In this mix of history, journalism, political analysis, and first-person accounts, former chief coroner and Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell, renowned criminologist Neil Boyd, and investigative journalist Lori Culbert, offer a portrait of one of North America’s poorest, most drug-challenged neighbourhoods: Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.A Thousand Dreams raises provocative questions about the challenges confr...

A forceful argument against America's vicious circle of growing inequality by the Nobel Prize–winning economist.The top 1 percent of Americans control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth. And, as Joseph E. Stiglitz explains, while those at the top enjoy the best health care, education, and benefits of wealth, they fail to realize that “their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live.”Stiglitz draws on his deep understanding of economics to show that growing inequali...

**From one of the world’s best-known development economists—an excoriating attack on the tragic hubris of the West’s efforts to improve the lot of the so-called developing world."Brilliant at diagnosing the failings of Western intervention in the Third World." —BusinessWeek**In his previous book, The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly criticized the utter ineffectiveness of Western organizations to mitigate global poverty, and he was promptly fired...

"A lyrical and understanding chronicler of people who somehow become displaced within their own lives. . . . Mr. Lindsay-Abaire has shown a special affinity for female characters suddenly forced to re-evaluate the roles by which they define themselves."—The New York TimesWith his latest play Good People, David Lindsay-Abaire returns to Manhattan Theatre Club where four of his previous works were produced, including his 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning Rabbit Hole

In the fifty years since it was published, The Other America has been established as a seminal work of sociology. This anniversary edition includes Michael Harrington’s essays on poverty in the 1970s and ’80s as well as a new introduction by Harrington’s biographer, Maurice Isserman. This illuminating, profoundly moving classic is still all too relevant for today’s America.When Michael Harrington’s masterpiece, The Other America, was first publish...

Originally published in Seoul in 1938, soon after the outbreak of the Pacific War, "Peace Under Heaven" is a satirical novel centering on the household of a Korean landlord during the Japanese colonial occupation. Master Yun, embodying the traditional ambitions of a standard Korean paterfamilias, by being projected fast forward into a modern urban environment, caricatures the increasing irrelevance of Confucian mores to 20th-century social reality. Depicting the anomic lives of the Yun hou...

An inside look at how community service organizations really workVolunteering improves inner character, builds community, cures poverty, and prevents crime. We've all heard this kind of empowerment talk from nonprofit and government-sponsored civic programs. But what do these programs really accomplish? In Making Volunteers, Nina Eliasoph offers an in-depth, humorous, wrenching, and at times uplifting look inside youth and adult civic programs. She reveals...

Three hundred million - that's the number of people subjected to slavery, sex-trafficking, discrimination, and unspeakable poverty in India. That's the same number of people as live in the entire United States. They are the Dalit people, the untouchables.When Matthew Cork, a California pastor, first encountered the Dalits he was shaken to his core. He learned that Gandhi's success at bringing about freedom did not extend to freeing the Dalits from the bondage of the Caste system th...

This feeble blemished light, this dawn mangled by night, this is not the morning we had all so longed for... -Faiz Ahmed Faiz In the two decades since the early 1990s, when India confirmed its allegiance to the Free Market, more of its citizens have become marginalized than ever before, and society has become more sharply riven than ever. In 'Looking Away', Harsh Mander ranges wide to record and analyse the many different fault lines which crisscross Indian society today. There is increasi...

Thirty-six major contemporary writers examine life in a deeply divided America—including Anthony Doerr, Ann Patchett, Roxane Gay, Rebecca Solnit, Hector Tobar, Joyce Carol Oates, Edwidge Danticat, Richard Russo, Eula Bliss, Karen Russell, and many moreAmerica is broken. You don’t need a fistful of statistics to know this. Visit any city, and evidence of our shattered social compact will present itself. From Appalachia to the Rust Belt and down to rural Texas, the g...

This book seeks to be relevant to the call to address inequalities, injustice, human rights, and social exclusion in a more integrated, holistic, and transformative manner. It seeks to do so by looking at what we have learned in both the development and human rights communities. Further, it addresses fundamental obstacles that neither community has dealt with in this context, such as changing power relations. The book builds on the report of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor ...

"It must be some kind of experiment or something, to see how long people can live without food, without shelter, without security."—homeless woman, Grand Central Station, winter"Homelessness is a routine fact of life on the margins. Materially, it emerges out of a tangled but unmysterious mix of factors: scarce housing, poorly planned and badly implemented policies of relocation and support, dismal prospects of work, exhausted or alienated kin.... Any outreach worker could tell you...