How do Americans view environmental issues? This study by a team of cognitive anthropologists reveals similarities in the way different groups of Americans view environmental change, while also showing that Americans may have misunderstandings about these

Why stigmatizing and confining a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to all Americans. The United States, home to five percent of the world's population, now houses twenty-five percent of the world's prison inmates. Our incarceration rate—at 714 per 100,000 residents and rising—is almost forty percent greater than our nearest competitors (the Bahamas, Belarus, and Russia). More pointedly, it is 6.2 times the Canadian rate and 12.3 times the rate in Japan. Economist Glenn Loury argues that this extraordinary mass incarceration is not a response to rising crime rates or a proud success of social policy. Instead, it is the product of a generation-old collective decision to become a more punitive society. He connects this policy to our history of racial oppression, showing that the punitive turn in American politics and culture emerged in the post-civil rights years and has today become the main vehicle for the reproduction of racial hierarchies. Whatever the explanation, Loury argues, the uncontroversial fact is that changes in our criminal justice system since the 1970s have created a nether class of Americans—vastly disproportionately black and brown—with severely restricted rights and life chances. Moreover, conservatives and liberals agree that the growth in our prison population has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Stigmatizing and confining of a large segment of our population should be unacceptable to Americans. Loury's call to action makes all of us now responsible for ensuring that the policy changes.

The American society has changed dramatically since the two World War ended. Grab a copy today to find out more! This book is a narrative of the changes in America's values, primarily since WWII. When atomic bombs announced the arrival of science that challenged the security of Newtonian mechanics and as technology distracted us from the importance of ethics and morality, we abandoned or redefined our traditional goals. As we became aware that what we call knowledge is merely an acceptable and useful idea and not a substantial truth, we grow anxious. I offer no absolute plan, but a direction. I intend to reveal some of the many strands of our confusion and thus help clarify the issues that divide us. It is not my intention to tell you what to think but to give you concrete examples to think about. Each chapter focuses on a specific face of American life; together they present a narrative of America's current social dilemma. Like all stories, my book has an "exposition" (Not Too Long Ago, People Knew What They Were About), a "complication" (Then, They Succumbed to the Lures of Technology and Materialism, a "rising action" (And Fell Victim to the Conflicts of the Times), a "climax" (Finally, They Experienced A Fundamental Revolution in Knowledge), a "falling action" (Therefore, We Need to Retool our Minds), and a "resolution" (And to Reestablish Grounded Values). American history, then, especially since WWII, is a dramatic illustration of our ideas about knowledge, ignorance, and faith. It also reveals the confusion rooted in our denial of the paradoxical nature of reality, and by our casual disregard of mortality

Over the past half-century, El Salvador has transformed dramatically. Historically reliant on primary exports like coffee and cotton, the country emerged from a brutal civil war in 1992 to find much of its national income now coming from a massive emigrant workforce that earns money in the US and sends it home. In this work, Pedersen examines this new way of life as it extends across two places: Intipucā, a Salvadoran town infamous for its remittance wealth, and the Washington, DC metro area.

What values do Americans hold dear? What happens when real-world situations cause those values to conflict? To better understand the intellectual map of how American society works, Arthur G. Neal and Helen Youngelson-Neal analyze values prominent in American word and deed. These values appear in our nation's formal documents-rights and privileges prominently emphasized in the US Constitution and inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. They have shaped the historical destiny and, indeed, include those values most extensively propagated by the general population. Using these criteria, the authors identify individualism, the pursuit of happiness, freedom, consumerism, materialism, equality of opportunity, technology, mastery of the environment, quality of marriage, and national unity as the core American values. Core values provide the raw materials for the construction of contemporary society as a moral community, wherever that community is located. Such values are clusters of ideas that are central to self-identities; they generate a sense of collective belonging and membership. As such, core values define the existing social order and advance a set of ideas for depicting a desirable future. The analysis presented here helps us understand contemporary conflicts inherent in the American value system and the problems confronted by Americans as they try to live within the limitations and contradictions of value systems.

An investigation into the impact of current technological advances on American values.

Althen (former foreign student adviser, U. of Iowa) gives advice to foreign visitors to the U.S. that is intended to help them understand the motivations, attitudes, communication styles, and actions of Americans. Emphasizing the interpretation of observed behavior, he covers ways of reasoning and American ideas about politics, family life, education, religion, the media, social relationships, racial and ethnic diversity, male-female relationships, sports and recreation, driving, shopping, personal hygiene, and organizational and public behavior. Over-generalization is an understandable danger in such a work as this, but Althen does make an effort to emphasize that there are variations among Americans, while he concentrates on the similarities. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR