"A girl is inspired by an ambitious woman to ponder the word and claim it for herself as well"--

Winner, 2021 Best Book Award, Comparative and International Education Society Higher Education Special Interest Group Winner, 2021 Best Book Award, Comparative and International Education Society Study Abroad and International Studies Special Interest Group Honorable Mention, 2021 Pierre Bourdieu Award for the Best Book in Sociology of Education, Section on the Sociology of Education, American Sociological Association Over the past decade, a wave of Chinese international undergraduate students—mostly self-funded—has swept across American higher education. From 2005 to 2015, undergraduate enrollment from China rose from under 10,000 to over 135,000. This privileged yet diverse group of young people from a changing China must navigate the complications and confusions of their formative years while bridging the two most powerful countries in the world. How do these students come to study in the United States? What does this experience mean to them? What does American higher education need to know and do in order to continue attracting these students and to provide sufficient support for them? In Ambitious and Anxious, the sociologist Yingyi Ma offers a multifaceted analysis of this new wave of Chinese students based on research in both Chinese high schools and American higher-education institutions. Ma argues that these students’ experiences embody the duality of ambition and anxiety that arises from transformative social changes in China. These students and their families have the ambition to navigate two very different educational systems and societies. Yet the intricacy and pressure of these systems generate a great deal of anxiety, from applying to colleges before arriving, to studying and socializing on campus, and to looking ahead upon graduation. Ambitious and Anxious also considers policy implications for American colleges and universities, including recruitment, student experiences, faculty support, and career services.

*Named a Best Business Book of 2020 by Fortune and Bloomberg* Full of empowering wisdom from one of Silicon Valley's first female African American CEOs, this inspiring leadership book offers a blueprint for how to achieve your personal and professional goals. Shellye Archambeau recounts how she overcame the challenges she faced as a young black woman, wife, and mother, managing her personal and professional responsibilities while climbing the ranks at IBM and subsequently in her roles as CEO. Through the busts and booms of Silicon Valley in the early 2000s, this bold and inspiring book details the risks she took and the strategies she engaged to steer her family, her career, and her company MetricStream toward success. Through her journey, Shellye discovered that ambition alone is not enough to achieve success. Here, she shares the practical strategies, tools, and approaches readers can employ right now, including concrete steps to most effectively: Dismantle impostor syndrome Capitalize on the power of planning Take risks Developing financial literacy Build your network Establish your reputation Take charge of your career Integrate work, marriage, parenthood, and self-care Each chapter lays out key takeaways and actions to increase the odds of achieving your personal and professional goals. With relatable personal stories that ground her advice in the real world and a foreword by leading venture capitalist and New York Times bestselling author Ben Horowitz, Unapologetically Ambitious invites readers to move beyond the solely supportive roles others expect them to fill, to learn how to carefully tread the thin line between assertive and aggressive, and to give themselves permission to strive for the top. Make no apologies for the height of your ambitions. Shellye Archambeau will show you how.

Ambitious Form describes the transformation of Italian sculpture during the neglected half century between the death of Michelangelo and the rise of Bernini. The book follows the Florentine careers of three major sculptors--Giambologna, Bartolomeo Ammanati, and Vincenzo Danti--as they negotiated the politics of the Medici court and eyed one another's work, setting new aims for their art in the process. Only through a comparative look at Giambologna and his contemporaries, it argues, can we understand them individually--or understand the period in which they worked. Michael Cole shows how the concerns of central Italian artists changed during the last decades of the Cinquecento. Whereas their predecessors had focused on specific objects and on the particularities of materials, late sixteenth-century sculptors turned their attention to models and design. The iconic figure gave way to the pose, individualized characters to abstractions. Above all, the multiplicity of master crafts that had once divided sculptors into those who fashioned gold or bronze or stone yielded to a more unifying aspiration, as nearly every ambitious sculptor, whatever his training, strove to become an architect.

