Social workers produced thousands of case files about the poor during the interwar years. Analyzing almost two thousand such case files and traveling from Boston, Minneapolis, and Portland to London and Melbourne, "Miss Cutler and the Case of the Res...

In this intriguing book, renowned sociolinguistics experts explore the importance of discourse analysis, a process that examines patterns of language to understand how users build cooperative understanding in dialogues. It presents discourse analys...

What are the reasons for the current epidemic of eating disorders, the increasing obsession with exercise, diet, and cosmetic surgery, the constant exhortations to look and feel good? This engrossing book examines our concern with the "good body" fro...

Members of adoption triangles-adoptees, birthparents, and adopting parents-must struggle with difficult and sometimes heartrending issues. Should adopted children be enabled to trace their biological parents? Does the individual's right to self-disco...

In this book leading experts in the field of addictions report on key aspects of addictive disorders. They focus particularly on relapse, the long-term course of addiction to drugs or alcohol, and interventions to prevent relapse and promote recovery...

The United States is in transit from an industrial to a postindustrial society, from a modern to postmodern culture, and from a national to a global economy. In this book Richard Harvey Brown asks how we can distinguish the uniquely American elements...

This study questions conventional wisdom about the nature and outcome of the South African conflict. Avoiding both wishful thinkiong and mere moralizing, Heribert Adam and Hermann Giliomee critically examine the applicability of such concepts as colo...

Why has the large income gap between blacks and whites persisted for decades after the passage of civil rights legislation? More specifically, why do African Americans remain substantially underrepresented in the highest-paying professions, such as s...

For American parents, teenage sex is something to be feared and forbidden: most would never consider allowing their children to have sex at home, and sex is a frequent source of family conflict. In the Netherlands, where teenage pregnancies are far l...

Commentators from Bill Cosby to Barack Obama have observed the phenomenon of black schoolchildren accusing studious classmates of 'acting white'. How did this contentious phrase, with roots in Jim Crow-era racial discord, become a part of the schoolg...