The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report

A Concise Economic History of the World

From Paleolithic Times to the Present

Rondo E. Cameron

This classic book offers a broad sweep of economic history from prehistoric times to the present, and explores the disparity of wealth among nations. Now in its fourth edition, A Concise Economic History of the World includes expanded coverage of recent developments in the European Union, transition economies, and East Asia.

Nickel and Dimed

On (Not) Getting By in America

Barbara Ehrenreich

Our sharpest and most original social critic goes "undercover" as an unskilled worker to reveal the dark side of American prosperity. Millions of Americans work full time, year round, for poverty-level wages. In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that a job -- any job -- can be the ticket to a better life. But how does anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich left her home, took the cheapest lodgings she could find, and accepted whatever jobs she was offered. Moving from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, she worked as a waitress, a hotel maid, a cleaning woman, a nursing-home aide, and a Wal-Mart sales clerk. She lived in trailer parks and crumbling residential motels. Very quickly, she discovered that no job is truly "unskilled," that even the lowliest occupations require exhausting mental and muscular effort. She also learned that one job is not enough; you need at least two if you int to live indoors. Nickel and Dimed reveals low-rent America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate stratagems for survival. Read it for the smoldering clarity of Ehrenreich's perspective and for a rare view of how "prosperity" looks from the bottom. You will never see anything -- from a motel bathroom to a restaurant meal -- in quite the same way again.

Poverty in America

A Handbook

John Iceland

Praise for the first edition: “Highly readable. Will very likely become a standard reference for students of poverty.”—William Julius Wilson, author of When Work Disappears “With succinct and engaging prose, Poverty in America covers the gamut —from theoretical issues to measurement to history to public policy—better than any other book out there right now.”—Dalton Conley, author of Honky

American Indians in the Marketplace

Persistence and Innovation Among the Menominees and Metlakatlans, 1870-1920

Brian C. Hosmer

Over time, these peoples came to understand how the market worked, recognized that the broader economy operated according to market principles, and learned how to adjust to it. Hosmer reveals how their strategies of "purposeful modernization" brought relative economic independence and sometimes the respect and cooperation of local and federal governments, how it helped chart a middle course betweenunchecked individuality and a communal ethos that might stifle economic development, and how economic development and cultural values ultimately affected one another.

The Populist Vision

Charles Postel

Publisher description

War and Economy in the Third Reich

R. J. Overy

When Hitler came to power in 1933 he had two aims for the economy: a rapid recovery from the depths of the Great Slump and the creation of a vast economic foundation for Germany's renewed bid for world power. These eleven essays explore the tension between Hitler's vision of an armed economy and the reality of German economic and social life. Richard Overy argues that the German economy was much less crisis-ridden in 1939 than its enemies supposed, and that Hitler, far from limiting his war effort, tried to mobilize the economy for "total war" from 1939 onwards. Only the poor organization of the Nazi state and the interference of the military prevented higher levels of military output. Many of these essays challenge accepted views of the Third Reich. In his introduction Richard Overy relects on the issues the essays raise, and the ways in which the subject is changing. Often thought-provoking, always informed, War and Economy opens a window on a essential aspect of Hitler's Germany.