Stanley Aronowitz
How Class Works: Power and Social Movement

Offering an important revision of conventional wisdom, Stanley Aronowitz demonstrates that class remains a potent force in the United States. Aronowitz shows that class need not to be understood simply in terms of socio-economic stratification, but rather as the power of social groups to make a difference. Aronowitz explains that social groups from different economic and political positions become classes when they make demands that change the course of history. For instance, labor movements, environmental activists, and feminists have engaged in class struggles as their demands for power reconfigured the social order. The emerging global justice movements – comprised of activists from heterogeneous social and political backgrounds – also show potential for class formation. Written by a prominent scholar and social activist, this book offers a stunning reconceptualization of the meaning and significance of class in modern America.
For more information on the book, or to order your copy, visit one of these websites:
Amazon.com or Barnes&Noble

Stanley Aronowitz and Heather Gautney have a new book out entitled: IMPLICATING EMPIRE: Globalization & Resistance in the 21st Century World Order. Implicating Empire is the first book to critically examine the various dimensions of globalization and resistance in the 21st century and to integrate them into a wide-ranging analysis.

The book contains chapters from CUNY Professors: Cindy Katz, Professor of Environmental Psychology at the Graduate Center, ["Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction"]; Corey Robin, Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, ["Fear, American Style: Civil Liberty after 9/11"]; Bill Tabb, Professor at Queens College and the Graduate Center, ["A Race to the Bottom?"], and Stanley Arronowitz, co-editor and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, ["Global Capital and Its Opponents"].

The book also contains chapters from several Graduate Center Students, as well as many other non-CUNY academics. For more information on the book, or to order your copy, visit one of these websites: http://www.amazon.com... or http://search.barnesandnoble.com....

Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Arne L. Kalleberg, Editors
Fighting for Time: Shifting Boundaries of Work and Social Life

Though there are still just twenty-four hours in a day, society’s idea of who should be doing what and when has shifted. Time, the ultimate scarce resource, has become an increasingly contested battle zone in American life, with work, family, and personal obligations pulling individuals in conflicting directions. In "Fighting for Time," editors Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Arne Kalleberg bring together a team of distinguished sociologists and management analysts to examine the social construction of time and its importance in American culture.
For more information on the book, or to order your copy, visit one of these websites:
www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com

Elizabeth and Stuart Ewen
Typecasting: On the Arts & Sciences of Human Inequality

Typecasting chronicles the emergence of the "science of first impression" and reveals how the work of its creators-early social scientists-continues to shape how we see the world and to inform our most fundamental and unconscious judgments of beauty, humanity, and degeneracy. In this groundbreaking exploration of the growth of stereo-typing amidst the rise of modern society, authors Ewen and Ewen demonstrate "typecasting" as a persistent cultural practice. Drawing on fields as diverse as history, pop culture, racial science, and film, and including over one hundred images, many published here for the first time, the authors present a vivid portrait of stereotyping as it was forged by colonialism, industrialization, mass media, urban life, and the global economy.
For more information on the book, or to order your copy, visit one of these websites:
www.amazon.com or www.barnesandnoble.com

Francis Fox Piven
Challenging Authority:How Ordinary People Changed America

What do the American Revolution, the Abolitionist movement, the labor movement, and the Vietnam antiwar movement have in common? These are examples of the profound moments in American history when ordinary Americans collectively and persuasively told the government ENOUGH! /Challenging Authority/ argues that ordinary people exercise extraordinary political courage and power in American politics when, frustrated by politics as usual, they rise up in anger and hope, and defy the authorities and the status quo rules that ordinarily govern their daily lives. By doing so, they disrupt the workings of important institutions and become a force in American politics.
For more information on the book, or to order your copy, visit this website:  http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com/

Gerald Handel
Childhood Socialization, 2nd edition.(ed.)

Gerald Handel(with Spencer Cahill and Frederick Elkin)
Children and Society: The Sociology of Children and Childhood Socialization

Children and Society presents a comprehensive sociological portrayal of children and childhood from birth to the beginning of adolescence. A major theme is the tension between children's active agency and the socializing influences of the family, school, peer groups, and mass media. The book incorporates the most recent research and theories of childhood socialization. Its theoretical perspective is primarily symbolic interactionism which emphasizes the development of the self. The volume features research that documents cultural variations within American society shaped by social class, race and ethnicity, and gender. For more information, visit: http://www.roxbury.net/cas.html

William Kornblum
At Sea in the City: New York from the Water's Edge

"From Ellis Island to Coney Island and all docks in between, one man sets sail and discovers New York from a fresh perspective.

