Sociology

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Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft is an academic work focusing on the Salem witch trials. First published by Harvard University Press in 1974, the book offers an alternative explanation for the phenomenon of witch hysteria and its special relevance to the town of Salem, Massachusetts. The book was well-received by critics for its unique approach to this familiar material. It falls into the nonfiction categories of popular culture, social sciences, and U.S. history... Read Salem Possessed Summary

First published in Hebrew in 2011, with the English translation following in 2014, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind examining the shaping of human history. Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari shines a light, sometimes harshly, on how humans have exploited the ideas of capitalism, religion, and politics to control the globe and put the species Homo sapiens on the threshold of banishing natural selection. Sapiens landed on the New York Times best-seller list and won... Read Sapiens Summary

Jonathan Kozol's 1991 book, Savage Inequalities, is a critical look at the American educational system and its failures. The main argument of the book is that a tremendous divide exists between rich and poor in education, a divide intensified by ethnic and racial prejudice. Kozol claims that in many communities and localities, American schools remain effectively segregated, more than 50 years after the criminalization of such practices. Kozol argues that while the letter of the... Read Savage Inequalities Summary

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Schindler’s List (originally titled Schindler’s Ark) is a 1982 historical novel by Australian author Thomas Keneally. It tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi party who used his position as a German industrialist to save more than 1,200 people’s lives during the war. In protecting as many people as he could from the genocidal Nazi regime, Schindler risked being sent to a concentration camp himself. Keneally wrote the novel with the... Read Schindler's List Summary

Kate Millett’s 1970 book Sexual Politics is a groundbreaking feminist critique of literature and social organization that is widely regarded as an essential radical feminist text.It opens with brief exploration of fiction by Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet. Presenting these as “Incidents of Sexual Politics,” Millett examines how power operates within sexual relationships and builds an argument that the relationship between the sexes is a political issue revolving around the dominance of one... Read Sexual Politics Summary

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, published in 2009, is an often personal and meditative pitch for a cultural recommitment to the vocational arts. As a mechanic with a doctorate in philosophy, author Matthew B. Crawford has lived both lives—that of the “knowledge worker” of white-collar culture and that of the manual laborer who solves the problems society faces on a daily basis. He uses the space of the book... Read Shop Class as Soulcraft Summary

Sidewalk tells the true story of sociologist Mitchell Duneier’s years-long effort to understand the informal sidewalk economy of 1990s Greenwich Village, in New York City. The story begins when Duneier meets Hakim Hasan, who is a vendor of books on Sixth Avenue, one of the commercial hubs of the Village and the main focus of this book. Through Hakim, Duneier becomes acquainted with several of the lower-income book and magazine vendors, scavengers, and panhandlers that... Read Sidewalk Summary

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Written by American journalist Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008) is a thorough account of the forms of slavery perpetuated by economic disempowerment in the South after the Civil War up to World War II. The book addresses themes like The Intentional Revival of Slavery, The Toxic Mix of White Mythology and Naïve Racism, and Challenges of Confronting the Past. Slavery... Read Slavery by Another Name Summary

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Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County is a 2015 nonfiction book by Kristen Green about the closing of public schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia from 1959 to 1964, following the 1954 United States Supreme Court ruling that school segregation is unconstitutional. During the five years the public schools were closed, black students in Prince Edward County largely went uneducated while a new private school for whites, Prince Edward Academy, opened. The book... Read Something Must Be Done About Prince Edward County Summary

Sophie's World is a young adult book by Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder. The book follows main character Sophie, a young girl who is fourteen years old and living with her parents in Norway. Sophie's life changes dramatically when she receives a series of strange postcards, which ask her large, existential questions about the world around her. Each day, Sophie receives a postcard, and in the evenings she receives a package from a man named Alberto... Read Sophie's World Summary

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So You Want to Talk About Race is a 2018 non-fiction book written by Ijeoma Oluo, an American author of Nigerian descent whose columns and news articles on race have appeared in The Guardian, The Stranger, and Jezebel, among other places. This guide refers to the first edition published in 2018 by Seal Press. The title gestures to the discourse that is necessary to combat racial oppression in the United States. The book made Bustle’s... Read So You Want to Talk About Race Summary

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Ibrahim Kendi’s comprehensive history of racial thought in the US, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, was published in 2016 and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. Kendi has also collaborated author Jason Reynolds (Long Way Down, Ain't Burned All the Bright) on a young adult "remix" of Stamped from the Beginning titled Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You, and is well known for his 2019 book, How to... Read Stamped From the Beginning Summary