San Antonio College Library

In what is destined to become one of the most important books published this year, Lillian Rubin takes us inside the lives, hearts, and minds of America's working-class families and lets us hear them speak. With an eloquence rivaling that of her earlier classic, Worlds of Pain, Lillian Rubin lays bare the dreams, disappointments, insecurities, loves, and hates of those she calls "the invisible Americans." Based on nearly four hundred interviews with...

David Lamb is a remarkable reporter and story teller. His passion is the people of America - their histories, their lives, the dramas that absorb them. In his hands, these people become figures in a coherent, compelling frieze of America in the late twentieth century. In David Lamb's America, people greet each new day with a kind of gritty realism, steadfastly optimistic in the face of disappointments, large and small. This is an original and colorful...

Family historian Stephanie Coontz offers a guide to the causes and consequences of today's family trends. Meticulously researched and carefully balanced, The Way We Really Are demonstrates why a historically informed perspective on changing family roles and arrangements can be as helpful in sorting through many family dilemmas as going into therapy - and much more helpful than listening to today's political debates. Coontz argues that although we...

The newly developing stages of Second Adulthood are vividly dramatized.

"Consider this paradox: Ecologists estimate that it would take three planets Earth to provide an American standard of living to the entire world. Yet it is that standard of living to which the whole world aspires." "In Consuming Desires, Roger Rosenblatt brings together a collection of writers to shed light on that disturbing paradox. The book presents a rich and varied dialogue on the underlying roots of consumer culture and its pervasive impact...

"This detailed and fascinating portrait of America's elite leaders is based on interviews with more than 1800 members of ten strategic leadership groups - including federal judges, business executives, religious leaders, high-level bureaucrats, military leaders, labor union chiefs, lawyers, leading journalists, and motion picture and television magnates. The results of the survey - the most comprehensive ever conducted on America's elite groups -...

"David Kirp has collected a variety of stories from across America to recreate the immediate experience of community - tales that signify in their particulars, giving meaning to the much bandied-about idea of civic virtue. They paint a rich picture of how, for better and for worse, Americans live together." "We meet two San Francisco families, one Nicaraguan and the other black, trying to live peacefully with each other; residents in the fire-ravaged...

Collection of articles that contain the facts, history, and viewpoints on a number of controversial issues.

In Robert H. Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah, one of our nation's most distinguished conservative scholars offers a prophetic and unprecedented view of a culture in decline, a nation in such serious moral trouble that its very foundation is crumbling. Of our own President, Bork writes: "Thirty years ago, Clinton's behavior would have been absolutely disqualifying. Since the 1992 election, the public has learned far more about what is known, euphemistically,...