Welfare Brat

Welfare Brat
Author: Mary Childers
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2008-12-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1596917415

Mary Childers's intimate and frank memoir tells the story of growing up in a family in which five out of seven children dropped out of high school and four different fathers dropped out of sight. With this lyrical and often humorous examination of how she became the first person in her family to attend college, Childers illuminates the causes of welfare dependence, generational poverty, and submission to a popular culture that values sexuality more than self-esteem and self-sufficiency.

Welfare Brat

Welfare Brat
Author: Mary Childers
Publisher: Bloomsbury Pub Plc USA
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2005-05-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781582345864

A woman who grew up in the blighted Bronx during the 1960s offers an intimate, candid memoir of poverty, abuse, and the welfare system, describing a world of urban decay, rampant crime, race riots, white flight, alcohol and drugs, and her own difficult struggle to achieve self-sufficiency. 30,000 first printing.

Boulevard of Dreams

Boulevard of Dreams
Author: Constance Rosenblum
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2011-03-18
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0814777244

An enthralling story of the iconic Grand Concourse in the West Bronx Stretching over four miles through the center of the West Bronx, the Grand Boulevard and Concourse, known simply as the Grand Concourse, has gracefully served as silent witness to the changing face of the Bronx, and New York City, for a century. Now, a New York Times editor brings to life the street in all its raucous glory. Designed by a French engineer in the late nineteenth century to echo the elegance and grandeur of the Champs Elysées in Paris, the Concourse was nearly twenty years in the making and celebrates its centennial in November 2009. Over that century it has truly been a boulevard of dreams for various upwardly mobile immigrant and ethnic groups, yet it has also seen the darker side of the American dream. Constance Rosenblum unearths the colorful history of this grand street and its interlinked neighborhoods. With a seasoned journalist’s eye for detail, she paints an evocative portrait of the Concourse through compelling life stories and historical vignettes. The story of the creation and transformation of the Grand Concourse is the story of New York—and America—writ large, and Rosenblum examines the Grand Concourse from its earliest days to the blighted 1960s and 1970s right up to the current period of renewal. Beautifully illustrated with a treasure trove of historical photographs, the vivid world of the Grand Concourse comes alive—from Yankee Stadium to the unparalleled collection of Art Deco apartments to the palatial Loew’s Paradise movie theater. An enthralling story of the creation of an iconic street, an examination of the forces that transformed it, and a moving portrait of those who called it home, Boulevard of Dreams is a must read for anyone interested in the rich history of New York and the twentieth-century American city.

The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God

The Singing and Dancing Daughters of God
Author: Timothy Schaffert
Publisher: Unbridled Books
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2009-03-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1936071304

A blithe and redemptive seriocomic love story filled with country music, the ghosts of Halloween, and an ironic brand of down-home religion. Newly divorced and feeling the pain of separation from his family, Hud Smith channels his regret into writing country-western songs, contemplating life on the lam with his 8-year-old daughter, and searching cryptic postcards for news of his teenage son who has run off with The Daughters of God, an alternative Gospel-punk band of growing fame. Then he finds himself inching toward reconciliation with his ex, tossing his whole talent for misery into question as they head off in a borrowed school bus, hoping so very tentatively to bring the entire family together again. In this endearing misadventure that threatens to turn out right in spite of it all, Schaffert writes a thin line between tragedy and hilarity, turning wry humor and a keen sense of the paradoxical onto characters who deserve all the tender care he gives them.

Coming of Age in a Hardscrabble World

Coming of Age in a Hardscrabble World
Author: Nancy C. Atwood
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2019-09-01
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0820355321

Nonfiction storytelling is at its best in this anthology of excerpts from memoirs by thirty authors--some eminent, some less well known--who grew up tough and talented in working-class America. Their stories, selected from literary memoirs published between 1982 and 2014, cover episodes from childhood to young adulthood within a spectrum of life-changing experiences. Although diverse ethnically, racially, geographically, and in sexual orientation, these writers share a youthful precocity and determination to find opportunity where little appeared to exist. All of these perspectives are explored within the larger context of economic insecurity--a needed perspective in this time of growing inequality. These memoirists grew up in families that led "hardscrabble" lives in which struggle and strenuous effort were the norm. Their stories offer insight on the realities of class in America, as well as inspiration and hope.

Ted, White, and Blue

Ted, White, and Blue
Author: Ted Nugent
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2010-05-17
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1596986050

It’s About Time. America has been craving leadership—and at last a gun-slinging, mega-rock star, deerslayer, and patriot has stepped forward to provide it. Make way for Ted Nugent. Cocked, locked, and ready to rock, the Motor City Madman, the thinking man’s Abraham Lincoln, has unleashed the ultimate high-octane political manifesto for the ages in Ted, White, and Blue—the most important patriotic statement since the Constitution. In Ted, White, and Blue you’ll discover: Why war is the answer to so many of our current problems Why if Ted were a Mexican, he’d start a revolution (and how, since he’s not, we can control our own borders) How to put Uncle Sam on a diet (a waste-watchers program for government) If you care about America, if you want to preserve, protect, and defend the land of the free and the home of the brave, if you’re fed up with lazy, whining, fear mongering, government-gorging Obamaniacs, then you need to read Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto.

Sociology Meets Memoir

Sociology Meets Memoir
Author: Margaret K. Nelson
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2024-12-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1479827320

"This innovative book offers a discussion of how memoirs might be useful for sociologists. By reading the guide, students and teachers alike will gain an understanding of how they might approach the current outpouring of memoirs and incorporate them into their teaching, learning, writing and research"--

Two Weeks Every Summer

Two Weeks Every Summer
Author: Tobin Miller Shearer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501708457

Two Weeks Every Summer, which is based on extensive oral history interviews with former guests, hosts, and administrators in Fresh Air programs, opens a new chapter in the history of race in the United States by showing how the actions of hundreds of thousands of rural and suburban residents who hosted children from the city perpetuated racial inequity rather than overturned it. Since 1877 and to this day, Fresh Air programs from Maine to Montana have brought inner-city children to rural and suburban homes for two-week summer vacations. Tobin Miller Shearer brings to the forefront of his history of the Fresh Air program the voices of the children themselves through letters that they wrote, pictures that they took, and their testimonials. Shearer offers a careful social and cultural history of the Fresh Air programs, giving readers a good sense of the summer experiences for both hosts and the visiting children. By covering the racially transformative years between 1939 and 1979, Shearer shows how the rhetoric of innocence employed by Fresh Air boosters largely served the interests of religiously minded white hosts and did little to offer more than a vacation for African American and Latino urban youth. In what could have been a new arena for the civil rights movement, white adults often overpowered the courageous actions of children of color. By giving white suburbanites and rural residents a safe race relations project that did not require adjustments to their investment portfolios, real estate holdings, or political affiliations, the programs perpetuated an economic order that marginalized African Americans and Latinos by suggesting that solutions to poverty lay in one-on-one acts of charity.

Parenting Out of Control

Parenting Out of Control
Author: Margaret K. Nelson
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2012-03
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0814763898

They go by many names: helicopter parents, hovercrafts, PFHs (Parents from Hell). Drawing on a wealth of eye-opening interviews with parents across the country, Margaret K. Nelson cuts through the stereotypes and hyperbole to examine the realities of what she terms parenting out of control. Situating this phenomenon within a broad sociological context, she finds several striking explanations for why today's prosperous and well-educated parents are unable to set realistic boundaries when it comes to raising their children. Analyzing the goals and aspirations parents have for their children as well as the strategies and technologies they use to reach them, Nelson discovers fundamental differences among American parenting styles that expose class fault lines, both within the elite and between the elite and the middle and working classes. Today's parents are faced with unprecedented opportunities and dangers for their children, and are evolving novel strategies to adapt to these changes -- this lucid and insightful work provides an authoritative examination of what happens when these new strategies go too far