The smart growth movement aims to combat urban and suburban sprawl by promoting livable communities based on pedestrian scale, diverse populations, and... mixed land use. But, as this book documents, smart growth has largely failed to address issues of social equity and environmental justice. Smart growth sometimes results in gentrification and displacement of low- and moderate-income families in existing neighborhoods, or transportation policies that isolate low-income populations. Growing Smarter is one of the few books to view smart growth from an environmental justice perspective, examining the effect of the built environment on access to economic opportunity and quality of life in American cities and metropolitan regions.The contributors to Growing Smarter--urban planners, sociologists, economists, educators, lawyers, health professionals, and environmentalists--all place equity at the center of their analyses of "place, space, and race." They consider such topics as the social and environmental effects of sprawl, the relationship between sprawl and concentrated poverty, and community-based regionalism that can link cities and suburbs. They examine specific cases that illustrate opportunities for integrating environmental justice concerns into smart growth efforts, including the dynamics of sprawl in a South Carolina county, the debate over the rebuilding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and transportation-related pollution in Northern Manhattan. Growing Smarter illuminates the growing racial and class divisions in metropolitan areas today--and suggests workable strategies to address them.

Is something crucial missing from your congregation's programs? Beneath the surface of churches' programs and activities lies the more fundamental... question of how leaders and churches can be enabled to discern and obediently cooperate with the guidance and empowering of the Holy Spirit. Since the Kingdom of God is an active expression of His reign on earth, it is extended and realized as individuals and churches seek and submit to His will and purposes. Growing the Church in the Power of the Holy Spirit offers a practical guide for nurturing with churches the dynamic cooperative process, drawing on a breadth of experience from around the world. Many leaders overlook the necessary precondition of discerning and cooperating with the empowering will of the Holy Spirit before putting their plans into action. But how is this to be accomplished? Seven dynamics facilitate this process. These factors, advanced by the church leadership and brought into being by the Holy Spirit, help congregations undertake such crucial tasks as preaching/teaching, worship, healing, governance, making disciples of converts, and evangelism. As believers actively cooperate with the Holy Spirit, the church is strengthened in its role of being a foretaste of the Kingdom of God.

Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New... Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker who broke every mold and did it brilliantly—he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things—and the book’s surprise success established him as one of America’s most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderfully hands-on way with words.For Goodman, the unhappiness of young people was a concentrated form of the unhappiness of American society as a whole, run by corporations that provide employment (if and when they do) but not the kind of meaningful work that engages body and soul. Goodman saw the young as the first casualties of a humanly re­pressive social and economic system and, as such, the front line of potential resistance. Noam Chomsky has said, “Paul Goodman’s impact is all about us,” and certainly it can be felt in the powerful localism of today’s renascent left. A classic of anarchist thought, Growing Up Absurd not only offers a penetrating indictment of the human costs of corporate capitalism but points the way forward. It is a tale of yesterday’s youth that speaks directly to our common future.

The heart of this book is a case study that responds essentially to the question, What is an American high school like? This discussion of the ... classroom experience, the vast extracurricular program, the money-raising activities, the student diaries, and the reflections of seniors on their school days captures the reality of school life in many American communities. The author wants students of American schools to read this study and say, "So this is the way it is." More than a case study of a school, however, this book is intended to portray the integral relationship between school and community in a rural area. This portrayal was essentially shaped by a central idea that orders the mass of collected data: the survival of community.

One fateful starless night, 17-year-old Ira Wagler got up at 2 AM, left a scribbled note under his pillow, packed all of his earthly belongings into in... a little black duffel bag, and walked away from his home in the Amish settlement of Bloomfield, Iowa. Now, in this heartwarming memoir, Ira paints a vivid portrait of Amish life--from his childhood days on the family farm, his Rumspringa rite of passage at age 16, to his ultimate decision to leave the Amish Church for good at age 26. Growing Up Amish is the true story of one man's quest to discover who he is and where he belongs. Readers will laugh, cry, and be inspired by this charming yet poignant coming of age story set amidst the backdrop of one of the most enigmatic cultures in America today--the Old Order Amish.

Nearly 90 percent of those who grow up Amish choose the Amish way: a lifetime commitment to the faith and a traditional way of life. To outsiders... immersed in the daily realities and luxuries of the modern world, this statistic may seem unbelievable. In this in-depth study of Amish adolescence, Richard A. Stevick offers a balanced, comprehensive, and engaging account of the social forces and rituals—including Rumspringa—that contribute to this statistic. In Growing Up Amish, Stevick reveals the world of Amish youth caught between the expectations of their traditional community and the growing pressures and temptations that accompany adolescence. Drawing from a dozen years of research in more than seventy communities in fifteen states, he carefully details home life and school, social singings and wild parties, isolated settlements and Amish youth gangs, and courtship practices and wedding rituals. Stevick shows how the strong and distinct Amish identity is fostered by the entire community—parents, ministers, teachers, and neighbors. With positive reinforcement and constant modeling of Amish behavior and values, this strong identity keeps most youth from feeling at ease in and identifying with the outside world.This definitive work provides new and important insight into what life is really like for the adolescents, their families, and their communities during the "running around" years and how these fascinating rituals have, in fact, helped the Amish preserve their unique culture.

This book provides an inside view of the social construction of bilingualism in one of the largest and most disadvantaged Spanish-speaking groups in the... United States.

