Title: Acceptable risk?: making decisions in a toxic environment 
Author: Clarke, Lee Ben
Published: University of California Press,  1989
Subjects: Sociology | Technology and Society | Environmental Studies | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: Organizations and modern technology give us much of what we value, but they have also given us Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Bhopal. The question at the heart of this paradox is "What is acceptable risk?" Based on his examination of the 1981 contamination of an office building in Binghamton, New York, Lee Clarke's compelling study argues that organizational processes are the key to understanding how some risks rather than others are defined as acceptable. He finds a pattern of decision-making based on relationships among organizations rather than the authority of individuals or single agencies.   [brief]
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Title: The activist's handbook: a primer for the 1990s and beyond
Author: Shaw, Randy 1956-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Politics | Sociology | California and the West | Urban Studies | American Studies | Public Policy
Publisher's Description: The Activist's Handbook is a hard-hitting guide to winning social change in the 1990s. Randy Shaw, attorney and longtime activist for urban issues, shows how positive change can still be accomplished despite an increasingly grim political order, if activists employ the strategies set forth in this desperately needed primer.Inspiring "fear and loathing" in politicians, building diverse coalitions, and harnessing the media, the courts, and the electoral process to one's cause are only some of the key tactics Shaw advocates and explains. Central to all social-change activism, Shaw shows, is being proactive: rather than simply reacting to right-wing proposals, activists must develop an agenda and focus their resources on achieving it. The Activist's Handbook details the impact of specific strategies on campaigns across the country: battles over homelessness, the environment, AIDS policies, neighborhood preservation, and school reform among others. Though activist groups can have widely different aims, similar tactics are shown to produce success.Further, the book offers a sophisticated analysis of the American power structure by someone on the front lines. In showing how people can and must make a difference at both local and national levels, this is an indispensable guide not only for activists, but for everyone interested in the future of progressive politics in America.   [brief]
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Title: Aging in the past: demography, society, and old age 
Author: Kertzer, David I 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1995
Subjects: Sociology | History | Demography
Publisher's Description: Thanks to improved food, medicine, and living conditions, the average age of the population is increasing throughout the modern industrialized world. Yet, despite the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in the lives of older people and the blossoming of historical demography, little historical demographic attention has been paid to the lives of the elderly. A landmark volume, Aging in the Past marks the emergence of the historical demographic study of aging.Following a masterly explication of the new field by Peter Laslett, leading scholars in family history and historical demography offer new research results and fresh analyses that greatly increase our understanding of aging, historically and across cultures. Focusing primarily on post-Industrial Europe and the United States, they explore a range of issues under the broad topics of living arrangements, widowhood, and retirement and mortality. This important work provides a much-needed historical perspective on and suggests possible alternative solutions to the problems of the aged.   [brief]
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Title: AIDS: the making of a chronic disease 
Author: Fee, Elizabeth
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: History | Medicine | United States History | Sociology
Publisher's Description: When AIDS was first recognized in 1981, most experts believed that it was a plague, a virulent unexpected disease. They thought AIDS, as a plague, would resemble the great epidemics of the past: it would be devastating but would soon subside, perhaps never to return. By the middle 1980s, however, it became increasingly clear that AIDS was a chronic infection, not a classic plague.In this follow-up to AIDS: The Burdens of History , editors Elizabeth Fee and Daniel M. Fox present essays that describe how AIDS has come to be regarded as a chronic disease. Representing diverse fields and professions, the twenty-three contributors to this work use historical methods to analyze politics and public policy, human rights issues, and the changing populations with HIV infection. They examine the federal government's testing of drugs for cancer and HIV, and show how the policy makers' choice of a specific historical model (chronic disease versus plague) affected their decisions. A powerful photo essay reveals the strengths of women from various backgrounds and lifestyles who are coping with HIV. A sensitive account of the complex relationships of the gay community to AIDS is included. Finally, several contributors provide a sampling of international perspectives on the impact of AIDS in other nations.   [brief]
