New Books September 2024: Home

Indigenous Activism profiles eighteen American Indian women of the twentieth century who distinguished themselves through their political activism.

A psychiatrist tells the story of her struggle to help her patients in our broken American mental health care system. In this clinical memoir, Alice Feller brings the reader into the world of serious mental illness using patient vignettes and personal accounts of her work, drawn from medical school, hospital wards, private practice, public clinics, and beyond, spanning a career from the 1970s to the present day. Individual chapters are devoted to cases describing the impact of homelessness, substance abuse, racism, family involvement, and early intervention for schizophrenia cases, on treatment outcomes. Feller identifies specific barriers to care and advocates for reparative strategies that would make the most meaningful and immediate improvements. This book is meant for anyone whose life is touched by mental illness, whether a patient, in the family, or more personally.

A college education-especially an elite one-is often a gateway to prestigious careers and wealth accumulation. But that gate is hard to pass through for those with few resources. High tuition and admissions barriers including standardized tests that require expensive preparation have historically kept many low-income students out of elite colleges and universities. Some of these institutions have taken measures to break down barriers that prevent low-income students from attending their schools. Not only are these colleges recruiting high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds, they're providing tuition grants instead of loans and on-campus resources to support these students. However, as sociologist Melissa Osborne shows in Polished, many of these students still aren't thriving.

Reclaiming life in adulthood IS possible after surviving childhood abuse. Botwin offers stories of the tremendous healing that comes from facing undigested memories and feelings. Learn how survivors turned their lives around after living through unimaginable, horrific experiences of abuse as children.

A fascinating look at the history of film and television animation in the United States, from the animated comic strips of the early 1900s to the proliferation of animation companies and hit films of the present.

A rare study that transforms our understanding of why youth die by suicide, why youth suicide clusters happen, and how to stop them Youth suicide clusters have deeply unsettled communities in recent years. While clusters have been widely documented in the media, too little is known about why youth die by suicide, why youth suicide clusters happen, and how to stop them both. In Life under Pressure, Anna S. Mueller and Seth Abrutyn investigate the social roots of youth suicide and why certain places weather disproportionate incidents of adolescent suicides and suicide clusters. Through close examination of kids' lives in a community repeatedly rocked by youth suicide clusters, Mueller and Abrutyn reveal how the social worlds that youth inhabit and the various messages they learn in those spaces--about who they are supposed to be, mental illness, and help-seeking--shape their feelings about themselves and in turn their risk of suicide. With great empathy, Mueller and Abrutyn also identify the moments when adults unintentionally fail kids by not talking to them about suicide, teaching them how to seek help, or helping them grieve. Through stories of survival, resilience, and even rebellion, Mueller and Abrutyn show how social environments can cause suicide and how they can be changed to help kids discover a life worth living. By revealing what it is like to live and die in one community, Life under Pressure offers tangible solutions to one of the twenty-first century's most tragic public health problems.

In 1927, at the age of twenty-three, George Meléndez Wright conceptualized and eventually funded the first wildlife survey of western National Parks, radically changing how the National Park Service (NPS) would manage natural resources under its charge. By the time Wright arrived in Yosemite National Park to work as a ranger naturalist-the first Hispanic person to occupy a professional position in the NPS-he had already visited every national park in the Western United States. At a time when national parks routinely fed bears garbage as part of "shows" and killed "bad" predators such as wolves and coyotes, Wright's new ideas for conservation set the stage for modern scientific management of parks and other public lands. Before his revolutionary ideas began to influence Park Service policy, however, Wright faced persistent pushback by an entrenched culture that disregarded wildlife apart from the role that fauna played as a tourist attraction. Nonetheless, he prevailed. Wright died tragically in a car accident in 1936, while working to establish parks and wildlife refuges on the US-Mexico border, and yet, to this day, he remains a celebrated figure among conservationists, wildlife experts, and park managers. Jerry Emory, a writer connected to Wright's family, draws on hundreds of letters, field notes, interviews, and other primary documents to offer both a biography of Wright and a historical account of a crucial period in the evolution of our parks. Including a foreword by former National Park Service director Jonathan Jarvis, the book explores and celebrates Wright's vision for science-based wildlife management and his vocal support of wilderness in our parks and asks if current practices have achieved his goals.

Some moments in sports-- whether they take place on a track, on a tennis court, or in a courtroom-- transcend the event itself. Gitlin looks at particular events that revolutionized a sport, how a contest of speed inspired a nation, or even how a humble victory affected the world. The twenty events featured in this book had profound social, political, and cultural importance and inspired athletes and spectators alike.

How AI is revolutionizing the future of learning and how educators can adapt to this new era of human thinking. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing the way we learn, work, and think. Its integration into classrooms and workplaces is already underway, impacting and challenging ideas about creativity, authorship, and education. In this groundbreaking and practical guide, teachers will discover how to harness and manage AI as a powerful teaching tool. José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson present emerging and powerful research on the seismic changes AI is already creating in schools and the workplace, providing invaluable insights into what AI can accomplish in the classroom and beyond. By learning how to use new AI tools and resources, educators will gain the confidence to navigate the challenges and seize the opportunities presented by AI. From interactive learning techniques to advanced assignment and assessment strategies, this comprehensive guide offers practical suggestions for integrating AI effectively into teaching and learning environments. Bowen and Watson tackle crucial questions related to academic integrity, cheating, and other emerging issues. In the age of AI, critical thinking skills, information literacy, and a liberal arts education are more important than ever. As AI continues to reshape the nature of work and human thinking, educators can equip students with the skills they need to thrive in a rapidly evolving world. This book serves as a compass, guiding educators through the uncharted territory of AI-powered education and the future of teaching and learning.

In this sweeping book, Michael S. Roth narrates a vivid and dynamic history of students, exploring some of the principal models for learning that have developed in very different contexts, from the sixth century BCE to the present. Beginning with the followers of Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus and moving to medieval apprentices, students at Enlightenment centers of learning, and learners enrolled in twenty-first-century universities, he explores how students have been followers, interlocutors, disciples, rebels, and children becoming adults. There are many ways to be a student, Roth argues, but at their core is developing the capacity to think for oneself by learning from others, and thereby finding freedom. In an age of machine learning, this book celebrates the student who develops more than mastery, cultivating curiosity, judgment, creativity, and an ability to keep learning beyond formal schooling. Roth shows how the student throughout history has been someone who interacts dynamically with the world, absorbing its lessons and creatively responding to them.

In this compelling book, Rūta Vanagaitė holds an extended conversation with noted historian Christoph Dieckmann, the author of one of the most influential books on the Holocaust. Her searching exchanges with Dieckmann illuminate the most profound questions we have as we struggle to understand the Holocaust.

We are living in an era of veritable STEM obsession. Not only do tech companies dominate our cultural imagination of American enterprise and financial growth, we urgently need science-based solutions to impending crises. As a society, we have poured enormous resources into cultivating young minds for STEM careers. The US sponsors 209 distinct STEM education programs in 13 different federal agencies at a cost of more than $3 billion. This spending is on top of countless initiatives from philanthropic foundations and corporate giving. And yet, we are facing a STEM worker crisis. In this project, sociologist John D. Skrentny asks, if we're investing so much in STEM education, why are as many as 75% of graduates with STEM degrees opting out of STEM careers? The problem is not education, he argues, but the available jobs. Skrentny aims to bring a reality check to America's growing dedication to STEM education. Each chapter highlights an aspect of STEM work culture that drives away bright minds, ranging from workplace culture and "burn and churn" management practices, to lack of job security, to the constant need for training on new innovations, to the racism and sexism that exclude non-white and Asian people and women. Skrentny shows that if we have any hope of crafting science-based solutions to many of our most urgent societal issues, we have to change the way we're treating these workers on whom our future depends.

In this ambitious, groundbreaking, and sweeping work, Jonathan Sperber guides readers through six decades of global history, from the end of World War Two to the onset of the new millennium. As Sperber's immersive and propulsive book reveals, the defining quality of these decades involved the rising and unstoppable flow of people, goods, capital, and ideas across boundaries, continents, and oceans, creating prosperity in some parts of the world, destitution in others, increasing a sense of collective responsibility while also reinforcing nationalism and xenophobia. It was an age of transformation in every realm of human existence: from relations with nature to relations between and among nations, superpowers to emerging states; from the forms of production to the foundations of religious faith. These changes took place on an unprecedentedly global scale. The world both developed and contracted. Most of all, it became interconnected. To make sense of it, Sperber illuminates the central trends and crucial developments across a wide variety of topics, adopting a chronology that divides the era into three distinct periods: the postwar, from 1945 through 1966, which retained many elements of period of world wars; the upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, when the pillars of the postwar world were undermined; and the two decades at the end of the millennium, when new structures were developed, structures that form the basis of today's world, even as the iconic World Trade Center was reduced by terrorism to rubble. The Age of Interconnection is a clear-eyed portrait of an age of blinding change.

As television began to overtake the political landscape in the 1960s, network broadcast companies, bolstered by powerful lobbying interests, dominated screens across the nation. Yet over the next three decades, the expansion of a different technology, cable, changed all of this. '24/7 politics' tells the story of how the cable industry worked with political leaders to create an entirely new approach to television, one that tethered politics to profits and divided and distracted Americans by feeding their appetite for entertainment--frequently at the expense of fostering responsible citizenship. In this timely and provocative book, Kathryn Cramer Brownell argues that cable television itself is not to blame for today's rampant polarization and scandal politics--the intentional restructuring of television as a political institution is. She describes how cable innovations--from C-SPAN coverage of congressional debates in the 1980s to MTV's foray into presidential politics in the 1990s--took on network broadcasting using market forces, giving rise to a more decentralized media world. Brownell shows how cable became an unstoppable medium for political communication that prioritized cult followings and loyalty to individual brands, fundamentally reshaped party politics, and, in the process, sowed the seeds of democratic upheaval. '24/7 politics' reveals how cable TV created new possibilities for antiestablishment voices and opened a pathway to political prominence for seemingly unlikely figures like Donald Trump by playing to narrow audiences and cultivating division instead of common ground.

The untold story of the engineering behind the empire, showing how imperial Spain built upon existing infrastructure and hierarchies of the Inca, Aztec, and more, to further its growth. Sixteenth-century Spain was small, poor, disunited, and sparsely populated. Yet the Spaniards and their allies built the largest empire the world had ever seen. How did they achieve this? Felipe Fernández-Armesto and Manuel Lucena Giraldo argue that Spain's engineers were critical to this venture. The Spanish invested in infrastructure to the advantage of local power brokers, enhancing the abilities of incumbent elites to grow wealthy on trade, and widening the arc of Spanish influence. Bringing to life stories of engineers, prospectors, soldiers, and priests, the authors paint a vivid portrait of Spanish America in the age of conquest. This is a dazzling new history of the Spanish Empire, and a new understanding of empire itself, as a venture marked as much by collaboration as oppression.