Social Policy Books - Page 12

Revisiting Rental Housing: Policies, Programs, and Priorities

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Editorial Review:

Rental housing is increasingly recognized as a vital housing option in the United States. Yet government policies and programs continue to grapple with widespread problems, including affordability, distressed urban neighborhoods, poor-quality housing stock, concentrated poverty, and exposure to health hazards in the home. These challenges can be costly and difficult to address. The time is ripe for fresh, authoritative analysis of this important yet often overlooked sector.

In Revisiting Rental Housing, leading housing researchers build on decades of experience, research, and evaluation to inform our understanding of rental housing challenges and what to do about them. The authors look at contributing factors and problems generated by the operation of rental markets, and assess whether existing policies and programs have helped and what lessons have been learned. Finally, the authors suggest new directions for housing policy, including the integration of best practices from past lessons into existing programs and innovations for large-scale, long-term market and policy solutions that can get to the root of rental housing challenges.

Contributors: William C. Apgar (Harvard University), Eric S. Belsky (Harvard University), Jackie M. Cutsinger (Wayne State University), Anthony Downs (Brookings), Rachel Bogardus Drew (Harvard University), Ingrid Gould Ellen (New York University), George C. Galster (Wayne State University), Bruce Katz (Brookings), Jill Khadduri (Abt Associates), Ron Malega (University of Georgia), Shekar Narasimhan (Beekman Advisors), Rolf Pendall (Cornell University), John M. Quigley (University of California-Berkeley), James A. Riccio (MDRC), Stuart S. Rosenthal (Syracuse University), Margery Austin Turner (Urban Institute), and Charles Wilkins (Compass Group)

Global Development 2.0: Can Philanthropists, the Public, and the Poor Make Poverty History?

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Editorial Review:

An unprecedented explosion of development players heralds a new era of global action on poverty. Global Development 2.0 celebrates this transformative trend within international aid and offers lessons to ensure that this wave of generosity yields lasting and widespread improvements to the lives and prospects of the world's poorest.

Age Power

Ken Dychtwald

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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Personal Health -> Healthy Living

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Total reviews: 32 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The bestselling author of Age Wave reveals how the aging of the baby-boom generation will forever reshape our homes, families and businesses--and how we can be ready.

In the past, few people had a chance to "age." Throughout 99 percent of human history, the average life expectancy was less than eighteen years. Today, however, we are witnessing an unprecedented generational shift. In America, the largest generation in history--the baby boomers--is fast approaching its senior years, in which the elderly will routinely live well beyond their eighties and nineties. While this is an exciting new stage, it begs uncomfortable questions:
-- With advances in longevity, at what age should people be considered "old" and therefore eligible for "old age" entitlements?
-- How can we adjust work, retirement, education, marriage, and family relations to accommodate tens of millions of us living to eighty--or one hundred?
-- What will we do when millions of Americans outlive the money set aside in their pensions and retirement plans?
-- How can we transform our health-care system to be ready for the coming onslaught of Alzheimer's and other degenerative diseases?
-- What useful and productive roles can we create for elderly boomers, so that the age wave they are producing creates rich opportunities rather than crushing problems?

In this breakthrough book, Dychtwald explains how individuals, businesses, and governments can best prepare for the challenges of a new era in which the priorities will be set based on the needs and desires of the elderly. He surveys how we each must make individual decisions right now to "age proof" our families and ourselves.

Hard Line: Life and Death on the US-Mexico Border

Ken Ellingwood

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Editorial Review:

The Southwestern border is one of the most fascinating places in America, a region of rugged beauty and small communities that coexist across the international line. In the past decade, the area has also become deadly as illegal immigration has shifted into some of the harshest territory on the continent, reshaping life on both sides of the border.