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Title: All in sync: how music and art are revitalizing American religion
Author: Wuthnow, Robert
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: Religion | American Studies | Art | Music | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Robert Wuthnow shows how music and art are revitalizing churches and religious life across the nation in this first-ever consideration of the relationship between religion and the arts. All in Sync draws on more than four hundred in-depth interviews with church members, clergy, and directors of leading arts organizations and a new national survey to document a strong positive relationship between participation in the arts and interest in spiritual growth. Wuthnow argues that contemporary spirituality is increasingly encouraged by the arts because of its emphasis on transcendent experience and personal reflection. This kind of spirituality, contrary to what many observers have imagined, is compatible with active involvement in churches and serious devotion to Christian practices. The absorbing narrative relates the story of a woman who overcame a severe personal crisis and went on to head a spiritual direction center where participants use the arts to gain clarity about their own spiritual journeys. Readers visit contemporary worship services in Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston and listen to leaders and participants explain how music and art have contributed to the success of these services. All in Sync also illustrates how music and art are integral parts of some Episcopal, African American, and Orthodox worship services, and how people of faith are using their artistic talents to serve others. Besides examining the role of the arts in personal spirituality and in congregational life, Wuthnow discusses how clergy and lay leaders are rethinking the role of the imagination, especially in connection with traditional theological virtues. He also shows how churches and arts organizations sometimes find themselves at odds over controversial moral questions and competing claims about spirituality. Accessible, relevant, and innovative, this book is essential for anyone searching for a better understanding of the dynamic relationships among religion, spirituality, and American culture.   [brief]
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Title: Alliance capitalism: the social organization of Japanese business 
Author: Gerlach, Michael L
Published: University of California Press,  1997
Subjects: Economics and Business | Sociology | Japan
Publisher's Description: Business practices in Japan inspire fierce and even acrimonious debate, especially when they are compared to American practices. This book attempts to explain the remarkable economic success of Japan in the postwar period - a success it is crucial for us to understand in a time marked by controversial trade imbalances and concerns over competitive industrial performance.Gerlach focuses on what he calls the intercorporate alliance, the innovative and increasingly pervasive practice of bringing together a cluster of affiliated companies that extends across a broad range of markets. The best known of these alliances are the keiretsu , or enterprise groups, which include both diversified families of firms located around major banks and trading companies and vertical families of suppliers and distributors linked to prominent manufacturers in the automobile, electronics, and other industries. In providing a key link between isolated local firms and extended international markets, the intercorporate alliance has had profound effects on the industrial and social organization of Japanese businesses.Gerlach casts his net widely. He not only provides a rigorous analysis of intercorporate capitalism in Japan, making useful distinctions between Japanese and American practices, but he also develops a broad theoretical context for understanding Japan's business networks. Addressing economists, sociologists, and other social scientists, he argues that the intercorporate alliance is as much a result of overlapping political, economic, and social forces as are such traditional Western economic institutions as the public corporation and the stock market.Most compellingly, Alliance Capitalism raises important questions about the best method of exchange in any economy. It identifies situations where cooperation among companies is an effective way of channeling corporate activities in a world marked by complexity and rapid change, and considers in detail alternatives to hostile takeovers and other characteristic features of American capitalism. The book also points to the broader challenges facing Japan and its trading partners as they seek to coordinate their distinctive forms of economic organization.   [brief]
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Title: America at century's end 
Author: Wolfe, Alan 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  1991
Subjects: American Studies | Ethnic Studies | Sociology | Urban Studies | Politics | Postcolonial Studies