"This is the playbook for how to get flexibility in your career." - Molly Beck, author, Reach Out and founder of MessyBun.com "Critical advice for women when the traditional office job doesn't fit family life." - Meredith Bodgas, Editor-in-Chief, Working Mother magazine "Sollmann advocates that we 'lean in' to what she aptly labels one's own personal measure of success, rather than a monolithic vision of the ideal career."-- Whitney Johnson, critically-acclaimed author, Build an A Team and Disrupt Yourself, Thinkers50 Management Thinkers Ambition Redefined is a timely alternative to current women's business books that define professional ambition and success as climbing the corporate ladder. In fact, this is not a path that all women want or should feel pressured to follow. Sollmann's focus is on the more critical and widespread workplace issue for everyday women -- to always work in a way that fits their lives alongside their two major caregiving roles: for children and aging parents. Sollmann debunks common assumptions such as: IT'S NOT "WORTH IT" UNLESS THE SALARY IS HIGH. Women forfeit up to 4X their salaries every year out of the workforce to care for children and/or elderly parents--and it does not take a six-figure salary to achieve long-term financial security. FINDING FLEXIBLE WORK IS IMPOSSIBLE. Sollmann shines a bright light on the ever-widening world of flexwork--where women can find many interesting and exciting ways to tuck all generations of their families into a future that is financially secure and safe. The book includes realistic, practical tools for preparing for and finding flexible work within a current job or a new opportunity. IT WON'T HAPPEN TO ME. Divorce, death of a spouse, or unexpected financial support for aging parents are some of the life "you never knows" that all women could experience. Divorce, death of a spouse, caring for aging parents or adult children are some of the life "you never knows" that all women could experience. Sollmann encourages women to anticipate and buffer life surprises and she shows the profound impact of continual earning, saving, and investing toward a long and comfortable retirement. WORK ENDS AT AGE 65. Women who leave the workforce and want to return in their forties, fifties or sixties will be in good company as the ranks of older workers rise. Over the next two decades, adults age 50 and over will have greater rates of workforce participation into their sixth and seventh decades. Eye-opening and practical, the book shows that when we redefine ambition, we acknowledge that challenging, lucrative work can be found in many flexible ways that favor personal satisfaction over public applause.

Murder, street brawls, marital squabbles, infidelity, official corruption, public insults, and rebellion are just a few of the social layers Reuben Zahler investigates as he studies the dramatic shifts in Venezuela as it transformed from a Spanish colony to a modern republic. His book Ambitious Rebels illuminates the enormous changes in honor, law, and political culture that occurred and how ordinary men and women promoted or rejected those changes. In a highly engaging style, Zahler examines gender and class against the backdrop of Venezuelan institutions and culture during the late colonial period through post-independence (known as the “middle period”). His fine-grained analysis shows that liberal ideals permeated the elite and popular classes to a substantial degree while Venezuelan institutions enjoyed impressive levels of success. Showing remarkable ambition, Venezuela’s leaders aspired to transform a colony that adhered to the king, the church, and tradition into a liberal republic with minimal state intervention, a capitalistic economy, freedom of expression and religion, and an elected, representative government. Subtle but surprisingly profound changes of a liberal nature occurred, as evidenced by evolving standards of honor, appropriate gender roles, class and race relations, official conduct, courtroom evidence, press coverage, economic behavior, and church-state relations. This analysis of the philosophy of the elites and the daily lives of common men and women reveals in particular the unwritten, unofficial norms that lacked legal sanction but still greatly affected political structures. Relying on extensive archival resources, Zahler focuses on Venezuela but provides a broader perspective on Latin American history. His examination provides a comprehensive look at intellectual exchange across the Atlantic, comparative conditions throughout the Americas, and the tension between traditional norms and new liberal standards in a postcolonial society.

A “fascinating and well-documented social history” of American beer, from the immigrants who invented it to the upstart microbrewers who revived it (Chicago Tribune). Grab a pint and settle in with AmbitiousBrew, the fascinating, first-ever history of American beer. Included here are the stories of ingenious German immigrant entrepreneurs like Frederick Pabst and Adolphus Busch, titans of nineteenth-century industrial brewing who introduced the pleasures of beer gardens to a nation that mostly drank rum and whiskey; the temperance movement (one activist declared that “the worst of all our German enemies are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller”); Prohibition; and the twentieth-century passion for microbrews. Historian Maureen Ogle tells a wonderful tale of the American dream—and the great American brew. “As much a painstakingly researched microcosm of American entrepreneurialism as it is a love letter to the country’s favorite buzz-producing beverage . . . ‘Ambitious Brew’ goes down as brisk and refreshingly as, well, you know.” —New York Post