In 1925, William and Charlotte Wiser arrived in the North Indian village of Karimpur. Over the next five years they wrote one of the first studies of... village India, originally published in 1930. Charlotte Wiser continued to observe and write about the village until her death, when Susan Wadley picked up the narrative. With updates from the 1960s, 1970s, 1984, and 2000, this expanded edition now encapsulates seventy-five years of continuity and change in the village.The book traces the initial awkwardness between the Wisers and the villagers and the years of friendship and welcome that followed; sketches the social and economic changes brought on by the increasing encroachment of the outside world; and describes the day-to-day life of people who live in the village--the education of the young, life in the courtyard, castes, marriage, and family. The book now stands as a personal and insightful story of the village and the people who came to study it.

If you want to know what today's murderers, gangbangers and street predators are really like, take a step behind prison walls. A veteran prison guard... reveals the truth behind staff rivalries, incarcerated killers, old-time cons, racial tension, inmate threats and ingenuity, and the darker sides of prisoner behavior.

As America tried to absorb the shock of the 9/11 attacks, Muslim Americans were caught up in an unprecedented wave of backlash violence. Public... discussion revealed that widespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Islam persisted, despite the striking diversity of the Muslim community. Letting the voices of 140 ordinary Muslim American men and women describe their experiences, Lori Peek's path-breaking book, Behind the Backlash, presents moving accounts of prejudice and exclusion. Muslims speak of being subjected to harassment before the attacks, and recount the discrimination they encountered afterwards. Peek also explains the struggles of young Muslim adults to solidify their community and define their identity during a time of national crisis. Behind the Backlash seeks to explain why blame and scape-goating occur after a catastrophe. Peek sets the twenty-first century experience of Muslim Americans, who were vilified and victimized, in the context of larger sociological and psychological processes. Peek's book will be of interest to those in disaster research studies, sociology of religion, and race and ethnic relations.

In this nuanced look at white working-class life and politics in twentieth-century America, Kenneth Durr takes readers into the neighborhoods,... workplaces, and community institutions of blue-collar Baltimore in the decades after World War II. Challenging notions that the "white backlash" of the 1960s and 1970s was driven by increasing race resentment, Durr details the rise of a working-class populism shaped by mistrust of the means and ends of postwar liberalism in the face of urban decline. Exploring the effects of desegregation, deindustrialization, recession, and the rise of urban crime, Durr shows how legitimate economic, social, and political grievances convinced white working-class Baltimoreans that they were threatened more by the actions of liberal policymakers than by the incursions of urban blacks. While acknowledging the parochialism and racial exclusivity of white working-class life, Durr adopts an empathetic view of workers and their institutions. Behind the Backlash melds ethnic, labor, and political history to paint a rich portrait of urban life--and the sweeping social and economic changes that reshaped America's cities and politics in the late twentieth century.

“A book of extraordinary intelligence [and] humanity . . . beyond groundbreaking.”—Junot Díaz, The New York Times Book Review   In this... brilliant, breathtaking book by Pulitzer Prize winner Katherine Boo, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human through the dramatic story of families striving toward a better life in Annawadi, a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport. As India starts to prosper, the residents of Annawadi are electric with hope. Abdul, an enterprising teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Meanwhile Asha, a woman of formidable ambition, has identified a shadier route to the middle class. With a little luck, her beautiful daughter, Annawadi’s “most-everything girl,” might become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest children, like the young thief Kalu, feel themselves inching closer to their dreams. But then Abdul is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power, and economic envy turn brutal. With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects people to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, based on years of uncompromising reporting, carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds—and into the hearts of families impossible to forget.   NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER   “An instant classic of narrative nonfiction.”—Elle   “[A] landmark book.”—The Wall Street Journal   “Riveting, fearlessly reported . . . [Grade:] A”—Entertainment Weekly   “A Mumbai slum understood and imagined as never before in language of intense beauty.”—Salman Rushdie   “One of the most powerful indictments of inequality I’ve ever read.”—Barbara Ehrenreich   “Incandescent writing and excruciatingly good storytelling . . . Read it, and the forgotten people of Annawadi will be with you forever.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families... striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.   In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.   Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”   But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.   With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

