Almost Home - America's Love-Hate Relationship with Community

Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line

The Marketing of Higher Education

David L. Kirp

How can you turn an English department into a revenue center? How do you grade students if they are "customers" you must please? How do you keep industry from dictating a university's research agenda? What happens when the life of the mind meets the bottom line? Wry and insightful, Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line takes us on a cross-country tour of the most powerful trend in academic life today--the rise of business values and the belief that efficiency, immediate practical usefulness, and marketplace triumph are the best measures of a university's success. With a shrewd eye for the telling example, David Kirp relates stories of marketing incursions into places as diverse as New York University's philosophy department and the University of Virginia's business school, the high-minded University of Chicago and for-profit DeVry University. He describes how universities "brand" themselves for greater appeal in the competition for top students; how academic super-stars are wooed at outsized salaries to boost an institution's visibility and prestige; how taxpayer-supported academic research gets turned into profitable patents and ideas get sold to the highest bidder; and how the liberal arts shrink under the pressure to be self-supporting. Far from doctrinaire, Kirp believes there's a place for the market--but the market must be kept in its place. While skewering Philistinism, he admires the entrepreneurial energy that has invigorated academe's dreary precincts. And finally, he issues a challenge to those who decry the ascent of market values: given the plight of higher education, what is the alternative?

The College Dropout Scandal

David L. Kirp

Each year, hundreds of thousands of students leave college without a degree, saddled with debt, and little to show for it. In The College Dropout Scandal, David Kirp outlines the scale of the problem and illustrates a range of reforms proven to boost undergraduate learning and raise graduation rates.

Improbable Scholars

The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America's Schools

David L. Kirp

No school district can be all charismatic leaders and super-teachers. It can't start from scratch, and it can't fire all its teachers and principals when students do poorly. Great charter schools can only serve a tiny minority of students. Whether we like it or not, most of our youngsters will continue to be educated in mainstream public schools. The good news, as David L. Kirp reveals in Improbable Scholars, is that there's a sensible way to rebuild public education and close the achievement gap for all students. Indeed, this is precisely what's happening in a most unlikely place: Union City, New Jersey, a poor, crowded Latino community just across the Hudson from Manhattan. The school district--once one of the worst in the state--has ignored trendy reforms in favor of proven game-changers like quality early education, a word-soaked curriculum, and hands-on help for teachers. When beneficial new strategies have emerged, like using sophisticated data-crunching to generate pinpoint assessments to help individual students, they have been folded into the mix. The results demand that we take notice--from third grade through high school, Union City scores on the high-stakes state tests approximate the statewide average. In other words, these inner-city kids are achieving just as much as their suburban cousins in reading, writing, and math. What's even more impressive, nearly ninety percent of high school students are earning their diplomas and sixty percent of them are going to college. Top students are winning national science awards and full rides at Ivy League universities. These schools are not just good places for poor kids. They are good places for kids, period. Improbable Scholars offers a playbook--not a prayer book--for reform that will dramatically change our approach to reviving public education.

The Sandbox Investment

The Preschool Movement and Kids-First Politics

David L. Kirp

Listen to a short interview with David L. KirpHost: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane The rich have always valued early education, and for the past forty years, millions of poor kids have had Head Start. Now, more and more middle class parents have realized that a good preschool is the smartest investment they can make in their children's future in a competitive world. As The Sandbox Investment shows, their needs are key to the growing call for universal preschool. Writing with the verve of a magazine journalist and the authority of a scholar, David L. Kirp makes the ideal guide to this quiet movement. He crouches in classrooms where committed teachers engage lively four-year-olds, and reveals the findings of an extraordinary longitudinal study that shows the life-changing impact of preschool. He talks with cutting-edge researchers from neuroscience and genetics to economics, whose findings increasingly show how powerfully early childhood shapes the arc of children's lives. Kids-first politics is smart economics: paying for preschool now can help save us from paying for unemployment, crime, and emergency rooms later. As Kirp reports from the inside, activists and political leaders have turned this potent idea into campaigns and policies in red and blue states alike. The Sandbox Investment is the first full story of a campaign that asks Americans to endorse a vision of society that does well by doing good. For anyone who is interested in politics or the social uses of research--for anyone who's interested in the children's futures--it's a compelling read.

