Social Science Ebooks

From hungry ghosts, vampiric babies, and shapeshifting fox spirits to the avenging White Lady of urban legend, for generations, Asian women's roles have been shaped and defined through myth and story. In Unquiet Spirits, Asian writers of horror reflect on the impact of superstition, spirits, and the supernatural in this unique collection of 21 personal essays exploring themes of otherness, identity, expectation, duty, and loss, and leading, ultimately, to understanding and empowerment.

An intimate and astonishing rumination on gun violence in America from one of our greatest living writers and “genuine American original” (The Boston Globe) Paul Auster Paul Auster was a crack marksman as a kid, and like most American boys of his generation he grew up playing with toy six-shooters and mimicking the gun-slinging cowboys in B-Westerns. But he also knows how families can be wrecked by a single act of gun violence: His grandmother shot and killed his grandfather when his father was just six years old. Now, at this time of intense national discord, no issue divides Americans more deeply than the debate about guns. There are currently more guns than people in the United States, and every day more than one hundred Americans are killed by guns and another two hundred are wounded. These numbers are so large, so catastrophic, so disproportionate to what goes on elsewhere, that one must ask why. Why is America so different—and why are we the most violent country in the Western world? In this short, searing book, Auster traces centuries of America’s use and abuse of guns, through the colonial prehistory of the Republic, armed conflict against the native population, the forced enslavement of millions, and the mass shootings that dominate the current news cycle. He examines the embattled gun-control and anti-gun-control camps, frames gun violence as a public health issue, and investigates the details of one horrific incident– including the perpetrator’s unchecked purchase of the gun he used and the suffering of a bystander-turned-hero.  Filled with haunting photographs by Spencer Ostrander that document the abandoned sites of more than thirty mass shootings, Bloodbath Nation is an unflinching work about guns in America that asks: What kind of society do we want to live in?

An adoptee reconnects with the Lakota family and culture she was born into—and nurtures a new tradition that helps others to do the same. In the 1950s, when Sandy White Hawk was a toddler, she was taken from her Lakota family on the Rosebud Indian Reservation. Her adoption papers identify her as "a child of the Indian race," and her adoptive mother never let her forget it. This memoir of her removal from and return to her extended Lakota family is also the story of her life work: helping other adoptees and tribal communities to reconcile the enormous harms that widespread removals have caused. Many people believe that adoption is needed to protect "unwanted children" from "unfit mothers," to offer a child a "better chance at life." White Hawk shows that this is a myth; that adoption, particularly transracial adoption, is layered in complexities that adoptees are left to navigate in emotional isolation, without a language to speak about what is happening to them. White Hawk founded First Nation Repatriation Institute, which addresses the post-adoption issues of Native American individuals, families, and communities. Incorporating the testimony of adoptees, formerly fostered individuals, and birth relatives, she argues that those who experienced child protection need to inform the policies for child removal and placement—and that everyone involved in the issue must focus on family preservation.

“Winning, cheeky, and illuminating….What appears initially as a folly with a look-at-this cover and title becomes, thanks to Radke’s intelligence and curiosity, something much meatier, entertaining, and wise.” —The Washington Post “Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction.” —Esquire, Best Books of 2022 A “carefully researched and reported work of cultural history” (The New York Times) that explores how one body part has influenced the female—and human—experience for centuries, and what that obsession reveals about our lives today. Whether we love them or hate them, think they’re sexy, think they’re strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. A woman’s butt, in particular, is forever being assessed, criticized, and objectified, from anxious self-examinations trying on jeans in department store dressing rooms to enduring crass remarks while walking down a street or high school hallways. But why? In Butts: A Backstory, reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributing editor Heather Radke is determined to find out. Spanning nearly two centuries, this “whip-smart” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) cultural history takes us from the performance halls of 19th-century London to the aerobics studios of the 1980s, the music video set of Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” and the mountains of Arizona, where every year humans and horses race in a feat of gluteal endurance. Along the way, she meets evolutionary biologists who study how butts first developed; models whose measurements have defined jean sizing for millions of women; and the fitness gurus who created fads like “Buns of Steel.” She also examines the central importance of race through figures like Sarah Bartmann, once known as the “Venus Hottentot,” Josephine Baker, Jennifer Lopez, and other women of color whose butts have been idolized, envied, and despised. Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.