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Title: America calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940
Author: Fischer, Claude S 1948-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: History | Sociology | United States History | Technology and Society | History and Philosophy of Science | American Studies
Publisher's Description: The telephone looms large in our lives, as ever present in modern societies as cars and television. Claude Fischer presents the first social history of this vital but little-studied technology - how we encountered, tested, and ultimately embraced it with enthusiasm. Using telephone ads, oral histories, telephone industry correspondence, and statistical data, Fischer's work is a colorful exploration of how, when, and why Americans started communicating in this radically new manner.Studying three California communities, Fischer uncovers how the telephone became integrated into the private worlds and community activities of average Americans in the first decades of this century. Women were especially avid in their use, a phenomenon which the industry first vigorously discouraged and then later wholeheartedly promoted. Again and again Fischer finds that the telephone supported a wide-ranging network of social relations and played a crucial role in community life, especially for women, from organizing children's relationships and church activities to alleviating the loneliness and boredom of rural life.Deftly written and meticulously researched, America Calling adds an important new chapter to the social history of our nation and illuminates a fundamental aspect of cultural modernism that is integral to contemporary life.   [brief]
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Title: American gulag: inside U.S. immigration prisons
Author: Dow, Mark
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: Politics | American Studies | Anthropology | Ethnic Studies | Law | Sociology
Publisher's Description: Before September 11, 2001, few Americans had heard of immigration detention, but in fact a secret and repressive prison system run by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service has existed in this country for more than two decades. In American Gulag, prisoners, jailers, and whistle-blowing federal officials come forward to describe the frightening reality inside these INS facilities. Journalist Mark Dow's on-the-ground reporting brings to light documented cases of illegal beatings and psychological torment, prolonged detention, racism, and inhumane conditions. Intelligent, impassioned, and unlike anything that has been written on the topic, this gripping work of investigative journalism should be read by all Americans. It is a book that will change the way we see our country. American Gulag takes us inside prisons such as the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, the Corrections Corporation of America's Houston Processing Center, and county jails around the country that profit from contracts to hold INS prisoners. It contains disturbing in-depth profiles of detainees, including Emmy Kutesa, a defector from the Ugandan army who was tortured and then escaped to the United States, where he was imprisoned in Queens, and then undertook a hunger strike in protest. To provide a framework for understanding stories like these, Dow gives a brief history of immigration laws and practices in the United States - including the repercussions of September 11 and present-day policies. His book reveals that current immigration detentions are best understood not as a well-intentioned response to terrorism but rather as part of the larger context of INS secrecy and excessive authority. American Gulag exposes the full story of a cruel prison system that is operating today with an astonishing lack of accountability.   [brief]
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Title: American homo: community and perversity 
Author: Escoffier, Jeffrey
Published: University of California Press,  1998
Subjects: Gender Studies | Sociology | American Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: Jeffrey Escoffier traces the emergence of a gay and lesbian political identity over the last four decades in this wide-ranging collection of his most influential essays. Situating the development of gay and lesbian communities in a broad sweep of recent American history, Escoffier examines how an urban subculture created by stigmatized and invisible men and women evolved into a vital public community with an activist political agenda and an influential position in contemporary American culture. Detailing what he calls the "political economy of the closet," Escoffier argues that the market process often played a crucial role (for better or for worse) in the emergence of gay and lesbian communities, and conversely, that these new communities have significantly impacted the American marketplace.From the development of a camp sensibility in popular culture - inspired by the erotic exhibitionism of drag queens - to the public reformation of safer-sex guidelines, Escoffier demonstrates how the gay movement has gradually acquired both social authority and recognition as a booming market. Throughout the ongoing struggle for legitimacy, gays and lesbians have had to negotiate the historical tension between the homoeroticism that courses through American culture and periodic outbreaks of homophobic paranoia. Escoffier follows the lesbian and gay movement across the contested terrain of American political life between the poles of multiculturalism and the religious right, to reveal how sexual minorities constitute a challenge to American society even as they are thoroughly integrated as citizens and kin. From McCarthy-era witchhunts to the activism of Queer Nation, Escoffier vividly describes the characteristic American homosexual journey through the tangled political web of authenticity, identity, and community.   [brief]
