Full AspenCat Catalog

Explores the meaning of the American dream for ordinary people across the country, from a woman who left Iran in search of religious freedom to a ten-year-old entrepreneur whose nonprofit company provides supplies to poor schools.

"As a boy, Robert Kaplan listened to his truck-driver father tell evocative stories about traveling across America in his youth, travels in which he learned to understand the country literally from the ground up. In Earning the Rockies, Kaplan undertakes his own cross-country journey to recapture an appreciation of American geography often lost in the jet age. Along the way, he witnesses both prosperity and decline--increasingly cosmopolitan cities...

A critique of the white American class structure argues that the paths of social mobility that once advanced the nation are now serving to further isolate an elite upper class while enforcing a growing and resentful white underclass.

In Robert H. Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah, one of our nation's most distinguished conservative scholars offers a prophetic and unprecedented view of a culture in decline, a nation in such serious moral trouble that its very foundation is crumbling. Of our own President, Bork writes: "Thirty years ago, Clinton's behavior would have been absolutely disqualifying. Since the 1992 election, the public has learned far more about what is known, euphemistically,...

"Green is the new red, white, and blue," Thomas Friedman declares, and proposes that a national strategy is needed to save the planet and to make America healthier, richer, more innovative, more productive, and more secure. Green-oriented practices and technologies are the only way to mitigate climate change and the best way to "reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad, retool America for the new century, and restore America to its natural...

As with many self-destructive kids, Noah Levine's search for meaning led him first to punk rock, drugs, drinking, and dissatisfaction. But the search didn't end there. Having clearly seen the uselessness of drugs and violence, Noah looked for positive ways to channel his rebellion against what he saw as the lies of society. Fueled by his anger at so much injustice and suffering, Levine now uses that energy and the practice of Buddhism to awaken his...

"Drawn from Kao Kalia Yang's childhood experiences as a Hmong refugee, this heartfelt picture book offers a window into the life of a family with little money and a great deal of love."--

The NBC news anchor and former White House correspondent evaluates the American dream of the past, present, and future as experienced by four generations of his and other families.

The author examines the "gilded age" of the twenty-first century, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can - except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. The affluent rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor and lavishly reward "thought leaders" who redefine "change" in winner-friendly ways, seeking to do more good, but never less harm. The author recounts the limousine confessions of a...

After thirty years spent scratching together a middle-class life out of a dirt-poor childhood, Joe Bageant moved back to his hometown of Winchester, Virginia, where he realized that his family and neighbors were the very people who carried George W. Bush to victory. That was ironic, because Winchester, like countless American small towns, is fast becoming the bedrock of a permanent underclass. Two in five of the people in his old neighborhood do not...