Class

• Vincenzo Pietropaolo
• Between the Lines; 2009
• Paperback; 144 pages
• 9781897071540

Like migratory birds, most of Canada's 20,000 "guest" farm workers arrive in the spring and leave in the autumn. Hailing primarily from Mexico, Jamaica, and smaller countries of the Caribbean, these temporary workers have become entrenched in the Canadian labour force and are the mainstay of many traditional family farms in Canada. Many of them make the trip year after year after year.

Vincenzo Pietropaolo has been photographing guest workers and recording their stories since 1984 - in the process travelling to forty locations throughout Ontario and to their homes in Mexico, Jamaica, and Montserrat. The resulting photographs have been highly acclaimed internationally through many publications and exhibitions, including a travelling show curated by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography that opened in Mexico City.

With a foreword by Naomi Rosenblum, this beautiful and timely book of photography and exposition aims to shed light on a subject about which many Canadians know all too little.


Vincenzo Pietropaolo is an award-winning photographer whose work has been widely published in Canada and abroad. An Italian-Canadian, he and his family immigrated to Canada in 1959. He is the author of Celebration of Resistance: Ontario's Days of Action (1999) and Not Paved with Gold: Italian-Canadian Immigrants in the 1970s (2006).

• Neil Boyd, Larry Campbell & Lori Culbert
• Greystone Books, September 2009
• Paperback, 312 pages
• ISBN: 9781553652984

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (2-3 weeks).

A complex look at a community at risk, by three people who have seen it on the ground. In this mix of history, journalism, political analysis, and first-person accounts, former chief coroner and Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell, renowned criminologist Neil Boyd, and investigative journalist Lori Culbert, offer a portrait of one of North America’s poorest, most drug-challenged neighbourhoods: Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. A Thousand Dreams raises provocative questions about the challenges confronting not only Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside but also all of North America’s major cities and offers concrete, urgently needed solutions.

Neil Boyd is a professor and associate director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. He is a frequent media commentator on drug law, drug policy, and criminal violence, and has completed community impact studies on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Educated in psychology at the University of Western Ontario and in law at Osgoode Hall Law School, he is the author of five previous books, including The Last Dance.

Larry Campbell was mayor of Vancouver from 2002 to 2005 and oversaw the establishment of North America’s first legal injection site. His career as chief coroner for B.C. inspired the Gemini Award–winning TV series Da Vinci’s Inquest. He was appointed a Canadian senator in 2005.

• Martín Sánchez-Jankowski
• University of California, 2008
• Paperback, 487 pages
• 9780520256750

Woven throughout with rich details of everyday life, this original, on-the-ground study of poor neighborhoods challenges much prevailing wisdom about urban poverty, shedding new light on the people, institutions, and culture in these communities. Over the course of nearly a decade, Martín Sánchez-Jankowski immersed himself in life in neighborhoods in New York and Los Angeles to investigate how social change and social preservation transpire among the urban poor. Looking at five community mainstays--the housing project, the small grocery store, the barbershop and the beauty salon, the gang, and the local high school--he discovered how these institutions provide a sense of order, continuity, and stability in places often thought to be chaotic, disorganized, and disheartened. His provocative and ground-breaking study provides new data on urban poverty and also advances a new theory of how poor neighborhoods function, illuminating the creativity and resilience that characterize the lives of those who experience the hardships associated with economic deprivation.

• Harry Braverman
• Monthly Review Press, 1998
• Paperback, 338 pages
• ISBN: 9780853459408

This widely acclaimed book, first published in 1974, was a classic from its first day in print. Written in a direct, inviting way by Harry Braverman, whose years as an industrial worker gave him rich personal insight into work, Labor and Monopoly Capital overturned the reigning ideologies of academic sociology.This new edition features an introduction by John Bellamy Foster that sets the work in historical and theoretical context, as well as two rare articles by Braverman, "The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century" (1975) and "Two Comments" (1976), that add much to our understanding of the book.

Harry Braverman was director of Monthly Review Press at the time of his death in 1976. John Bellamy Foster is associate professor of sociology at the University of Oregon, author of The Vulnerable Planet, and co-editor of In Defense of History: Marxism and Postmodern Agenda.

• Mike Davis
• Verso, 2007
• Paperback, 464 pages
• 9781859843826

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history.

Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites.

Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

• Andrew Ross
• New York UP, 2009
• Hardcover, 263 pages
• ISBN: 9780814776292

Is job insecurity the new norm? With fewer and fewer people working in steady, long-term positions for one employer, has the dream of a secure job with full benefits and a decent salary become just that—a dream? Nice Work If You Can Get I, Andrew Ross surveys the new topography of the global workplace and finds an emerging pattern of labor instability and uneven development on a massive scale. Combining detailed case studies with lucid analysis and graphic prose, he looks at what the new landscape of contingent employment means for workers across national, class, and racial lines—from the emerging “creative class” of high-wage professionals to the multitudes of temporary, migrant, or low-wage workers. Developing the idea of “precarious livelihoods” to describe this new world of work and life, Ross explores what it means in developed nations—comparing the creative industry policies of the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union, as well as developing countries—by examining the quickfire transformation of China’s labor market. He also responds to the challenge of sustainability, assessing the promise of “green jobs” through restorative alliances between labor advocates and environmentalists.

• Mike Davis
• Verso Books; September 2007
• Paperback; 256 pages
• 978 1 84467 160 1

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

According to the united nations, more than one billion people now live in the slums of the cities of the South. In this brilliant and ambitious book, Mike Davis explores the future of a radically unequal and explosively unstable urban world.

From the sprawling barricadas of Lima to the garbage hills of Manila, urbanization has been disconnected from industrialization, even economic growth. Davis portrays a vast humanity warehoused in shantytowns and exiled from the formal world economy. He argues that the rise of this informal urban proletariat is a wholly original development unforeseen by either classical Marxism or neo-liberal theory.

Are the great slums, as a terrified Victorian middle class once imagined, volcanoes waiting to erupt? Davis provides the first global overview of the diverse religious, ethnic, and political movements competing for the souls of the new urban poor. He surveys Hindu fundamentalism in Bombay, the Islamist resistance in Casablanca and Cairo, street gangs in Cape Town and San Salvador, Pentecostalism in Kinshasa and Rio de Janeiro, and revolutionary populism in Caracas and La Paz.

Planet of Slums ends with a provocative meditation on the “war on terrorism” as an incipient world war between the American empire and the slum poor.

• Saul D. Alinsky
• Vintage Books, 1989
• Paperback, 196 pages
• 9780679721130

The father of modern community organization, Saul Alinsky taught a generation of activists and politicians how to effectively construct social change. In Rules for Radicals, Alinsky writes with passion and intelligence, carefully outlining “the difference between being a realistic radical and being a rhetorical one.”  Indispensable since its first publication in 1971, this book continues to inform and inspire all those who believe that political engagement is the key to maintaining America's democratic tradition.

Saul Alinsky was born in Chicago in 1909 and educated first in the streets of that city and then in its university. Graduate work at the University of Chicago in criminology introduced him to the Al Capone gang, and later to Joliet State Prison, where he studied prison life. He founded what is known today as the Alinsky ideology and Alinsky concepts of mass organization for power. His work in organizing the poor to fight for their rights as citizens has been internationally recognized. In the late 1930s he organized the Back of the Yards area in Chicago (the neighborhood made famous in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle). Subsequently, through the Industrial Areas Foundation which he began in 1940, Mr. Alinsky and his staff helped to organize communities not only in Chicago but throughout the country. He later turned his attentions to the middle class, creating a training institute for organizers. He died in 1972.

• E.P. Thompson
• Penguin, 1991
• Paperback, 958 pages
• 9780140136036

The Making of the English Working Class is probably the most imaginative post-war work of English social history.

This classic account of artisan and working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, adds an important dimension to our understanding of the nineteenth century. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and re-creates the whole life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation and who yet created a culture and political consciousness of great vitality.

• James Turk (ed)
• James Lorimer & Company, 2008
• Paperback, 416 pages
• ISBN: 9781552770405

Universities at Risk, a group of leading scholars in education, ethics, politics and medicine, among other areas, probe the forces that are threatening the integrity of post-secondary education, from both within and without. This book delves into the subject of corporate sponsorship, exploring the influences of powerful industries -- tobacco and pharmaceutical companies, for example. The book also discusses the struggle for credibility and threat to free inquiry when special interest groups, right-wing think tanks, and discredited popular movements (such as intelligent design) infiltrate academia. Chapters on the middle eastern studies and First Nations universities look at external politics that inhibit intellectual freedom. The more insidious trends toward corporatization and "managerializing" the university also come under scrutiny. This timely book concludes with a discussion about why preserving academic integrity -- despite the clamorous voices of the forces threatening it --is so vital to public interest.

Contributors include: Brian Alters, Gary Bauslaugh, Mary Burgan. Joanna Cohen, Rosemary Deem, Shadia Drury, Brenda Gallie, Donald Gutstein, Marcus Harvey, David Healy, Michael Higgins, Sheldon Krimsky, Kevin Mattson, Arthur Schafer, Blair Stonechild, Jon Thompson, Pat Walden.