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Title: American scream: Allen Ginsberg's Howl and the making of the Beat Generation
Author: Raskin, Jonah 1942-
Published: University of California Press,  2004
Subjects: American Studies | Literature | Sociology | Poetry
Publisher's Description: Written as a cultural weapon and a call to arms, Howl touched a raw nerve in Cold War America and has been controversial from the day it was first read aloud nearly fifty years ago. This first full critical and historical study of Howl brilliantly elucidates the nexus of politics and literature in which it was written and gives striking new portraits of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William Burroughs. Drawing from newly released psychiatric reports on Ginsberg, from interviews with his psychiatrist, Dr. Philip Hicks, and from the poet's journals, American Scream shows how Howl brought Ginsberg and the world out of the closet of a repressive society. It also gives the first full accounting of the literary figures - Eliot, Rimbaud, and Whitman - who influenced Howl, definitively placing it in the tradition of twentieth-century American poetry for the first time. As he follows the genesis and the evolution of Howl, Jonah Raskin constructs a vivid picture of a poet and an era. He illuminates the development of Beat poetry in New York and San Francisco in the 1950s--focusing on historic occasions such as the first reading of Howl at Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955 and the obscenity trial over the poem's publication. He looks closely at Ginsberg's life, including his relationships with his parents, friends, and mentors, while he was writing the poem and uses this material to illuminate the themes of madness, nakedness, and secrecy that pervade Howl. A captivating look at the cultural climate of the Cold War and at a great American poet, American Scream finally tells the full story of Howl - a rousing manifesto for a generation and a classic of twentieth-century literature.   [brief]
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Title: Annihilating difference: the anthropology of genocide
Author: Hinton, Alexander Laban
Published: University of California Press,  2002
Subjects: Anthropology | African Studies | Asian Studies | Ethnic Studies | Gender Studies | History | Sociology | Media Studies | Religion | Religion
Publisher's Description: Genocide is one of the most pressing issues that confronts us today. Its death toll is staggering: over one hundred million dead. Because of their intimate experience in the communities where genocide takes place, anthropologists are uniquely positioned to explain how and why this mass annihilation occurs and the types of devastation genocide causes. This ground breaking book, the first collection of original essays on genocide to be published in anthropology, explores a wide range of cases, including Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Bosnia.   [brief]
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Title: Another kind of love: male homosexual desire in English discourse, 1850-1920 
Author: Craft, Christopher 1952-
Published: University of California Press,  1994
Subjects: Literature | Sociology | Literary Theory and Criticism | Gender Studies | GayLesbian and Bisexual Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study that will be of interest to all those concerned with the politics of gender, the history of sexuality, and the erotics of reading, Christopher Craft investigates questions fundamental to any history of present sexualities. How does the modern binary homosexual/heterosexual relate to earlier formulations like "sexual inversion" and "sodomy"? What part does literature play in the development of such categories, or in a culture's resistance to them? And what are the implications for the creation and maintenance of the presumed "natural" male heterosexual subject? How has male heterosexual subjectivity been established as a bulwark against the attractions of a homosexual desire that is repeatedly incited by the very culture that condemns it?Craft examines the discourses of nineteenth-century psychiatry and sexology; some of Freud's central writings; and Tennyson's In Memoriam , Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest , Stoker's Dracula , and Lawrence's Women In Love .   [brief]
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Title: The Arab world: society, culture, and state
Author: Barakat, Halim Isber
Published: University of California Press,  1993
Subjects: Sociology | Politics | Sociology