"New York is a city of few boundaries. And though the land itself may end at the water, the city does not. Some people, like William Kornblum, still see the city as an urvan archipelago, shaped by the water and the people who have sailed it for goods, money, pirate's loot, and freedom.

"Kornblum-New York City native, longtime sailor, and urban sociologist-has spent decades plying the waterways of the city in his ancient sailboat, Tradition. In At Sea in the City, he takes the reader along as he sails through his hometown, revealing the history of the city's waterfront and maritime culture and the stories of the men and women who made the water their own.
--Taken from publisher's website.

For more information about the book, the author, or ordering the book, visit Alogonquin's website at: http://www.algonquin.com/kornblum/.

Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic
Chinese America: The Untold Story of America's Oldest New Community               
Chinese America is a landmark analysis that draws on firsthand reporting in Asia and the US. Offering a new picture of the country's development, Kwong and Miscevic provide the first comprehensive report on the suburban immigrant communities that are transforming America. Urban ghettos continue to host some of the country's poorest immigrants, but Chinese Americans now live in the suburbs in similar proportions to whites—and have brought with them Chinese supermarket chains, language schools, and growing clout in America and Asia. Exploring the burgeoning trade—and underlying conflicts—between China and the US, Chinese America reveals the complex connections between immigration, globalization, and foreign policy in our time.

Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore
Gender & the Social Construction of Illness: Second Edition

Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore consider the interface between the social institutions of gender and Western medicine and offer a distinct feminist viewpoint to analyze issues of power and politics concerning physical illness. The book covers gender and the social construction of illness, social epidemiology, the health professions, disability, PMS and menopause, genital surgeries, AIDS, and feminist health care.

The book is available at the Altamira website: http://www.altamirapress.com/Catalog/Multibook.shtml    

Samuel W. Bloom
The World as Scalpel: A History of Medical Sociology

"A doctor can damage a patient as much with a misplaced word as with a slip of the scalpel." This statement, from Lawrence J. Henderson, a famous physician whose name is part of the lore of the basic science of medicine, epitomizes the central theme of potent for harm, how equally powerful they can be to help if used with disciplined knowledge and understanding. Nowhere does this simple truth apply more certainly than in the behavior of a physician.

Medical sociology studies the full social context of health and disease, the interpersonal relations, social institutions, and the influence of social factors on the problems of medicine. Throughout its history, medical sociology has struggled between advocacy and objectivity, between the demand to be active and applied and to have the legitimacy of science. The story of medical sociology divides naturally into two parts: the pre-modern, represented by various studies of health and social problems in Europe and the United States until the second World War, and the modern post-war period. The modern period has seen rapid growth and the achievement of the full formal panopoly of professionalism.

This engaging account documents the development of professional associations, official journals, and programs of financial support, both private and governmental. Written by a distinguished pioneer in medical sociology, THE WORLD AS SCALPEL is a definitive study of a relatively new, but critically important field.
~Published by Oxford University Press
Click here for ordering information.
 

Sharon Zukin
After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City

Sharon Zukin, of the sociology Program and Brooklyn College, and Michael Sorkin, head of the urban design program at City College, have published a book of essays by New York Urbanists entitled After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City (Routledge, 2002). The essays make the point that New York City has been at war or suffered disasters several times during the past two hundred years, and that Lower Manhattan has been made and re-made not only by the building of the World Trade Center in the 1960s and 70s, but also by the role of Wall Street in the global financial system, the importance of real estate interests in local development, and the desire to create both landscapes of power and public spaces of mingling and cultural fusion. Though the authors anticipate political conflicts over future rebuilding plans, they urge that the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 not usher in a new era of fiscal cutbacks, but lead to a renewal of the city's progressive promise.

Marnia Lazreg

Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to Baghdad, Princeton University Press

Was released on December 5, 2007.

(Link: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/18524.html).

She was also interviewed about her book on WBAI, “Law and Disorder” Program, on December 17, 2007.
The Maison Française, Columbia University, will be hosting a book launch event on February 7, 2008 and a book party has tentatively been scheduled for Feb. 20th or 27th in Sociology lounge at GC.

Congratulations to Marnia!

Stephen Steinberg

Race Relations: A Critique, Stanford University Press


The book was featured in the Research & Books column in the Chronicle of Higher Education (November 16, 2007).

Congratulations to Prof. Steinberg!