Metropolitanization and Public Services

Charles M. Haar, John G. Wofford, David L. Kirp, David K. Cohen, Leonard J. Duhl, Allen V. Haefele

Metropolitanization and Public Services is third in a series on the governance of metropolitan regions which aims to explore the welfare and development of Metropolitan America. Originally published in 1972, this study discusses who decides which essential public services need to be provided within a metropolitan area by looking at political reform as well as presenting ideas on functional efficiency, costs and benefits and the effectiveness of the political process. This title will be of interest to students of environmental studies.

Just Schools

The Idea of Racial Equality in American Education

David L. Kirp

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1982.

Bowling Alone

The Collapse and Revival of American Community

Robert D. Putnam

Packed with provocative information about the social and political habits of twentieth-century Americans.

Aztec Medicine, Health, and Nutrition

Bernard Ortiz de Montellano

Why were a handful of Spaniards able to overthrow the Aztec Empire? The dramatic destruction of the Aztecs has prompted historians, anthropologists, demographers, and epidemiologists to look closely at the health and nutrition of the Valley of Mexico. If the Aztecs were overcrowded, living at the edge of starvation, and incapable of treating disease effectivefly, then their decimation by the Europeans becomes much easier to undestand. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano argues that such hypotheses do not hold up. Rather, at the time of the Conquest, the Aztecs were a thriving, well-nourished, healthy people. The swift, brutal success of the conquistadors cannot be explained by the prior ill-health or medical incompetence of their victims. To support his case, Ortiz de Montellano uses an astonishing array of evidence gained from many disciplines. Ortiz de Montellano presents the most comprehensivve and detailed explanation of Aztec medical beliefs available in English. -- From publisher's description.

Margaret Sanger's Eugenic Legacy

The Control of Female Fertility

Angela Franks

Margaret Sanger, the American birth-control and population-control advocate who founded Planned Parenthood, stands like a giant among her contemporaries. With her dominating yet winning personality, she helped generate shifts of opinion on issues that were not even publicly discussed prior to her activism, while her leadership was arguably the single most important factor in achieving social and legislative victories that set the parameters for today's political discussion of family-planning funding, population-control aid, and even sex education. This work addresses Sanger's ideas concerning birth control, eugenics, population control, and sterilization against the backdrop of the larger eugenic context.

Sixteen Acres

Architecture and the Outrageous Struggle for the Future of Ground Zero

Philip Nobel

A behind-the-scenes look at the redevelopment plans for the World Trade Center site examines the deceptions and betrayals as factions and institutions converge to create a new culture at Ground Zero.

Mother Camp

Female Impersonators in America

Esther Newton

For two years Ester Newton did field research in the world of drag queens—homosexual men who make a living impersonating women. Newton spent time in the noisy bars, the chaotic dressing rooms, and the cheap apartments and hotels that make up the lives of drag queens, interviewing informants whose trust she had earned and compiling a lively, first-hand ethnographic account of the culture of female impersonators. Mother Camp explores the distinctions that drag queens make among themselves as performers, the various kinds of night clubs and acts they depend on for a living, and the social organization of their work. A major part of the book deals with the symbolic geography of male and female styles, as enacted in the homosexual concept of "drag" (sex role transformation) and "camp," an important humor system cultivated by the drag queens themselves. "Newton's fascinating book shows how study of the extraordinary can brilliantly illuminate the ordinary—that social-sexual division of personality, appearance, and activity we usually take for granted."—Jonathan Katz, author of Gay American History "A trenchant statement of the social force and arbitrary nature of gender roles."—Martin S. Weinberg, Contemporary Sociology

The History of the American Indians

A Critical Edition

James Adair

James Adair was an Englishman who lived and traded among the southeastern Indians for more than 30 years, from 1735 to 1768. Adair's written work, first published in England in 1775, is considered one of the finest histories of the Native Americans.

