I have spent an entire career, via reading, research, and teaching, helping people realize their dreams. For me, it represents âpaying it forward,â thanking those who helped a girl from an ethnic, working-class background become an internationally recognized scholar. Studying optimism and goal-seeking has taught me that dreaming and optimism are importantâbut they are simply not enough to move someone forward. Dreams must become projects motivated by mentoring, planning, and hard work. Not everyone has those resources available to them. The curse of social inequality can indeed destroy hopes and dreams in the very early lives of the socially disadvantagedâwith devastating consequences for society as a whole.
I wrote
Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future
Bright-sided shows the chokehold that positive thinking has on Americans. I admired the way the author âbucksâ this central tenet of our society. The author demonstrates how positive thinking permeates all facets of American lives. Most importantly, she convinced me of the false promises and perils that emanate from our culture of positive thinking.
Barbara Ehrenreich's New York Times bestselling Bright-sided is a sharp-witted knockdown of America's love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism
Americans are a "positive" people -- cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: This is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive is the key to getting success and prosperity. Or so we are told.
In this utterly original debunking, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the false promises of positive thinking and shows its reach into every corner of American life, from Evangelical megachurches to the medical establishment, and, worstâŚ
We hear everyday voices telling us their true feelings, telling us whether they even dare to dream and whether they believe they can accomplish their dreams. We see first-hand how social inequality can, for some, destroy hopes and dreams for the future and replace those hopes and dreams with desperation and resentment.
This classic text addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next. With the original 1987 publication of Ain't No Makin' It, Jay MacLeod brought us to the Clarendon Heights housing project where we met the 'Brothers' and the 'Hallway Hangers'. Their story of poverty, race, and defeatism moved readers and challenged ethnic stereotypes. MacLeod's return eight years later, and the resulting 1995 revision, revealed little improvement in the lives of these men as they struggled in the labor market and crime-ridden underground economy. TheâŚ
Never Ready is a story about the complexity of friendship and belonging, their fluidity and inherent loss.
As she curates her life, Henri discovers the mysterious strength of her families, the one she was born into, and the one she findsâbut no one is ever really ready for goodbye.
For me, this book shows how those in underprivileged positions both learn to dream of beauty and accomplishment and, at the same time, painfully experience the futility of dreaming.
We watch the characters defend optimism while being buried by reality. It is a touching, heartbreaking tale of the realities of social inequality.
A special 75th anniversary edition of the beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the twentieth century.
From the moment she entered the world, Francie Nolan needed to be made of stern stuff, for growing up in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn, New York demanded fortitude, precocity, and strength of spirit. Often scorned by neighbors for her familyâs erratic and eccentric behaviorâsuch as her father Johnnyâs taste for alcohol and Aunt Sissyâs habit of marrying serially without the formality of divorceâno one, least of all Francie, couldâŚ
This book shows how powerful are the tenets of the American Dream. It also shows how our society has failed to live up to those tenets.
My most important take-away is that the growing racial divide in achieving dreams will lead to deeper and deeper fractures in the fabric of American Society.Â
The ideology of the American dream - the faith that an individual can attain success and virtue through strenuous effort - is the very soul of the American nation. This book argues that Americans have failed to face up to what that dream requires of their society, and yet they possess no other central belief that can save the United States from chaos. This text attributes America's national distress to the ways in which white and African Americans have come to view their own and each other's opportunities. By examining the hopes and fears of whites and especially of blacksâŚ
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes a new way to look at American history: through the lens of giving thanks.
Author Denise Kiernan tells the fascinating story of Sarah Josepha Hale, a widowed mother of five who campaignedâŚ
After reading this book, I came away with a hard truth. Dreaming alone is not enough.
In this book, we see, in the most poignant, painful terms, what happens to dreams when situations do not allow them to grow and when people are not helped to plan in ways that can make dreams come true. Dreams must be âcodifiedâ to workable plans or, like raisins in the sun, they simply dry up.
"Come to A Raisin in the Sun as you would to any classic. It speaks to us today as it did almost half a century ago." Bonnie Greer
In south side Chicago, Walter Lee, a Black chauffeur, dreams of a better life, and hopes to use his father's life insurance money to open a liquor store. His mother, who rejects the liquor business, uses some of the money to secure a proper house for the family. Mr Lindner, a representative of the all-white neighbourhood, tries to buy them out. Walter sinks the rest of the money into his business scheme,âŚ
Most of us understand that someoneâs place in society can close doors to opportunity. Yet, we have also been taught to believe that anything is possible if we really follow our dreams. This book reveals that our social positionâour social class, gender, race, age, and life eventsâquietly yet powerfully influence what we dream, whether we embrace dreaming or dream at all, and whether we believe that our dreams can become realities.
Drawing on a wealth of original interviews with people from diverse social backgrounds, Dreams of a Lifetime demonstrates that studying hopes and dreamsâthings considered so pivotal to successâprovides an important new avenue for understanding and combating inequalityâespecially inequalities that precede and dampen plans and efforts to âgrasp the golden ring.â
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes a new way to look at American history: through the lens of giving thanks.
Author Denise Kiernan tells the fascinating story of Sarah Josepha Hale, a widowed mother of five who campaignedâŚ
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year searchâŚ