A classic work on the African-American experience is revised for the nineties with essays reflecting the concerns of black children from the last... three decades and commentary from today's sports stars, politicians, and inner-city gang members.

A myth-shattering "how-to" by the established authority in the field that proves creativity must originate from within the child and shows parents and... teachers how to help foster it. Based on more than 12 years of research with thousands of children, and rich with examples from real life, here are answers to the questions parents ask most often. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

PUBLISHER'S WEEKLYJones combines memoir and mystery in his latest novel (after Zombie Bake-Off), returning to his hometown of Greenwood, Texas, to... explore a decades-old crime that would rend a community irrevocably asunder. In 1985, when the author is just 12 years old, a suspicious fire decimates Greenwood's cotton crop and threatens many of the townsfolk's livelihoods. Local teen Tommy Moore is caught in the field with an incriminatingly lit cigarette, and his savage beating by a descendant of the community's largest landowning family kicks off a tragic cycle of retribution that exacerbates longstanding conflicts amongst the people of Greenwood. Drawing from memory, interviews, and town legend, Jones acknowledges that he's an unreliable narrator, and that his story is "piecemeal, secondhand, polluted, cleaned-up then tore down." The book is an ambitious hybrid of fact and myth, past and present, that calls into question the nature of truth itself. While its sprawling web of characters and story lines may seem convoluted at times, the novel is unified by Jones's rhythmic prose and his evident compassion for his former neighbors' tragedies--both personal and pastoral. (June)Reviewed on: 09/03/2012  We write novels and maybe read them to feel briefly new and alive. But novels are always taking us back through the pasts none of us want to admit. Growing up Dead in Texas is that thrilling resurrection--the life inside death and the death inside life. Trust me. I lived in West Texas. Stephen Graham Jones' book took my breath away and gave it back to me. This book is brilliant. -- Lidia Yuknavitch Like finding my own diary from the years I'd forgotten, blacked out. Not so much reading, but more like remembering events I hadn't actually lived through. I can't say enough good things about this book.   --  Craig Clevenger It was a fire that could be seen for miles, a fire that split the community, a fire that turned families on each other, a fire that it's still hard to get a straight answer about. A quarter of a century ago, someone held a match to Greenwood, Texas's cotton.Stephen Graham Jones was twelve that year. What he remembers best, what's stuck with him all this time, is that nobody ever came forward to claim that destruction.And nobody was ever caught.Greenwood just leaned forward into next year's work, and the year after that, pretending that the fire had never happened. But it had.This fire, it didn't start twenty-five years ago. It had been smoldering for years by then. And everybody knew it. Getting them to say anything about it's another thing, though. Some secrets were buried on purpose.Now Stephen's going back the only way he knows how: with a pen. His first time back since he graduated high school. There's questions to be asked, there's stories to be recorded, and pieces of other stories that can be put together.Packed with small-town paranoia, mystery, and more secrets than your average graveyard, Growing Up Dead in Texas is Stephen Graham Jones' breakout novel. It's a story about farming. It's a story about Texas. It's a story about finally standing up from the dead, and walking away. And then going back one more time, when it's supposed to have been long enough ago already that you can deal with it as just events, as just facts.In the tradition of Robert McCammon's A Boy's Life and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life, Growing up Dead in Texas is a narrative lens onto the past, to see where things started. And where they keep starting again and again.

Growing Up Empty is a study of the hidden hunger epidemic that still remains largely unacknowledged at the highest political levels and "an... unforgettable exploration of public policy, its failures and its victims" (William Raspberry, Washington Post). Twenty years after Ronald Reagan declared that hunger was no longer an American problem, Schwartz-Nobel shows that hunger has reached epic proportions, running rampant through urban, rural, and suburban communities, affecting blacks, whites, Asians, Christians and Jews, and nonbelievers alike. Among the people we come to know are the new homeless. Born of the "Welfare to Work" program, these working poor have jobs but do not make enough to support their families, such as the formerly middle-class housewife reduced to stealing in order to feed her children, or the soldier fighting on our front lines while his young wife stands in bread lines and is denied benefits and baby formula at a military health clinic. With skillful investigative reporting and a novelist's humanitarian eye for detail, Schwartz-Nobel portrays a haunting reality of human suffering that need not exist. A call to action, Growing Up Empty is advocacy journalism at its best.

The editors who brought us Unsettling America and Identity Lessons have compiled a short-story anthology that focuses on themes of racial and ethnic... assimilation. With humor, passion, and grace, the contributors lay bare poignant attempts at conformity and the alienation sometimes experienced by ethnic Americans. But they also tell of the strength gained through the preservation of their communities, and the realization that it was often their difference from the norm that helped them to succeed. In pieces suggesting that American identity is far from settled, these writers illustrate the diversity that is the source of both the nation's great discord and infinite promise.

Growing Up Fast tells the life stories of Shayla, Jessica, Amy, Colleen, Liz, and Sheri--six teen mothers whom Joanna Lipper first met in 1999 when they... were enrolled at the Teen Parent Program in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Less than a decade older than these teen parents, she was able to blend into the fabric of their lives and make a short documentary film about them. Over the course of the next four years she continued to earn their trust as they shared with her the daily reality of their lives and their experiences growing up in the economically depressed post-industrial landscape of Pittsfield, Massachusetts.