Arlene Davila is a Professor of Anthropology and of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is a cultural anthropologist interested in urban and ethnic studies, the political economy of culture and media, and consumption studies. Her work focuses on Puerto Ricans in the eastern United States, and Latinos nationwide.

As salsa takes over both the dance floor and the condiment shelf, the influence of Latin culture is gaining momentum in American society as a whole. Yet the increasing visibility of Latinos in mainstream culture has not been accompanied by a similar level of economic parity or political enfranchisement. In this important, original, and entertaining book, Arlene Davila provides a critical examination of the Hispanic marketing industry and of its role in the making and marketing of U.S. Latinos.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Arlene Davila brilliantly considers the cultural politics of urban space in this lively exploration of Puerto Rican and Latino experience in New York, the global center of culture and consumption. Barrio Dreams makes a compelling case that–despite neoliberalism’s race-and ethnicity-free tenets–dreams of economic empowerment are never devoid of distinct racial and ethnic considerations. This is one of the most nuanced and original examinations of the complex social and economic forces shaping our cities today.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Author Arlene Davila focuses on the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture, the government institution charged with defining authenticated views of national identity since the 1950s. Davila pays particular attention to the increasing prominence of corporate sponsorship in determining what is distinguished as authentic “Puerto Rican culture.” This in-depth examination also makes clear that despite contemporary concerns with “authenticity,” commercialism is an inescapable aspect of all cultural expressions on the island.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Michael Zweig is Professor of Economics and Director of the Center for the Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he has received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching.

The United States is not a middle class society, says Michael Zweig. In this convincing work, Michael Zweig shows that the majority of Americans are actually working class and argues that recognizing this fact is essential if that majority is to achieve political influence and social strength. “Class,” Zweig writes, “is primarily a matter of power, not income.”
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

The contributors to this volume argue that class identity in the United States has been hidden for too long. Their essays, published here for the first time, cover the relation of class to race and gender, to globalization and public policy, and to the lives of young adults. They describe how class, defined in terms of economic and political power rather than income, is in fact central to Americans’ everyday lives. What’s Class Got to Do with It? is an important resource for the new field of working class studies.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Howard Zinn is a historian, playwright, and social activist. He has taught at Spelman College and Boston University, and has been a visiting professor at the University of Paris and the University of Bologna. He has received the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, and the Lannan Literary Award. He lives in Auburndale, Massachusetts.

Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People’s History of the United States is the only volume to tell America’s story from the point of view of — and in the words of — America’s women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, working poor, and immigrant laborers. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Howard Zinn, historian Paul Buhle, and cartoonist Mike Konopacki have collaborated to retell, in vibrant comics form, a most immediate and relevant chapter of A People’s History: the centuries-long story of America’s actions in the world. Narrated by Zinn, this version opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution. A People’s History of American Empire presents the classic ground-level history of America in a dazzling new form.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Perhaps no other historian has had a more profound and revolutionary impact on American education than Howard Zinn. This is the first book devoted to his views on education and its role in a democratic society. Howard Zinn on Democratic Education describes what is missing from school textbooks and in classrooms – and how we move beyond these deficiencies to improve student education. This book seeks to redefine national goals at a time when public debates over education have never been more polarized— nor higher in public visibility and contentious debate.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Collected here under one cover is a brief history of America told through dramatic readings applauding the enduring spirit of dissent. Here in their own words, and interwoven with commentary by Zinn, are Columbus on the Arawaks; Harriet Hanson, a Lowell mill worker; Frederick Douglass; Mark Twain; Mother Jones; Eugene V. Debs; Langston Hughes; Genova Johnson Dollinger on a sit-down strike at General Motors in Flint, Michigan; an interrogation from a 1953 HUAC hearing; Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper and member of the Freedom Democratic Party; and Malcolm X, among others.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Historian, activist, and bestselling author Howard Zinn has been interviewed by David Barsamian for public radio numerous times over the past decade. Original Zinn is a collection of their conversations, showcasing the acclaimed author of A People’s History of the United States at his most engaging and provocative. Original Zinn is Zinn at his irrepressible best, the acute perception of a scholar whose impressive knowledge and probing intellect make history immediate and relevant for us all.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Here, Zinn directs his critique to what he calls “American orthodoxies” — that set of beliefs guardians of our culture consider sacrosanct: justifications for war, cynicism about human nature and violence, pride in our economic system, certainty of our freedom of speech, romanticization of representative government, confidence in our system of justice. Those orthodoxies, he believes, have a chilling effect on our capacity to think independently and to become active citizens in the long struggle for peace and justice.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Containing just the Twentieth Century chapters from Zinn’s bestselling A People’s History of the United States, this reissue is brought up-to-date with coverage of events since 2001, analyzing modern political history such as the Gulf War, the post-Cold War “peace dividend,” and the continuing debate over welfare, the Clinton Presidency, and the War on Terrorism.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Jody Williams is the founding coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL). Prior to beginning the ICBL, Ms. Williams worked for eleven years to build public awareness about U.S. policy toward Central America.