From Pulitzer Prize-winner Katherine Boo, a landmark work of narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic and sometimes heartbreaking story of families... striving toward a better life in one of the twenty-first century’s great, unequal cities.   In this brilliantly written, fast-paced book, based on three years of uncompromising reporting, a bewildering age of global change and inequality is made human.   Annawadi is a makeshift settlement in the shadow of luxury hotels near the Mumbai airport, and as India starts to prosper, Annawadians are electric with hope. Abdul, a reflective and enterprising Muslim teenager, sees “a fortune beyond counting” in the recyclable garbage that richer people throw away. Asha, a woman of formidable wit and deep scars from a childhood in rural poverty, has identified an alternate route to the middle class: political corruption. With a little luck, her sensitive, beautiful daughter—Annawadi’s “most-everything girl”—will soon become its first female college graduate. And even the poorest Annawadians, like Kalu, a fifteen-year-old scrap-metal thief, believe themselves inching closer to the good lives and good times they call “the full enjoy.”   But then Abdul the garbage sorter is falsely accused in a shocking tragedy; terror and a global recession rock the city; and suppressed tensions over religion, caste, sex, power and economic envy turn brutal. As the tenderest individual hopes intersect with the greatest global truths, the true contours of a competitive age are revealed. And so, too, are the imaginations and courage of the people of Annawadi.   With intelligence, humor, and deep insight into what connects human beings to one another in an era of tumultuous change, Behind the Beautiful Forevers carries the reader headlong into one of the twenty-first century’s hidden worlds, and into the lives of people impossible to forget.

Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on 13 August 1961 eighteen million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice... which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. This new history rejects traditional, top-down approaches to Cold War politics, exploring instead how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, 'caught out' by Sunday the Thirteenth. Party, police, and Stasi reports reveal why one in six East Germans fled the country during the 1950s, undermining communist rule and forcing the eleventh-hour decision by Khrushchev and Ulbricht to build a wall along the Cold War's frontline. Did East Germans resist or come to terms with immurement? Did the communist regime become more or less dictatorial within the confines of the so-called 'Antifascist Defence Rampart'? Using film and literature, but also the GDR's losing battle against Beatlemania, Patrick Major's cross-disciplinary study suggests that popular culture both reinforced and undermined the closed society. Linking external and internal developments, Major argues that the GDR's official quest for international recognition, culminating in Ostpolitik and United Nations membership in the early 1970s, became its undoing, unleashing a human rights movement which fed into, but then broke with, the protests of 1989. After exploring the reasons for the fall of the Wall and reconstructing the heady days of the autumn revolution, the author reflects on the fate of the Wall after 1989, as it moved from demolition into the realm of memory.

Behind the Blackboard: Selections on the Foundations of Education is a corpus of significant writings on primary education. The essays, legislative... enactments, legal decisions, and research results included in the text provide readers with a comprehensive understanding of schooling, and the educational movements behind it, in the United States.Each of the ten chapters in Behind the Blackboard addresses an important theme in education. Introductions to the chapters provide context for the selected readings. The chapters themselves present a survey of important and determinant concepts, ideas, social movements, court decisions and authoritative education treatises that have exerted significant influences on the American educational establishment from the colonial period to the present.The selected materials cover a wide range of topics including:- The concept of “the purpose of education”;- The role of education in promoting democracy;- The two main forms of curriculum – state-mandated and hidden;- Strategies and modalities used by teachers;- The impact of charter schools;- The impact of social movements.Behind the Blackboard is intended for use by college and university students, educators, and policy makers. The book deepens the reader’s understanding of how education has evolved over the years, and provides insight into what the future holds for such an important American institution. It can be used as the primary textbook in courses on education, or as a supplement to other books. Behind the Blackboard is also a useful guide for instructors who want to develop and enrich their syllabi, and students who are researching the educational system and its history.Georges E. Fouron is Professor of Education and Social Sciences at Stony Brook University. His eclectic research interests include education, transnational migration, globalization, and immigrants' identity. He is the co-author, with Nina Glick Schiller, of “Georges Woke up Laughing, Long-Distance Nationalism and the Search for Home.” In addition, he has published many book chapters and scholastic articles in many learned journals, including American Ethnologist, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, and Urban and Community Research.

