How the Cold War era changed the trajectory of women's gymnastics

Electrifying athletes like Olga Korbut and Nadia Comăneci helped make women’s artistic gymnastics one of the most popular events in the Olympic Games. But the transition of gymnastics from a women’s sport to a girl’s sport in the 1970s also laid the foundation for a system of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of gymnasts around the world. Georgia Cervin offers a unique history of women's gymnastics, examining how the high-stakes diplomatic rivalry of the Cold War created a breeding ground for exploitation. Yet, a surprising spirit of international collaboration arose to decide the social values and image of femininity demonstrated by the sport. Cervin also charts the changes in style, equipment, training, and participants that transformed the sport, as explosive athleticism replaced balletic grace and gymnastics dominance shifted from East to West.

Sweeping and revelatory, Degrees of Difficulty tells a story of international friction, unexpected cooperation, and the legacy of abuse and betrayal created by the win-at-all-cost attitudes of the Cold War.

As Louisiana and Cuba emerged from slavery in the late nineteenth century, each faced the question of what rights former slaves could claim. Degrees of Freedom compares and contrasts these two societies in which slavery was destroyed by war, and citizenship was redefined through social and political upheaval. Both Louisiana and Cuba were rich in sugar plantations that depended on an enslaved labor force. After abolition, on both sides of the Gulf of Mexico, ordinary people—cane cutters and cigar workers, laundresses and labor organizers—forged alliances to protect and expand the freedoms they had won. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, Louisiana and Cuba diverged sharply in the meanings attributed to race and color in public life, and in the boundaries placed on citizenship.

Louisiana had taken the path of disenfranchisement and state-mandated racial segregation; Cuba had enacted universal manhood suffrage and had seen the emergence of a transracial conception of the nation. What might explain these differences?

Moving through the cane fields, small farms, and cities of Louisiana and Cuba, Rebecca Scott skillfully observes the people, places, legislation, and leadership that shaped how these societies adjusted to the abolition of slavery. The two distinctive worlds also come together, as Cuban exiles take refuge in New Orleans in the 1880s, and black soldiers from Louisiana garrison small towns in eastern Cuba during the 1899 U.S. military occupation.

Crafting her narrative from the words and deeds of the actors themselves, Scott brings to life the historical drama of race and citizenship in postemancipation societies.

An ethnographic analysis of how insecurity is at the heart of contemporary higher education.

Institutions of higher education are often described as “ivory towers,” places of privilege where students exist in a “campus bubble,” insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that’s simply not the case.

Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Sociologist Blake Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examined interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He expertly identified the ways the college experience played out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions. Drawing from these firsthand accounts, Degrees of Risk presents a model for a better university, one that fosters success and confidence for a diverse range of students.

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

An ethnographic analysis of how insecurity is at the heart of contemporary higher education.

Institutions of higher education are often described as “ivory towers,” places of privilege where students exist in a “campus bubble,” insulated from the trials of the outside world. These metaphors reveal a widespread belief that college provides young people with stability and keeps insecurity at bay. But for many students, that’s simply not the case.

Degrees of Risk reveals how insecurity permeates every facet of college life for students at public universities. Sociologist Blake Silver dissects how these institutions play a direct role in perpetuating uncertainty, instability, individualism, and anxiety about the future. Silver examined interviews with more than one hundred students who described the risks that surrounded every decision: which major to choose, whether to take online classes, and how to find funding. He expertly identified the ways the college experience played out differently for students from different backgrounds. For students from financially secure families with knowledge of how college works, all the choices and flexibility of college felt like an adventure or a wealth of opportunities. But for many others, especially low-income, first-generation students, their personal and family circumstances meant that that flexibility felt like murkiness and precarity. In addition, he discovered that students managed insecurity in very different ways, intensifying inequality at the intersections of socioeconomic status, race, gender, and other sociodemographic dimensions. Drawing from these firsthand accounts, Degrees of Risk presents a model for a better university, one that fosters success and confidence for a diverse range of students.

Those who exit a religion—particularly one they were born and raised in—often find themselves at sea in their efforts to transition to life beyond their community. In Degrees of Separation, Schneur Zalman Newfield, who went through this process himself, interviews seventy-four Lubavitch and Satmar ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews who left their communities.He presents their motivations for leaving as well as how they make sense of their experiences and their processes of exiting, detailing their attitudes and opinions regarding their religious upbringing. Newfield also examines how these exiters forge new ways of being that their upbringing had not prepared them for, while also considering what these particular individuals lose and retain in the exit process.

Degrees of Separation presents a comprehensive portrait of the prolonged state of being “in-between” that characterizes transition out of a totalizing worldview. What Newfield discovers is that exiters experience both a sense of independence and a persistent connection; they are not completely dislocated from their roots once they “arrive” at their new destination. Moreover, Degrees of Separation shows that this process of transitioning identity has implications beyond religion.