Almost Home

Helping Kids Move from Homelessness to Hope

Kevin Ryan, Tina Kelley

Inside the lives of homeless teens?moving stories of pain and hope from Covenant House Almost Home tells the stories of six remarkable young people from across the United States and Canada as they confront life alone on the streets. Each eventually finds his or her way to Covenant House, the largest charity serving homeless and runaway youth in North America. From the son of a crack addict who fights his own descent into drug addiction to a teen mother reaching for a new life, their stories veer between devastating and inspiring as they each struggle to find a place called home. Includes a foreword by Newark Mayor Cory Booker Shares the personal stories of six homeless youths grappling with issues such as drug addiction, family violence, prostitution, rejection based on sexual orientation, teen parenthood, and aging out of foster care into a future with limited skills and no support system Gives voice to the estimated 1.6 million young people in the United States and Canada who run away or are kicked out of their homes each year Includes striking photographs, stories of firsthand experiences mentoring and working with homeless and troubled youth, and practical suggestions on how to get involved Discusses the root causes of homelessness among young people, and policy recommendations to address them Provides action steps readers can take to fight youth homelessness and assist individual homeless young people Written by Kevin Ryan, president of Covenant House, and Pulitzer Prize nominee and former New York Times writer Tina Kelley Inviting us to get to know homeless teens as more than an accumulation of statistics and societal issues, this book gives a human face to a huge but largely invisible problem and offers practical insights into how to prevent homelessness and help homeless youth move to a hopeful future. For instance, one kid in the book goes on to become a college football player and counselor to at-risk adolescents and another becomes a state kickboxing champion. All the stories inspire us with victories of the human spirit, large and small. A portion of the proceeds from the sale of each book will help support kids who benefit from Covenant House's shelter and outreach services.

New York City Public Schools from Brownsville to Bloomberg

Community Control and Its Legacy

Heather Lewis

When New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg centralized control of the citys schools in 2002, he terminated the citys 32-year experiment with decentralized school control dubbed by the mayor and the media as the Bad Old Days. Decentralization grew out of the community control movement of the 1960s, which was itself a response to the bad old days of central control of a school system that was increasingly segregated and unequal. In this probing historical account, Heather Lewis draws on new archival sources and oral histories to argue that the community control movement did influence school improvement, in particular African American and Puerto Rican communities in the 1970s and 80s. Lewis shows how educators with unique insights into the relationships between the schools and the communities they served enabled meaningful change, with a focus on instructional improvement and equity that would be familiar to many observers of contemporary education reform. With a resurgence of local organizing and potential challenges to mayoral control, this informative history will be important reading for todays educational and community leaders.

Staging America

Cornerstone and Community-based Theater

Sonja Kuftinec

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A Love of Reading, The Second Collection

More Reviews of Contemporary Fiction

Robert Adams

Fourteen brilliant new reviews from the author of A Love of Reading. Passionate, thought provoking, and witty. A Love of Reading, the Second Collection contains 14 new reviews of modern classics from a discriminating, highly entertaining, and prodigiously well-read guide. In a stimulating selection, ranging from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace to Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and from Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain to Sheri Holman’s The Dress Lodger, popular literary critic Robert Adams skilfully interweaves a nimble and enlightening discussion of plot, theme, and characterization with fascinating historical, biographical, and literary context. Adams is repeatedly drawn to the spectacle of less-than-perfect humans making their way in a hostile world, and as a result his reviews are a hugely satisfying mix of rich pathos and abundant humour. In the words of the Calgary Herald, they are “a bibliophile’s dream.”

Punch

Mark Lemon, Henry Mayhew, Tom Taylor, Shirley Brooks, Francis Cowley Burnand, Owen Seaman

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The Home Book of Verse, American and English, 1580-1920

With an Appendix Containing a Few Well-known Poems in Other Languages

Burton Egbert Stevenson

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