Product Description: Homelessness in America has grown from a minor problem in isolated areas of a few big cities into a near epidemic. Today, scarcely any American city of any appreciable size lacks homeless people. Homeless shelters and programs have become as essential and as commonplace as police protection or water and sewage treatment...read more

Product Description: "Homelessness is not one problem, but many different kinds of problems involving many different kinds of people, each of them homeless for different reasons or who have become homeless in different ways… Among the homeless of today are men, women, children, and whole families; victims of domestic violence and male abandonment; young, middle-aged, and elderly; veterans; illegal immigrants; persons of every ethnic description; people who are homeless for strictly economic reasons; others who are homeless because they drink and drug too much; the lucid and the deranged; and on through a long list…...read more

Product Description: From the war-torn foothills of the Little Bighorns to the tragedy that is modern ranch life, this spellbinding collection of short fiction celebrates ordinary people struggling to do what's right. A cavalry trooper dismisses his premonitions of disaster for the fort, but as winter deepens, he can hardly deny the grisly precision of his dreams...read more

Product Description: James Wright's Address Unknown: The Homeless in America focused on the problem of homelessness during the mid-to-late 1980s, making an important contribution to the then-emerging public debate of a rapidly growing and increasingly visible social problem...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Drawing upon their research in the most extensive study to date, the authors here describe the means and methods of gun-related violence among urban youth. Using data collected from juvenile male inmates and male students in inner-city high schools, Sheley and Wright focus on the number, type, and method of acquisition of firearms, as well as the varying reasons given for carrying arms...read more

Product Description: Drawing upon their research in the most extensive study to date, the authors here describe the means and methods of gun-related violence among urban youth. Using data collected from juvenile male inmates and male students in inner-city high schools, Sheley and Wright focus on the number, type, and method of acquisition of firearms, as well as the varying reasons given for carrying arms...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This updated volume from Professors Wright and Rossi is part of a larger, continuing research program, focused on the acquisition, carrying, and use of guns and other weapons in the commission of criminal acts. For this expanded edition, Dr...read more

Product Description: This volume, develops three principal themes. First, poverty is not monolithic; secondly, the so-called underclass within the poverty population represents a new and corrosive development; and, third, the War on Poverty of the 1960s offered a boldness of vision that today's poverty policies tend to lack...read more

In 1978, the Social and Demographic Research Institute of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, received a grant from the National Institute of Justice to undertake a comprehensive review of the literature on weapons, crime, and violence in the United States. The purpose of the project is best described as a "sifting and winnowing" of the claims and counterclaims from both sides of the Great American Gun War—the perennial struggle in Ameri­can political life over what to do, if anything, about guns, about violence, and about crime. The review and analysis of the available studies consumed the better part of three years; the results of this work are contained in this volume. The intention of any review is to take stock of the available fund of knowledge in some topical area. Under the Gun is no different: our goal has been to glean from the volumes of previous studies those facts that, in our view, seem firmly and certainly established; those hypotheses that seem adequately supported by, or at least approximately consistent with, the best available research evidence; and those areas or topics about which, it seems, we need to know a lot more than we do. One of our major conclusions can be stated in advance: despite the large number of studies that have been done, many critically important questions have not been adequately researched, and some of them have not been examined at all. Much of the available research in the area of weapons and crime has been done by advocates for one or another policy position. As a consequence, the manifest intent of many "studies" is to persuade rather than to inform. We have tried to approach the topic from a purely agnostic point of view, treating as an open question what policies should be enacted with regard to gun, or crime, control. Thus, we have tried to judge each study on its own merits, on the basis of the routine standards normally applied to social-scientific research, and not on the basis of how effectively it argues for a particular policy direction. It would, of course, be presumptuous to claim that we have set aside all our own biases in conducting this study. Whether or not our treatment is fair and objective is clearly something for the reader, and not us, to decide.

Product Description: Is the consciousness of Americans in the midst of dramatic transformation? Or do people think and feel much the same as they have always thought and felt? Do most people enjoy their work, or hate it? Is the American family being replaced by new institutional forms, or is it much the same as it was in the 1950's? Have material values been replaced by a "postmaterial consciousness" in a postindustrial society? Are Americans becoming more conservative, less conservative, or staying about the same? State of the Masses asks the important questions...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This 1981 Abt Books publication is the most comprehensive study to date on social research methods and findings relevant to disaster response. Included are presentations and discussions of two studies undertaken by the Social and Demographic Research Institute between 1976 and 1979, one focused on the long-term effects of natural hazards on American communities and the other examining the state and local politics of natural hazard issues...read more