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"Rachel Morgan's frank and incisive history begins with Richard Wetherill's "discovery" of Mesa Verde in Colorado in 1888. Subsequent expeditions by amateurs, looters, and budding professional archaeologists abetted the devastation of Indigenous sites throughout the Southwest. These expeditions became the proving grounds for different conceptions of what archaeology should be and how it should be practiced. Ultimately, revulsion at the work of nineteenth-century explorers led to more rigorous and ethical norms, as well as federal regulation, but the core issues of how we ought best to engage with the evidence and people of the past remain live ones today. Morgan, an archaeologist, knows well the field's history of racism and unethical behavior, and she is both unsparing and even-handed in assessing what happened in the Southwest and how it informs relations among people-and with the planet-today"--

"The new economics of love and marriage-and who benefits. The realities of single parenting in the US have long carried a connotation of hardship-not just in finances, but in the wrenching day-to-day challenges of parenting without a net. As marriage rates in the US continue to drop, and as single-parent households become increasingly concentrated at the lower end of the income spectrum, it begs the question: what does all this mean for a country and a society already dogged by inequality and the weight of racial discrimination? The Two-Parent Privilege examines the emerging role of marriage in the United States. Weaving data and observations drawn from across the social sciences, economist Melissa Kearney explores how the concentration of marriage among the affluent has made the institution of marriage itself a propagator of American inequality--one that may signal the end of American economic mobility. Kearney's work is a trenchant, sometimes uncomfortable, but deeply necessary critical look at how the makeup of our households are charting our path ahead"--

A collection of essays by American art critic Dave Hickey, nicknamed "The Bad Boy of Art Criticism." When Dave Hickey was twelve, he rode the surfer's dream: the perfect wave. And, like so many things in life we long for, it didn't quite turn out--he shot the pier and dashed himself against the rocks of Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach, which nearly killed him. Hickey went on to develop a career as one of America's foremost critical iconoclasts, a trusted no-nonsense voice commenting on the worlds of art and culture. Perfect Wave brings together essays on a wide range of subjects from throughout Hickey's career, displaying his breadth of interest and powerful insight into what makes art work, or not, and why we care. With Hickey as our guide, we travel to Disneyland and Vegas, London and Venice. We discover the genius of Karen Carpenter and Waylon Jennings, learn why Robert Mitchum matters more than Jimmy Stewart, and see how the stillness of Antonioni speaks to us today. Never slow to judge--or to surprise us in doing so--Hickey relates his wincing disappointment in the later career of his early hero Susan Sontag and shows us the appeal to our commonality that we've been missing in Norman Rockwell. Bookended by previously unpublished personal essays that offer a new glimpse into Hickey's own life--including the aforementioned conclusion to his surfing career--Perfect Wave is a welcome addition to the Hickey canon.

The latest volume in the Supreme Court Review series. Since it first appeared in 1960, the Supreme Court Review has won acclaim for providing a sustained and authoritative survey of the implications of the Court's most significant decisions. SCR is an in-depth annual critique of the Supreme Court and its work, analyzing the origins, reforms, and modern interpretations of American law. SCR is written by and for legal academics, judges, political scientists, journalists, historians, economists, policy planners, and sociologists.

Whether charting the moments before or after work, the unspoken emotions accompanying separation and reunion, or the necessity of a grocery store as a "last place" for people to engage publicly, Laton Carter's poems attend to the parts of our lives that are easiest to ignore, like solitary highway drivers passing in their cars and the unspoken link binding people together. In poem after poem, the speaker relentlessly pulls the reader to spaces, both physical and emotional--fearful of the inability to bridge the gap between ideas, places, and individuals, yet unable to avoid trying. Mining the territory of responsibility and longing, these poems remind us that the minutiae and variation in our private lives combine to serve up a larger public identity. An impressively mature first collection of poems, "Leaving" is a bold book that eschews the superfluous, leaving only that which is most essential and meaningful.

Your smile.There wasn't one.You never smiled. Born in Tehran but living in Germany, the eminent writer SAID has suffered two forms of exile. Force to leave Iran for political reasons, he was also separated from his mother shortly after his birth when his parents divorced. At the age of forty-three, however, SAID received word that his mother was traveling abroad and wanted to see him. Landscapes of a Distant Mother is the account of their wrenching reunion. A memoir of longing and loss, the book offers a haunting portrait of a son's broken relationship with his mother and the Islamic dictatorship that shadows both their lives. Landscapes of a Distant Mother gives English-speaking readers an introduction to one of Europe's most important immigrant writers. Unsentimental and spare, the book chronicles the discomfiting sensation of viewing one's mother as a stranger and all the psychological implications of their mutual disappointment. SAID's distance from his mother--whom he describes almost clinically, with her "particular way of speaking, the style laced with religious formulas, inclined to emotionalism, self-pity and expletives"--becomes a measure of the alienation he feels from everything around him. His book gives voice to the full meaning of modern exile--its political force, profound sadness, and perpetual yearning.