Publisher's Description: This wide-ranging examination of Arab society and culture offers a unique opportunity to know the Arab world from an Arab point of view. Halim Barakat, an expatriate Syrian who is both scholar and novelist, emphasizes the dynamic changes and diverse patterns that have characterized the Middle East since the mid-nineteenth century.The Arab world is not one shaped by Islam, nor one simply explained by reference to the sectarian conflicts of a "mosaic" society. Instead, Barakat reveals a society that is highly complex, with many and various contending polarities. It is a society in a state of becoming and change, one whose social contradictions are at the root of the struggle to transcend dehumanizing conditions. Arguing from a perspective that is both radical and critical, Barakat is committed to the improvement of human conditions in the Arab world.   [brief]
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Title: Armenia: portraits of survival and hope
Author: Miller, Donald E. (Donald Earl) 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  2003
Subjects: History | Middle Eastern Studies | Religion | Sociology
Publisher's Description: A remarkable view of how geopolitics affects ordinary people, this book documents, in words and pictures, the lives of Armenians in the last two decades. Based on intimate interviews with three hundred Armenians and featuring Jerry Berndt's superb photographs, it brings together firsthand testimony about the social, economic, and spiritual circumstances of Armenians during the 1980s and 1990s, when the country faced an earthquake, pogroms, and war. At times shocking and deeply emotional, Armenia: Portraits of Survival and Hope is a story of extreme suffering and hardship, a searching look at the fight for independence, and an exceptionally complex portrait of the human spirit. A companion to the Millers' highly acclaimed work Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide, which documented the genocide of 1915, this book focuses on four groups of people: survivors of the earthquakes that devastated northwestern Armenia in 1988; refugees from Azerbaijan who fled Baku and Sumgait because of pogroms against them; women, children, and soldiers who were affected by the war in Nagorno-Karabakh; and ordinary citizens who survived several winters without heat because of the blockade against Armenia by Turkey and Azerbaijan. The Millers' narrative situates these accounts contextually and thematically, but the voices of individuals remain paramount. The Millers also describe their personal experiences in repeated research trips, inviting us to look beyond the headlines and think beyond the circumstances of our own lives as they bring contemporary Armenia to life.   [brief]
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Title: At the dawn of modernity: biology, culture, and material life in Europe after the year 1000
Author: Levine, David 1946-
Published: University of California Press,  2001
Subjects: Sociology | Social Theory | European History | European Studies
Publisher's Description: Looking at a neglected period in the social history of modernization, David Levine investigates the centuries that followed the year 1000, when a new kind of society emerged in Europe. New commercial routines, new forms of agriculture, new methods of information technology, and increased population densities all played a role in the prolonged transition away from antiquity and toward modernity. At the Dawn of Modernity highlights both "top-down" and "bottom-up" changes that characterized the social experience of early modernization. In the former category are the Gregorian Reformation, the imposition of feudalism, and the development of centralizing state formations. Of equal importance to Levine's portrait of the emerging social order are the bottom-up demographic relations that structured everyday life, because the making of the modern world, in his view, also began in the decisions made by countless men and women regarding their families and circumstances. Levine ends his story with the cataclysm unleashed by the Black Death in 1348, which brought three centuries of growth to a grim end.   [brief]
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Title: Authors of their own lives: intellectual autobiographies 
Author: Berger, Bennett M
Published: University of California Press,  1990
Subjects: Sociology | Autobiographies and Biographies
Publisher's Description: All students and scholars are curious about the human faces behind the impersonal rhetoric of academic disciplines. Here twenty of America's most prominent sociologists recount the intellectual and biographical events that shaped their careers. Family history, ethnicity, fear, private animosities, extraordinary determination, and sometimes plain good fortune are among the many forces that combine to mold the individual talents presented in Authors of Their Own Lives . With contributions from women and men, young and old, native-born Americans and immigrants, quantitative scholars and qualitative ones, this book provides a fascinating source for students and professional sociologists alike.Some of the autobiographies maintain their reserve, others are profoundly revealing. Their subjects range from childhood, educational, and intellectual influences, to academic careerism and burnout, to the history of American sociology. Authors stands alone as a deeply personal autobiographical account of contemporary sociology.   [brief]