In Hard Line, Ken Ellingwood, a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, captures the heart of this complex and fascinating land, through the dramatic stories of undocumented immigrants and the border agents who track them through the desert, Native Americans divided between two countries, human rights workers aiding the migrants and ranchers taking the law into their own hands. This is a vivid portrait of a place and its people, and a moving story of the West that has major implications for the nation as a whole.

Being Black, Living in the Red: Race, Wealth, and Social Policy in America

Dalton Conley

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

What is more important--race or class--in determining the socioeconomic success of the blacks and whites born since the civil rights triumphs of the 1960s? When compared to whites, African Americans complete less formal schooling, work fewer hours at a lower rate of pay and are more likely to give birth to a child out of wedlock and to rely on welfare. Are these differences attributable to race per se, or are they the result of differences in socioeconomic background between the two groups?
Being Black, Living in the Red demonstrates that many differences between blacks and whites stem not from race but from economic inequalities that have accumulated over the course of American history. Property ownership--as measured by net worth--reflects this legacy of economic oppression. The racial discrepancy in wealth holdings leads to advantages for whites in the form of better schools, more desirable residences, higher wages, and more opportunities to save, invest, and thereby further their economic advantages.
Dalton Conley shows how factoring parental wealth into a reconceptualization of class can lead to a different future for race policy in the United States. As it currently stands, affirmative action programs primarily address racial diversity in schooling and work--areas that Conley contends generate paradoxical results with respect to racial equity. Instead he suggests an affirmative action policy that fosters minority property accumulation, thereby encouraging long-term wealth equity, or one that--while continuing to address schooling and work--is based on social class as defined by family wealth levels rather than on race.

Creating Equal: My Fight Against Race

Ward Connerly

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Total reviews: 36 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

From his impoverished childhood in segregated pre-war Louisiana to his audience with Bill Clinton at the White House, Ward Connerly's panoramic book spans a civil rights story that's making headlines from coast to coast. Since 1995, when Connerly first burst onto the American scene as the University of California Regent who forced the nation's largest public university to become color blind in its admissions policies, Connerly has led a national campaign to end race preference. In 1996, he passed Proposition 209 in California and two years later he led I-200, an identical measure, to victory in Washington state. He is now battling Governor Jeb Bush in Florida as he attempts to put a Florida Civil Rights Initiative on the ballot there. A personal book that gives the inside story of Connerly's battle against race preferences, Creating Equal names names and tells it like it is. It is destined to provoke debate from the dining room table to the halls of Congress. Connerly's encounters with the great and near great ranging from Jesse Jackson and Al Gore to Bill Clinton and Rupert Murdoch illuminate this book that has been praised by writers such as Shelby Steele. Illustrated with family and political photographs.

Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare

Dorothy Roberts

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Politically Biased 2 out of 5 stars.
11 of 24 people found this review helpful.

While this book purports to be an unbiased account of the foster care system and its impact on African-American children, it fails miserably. The author is biased against the system from the very beginning, and presents only stories that back her view of the system. There are definitely issues with the foster care system including: overworked case managers, lack of funds, inability to assist children in an appropriate fashion 100% of the time. Certainly there is a racial issue since the majority of children in foster care and up for adoption are minorities, but is this because of the foster care system itself or are we missing a major piece in the puzzle? It is this missing piece that is missing from Ms. Roberts' book.

Editorial Review:

Shattered Bonds is a stirring account of a worsening American social crisis--the disproportionate representation of black children in the U.S. foster care system and its effects on black communities and the country as a whole. Tying the origins and impact of this disparity to racial injustice, Dorothy Roberts contends that child-welfare policy reflects a political choice to address startling rates of black child poverty by punishing parents instead of tackling poverty's societal roots. Using conversations with mothers battling the Chicago child-welfare system for custody of their children, along with national data, Roberts levels a powerful indictment of racial disparities in foster care and tells a moving story of the women and children who earn our respect in their fight to keep their families intact.