The songs, dances, jokes, parodies, spoofs, and skits of blackface groups such as the Virginia Minstrels and Buckley's Serenaders became wildly popular... in antebellum America. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask not only explores the racist practices of these entertainers but considers their performances as troubled representations of ethnicity, class, gender, and culture in the nineteenth century. William J. Mahar's unprecedented archival study of playbills, newspapers, sketches, monologues, and music engages new sources previously not considered in twentieth-century scholarship. More than any other study of its kind, Behind the Burnt Cork Mask investigates the relationships between blackface comedy and other Western genres and traditions; between the music of minstrel shows and its European sources; and between "popular" and "elite" constructions of culture. By locating minstrel performances within their complex sites of production, Mahar offers a significant reassessment of the historiography of the field. Behind the Burnt Cork Mask promises to redefine the study of blackface minstrelsy, charting new directions for future inquiries by scholars in American studies, popular culture, and musicology.

The World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) carry out their mission to alleviate poverty and promote economic growth based on the... advice of professional economists. But as Sarah Babb argues in Behind the Development Banks, these organizations have also been indelibly shaped by Washington politics—particularly by the legislative branch and its power of the purse.            Tracing American influence on MDBs over three decades, this volume assesses increased congressional activism and the perpetual “selling” of banks to Congress by the executive branch. Babb contends that congressional reluctance to fund the MDBs has enhanced the influence of the United States on them by making credible America’s threat to abandon the banks if its policy preferences are not followed. At a time when the United States’ role in world affairs is being closely scrutinized, Behind the Development Banks will be necessary reading for anyone interested in how American politics helps determine the fate of developing countries.  

How is film used in research, and what are the implications of using audio-visual material in the development of scientific knowledge? This book... confronts the strategies and challenges of using film in research contexts with a focus on the concept of reflexivity and the relationship between the researcher and informant. Jenssen examines reflexivity with respect to specific social science methodologies and to the cultural forms of expression of modernity. She also covers the historical role of visual media in knowledge production and in the communication and dissemination of research, and shows how visual media underpin important aesthetic and ethical issues related to the construction of social life. This book is an accessible and provocative read for those in media studies and visual anthropology, as well as for all scholars and students who use film in research.

In the last twenty years, thousands upon thousands of the upper and middle classes have retreated into gated communities. In 2002, it is estimated that... one in eight Americans will live in these exclusive neighbourhoods. What has sparked this alarming trend? Behind the Gates is Setha Low's revealing account of what life is like inside these suburban fortresses. After years researching and interviewing families in Long Island, New York and San Antonio, Texas, Low provides an inside view of gated communities to help explain why people flee to these enclaves. Parents with children, young married couples, "empty-nesters" and retirees express their need for safety, their secret fears of a more ethnically diverse America, and their desire to recapture the close-knit, picket-fenced communities of their childhood. Ironically, she shows, gated neighbourhoods are in fact no safer than other suburbs, and many who move there are disheartened by the insularity and restrictive rules of the community.

Behind the Glass, Volume II presents another prime collection of firsthand interviews with the world's top record producers and engineers, sharing their... creative secrets and hit-making techniques - from the practical to the artistic. In these pages you'll find Daniel Lanois (U2, Bob Dylan) discussing the future of digital recording; T-Bone Burnett (Robert Plant and Alison Krauss) sharing his unique view of creating complex low end; and Hugh Padgham (Police, Genesis) analyzing the state of the business today. For real-world advice on everything from home recording to mixing to coaching a nervous singer, check out author Howard Massey's conversations with Mark Ronson (Amy Winehouse), Tony Brown (Reba McEntire), Gus Dudgeon (Elton John), John Simon (The Band), Russ Titelman (Steve Winwood), Bruce Swedien (Michael Jackson), Rodney Jerkins (Mary J. Blige), Simon Climie (Eric Clapton), Matt Serletic (Matchbox Twenty), and more.