Society

The Form Complete
Adam's Navel: A Natural and Cultural History of the Human Form
by Michael Sims
Neanderthals yawned. Tutankhamen cried. Eleanor of Aquitaine belched. No doubt Murasaki Shikibu combed her hair and Askia Muhammad liked to prop up his feet. The pages of Louis XV yearned to sit down.

Chapter 3
The Lost Children of Wilder: The Epic Struggle to Change Foster Care
by Nina Bernstein
In 1973, a young ACLU attorney filed a controversial class-action lawsuit that challenged New York City's operation of its foster-care system. The plaintiff was an abused runaway named Shirley Wilder who had suffered from the system's inequities.

The Pledge
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare
by Jason DeParle
Bruce Reed needed a better line. A little-known speechwriter in a long-shot campaign, he was trapped in the office on a Saturday afternoon, staring at a flat phrase.

Integration: Together and Separate
A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America
by David K. Shipler
A Country of Strangers is a magnificent exploration of the psychological landscape where blacks and whites meet. To tell the story in human rather than abstract terms, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer David K. Shipler bypasses both extremists

Introduction
The Culture Code
by Dr. Clotaire Rapaille
The Culture Code is the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing - a car, a type of food, a relationship, even a country - via the culture in which we are raised.

Narcissism
The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners
by Debra Dickerson
What is racism but a fascination with oneself? Why, a seventeenth-century European newly arrived in Africa must have mused, are these odd creatures not pale, not straight-haired, not freckled, not wearing filthy pantaloons, and not praying to two pieces

Eminem: The New White Negro
Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture
by Greg Tate (Editor)
Pentheus, the protagonist of Euripides' The Bacchae, was a young moralist and anarchical warrior who sought to abolish the worship of Dionysus (god of tradition, or perhaps better said, god of the re-cyclical, who causes the loss of individual identity

A Tale of Two Farms
Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.
A few summers ago I visited two dairy farms, Huls Farm and Gardar Farm, which despite being located thousands of miles apart were still remarkably similar in their strengths and vulnerabilities.

Taking the Words Out Of Black Mouths
The End of Blackness: Returning the Souls of Black Folk to Their Rightful Owners
by Debra Dickerson
Black people are not crazy. They're not paranoid. They're punch-drunk, or as Carter G. Woodson put it, 'the Negro's mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor. The problem of holding the Negro down, therefore, is easily solved.

Blacks on Television, Part 3
Authentically Black: Essays for the Black Silent Majority
by John McWhorter
A far cry from Beulah in the Hendersons' kitchen. Yet amid it all, throughout most of the 1960s there was not a single 'black show' proper on national television. This changed in 1968 with Julia, starring Diahann Carroll.

Modern Montana
Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.
When I asked my friend Stan Falkow, a 70-year-old professor of microbiology at Stanford University near San Francisco, why he had bought a second home in Montana's Bitterroot Valley, he told me how it had fitted into the story of his life.

Love It or Leave It
Don't Get Too Comfortable
by David Rakoff
George W. Bush made me want to be an American. It was a need I had not known before. A desire that came over me in a rush one day, not unlike that of the pencil-necked honors student suddenly overwhelmed with the inexplicable urge to make a daily gift

Part 1
A Match Made in Heaven: American Jews, Christian Zionists, and One Man's Exploration of the Weird and Wonderful Judeo-Evangelical Alliance
by Zev Chafets
In a time of jihad 'against Jews and Crusaders,' the Jews of America and Israel find themselves with a powerful albeit unlikely ally: tens of millions of American evangelicals. As the conflict in the Middle East roils and divisions harden, Israel

Love It or Leave It : Part 2
Don't Get Too Comfortable
by David Rakoff
All by way of saying, that if there ever came a time when the government of my new homeland was actually calling up the forty-something asking-and-telling homosexuals with hypo-active thyroids to take up arms, something very calamitous indeed will have

Affirmative Actions
Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans (Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes)
by Nelson George
For centuries the word soul was (pardon the pun) solely employed by religious leaders and philosophers to describe man's spiritual core. The soul could be cursed to eternal damnation. The soul could rise up to heavenly salvation.

Roots Of The Rejuvenile
Rejuvenile
by Christopher Noxon
Before he was a cash cow for Walt Disney, an inspiration for Steven Spielberg, and an obsession for Michael Jackson, Peter Pan was simply a revelation. When J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan, subtitled The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, opened at the Duke of York

Part 3
Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
by Jared Diamond, Ph.D.
A first set of factors involves damage that people inadvertently inflict on their environment, as already discussed. The extent and reversibility of that damage depend partly on properties of people (e.g., how many trees they cut down per acre per year)

Equal = Equal
The 51% Minority; How Women Still Are Not Equal and What You Can Do About It
by Lis Wiehl
Women make up 51% of the American population, yet still aren't treated equally to men in areas that matter most. In this provocative new book, Lis Wiehl, one of the country's top federal prosecutors, reveals the legal and social inequalities women

Part 4
American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare
by Jason DeParle
When she and Jewell met at the station there was no time for a reunion scene. They piled the kids and suitcases aboard and headed off for the two-hour ride up I-94. When Angie got home from work that night, she found a new resident of the compound

The $200 Billion Colossus
The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It
by Dr. Marcia Angell
The American pharmaceutical industry needs to be saved, mainly from itself, and Dr. Angell proposes a program of vital reforms, which includes restoring impartiality to clinical research and severing the ties between drug companies and medical education.