The love story between two teenagers 17 years old Ziegfried Vainer and 15 years old Iolanda Grünberg in the first part of the book and in the second part of the book what happened to Siegfried Wyner during the time that has worked for the city of New York Department of Buildings.

Yoshinobu Hakutani traces the development of African American modernism, which initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright's literary manifesto "Blueprint for Negro Writing" in 1937. Hakutani dissects and discusses the cross-cultural influences on the then-burgeoning discipline in three stages: American dialogues, European and African cultural visions, and Asian and African American cross-cultural visions. In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology is shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound, Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats's symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theatre and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel's jazz haiku energized by his cross-cultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music. The book demonstrates some of the most visible cultural exchanges in modern and postmodern African American literature. Such a study can be extended to other contemporary African American writers whose works also thrive on their cross-cultural visions, such as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and haiku poet Lenard Moore.

The late Gore Vidal occupied a unique position within American letters. Born into a political family, he ran for office several times, but was consistently critical of his nation’s political system and its leaders. A prolific writer in several genres, he was also widely known – particularly in the United States – on the basis of his frequent appearances in the various electronic media. In this groundbreaking work examining the central theme of power throughout Vidal’s writings, Heather Neilson focuses primarily on Vidal’s historical fiction. In his novels depicting American history and those set in ancient times, Vidal evokes a world in which deliberately propagated falsehood – ‘disinformation’ – becomes established as truth. Neilson engages with Vidal’s representations of political and religious leaders, and with his deeply ambivalent fascination with the increasingly inescapable influence of the media. She asserts that Vidal’s oeuvre has a Shakespearean resonance in its persistent obsession with the question of what constitutes legitimate power and authority.

The cartmen—unskilled workers who hauled goods on one horsecarts—were perhaps the most important labor group in early American cities. The forerunners of the Teamsters Union, these white-frocked laborers moved almost all of the nation’s possessions, touching the lives of virtually every American. New York City Cartmen, 1667–1850 tells the story of this vital group of laborers. Besides documenting the cartmen’s history, the book also demonstrates the tremendous impact of government intervention into the American economy via the creation of labor laws. The cartmen possessed a hard-nosed political awareness, and because they transported essential goods, they achieved a status in New York City far above their skills or financial worth. Civic support and discrimination helped the cartmen create a community all their own. The cartmen's culture and their relationship with New York's municipal government are the direct ancestors of the city's fabled taxicab drivers. But this book is about the city itself. It is a stirring street-level account of the growth of New York, growth made possible by the efforts of the cartmen and other unskilled laborers. Containing 23 black-and-white illustrations, New York City Cartmen is informative reading for social, urban, and labor historians.

Under the guise of 'development', a globalizing capitalism has continued to cause poverty through dispossession and the exploitation of labour across the Global South. This process has been met with varied forms of rural resistance by local movements of displaced farm workers, small and landless (women) peasants, and indigenous peoples in South and East Asia, the Pacific and Africa, who are resisting the forced appropriation of their land, the exploitation of labour and the destruction of their ecosystems and ways of life. In this provocative new collection, engaged scholars and activists combine grounded case studies with both Marxist and anti-colonial analyses, suggesting that the developmental project is a continuation of the colonial project. The authors then demonstrate the ways in which these local struggles have attempted to resist colonization and dispossession in the rural belt, thereby contributing essential movement-relevant knowledge on these experiences in the Global South. A vital addition to the fields of critical development studies, political-sociology, agrarian studies and the anthropology of resistance, this book addresses academics and analysts who have either minimized or overlooked local resistances to colonial capital, especially in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions.

The issue of race is often a scab Americans choose to ignore. However social science has a responsibility and an obligation to examine not simply the amenable subjects but also the controversial. This work, in a word, is controversial. Thomas Franks (2004) argued that cultural differences led white Kansans to abandon the Democratic Party for the Republican Party during the 1980s. He specifically argued that abortion was the unifying issue in this ideological migration. Simultaneously, future President Ronald Reagan opened his campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the sight of the massacre of four young civil rights activists over a decade earlier. Race has and is a factor in the American experience; Franks’ premise is simply that the absence of the concentration of African Americans in the Kansas area negated the influence of the “black threat hypothesis” on the observed ideological switch of white Kansans. This work argues that Franks’ premise fails to incorporate the over arching ideological switch of white voter migration to the Republican party that was occurring during the same period, and that Reagan’s speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi was an overt cue that he was rejecting the civil rights consensus for an historically established “race-based social contract” that positioned people of color outside the traditional bounds of the social contract. The study is a sociopolitical analysis of the African American experience utilizing the “racial contract” framework developed by Charles Mills. The “racial contract” holds that the social contract explicitly dictates interactions and transaction costs between citizens and government. Mills supposition is that historically non-Western Europeans were excluded from the penalties for violations of the social contract, and a tacit race based contract dictated transaction costs and interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans. The work utilizes the framework to trace the sociopolitical environment from the first appearance of Africans in America to the present. It has the supposition that the initial sociopolitical status of Africans in America was as a result of the reformation of the Western feudal agrarian culture, with African captives attached to the land as the neo-serfs; but that the reformation of feudalism was only possible within the context that Africans were implicitly viewed as outside the bounds of the codified social contract. It traces American sociopolitical conflict over the expansion of the “racial contract,” which was the basis of the American Civil War; and the establishment of an implicit sociopolitical order within the bounds of the racial contract at the end of the Civil War, with codified sanctions for violations of commensality and endogamy.