The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, published in 1988, is a nonfiction companion to a six-episode PBS documentary series by the same name. The main text of the book is a transcript of an extensive conversation between comparative mythology expert Joseph Campbell and journalist Bill Moyers. Using mythological stories, psychoanalytic theories, and personal anecdotes, Campbell and Moyers examine how world mythologies illuminate the mysteries of human life through shared symbols as... Read The Power of Myth Summary

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The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a sociological study of the ways individuals encounter each other. Published in 1956 by Erving Goffman, it focuses on the relationship between an individual carrying out a particular role in society (what Goffman calls a “performance”) and those who are present but not participant (whom he calls “observers”) in the activity. While the text begins with a general introduction to Goffman’s methodology, with Chapter 1 solely an... Read The Presentation Of Self In Everyday Life Summary

In 2007 the United States experienced an economic downturn that caused the standard for living for millions of Americans to plummet. While the share of national income dropped for 99 percent of Americans, the top 1 percent of Americans saw their wealth increase, in some cases considerably. Joseph E. Stiglitz published The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future in 2012 to explain this income gap and offer some hope that it... Read The Price of Inequality Summary

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The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is a book written by German historian and sociologist Max Weber in 1905. Weber is often considered to be one of the founders of the discipline of sociology, and The Protestant Ethic is one of his most famous texts. As a work of sociology, the book seeks to analyze broad changes in both the economic and the religious structures of Western European and American societies. Over the... Read The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Summary

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As World War II raged around him, F.A. Hayek wrote and published The Road to Serfdom, which became a touchstone of the campaign to preserve personal and economic freedoms. The book argues that Western democracies’ attraction to socialism will take them down a path to authoritarian dictatorships like those in Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. Government planning of economies, Hayek declares, must result in arbitrary and unfair edicts, as well as a loss of individual... Read The Road To Serfdom Summary

The Road to Wigan Pier is a 1937 nonfiction book by George Orwell. The book describes Orwell’s firsthand experiences of life in Great Britain’s working-class communities in the early 20th century and advocates for the adoption of socialism. SummaryThe Road to Wigan Pier begins in a small lodging house in Northern England. The impoverished, rundown house rents crowded rooms to people who work in the nearby mines. The landlord, Mr. Brooker, was once a miner... Read The Road to Wigan Pier Summary

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The Sexual Contract, published in 1988 by Polity Press, is an examination of social contract theory through a radical feminist lens. While acknowledging that the original contract itself is a political fiction, Carole Pateman claims that the original contract is a sexual-social contract that secures patriarchy and relations of sexually differentiated domination and subordination in modern civil society. However, dominant interpretations repress the sexual contract so that civil society appears to be post- or anti-patriarchal... Read The Sexual Contract Summary

The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2011) is a nonfiction book by writer, editor, and media critic Nicholas Carr. Carr is a prolific nonfiction writer known for his analysis of cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and human society. A 2011 Pulitzer Prize Finalist, The Shallows combines elements of personal essay, journalism, and academic research to explore The Impact of the Internet on Cognitive Processes, The Nature of Learning and Media in the... Read The Shallows Summary

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The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (2014) by Jeff Hobbs is a biography that chronicles the life of Rob Peace, a brilliant young Black man. Raised in East Orange, a crime-ridden suburb of Newark, New Jersey, Rob overcame numerous barriers to study biochemistry and molecular biophysics at Yale University. Despite academic success and a seemingly bright future, his life was tragically cut short when he was killed in a drug-related shooting at the... Read The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace Summary

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The Social Contract is a political treatise published in 1762 by the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau argues about the best ways to establish and maintain political authority without unduly sacrificing personal liberty. He builds off 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s idea of the “social contract” between the people and sovereign authority, departing from Hobbes in his views on monarchy and the natural state of humankind. The Social Contract was enormously influential on political thought before... Read The Social Contract Summary

Guy Debord’s 1967 philosophy text, The Society of the Spectacle, analyzes the phenomena of alienation and argues that alienation’s root cause is located within the economic, political, and cultural spheres of modern society. While previous periods of capitalist development saw the hyper-exploitation of workers, the period of capitalism after WWII saw an improvement in labor conditions for greater numbers of workers in society. However, for Debord, this improvement in work conditions did not translate to... Read The Society of the Spectacle Summary