA, points out, that if the President wishes there were no survivors, such a thing can be arranged. Although the thought
Download or read book Between the World and Me written by Ta-Nehisi Coates and published by One World. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.
Download or read book The Third Coast written by Thomas L. Dyja and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-03-25 with total page 561 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 Dream Hoarders written by Richard 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 In the Shadow of the American Dream written by David Wojnarowicz and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From life in the streets and love in the alleys to fame in the spotlight and an untimely death—raw, biting, and brilliant selections from the personal journals of one of the most uniquely creative artists of the late twentieth century When his life ended at age thirty-seven—a casualty of the AIDS epidemic that took so many before their time—David Wojnarowicz had long since established himself as one of America’s most vital artists and activists. In the Shadow of the American Dream is a stunning collection of riveting and revealing chapters from Wojnarowicz’s extensive personal diaries—thirty volumes’ worth of memories and lucid observations, some bitter, some sweet—that the author began writing when he was seventeen and continued until his death two decades later. Here is a brilliant chronicle of an artist’s emergence—a young man’s still achingly fresh memories of his unhappy adolescence and his glorious discovery of self. Wojnarowicz recalls his life on Manhattan’s Lower East Side with no shame or regret, and shares his hitchhiking journeys across the country. He talks of art and love and sex—embracing who he is fully and accepting his heartbreaking fate without pathos—while providing fascinating glimpses into the vibrant and colorful New York art scene and poignant views of life and death among the AIDS community. At once frightening and courageous, joyous and disturbing, enlightening and honest, In the Shadow of the American Dream is a treasured addition to the enduring literary legacy of David Wojnarowicz and a true testament to his unique brilliance.
Download or read book 5 Easy Theses written by James Stone and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-05-03 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A business leader and esteemed economic thinker outlines simple solutions to America’s five most pressing public policy issues, from healthcare to education to inequality. America today confronts a host of urgent problems, many of them seemingly intractable, but some we are entirely capable of solving. In Five Easy Theses, James M. Stone presents specific, common-sense solutions to a handful of our most pressing challenges, showing how simple it would be to shore up Social Security, rein in an out-of-control financial sector, reduce inequality, and make healthcare and education better and more affordable. The means are right in front of us, Stone explains, in various policy options that — if implemented — could preserve or enhance government revenue while also channeling the national economy toward the greater good. Accessible and thought provoking, Five Easy Theses reveals that a more democratic, prosperous America is well within our reach.
Download or read book The Dying Grass written by William T. Vollmann and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-07-26 with total page 1378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the National Book Award-winning author of Europe Central – a dazzling fictional account of the epic fighting retreat of the Nez Perce Indians In this fifth installment in his acclaimed Seven Dreams series of novels examining the collisions between Native Americans and European colonizers, William T. Vollmann tells the story of the epic fighting retreat of the Nez Perce Indians, with flashbacks to the Civil War. Defrauded and intimidated at every turn, the Nez Perces finally went on the warpath in 1877, subjecting the U.S. Army to its greatest defeat since Little Big Horn the previous year, as they fled from northeast Oregon across Montana to the Canadian border. Vollmann’s main character is not the legendary Chief Joseph but his pursuer, General Oliver Otis Howard, the brave, shy, tormented, devoutly Christian Civil War veteran. In this novel, we see him as commander, father, son, husband, friend, and killer. Teeming with many vivid characters on both sides of the conflict, and written in an original style in which the printed page works as a stage with multiple layers of foreground and background, The Dying Grass is another mesmerizing achievement from one of the most ambitious writers of our time.
