Product Description: American communities are facing chronic problems: fiscal stress, urban decline, environmental sprawl, mass incarceration, political isolation, disproportionate foreclosures and severe public health risks. In The Price of Paradise, David Troutt argues that it is a lack of mutuality in our local decision making that has led to this looming crisis facing cities and local governments...read more

Product Description: This book is the first in-depth examination of the 25 million Americans with the most intense hatred of President Obama―arguably the most Republican-friendly of recent Democratic presidents―and what the mindsets of these "Obama Haters" teach us about race and ethnicity in America today...read more

In this best-selling text BY social workers and FOR social workers, Charles Zastrow and Karen K. Kirst-Ashman, nationally prominent social work educators and authors, guide studetns in assessing and evaluating how individuals function within families, groups, organizations and communities during the key stages of the human life span. Zastrow, a member of the CSWE Commission on Accreditation, and Kirst-Ashman, a CSWE Board member, incorporate the most recent CSWE curriculum recommendations throughout. Using an effective, chronological life-span approach, the authors present separate chapters on biological, psychological, and social impacts at the different life-span stages. Chapter One introduces a practical Systems Impact Model that students can apply throughout the book to help them understand individual behavior in macro, mezzo, and micro settings. Consistent with the curriculum policy statements of the CSWE, content on social work values and ethics, diversity, social and economic justice and populations-at-risk is also includes. Zastrow and Kirst-Ashman make theories relevant to myriad practice settings by providing case examples, illustrations, photos, and exercises in every chapter. With thorough coverage of theories at all levels (micro, mezzo, macro) the book is comprehensive and balanced and provides students with a sound base on which to build assessment skills.

Product Description: Within these pages are the musings, the revelations, the ruminations, and the reflections of the incomparable Larry Wilmore. Here, collected for the first time, all in one place, are his Black Thoughts. From why black weathermen make him feel happy (or sad) and why brothas don't see UFOs to his search for Black Jesus or his quest to replace "African-American" with "chocolate," Wilmore has finally relented, agreeing to share his unique (black) perspective...read more

How do survivors recover from the worst urban flood in American history, a disaster that destroyed nearly the entire physical landscape of a city, as well as the mental and emotional maps that people use to navigate their everyday lives? This question has haunted the survivors of Hurricane Katrina and informed the response to the subsequent flooding of New Orleans across many years.Left to Chance takes us into two African American neighborhoods—working-class Hollygrove and middle-class Pontchartrain Park—to learn how their residents have experienced “Miss Katrina” and the long road back to normal life. The authors spent several years gathering firsthand accounts of the flooding, the rushed evacuations that turned into weeks- and months-long exile, and the often confusing and exhausting process of rebuilding damaged homes in a city whose local government had all but failed. As the residents’ stories make vividly clear, government and social science concepts such as “disaster management,” “restoring normality,” and “recovery” have little meaning for people whose worlds were washed away in the flood. For the neighbors in Hollygrove and Pontchartrain Park, life in the aftermath of Katrina has been a passage from all that was familiar and routine to an ominous world filled with raw existential uncertainty. Recovery and rebuilding become processes imbued with mysteries, accidental encounters, and hasty adaptations, while victories and defeats are left to chance.

Women in comedy have traditionally been pegged as either "pretty" or "funny." Attractive actresses with good comic timing such as Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Julia Roberts have always gotten plum roles as the heroines of romantic comedies and television sitcoms. But fewer women who write and perform their own comedy have become stars, and, most often, they've been successful because they were willing to be funny-looking, from Fanny Brice and Phyllis Diller to Lily Tomlin and Carol Burnett. In this pretty-versus-funny history, women writer-comedians—no matter what they look like—have ended up on the other side of "pretty," enabling them to make it the topic and butt of the joke, the ideal that is exposed as funny.Pretty/Funny focuses on Kathy Griffin, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho, Wanda Sykes, and Ellen DeGeneres, the groundbreaking women comics who flout the pretty-versus-funny dynamic by targeting glamour, postfeminist girliness, the Hollywood A-list, and feminine whiteness with their wit and biting satire. Linda Mizejewski demonstrates that while these comics don't all identify as feminists or take politically correct positions, their work on gender, sexuality, and race has a political impact. The first major study of women and humor in twenty years, Pretty/Funny makes a convincing case that women's comedy has become a prime site for feminism to speak, talk back, and be contested in the twenty-first century.

Product Description: Renowned social justice advocate john a. powell persuasively argues that we have not achieved a post-racial society and that there is much work to do to redeem the American promise of inclusive democracy. Culled from a decade of writing about social justice and spirituality, these meditations on race, identity, and social policy provide an outline for laying claim to our shared humanity and a way toward healing ourselves and securing our future...read more

Product Description: Covering equity issues of sex, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and disability, this work presents creative, nontraditional narratives about performing social justice work, acknowledging the contributions of previous generations, describing current challenges, and appealing to readers to join the struggle toward a better world...read more

Product Description: Develops an alternative framework for describing and explaining African American politics and the American political system and applies it to a number of case studies. Few scholars have influenced the development of the study of black politics as much as Mack H...read more

This text provides information on drugs and their effects on society and human behaviour. Drugs and behaviour is examined from the behavioural, pharmacological, historical, social, legal and clinical perspectives. Drugs studied include over-the-counter drugs, opiates and marijuana.