The Brooklyn Experience, Ellen Freudenheim’s fourth comprehensive Brooklyn book, is the insider’s guide to this fun destination. Offering photos, itineraries, and forty-one neighborhood profiles from Coney Island to Williamsburg, the book showcases Brooklyn’s remarkable culinary, cultural, and artistic renaissance. Interviews with sixty luminaries capture Brooklyn today: meteoric gentrification, celebrities, mafia trials, artisanal cocktails, and fabulous shopping. A celebration of the vibrant new and gritty old Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Experience lists 800 cultural venues, mom-and-pops, and eateries. 

In Privacy and the Past, medical historian Susan C. Lawrence explores the impact of research ethics and increasing privacy concerns on the study of history, offering insight into what historians should do when they research, write about, and name real people in their work. Engagingly written and powerfully argued, this book is an important first step in preventing privacy regulations from affecting the historical record and the ways that historians help us understand ourselves.

Today 368 million children receive school lunches in 151 countries, in programs supported by state and national governments. In Feeding the Future, Jennifer Geist Rutledge investigates how and why states have assumed responsibility for feeding children, chronicling the origins and spread of school lunch programs around the world, from the postwar period to the present. 

Drawing on interviews with 140 children from countries all over the globe, Elzbieta M. Gozdziak debunks the myths and uncovers the realities of trafficked children. Trafficked Children in the United States offers insight into how the children see themselves, contrasting their viewpoint with the institutional focus on vulnerability and pathology. Gozdziak concludes that the services provided by institutions are in effect a one-size-fits-all, trauma-based model, one that ignores the diversity of experience among trafficked children.

Moment of Action delves into the mysteries of screen performance, revealing both the acting techniques and the technical apparatuses that coalesce in an instant of cinematic alchemy to create movie gold. Considering a range of acting styles while examining films as varied as Bringing Up Baby, Psycho, The Red Shoes, Godzilla, and The Bourne Identity, Murray Pomerance takes us on an innovative exploration of the nexus at which the actor’s keen skills spark and kindle the audience’s receptive energies.

Transforming the Academy brings together faculty members from many different backgrounds—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, white, black, multiracial, and other—to examine the state of diversity within the American university. Whether describing challenging power dynamics within their classrooms or recounting protests that occurred on their campuses, the book’s contributors offer bracingly honest inside accounts of both the conflicts and the learning experiences that can emerge from being a representative of diversity. 

Transforming the Academy brings together faculty members from many different backgrounds—male and female, cisgender and queer, immigrant and native-born, white, black, multiracial, and other—to examine the state of diversity within the American university. Whether describing challenging power dynamics within their classrooms or recounting protests that occurred on their campuses, the book’s contributors offer bracingly honest inside accounts of both the conflicts and the learning experiences that can emerge from being a representative of diversity. 

An accomplished triathlete and social scientist, Diana Tracy Cohen offers much insight into the effects of endurance-sport training on family, parenting, and the sense of self.  Based in part on in-depth interviews with forty-seven triathletes and three prominent men in the race industry, Iron Dads explores the sacrifices that are required—both at home and at work—to cross an iron-distance finish line.    

Public Interests fills in a key part of the history of American social reform movements, revealing the impressive battles fought by groups like the NAACP, NOW, and the conservative Parents Television Council to shape both the nation’s television programming and its broadcasting policies. Allison Perlman takes us behind the scenes of several key regulatory fights, in the process vividly illustrating the resilience, flexibility, and diversity of media activist campaigns from the 1950s onward.  

The Jewish practice of bar mitzvah dates back to the twelfth century. Yet, as this new study reveals, the ritual has changed dramatically over time and now serves as a sometimes shaky bridge between the values of contemporary American culture and Judaic tradition. Interviewing over 200 individuals involved in bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies, from family members to religious educators to rabbis, Patricia Keer Munro presents a candid portrait of the conflicts that often emerge and the negotiations that ensue. 

