Renowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. An enthralling parable (or a cheap metaphor) of the American Dream as a beckoning finger toward a con game, a kind of virus infecting artists of all sorts over nearly a century, Fitzgerald's story has become a key to American culture and American life itself. Marcus follows the arc of The Great Gatsby from 1925 into the ways it has insinuated itself...

Revered today across the political spectrum, Abraham Lincoln believed in a small but active government in a nation defined by aspiration. He embraced the market and the transportation and communications revolutions beginning to take hold, and helped give birth to the modern industrial economy. Lincoln's vision of an upwardly mobile society that rewards and supports individual striving was wondrously realized. Now, it is under threat. Economic stagnation...

1921, Chicago. Nelly Sawyer is the daughter of the "wealthiest Negro in America," whose affluence catapulted his family to the heights of Black society. After the unexpected death of her only brother, Nelly becomes the premier debutante overnight. But Nelly has aspirations beyond society influence and marriage. For the past year, she has worked undercover as an investigative journalist, sharing the achievements and tribulations of everyday Black people...

As an adult book, Sam Quinones's Dreamland took the world by storm, winning the NBCC Award for General Nonfiction and hitting at least a dozen Best Book of the Year lists. Now, adapted for the first time for a young adult audience, this compelling reporting explains the roots of the current opiate crisis. In 1929, in the blue-collar city of Portsmouth, Ohio, a company built a swimming pool the size of a football field; named Dreamland, it became...

"Who is the American working class? Do they still have a fair shot at the American Dream? What do they think about their chances to secure the hallmarks of a middle-class life? While writing this book, Batya Ungar-Sargon visited states across the nation to speak with members of the American working-class fighting tooth and nail to survive. In Second Class, working-class Americans of all races, political orientations, and occupations share their stories—cleaning...

Presents the theory that the American dream, all but abandoned in the United States, has been adopted successfully in other countries, including Italy, France, Finland, Slovenia, Germany, Portugal, Norway, Tunisia, and Iceland, looking at such areas as worker benefits, public expenditure for the common good, and state-funded higher education.

Texas, 1921. La Gran Guerra ha terminado y Estados Unidos parece entrar en una nueva era de optimismo y abundancia. Pero para Elsa, considerada demasiado mayor para casarse en una época en la que el matrimonio es la única opción de una mujer, el futuro es incierto. Hasta la noche en que conoce a Rafe Martinelli y decide cambiar la dirección de su vida. Con su reputación arruinada, solo le queda una opción respetable: casarse con un hombre al...

"Accidental Sisters follows the lives of five refugee women in Houston, Texas, an epicenter of refugee resettlement, as they make their way through a yearlong program for struggling single mother refugees overseen by Alia Altikrity, herself a former refugee from Iraq. Entirely grounded in the words of each of these women--Mina, also from Iraq; Maandi from Sudan; Sara and Zara from Syria; and Elikya from the Democratic Republic of Congo--this book...