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Title: Battling for American labor: wobblies, craft workers, and the making of the union movement
Author: Kimeldorf, Howard
Published: University of California Press,  1999
Subjects: American Studies | Sociology | History | United States History | Labor Studies
Publisher's Description: In this incisive reinterpretation of the history of the American labor movement, Howard Kimeldorf challenges received thinking about rank-and-file workers and the character of their unions. Battling for American Labor answers the baffling question of how, while mounting some of the most aggressive challenges to employing classes anywhere in the world, organized labor in the United States has warmly embraced the capitalist system of which they are a part. Rejecting conventional understandings of American unionism, Kimeldorf argues that what has long been the hallmark of organized labor in the United States - its distinctive reliance on worker self-organization and direct economic action - can be seen as a particular kind of syndicalism.Kimeldorf brings this syndicalism to life through two rich and compelling case studies of unionization efforts by Philadelphia longshoremen and New York City culinary workers during the opening decades of the twentieth century. He shows how these workers, initially affiliated with the radical IWW and later the conservative AFL, pursued a common logic of collective action at the point of production that largely dictated their choice of unions. Elegantly written and deeply engaging, Battling for American Labor offers insights not only into how the American labor movement got to where it is today, but how it might possibly reinvent itself in the years ahead.   [brief]
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Title: Beethoven and the construction of genius: musical politics in Vienna, 1792-1803
Author: DeNora, Tia 1958-
Published: University of California Press,  1996
Subjects: Music | History | Sociology | Composers | European History
Publisher's Description: In this provocative account Tia DeNora reconceptualizes the notion of genius by placing the life and career of Ludwig van Beethoven in its social context. She explores the changing musical world of late eighteenth-century Vienna and follows the activities of the small circle of aristocratic patrons who paved the way for the composer's success.DeNora reconstructs the development of Beethoven's reputation as she recreates Vienna's robust musical scene through contemporary accounts, letters, magazines, and myths - a colorful picture of changing times. She explores the ways Beethoven was seen by his contemporaries and the image crafted by his supporters. Comparing Beethoven to contemporary rivals now largely forgotten, DeNora reveals a figure musically innovative and complex, as well as a keen self-promoter who adroitly managed his own celebrity.DeNora contends that the recognition Beethoven received was as much a social achievement as it was the result of his personal gifts. In contemplating the political and social implications of culture, DeNora casts many aspects of Beethoven's biography in a new and different light, enriching our understanding of his success as a performer and composer.   [brief]
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Title: Behind the label: inequality in the Los Angeles apparel industry
Author: Bonacich, Edna
Published: University of California Press,  2000
Subjects: Sociology | Social Problems | California and the West | Labor Studies | Economics and Business | Urban Studies | American Studies | Ethnic Studies
Publisher's Description: In a study crucial to our understanding of American social inequality, Edna Bonacich and Richard Appelbaum investigate the return of sweatshops to the apparel industry, especially in Los Angeles. The "new" sweatshops, they say, need to be understood in terms of the decline in the American welfare state and its strong unions and the rise in global and flexible production. Apparel manufacturers now have the incentive to move production to wherever low-wage labor can be found, while maintaining arm's-length contractual relations that protect them from responsibility. The flight of the industry has led to a huge rise in apparel imports to the United States and to a decline in employment. Los Angeles, however, remains a puzzling exception in that its industry employment has continued to grow, to the point where L.A. is the largest center of apparel production in the nation. Not only the availability of low-wage immigrant (often undocumented) workers but also the focus on moderately priced, fashion-sensitive women's wear makes this possible. Behind the Label examines the players in the L.A. apparel industry, including manufacturers, retailers, contractors, and workers, evaluating the maldistribution of wealth and power. The authors explore government and union efforts to eradicate sweatshops while limiting the flight to Mexico and elsewhere, and they conclude with a description of the growing antisweatshop movement. Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000   [brief]
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