Introduction to Social Problems (7th Edition)

Thomas J. Sullivan

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Editorial Review:

This social problems book features an applied approach that looks at the interplay between research and policy in finding solutions, along with a built-in student study guide.

Leave No Child Behind: Preparing Today's Youth for Tomorrow's World

James Comer

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The call-to-arms to “leave no child behind” in America has become popularly associated with the Bush administration’s education plan—a plan that actually diverges greatly from the ideals of the Children’s Defense Fund, which originated the concept. Here, in a bold and engaging new book, Dr. James Comer reclaims this now-famous exhortation as a tool for positive and substantive change.
Far removed from the federal government’s focus on standardized testing as the panacea for our educational ills, Dr. Comer’s argument—drawn from his own experiences as the creator of the School Development Program—urges teachers, policymakers, and parents alike to work toward creating a new kind of school environment.
In so doing, Dr. Comer reignites a crucial debate as he details the evolution and many successes of his School Development Program since its inception thirty-five years ago, and he illustrates how his model for change has proven effective in public schools throughout the country. Most important, he offers proof that students from all backgrounds can learn at a high level, adopt positive behavioral attitudes, and prepare for a fulfilling adult life, if they learn in schools that provide adequate support for their complete development--schools that know that leaving no child behind should be much more than just a convenient political slogan.

Social Problems: Community, Policy, and Social Action

Anna Leon-Guerrero

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Editorial Review:

Updated throughout, with a writing style that engages both 2- and 4-year college students, the Second Edition of Anna Leon-Guerrero’s popular Social Problems textbook humanizes social problems and addresses their consequences while emphasizing community awareness and action. The text focuses on inequalities, examining how race and ethnicity, gender, social class, sexual orientation, and age determine our life chances. Each chapter includes a discussion of relevant social policies or programs and highlights how individuals or groups have made a difference in their communities. Although the book looks primarily at the United States, global perspectives are interwoven where appropriate. Pedagogical features and a companion study site provide a platform for discussion that encourages critical thinking about the problems presented.

Key Features Retained and New to This Edition

• Coverage of social inequalities is expanded to five new chapters at the start of the text: New Chapters 2 through 6 (“Social Class and Poverty,” “Race and Ethnicity,” “Gender,” “Sexual Orientation,” and “Age and Aging”) focus on the bases of social inequality and how each contributes to our experience and understanding of social problems.
• Four theoretical perspectives (including feminism) are include throughout.
• A new full-color page design and larger trim size allow for better displays of visual content.
• The book features an improved illustration program, including visual essays now introducing each part of the text, and an expanded photo program, with carefully selected images spread throughout the chapters.
• The text has an increased focus on globalization, including more comparative theoretical material and examples in the “Taking a World View” boxes.
• “Voices in the Community” features provide personal stories from people attempting to make a difference in their communities.
• The new "What Does It Mean To Me?" features ask students to personalize the problems and solutions under study.
• The concluding chapter, “Social Problems and Social Action,” identifies ways in which students can become more involved in helping resolve issues in their own communities.
• “Internet and Community Exercises” at the end of each chapter include questions or activities that can be completed individually or by small student groups. These exercises take students out of the classroom, away from the textbook, and into their communities!

Accompanied by High-Quality Ancillaries!

• Instructor's Resources on CD-ROM are available to qualified instructors. These resources, edited by the author, include computerized testing, PowerPoint slides, and many other teaching resources to facilitate incorporating the book's community and policy perspectives. Contact Customer Care at 1.800.818.7243 (6 am–5 pm PST) to request a copy.
• A Student Study Site at www.pineforge.com/leonguerrero2study features an extensive set of materials, including self-quizzes, e-flashcards, links to NPR radio programs, YouTube video links, SAGE journal articles, and more. The site also provides links for “What Does It Mean to Me?” features and end-of-chapter exercises.

Intended Audience
Social Problems, Second Edition, is an ideal brief core undergraduate text for Social Problems courses in departments of sociology and social work.