Banning Landmines Disarmament, Citizen Diplomacy, and Human Security looks at accomplishments and setbacks in the crucial first decade of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. Edited by Nobel Peace Laureate Jody Williams and two other long-time leaders of the mine ban movement, Stephen Goose and Mary Wareham, this book features contributions by grassroots activists, diplomatic negotiators, mine survivors, arms experts, and human rights defenders.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

John Edgar Wideman won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1984 for Sent for You Yesterday and in 1990 for Philadelphia Fire. His second memoir, Fatheralong, was a finalist for the National Book. He teaches at Brown University.

Reimagining the black neighborhood of his youth, Wideman creates a dazzling and evocative milieu. From the wild and uninhibited 1920s to the narcotized 1970s, “he establishes a mythological and symbolic link between character and landscape, language and plot, that in the hands of a less visionary writer might be little more than stale sociology.” (New York Times Book Review)
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

A haunting portrait, Brothers and Keepers is John Edgar Wideman’s seminal memoir about two brothers — one an award-winning novelist, the other a fugitive wanted for robbery and murder. Wideman recalls the capture of his younger brother Robby, details the subsequent trials that resulted in a sentence of life in prison, and provides vivid views of the American prison system. A gripping, unsettling account, Brothers and Keepers weighs the bonds of blood, tenderness, and guilt that connect Wideman to his brother and measures the distance that lies between them.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Narrated in the bluesy voices of its three main characters, Two Cities is a simple love story, but it is also about the survival of an endangered black urban community and the ways that people discover for redeeming themselves in a society that is failing them. With its indelible images of confrontation and outrage, matched in equal measure by lasting impressions of hope, Two Cities is a compassionate, lacerating, and nourishing novel.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

A multilayered memoir of basketball, family, home, love, and race, John Edgar Wideman’s Hoop Roots brings “a touch of Proust to the blacktop” (Time) as it tells of the author’s love for a game he can no longer play. Beginning with the scruffy backlot playground he discovered in Pittsburgh some fifty years ago, Wideman works magical riffs that connect black music, language, culture, and sport. His voice modulates from nostalgic to outraged, from scholarly to streetwise, in describing the game that has sustained his passion throughout his life.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

In this vital and inspiring volume, John Edgar Wideman has brought together the first truly representative sampling of literature by African-American writers in the early centuries of our history. The result is a book as thrilling in its passion as it is vast in scope. The selections are all, fundamentally, stories of strength and survival. Wideman prefaces each selection with an illuminating biographical essay. The fruit of a lifetime’s devotion to the best American writing, My Soul Has Grown Deep will stand as an enduring monument to the depth and beauty of African-American literature.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Cornel West is professor of Afro-American studies and philosophy of religion at Harvard University.

This comprehensive text offers a systematic and thematic approach to West’s philosophical work. It moves the reader through his distinctive form of prophetic pragmatism, his historicist and improvisational philosophy of religion, his socialist democratic and truncated Marxist political philosophy, and his reflections on a range of cultural issues.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

In his essays, articles, books, and interviews, West emerges as America’s social conscience, urging attention to complicated issues of racial and economic justice, sexuality and gender, history and politics. This collection represents the best work of an always compelling, often controversial, and absolutely essential philosopher of the modern American experience.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

In Race Matters, Cornel West addresses a range of issues, from the crisis in black leadership and the myths surrounding black sexuality to affirmative action, the new black conservatism, and the strained relations between Jews and African Americans. He never hesitates to confront the prejudices of all his readers or wavers in his insistence that they share a common destiny. Bold in its thought and written with a redemptive passion grounded in the tradition of the African-American church, Race Matters is a book that is at once challenging and deeply healing.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Pointing to the rise of three antidemocratic dogmas that are rendering the energy of American democracy impotent—a callous free-market fundamentalism, an aggressive militarism, and an insidious authoritarianism—West argues that racism and imperial bullying have gone hand in hand in our country’s inexorable drive toward world dominance, including our current militaristic excesses. This impassioned and empowering call for the revitalization of America’s democracy, by one of our most distinctive and compelling social critics, will reshape the raging national debate about America’s role in today’s troubled world.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

