Books
Sociological takes on recent news and research.
Writing The City
Anthropologist John Hartigan considers the tricks and travails of writing about cities, via a review of Detroit: An American Autopsy and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. Read MoreThe Poverty of Policy
Family scientist Kevin Roy reviews the books So Rich, So Poor and Ain't No Trust. The books examine the consequences of welfare reform policy for low-income families and the next steps in dealing with rising social inequality. Read MorePrecarious Work
Sociologist Gretchen Purser reviews the books The Temp Economy, Intern Nation and The Precariat. These books explore recent transformations in the labor market and the increasingly precarious nature of work. Read MoreSlot Machine Capitalism
What is seductive about casino gambling? Sociologist Jacob Avery reviews the books Addiction by Design and Gambling for Profit in a desperate attempt to win some answers. Read MoreSchooling Elites
Lisa M. Stulberg reviews two new books on education and the creation of each new generation of American elites: Shamus Rahman Khan's Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul’s School, and Amy J. Binder and Kate Wood's Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives. Read MoreThe New Class War
Jeff Manza reviews three recent books and their takes on the coming (or current) class war so many believe is tearing America apart: Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, and Christopher Hayes's Twilight of the Elites: After Meritocracy. Read MoreLiving “Single”
Sociologist Pamela J. Smock reviews two recent monographs on the topic of singlehood. One, Going Solo, is authored by sociologist Eric Klinenberg and the other, Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled, is authored by English professor Michael Cobb. Read MoreMarx on Finance
Fredric Jameson’s new reading of Marx’s Capital, vol. 1 uses Marx’s account of the accumulation of capital in the form of producer goods to argue that a rising rate of structural unemployment is a fundamental tendency of capitalism as Marx understood, thereby challenging a “workerist” view of how Marx though capitalism could eventually end. Scholar Robert Meister argues that Jameson fails to grasp the role financial thinking in Marx’s account of the dual role of producer goods as both means of production and financial assets, and uses this account to sketch a view of the role of financial asset markets in production that builds on a Marxian foundation. Read MoreWhat They’re Watching
A "list" of what six social scientists are watching on television and film. Read MoreIs Marriage for Anyone?
Two recent books on marriage—Is Marriage for White People? by Ralph Richard Banks and Unhitched by Judith Stacey—are considered in this review essay by sociologist Micki McGee. Banks argues that the decline of marriage among African American women constitutes a social problem that could be remedied if more women from this group opted for interracial marriages. Stacey's cross-cultural study contends that marriage is an institution that attempts the near impossible task of reconciling the goals of domesticity with those of erotic life, and that in the process an extraordinary range of marital arrangements have emerged. Taken together these arguments ask us to consider who marriage serves. Read More