In celebration of American capitalism, we’ve thrown together a promo for your Black Friday / Cyber Monday / American buying spree. Use promo code “25BF2018” (active now until 11/30/2018) when you order books online at www.nyupress.org for 25% off and free domestic shipping! Check out the titles below which we think would be great gifts for friends, colleagues, that pesky uncle you never know what to buy, or even just a little post-shopping treat yo’ self.
What Would Mrs. Astor Do?
The Essential Guide to the Manners and Mores of the Gilded Age
By Cecelia Tichi
Wherever she went, Mrs. Astor made her judgments, dictating proper behavior and demeanor, men’s and women’s codes of dress, acceptable patterns of speech and movements of the body, and what and when to eat and drink. The ladies and gentlemen of high society took note. “What would Mrs. Astor do?” became the question every social climber sought to answer. And an invitation to her annual ball was a golden ticket into the ranks of New York’s upper crust. This work serves as a guide to manners as well as an insight to Mrs. Astor’s personal diary and address book, showing everything from the perfect table setting to the array of outfits the elite wore at the time. Channeling the queen of the Gilded Age herself, Cecelia Tichi paints a portrait of New York’s social elite, from the schools to which they sent their children, to their lavish mansions and even their reactions to the political and personal scandals of the day.
“Tichi delivers a crisp survey of New York’s upper-class world in the late 19th century, using society maven Caroline Astor as the guide… Presented with a breezy authority that keeps the pages turning, Tichi’s book will captivate those interested in a light look at America’s fashionable gentry of eras past.”—Publishers Weekly
Beyond Trans
Does Gender Matter?
By Heath Fogg Davis
Beyond Trans pushes the conversation on gender identity to its limits: questioning the need for gender categories in the first place. Whether on birth certificates or college admissions applications or on bathroom doors, why do we need to mark people and places with sex categories? Do they serve a real purpose or are these places and forms just mechanisms of exclusion? Heath Fogg Davis offers an impassioned call to rethink the usefulness of dividing the world into not just Male and Female categories but even additional categories of Transgender and gender fluid. Davis, himself a transgender man, explores the underlying gender-enforcing policies and customs in American life that have led to transgender bathroom bills, college admissions controversies, and more, arguing that it is necessary for our society to take real steps to challenge the assumption that gender matters.
“Davis’s solution-oriented Beyond Trans is a necessary voice in current debates about the administration of sex and transgender identity. From the infamous bathroom bills to cis citizens’ objection to financing the medical expenses of trans military personnel (the specter of which Donald Trump backhandedly invoked during his transgender ban tweets), to women’s colleges determining that sex-segregation and defining the boundaries of womanhood were necessary to a feminist project of education, Davis’s book offers applicable solutions and applies the knowledge gained from the positionality of trans, intersex, and non-binary viewpoints.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
Algorithms of Oppression
How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
By Safiya Umoja Noble
This book challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.
“Algorithms of Oppression is a wakeup call to bring awareness to the biases of the internet, and should motivate all concerned people to ask why those biases exist, and who they benefit.”—New York Journal of Books
Her Own Hero
The Origins of the Women’s Self-Defense Movement
By Wendy L. Rouse
“Wendy L. Rouse examines the self-defense movement through an intersectional feminist lens. . . . Rouse explores boxing, jujitsu, street harassment, the suffrage movement, and domestic violence to provide historical context to the 20th-century women’s movement . . . a compelling read.”—Bitch Magazine
A Rosenberg by Any Other Name
A History of Jewish Name Changing in America
By Kristen Fermaglich
“Fascinating . . . A fine contribution to an important, previously underexplored area of American Jewish identity and social history.”—Publishers Weekly
White Kids
Growing Up with Privilege in a Racially Divided America
By Margaret A. Hagerman
Featuring the actual voices of young, affluent white kids and what they think about race, racism, inequality, and privilege, White Kids illuminates how white racial socialization is much more dynamic, complex, and varied than previously recognized. It is a process that stretches beyond white parents’ explicit conversations with their white children and includes not only the choices parents make about neighborhoods, schools, peer groups, extracurricular activities, and media, but also the choices made by the kids themselves. By interviewing kids who are growing up in different racial contexts—from racially segregated to meaningfully integrated and from politically progressive to conservative—this important book documents key differences in the outcomes of white racial socialization across families. And by observing families in their everyday lives, this book explores the extent to which white families, even those with anti-racist intentions, reproduce and reinforce the forms of inequality they say they reject.
“White Kids brings to mind two words: must read…She puts forth a crucial analysis on the ‘well-meaning,’ ‘colorblind’ racism that her subjects perpetuate, stripping down the coded language of suburbia until it reveals the ugly truth underneath.” —STARRED Foreword Reviews