With Cornel West, nine of America’s most influential artists, scholars, and public figures — Maya Angelou, Bill Bradley, Harry Belafonte, Patricia Williams, Wynton Marsalis, Anna Deveare Smith, James Washington, James Forbes, and Haki Madhubuti — explore the origins of their political awareness, the relationship between art and politics, and the possibility of hope among African-Americans today. Defining the crucial issues of our times, they offer a transformative vision of the next century for black and white Americans alike.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Six weeks after 9/11, the USA Patriot Act was rushed through Congress. This 300-page bill gave sweeping new powers to the FBI, CIA, and Immigration and Naturalization Service, permitting them to wiretap telephone conversations, read E-mails, and arrest, detain, and deport suspicious individuals. It’s a Free Country examines the frightening consequences of the Patriot Act. In this thoughtful and timely anthology, journalists, lawyers, historians, congressmen, polemicists, and academics comment upon the assault on civil liberties that followed the devastating terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Suzanna Walters is an associate professor of sociology and director of the Women’s Studies Program at Georgetown University.

From the public outing of Ellen DeGeneres to the vicious murder of Matthew Shepard, gay lives and images have moved onto the center stage of American public life. Combining personal stories with incisive analysis, Suzanna Danuta Walters chronicles this historic moment in our culture, arguing that we live in a time when gays are seen, but not necessarily known. With a sophisticated mix of caution and optimism, it provides an illuminating guide through these exciting, controversial times.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

In a discussion of popular media, Walters shows that since World War II, mainstream culture has generally represented the mother/daughter relationship as one of never-ending conflict and thus promoted an ideology of separation as necessary to the daughter’s emancipation and maturity. This ideological move is placed in a social context of the anti-woman backlash of the early post-war period and the renewed anti-feminism of the Reagan and Bush years. Timely and vividly argued, Lives Together/Worlds Apart makes a brilliant contribution to discussions of popular culture and feminism.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Immanuel Wallerstein is the former President of the International Sociological Association (1994-1998), and chair of the international Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences (1993-1995). He is a Professor of Sociology at Yale University.

In World-Systems Analysis, Immanuel Wallerstein provides a concise and accessible introduction to the comprehensive approach that he pioneered thirty years ago to understanding the history and development of the modern world. For the first time in one volume, Wallerstein offers a succinct summary of world-systems analysis and a clear outline of the modern world-system, describing the structures of knowledge upon which it is based, its mechanisms, and its future.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Ever since the Enlightenment, Western intervention around the world has been justified by appeals to notions of civilization, development, and progress. The assumption has been that such ideas are universal, encrusted in natural law. But, as Immanuel Wallerstein argues, these concepts are not global. Rather, their primary function has been to provide justification for powerful states to impose their will against the weak under the smoke screen of what is supposed to be both beneficial to humankind. At a time when such intervention has returned to the center stage of world politics, his treatise is both relevant and compelling.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media studies scholar who has taught at the University of Texas, Wesleyan University, and New York University. He currently is associate professor of Culture and Communication at New York University.

Bringing to light the republican principles behind original copyright laws as well as present-day imbalances and future possibilities for freer expression and artistic equity, this volume takes important strides towards unraveling the complex web of culture, law, race, and technology in today’s global marketplace.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

The Anarchist in the Library is the first guide to one of the most important cultural and economic battlegrounds of our increasingly plugged-in world. Siva Vaidhyanathan draws the struggle for information that will determine much of the culture and politics of the twenty-first century: anarchy or oligarchy, total freedom vs. complete control. From Napster to Total Information Awareness to flash mobs, the debate over information technology in our lives has revolved around a single question: How closely do we want cyberspace to resemble the real world?
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Craig Unger was deputy editor of the New York Observer and editor-in-chief of Boston Magazine. He has written about George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush for the New Yorker, Esquire, and Vanity Fair. He lives in New York City.

From the author of the bestselling House of Bush, House of Saud comes a chilling account of the secret relationship between neoconservative policy makers and the Christian Right, and how this alliance has led America into a catastrophic quagmire in the Middle East.
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s

Newsbreaking and controversial, an award-winning investigative journalist uncovers the 30-year relationship between the Bush family and the house of Saud and explains its impact on American foreign policy, business, and national security. This deeply sourced account has already been cited by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Charles Schumer, and sets 9/11, the two Gulf Wars, and the ongoing Middle East crisis in a new context: What really happened when America’s most powerful political family became seduced by its Saudi counterparts?
>> Click here to purchase this book from Powell’s