The People of the Abyss (1903) is a work of nonfiction by American writer Jack London. Written after the author spent three months living in London's poverty-stricken East End, The People of the Abyss bears witness to the difficulties faced by hundreds and thousands of people every day in one of the wealthiest nations on earth. Inspired by Friedrich Engels's The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and Jacob Riis's How the Other Half Lives,...

"Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you...

A Book of Remarkable Criminals by H. B. Irving libreka classics — These are classics of literary history, reissued and made available to a wide audience. Immerse yourself in well-known and popular titles!

Woman and Labour' (1911) was written by South African writer and intellectual, Olive Schreiner, best known for her novels 'From Man to Man or Perhaps Only' (1926) and 'Undine' (1929). This collection of letters represents Schreiner's call for changes to the gender inequalities of early 20th-century labour practices. In it, she explains how women's domestic labour destroys their intellectual life and the importance of a woman having full economic independence...

The Subjection of Women by John Mill was first published in 1869, written in 1861 about women's rights. The ideas from this essay John developed jointly with his wife Harriet Taylor Mill. John Mill was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century, and English philosopher, and a civil servant and Member of the Parliament. John shows us how institutions are vital to the happiness of society and to the individual and as these institutions are...

A bold new theory on what sparked the "big bang" of human culture. The abrupt emergence of human culture over a stunningly short period continues to be one of the great enigmas of human evolution. This compelling book introduces a bold new theory on this unsolved mystery. Author Richard Klein reexamines the archaeological evidence and brings in new discoveries in the study of the human brain. These studies detail the changes that enabled humans to...

Critical theory emerged in the 1920s from the work of the Frankfurt School, the circle of German-Jewish academics who sought to diagnose-and, if at all possible, cure-the ills of society, particularly fascism and capitalism. In this book, Stephen Eric Bronner provides sketches of leading representatives of the critical tradition (such as George Lukács and Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas) as well...

Benjamin Christensen's Häxan (The Witch, 1922) stands as a singular film within the history of cinema. Deftly weaving contemporary scientific analysis and powerfully staged historical scenes of satanic initiation, confession under torture, possession, and persecution, Häxan creatively blends spectacle and argument to provoke a humanist re-evaluation of witchcraft in European history as well as the contemporary treatment of female "hysterics" and...

In the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a rock musician was fundamentally different than playing other kinds of music. It was a learned rather than a taught skill. In On Becoming a Rock Musician, sociologist H. Stith Bennett observes what makes someone a rock musician and what persuades others to take him seriously in this role. The book explores how bands form; the backstage and onstage reality of playing in a band; how bands promote themselves and interact...