Set in a castle and on its grounds in Brittany, The Little Field of Self is one long poem comprised of individual poems that articulate the essence of devotion and the conflict within the devoted. With surprising inventiveness and technical skill, and without ornamentation, self-consciousness, or self-display, Doreen Gildroy has forged an original poetic style that renders inner being authentically and convincingly.

The poems in Bat Ode speak to the way we live today and how it feels to occupy such a mongrel, fast-changing, postmodern world. Yet rather than breaking with the linguistic or poetic past, these poems seem to renew and reinvigorate it with a fresh vision. Jeredith Merrin's sense of humor, formal poise, enormous heart, and disarming wit, situate her as one of our most convincing social poets.

Holiday is a book of poems chiseled into public and private calendar markers, where the unfinished self seeks resolution, desperately and defiantly, through either completion or negation. The poems are filled with unflinching irony and an intelligence that both celebrates and laments personal, mythic, biblical, and historical events.

In The Color of Opportunity, Haya Stier and Marta Tienda ask: How do race and ethnicity limit opportunity in post-civil rights Chicago? In the 1960s, Chicago was a focal point of civil rights activities. But in the 1980s it served as the laboratory for ideas about the emergence and social consequences of concentrated urban poverty; many experts such as William J. Wilson downplayed the significance of race as a cause of concentrated poverty, emphasizing instead structural causes that called for change in employment policy. But in this new study, Stier and Tienda ask about the pervasive poverty, unemployment, and reliance on welfare among blacks and Hispanics in Chicago, wondering if and how the inner city poor differ from the poor in general. The culmination of a six-year collaboration analyzing the Urban Poverty and Family Life Survey of Chicago, The Color of Opportunity is the first major work to compare Chicago's inner city minorities with national populations of like race and ethnicity from a life course perspective. The authors find that blacks, whites, Mexicans, and Puerto Ricans living in poor neighborhoods differ in their experiences with early material deprivation and the lifetime disadvantages that accumulate--but they do not differ much from the urban poor in their family formation, welfare participation, or labor force attachment. Stier and Tienda find little evidence for ghetto-specific behavior, but they document the myriad ways color still restricts economic opportunity. The Color of Opportunity stands as a much-needed corrective to increasingly negative views of poor people of color, especially the poor who live in deprived neighborhoods. It makes a key and lasting contribution to ongoing debates about the origins and nature of urban poverty.

An old-fashioned man of character, Conrad Taylor is executive vice-president of a eastern university who, after leading a satisfying and well-ordered life, finds himself suddenly on shaky ground, struggling to do the right thing in the face of crisis, confrontation, and opportunity. A Man in Charge is an intricate novel about the uncertainties of personal power and the discovery of its limits.

Secret Understandings is a vibrant and richly textured portrait of Shelagh Jackman, a book illustrator who learns to cultivate the loving and complex relationships in her life while struggling to be true to her own best self, even when calamity puts her to the ultimate test-and triumph.

What is it that makes Americans so American? It can't be money: although the United States is the most productive economy in the world, it also has the highest poverty rates. It can't really be faith, either: Americans are the most religious people in the advanced industrial world, but they have the oldest official separation of church and state. Skepticism? Americans are highly suspicious of government, but at the same time they have a naive belief in markets. Is there such a thing as an American character amidst these, and other, paradoxes? In Restless Nation, James M. Jasper argues that this elusive national character can be found in Americans' faith in the fresh start. Americans believe that by relocating or changing their names or finding new jobs, they can make themselves into new people--make more money, get in touch with their inner selves, find spiritual truth, recover their physical health. American culture recommends flight from what you dislike and makes it easy to believe a better life is just around the corner, literally. It is this faith that has brought sixty million immigrants to the shores of the United States. And it is this faith that has put their descendants on the road for hundreds of years. Even today, Americans continue to move far more often--about every five years--than anyone else. From seventeenth-century publicity agents who extolled the virtues of the New World, to the great Northern migration of the early twentieth century, to yesterday's car commercials, Jasper sees a master narrative of restlessness that winds through American history. He traces this theme through four centuries of American history, using the life stories of famous and not-so-famous people, popular literature and other arts, and archives and statistics. Henry James, Houdini, Frederick Douglass, Bruce Springsteen, the Greek owner of a chain of laundries, and Huck Finn all make appearances in these pages, and Jasper's breadth of knowledge, wry humor, and utterly pleasurable style bring these stories together in an invigorating look at a complicated country. In the tradition of The Lonely Crowd and Habits of the Heart, Restless Nation explores what Americans are really like and how they came to believe so firmly in the "fresh start."

