San Antonio College Library

"Must the strip mall and the eight-lane highway define 21st century American life? That is a central question posed by critics of suburban and exurban living in America. Yet despite the ubiquity of the critique, it never sticks--Americans by the scores of millions have willingly moved into sprawling developments over the past few decades Americans find many of the more substantial criticisms of sprawl easy to ignore because they often come across...

The New York Times op-ed columnist probes the widening gap between American ideals and American realities, and urges us to do something about it. Herbert's work is characterized by a strong moral vision and a deep understanding of the human costs of political decisions. In this book he makes the case that in recent years America has too often failed to live up to its creed of fairness and justice in the lives of working people, racial minorities,...

"Over the past twenty years, Americans have been fed a mash of confusing financial and economic information. Economist Ellen Frank's alternately enlightening and shocking volume shows us how what we've been taught to think about stocks, interest rates, personal opportunities, employment, government spending, and inflation distorts popular understanding of how the economy really operates. But public confusion serves a distinct political goal: to camouflage...

In this exceptional new book, Dawson Barrett calls our attention to the post-1960s period, in which US economic, cultural, and political elites turned the tide against the protest movement gains of the previous forty years and reshaped the ability of activists to influence the political process. For much of the last half-century, policymakers in both major US political parties have been guided by the "pro-business" tenets of neoliberalism. Dubbed...

"In this paradigm-shifting and controversial book, legal theorist and author Martha Fineman documents how American policymakers' overemphasis on the values of self-sufficiency and autonomy has negatively affected government policy relating to the care of the young, the elderly, and the infirm." "Those charged with administering U.S. social policy have long considered the marital family household as appropriately both separate and self-sufficient,...

Why do American ghettos persist? Scholars and commentators often identify some factor - such as single motherhood, joblessness, or violent street crime - as the key to solving the problem and recommend policies accordingly. But, Tommie Shelby argues, these attempts to 'fix' ghettos or 'help' their poor inhabitants ignore fundamental questions of justice and fail to see the urban poor as moral agents responding to injustice.

"In order to move toward a more egalitarian society, the American education system must be reformed to account for genetic differences between individual academic abilities. All groups, all races, and all genders are created equal. Not all individuals are. The Cult of Smart is a provocative and groundbreaking discussion of human potential, a topic which, in recent times, has been corrupted by the pernicious and cynical pseudoscience of 'race realism.'...

Traces the successes and failures of the left/progressive movement in the United States through the twentieth century, and explores what the movement reveals about the direction American politics will take in the twenty-first century.

Cecile Richards has been an activist since she was taken to the principal's office in seventh grade for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. She had an extraordinary childhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her civil rights attorney father and activist mother taught their kids to be troublemakers. In the Richards household, the "dinner table was never for eating -- it was for sorting precinct lists." From the time Richards was a girl,...