Is sport good for kids? Child’s Play presents a nuanced examination of this question, considering not only the physical impacts of youth athletics, but its psychological and social ramifications as well. The eleven original scholarly essays in this collection provide a probing look into how sports—in community athletic leagues, in schools, and even on television—play a major role in how young people view themselves, shape their identities, and imagine their place in society.

Focusing largely on triathlon and “extreme” mountain biking, sociologist Stephen C. Poulson offers a fascinating exploration of the new lifestyle sports, shedding light on why people find them so compelling. Drawing on interviews with competitors, on his own experience as a participant, and other materials, Poulson looks at the commodification of the new sports, the types of people who decide to participate, those most often excluded, and whether or not participation in lifestyle sport should always be considered “good” for athletes. 

Designing Sound demonstrates how Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, and other groundbreaking American directors of the 1970s possessed not only visionary eyes, but also keen ears that enabled them to take cinematic sound design in innovative directions. Offering detailed case studies of key films and filmmakers, Jay Beck explores how sound design was central to the era’s experimentation with new modes of cinematic storytelling and aesthetic sensibilities, from the lyricism of Terrence Malick to the gritty realism of Martin Scorsese.   

Based on almost a decade of research in the Kathmandu Valley, Planning Families in Nepal offers a compelling account of Hindu Nepali women as they face conflicting global and local ideals regarding family planning. By examining family life as it unfolds over time, Jan Brunson delivers a fresh perspective on discussions of contraception, son preference, the joint family, and the inability of the concept “planning” to accurately describe conception and reproduction in a patrilocal family system. 

Written in the midst of a moment when transgender people are enjoying unprecedented visibility, this interdisciplinary essay collection brings together leading experts in the burgeoning field of Trans Studies to ask tough questions about what gender and embodiment mean in the twenty-first century. Both theoretically sophisticated and deeply grounded in real-world concerns, Trans Studies bridges the gap between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.  

Written in the midst of a moment when transgender people are enjoying unprecedented visibility, this interdisciplinary essay collection brings together leading experts in the burgeoning field of Trans Studies to ask tough questions about what gender and embodiment mean in the twenty-first century. Both theoretically sophisticated and deeply grounded in real-world concerns, Trans Studies bridges the gap between activism and academia by offering examples of cutting-edge activism, research, and pedagogy.  

In Invisible Asians, Kim Park Nelson analyzes the processes by which Korean American adoptees have been rendered racially invisible, and how that invisibility facilitates their treatment as exceptional subjects within the context of American race relations and in government policies, including immigration law. Park Nelson connects this invisibility to the ambiguous racial positioning of Asian Americans in American culture, and explores the implications of invisibility for Korean adoptees as they navigate race, culture, and nationality. 

In When Good Jobs Go Bad, Jeffrey Rothstein looks at the impact of globalization on workers in the North American auto industry, revealing that globalization has had a deleterious effect on even the most valued of blue-collar jobs. Rothstein shows how the consolidation of the Mexican and U.S.-Canadian auto industries, the expanding number of foreign automakers in North America, and the spread of lean production have all undermined organized labor and harmed workers.

Based on extensive research into the child welfare system in New York City, Catching a Case reveals that, in the face of draconian budget cuts and a political climate that blames the poor for their own poverty, child welfare practices have become punitive, focused on removing children from their families and on parental compliance with rules. Rather than provide needed help for family problems, case workers often hold parents to standards almost impossible for working-class and poor parents to meet.

Providing a picture of what ordinary life is like for urban dwellers surviving sectarian violence, The Insecure City captures the day-to-day experiences of Beirut's war-torn landscape. Kristin Monroe takes urban anthropology in a new and meaningful direction, telling the story of traffic in the Middle East, showing that when people move through Beirut they are experiencing the intersection of citizen and state, of the more and less privileged, and, in general, the city’s politically polarized geography.