Shakespeare, Vermeer, Lope de Vega, Molière, and Diderot don't usually keep company with one another. This new book-Richard Helgerson's first since the highly acclaimed Forms of Nationhood-shows that each contributed to a common project of enormous significance: the artistic promotion of the middle-class home. In a study that stretches over two centuries and four countries, Helgerson unearths the shared preoccupations of European domestic drama and painting. The result is an unexpected prehistory of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century cult of domesticity. Adulterous Alliances focuses on English, Spanish, and French drama from the 1590s through the late eighteenth century and on seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Helgerson finds that these plays and paintings register not only a new interest in nonaristocratic homes, but also an attention to the relation between those homes and the monarchic state. Domestic drama and painting emerged, he argues, as a by-product of early modern state formation, and defined themselves by their difference from the newly invented or revived genres of state: history painting, tragedy, historical drama, and history itself. Again and again, as Helgerson shows, the home and the marriage on which it is based are disrupted by a sexually predatory intruder-one who comes most often from the sphere of the state: a soldier, a courtier, a leading aristocrat, or even the king himself. And almost as often, the state intervenes to resolve the problem that it or its agents create. But whether savior or perpetrator, the state is always outshone by the home through which it expresses its power. The nonaristocratic home emerges not simply as an adjunct of state power, but as an alternative to it-a space that by the late eighteenth century would make its own claim as the ground for a revolutionary new order.

For those living in the 1930s and 1940s who endured the devastation of the Depression, racial and social unrest, and the two World Wars ending in the Holocaust, the question of how to carry on the struggle for justice in a world seemingly filled with self-interest and evil became all-consuming. Many turned for an answer to the realistic, yet also optimistic, political and ethical writings of Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). As the eminent theologian Langdon Gilkey demonstrates in this book, Niebuhr was able to provide such a persuasive answer because his social understanding was a theological understanding, one accomplished by viewing human being in relation to God as well as in its political and economic relations. This "Biblical" understanding of human nature, while acknowledging the often deep ambiguity and hypocrisy of the real historical world, also revealed a divine hand guiding that history. To Niebuhr, it is God's participation in history that gives it meaning and a promise of fulfillment, and presents believers the possibility of a social realism that maintains its moral nerve rather than succumbing to cynicism or despair. On Niebuhr provides the first systematic treatment of Niebuhr's mature theology in relation to his political theory and the crises of the 1930s and 1940s by a scholar who both understands the theology deeply and knew Niebuhr personally. The book begins with a look at Niebuhr's early political writings, then moves to Niebuhr's later understanding of human nature and history. On Niebuhr also presents a moving account of the role that Niebuhr's thought played in Gilkey's own experience as a prisoner of war and in his subsequent life's work. The result is an indispensable book for the many students and admirers of both these religious thinkers.

Addressing volatile social issues such as gender, pornography, race, welfare, immigration, and schooling, Wolfe examines the ills of American society in the 1990s. Through readings of Andrew Hacker, Elijah Anderson, and Christopher Jencks, for example, he offers a penetrating critique of our thinking about race. Similarly, his discussion of gender and feminism questions whether feminists have sacrificed the concerns of women for the sake of theory. Wolfe uses these and other readings to illustrate the paradoxes of social criticism. Exposing the weaknesses of mere polemics, Wolfe shows how some critics sacrifice fruitful social criticism for the sake of preserving political commitments. He concludes that social criticism does not lie within the boundaries of either left-wing or right-wing ideas, but rather is connected to a broad understanding of liberalism. Wolfe shows that it is possible to be critical and fair at the same time, and fair at the same time, and pinpoints exactly what is at stake in these controversial debates. This immensely readable book illustrates the power of social criticism to enlarge discussion of issues at the heart of democracy today.

Alan Williamson's beautiful Love and the Soul explores the vicissitudes of desire with eloquence and subtlety. Few contemporary poets have dissected either psyche or eros so truthfully, so incisively--and so poignantly.