BiblioVault - Books about Young

Age Discrimination in the American Workplace

Old at a Young Age

Gregory, Raymond F

Rutgers University Press, 2001

Nearly every middle-aged and older worker, at some time during his or her career, will suffer age discrimination in the workplace. Employers too often use early-retirement plans, restructurings, and downsizings to dismiss older workers. Many of these individuals are unwillingly ushered into earlier-than-planned retirements, are denied promotions, or are terminated. The baby-boomer generation now accounts for just under 50 percent of the entire workforce. A vast army of workers now stands ready to contest employer acts of age discrimination.

Attorney Raymond Gregory addresses himself to the millions of workers who think they might be facing age discrimination and traces the history of the federal measures enacted to assist workers in contesting unlawful employer conduct. He explains how the law works and presents actual court cases to demonstrate the ways that workers have challenged their employers. The cases help to illustrate legal principles in real-life experiences and many of the cases relate compelling stories of workers caught up in a web of employer discriminatory conduct. Gregory has eliminated all legal jargon, ensuring that all concepts are clear to his readers. Individuals will turn to this book again and again to obtain authoritative background on this important topic.

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Armies of the Young

Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism

Rosen, David M

Rutgers University Press, 2005

Children have served as soldiers throughout history. They fought in the American Revolution, the Civil War, and in both world wars. They served as uniformed soldiers, camouflaged insurgents, and even suicide bombers. Indeed, the first U.S. soldier to be killed by hostile fire in the Afghanistan war was shot in ambush by a fourteen-year-old boy.

Does this mean that child soldiers are aggressors? Or are they victims? It is a difficult question with no obvious answer, yet in recent years the acceptable answer among humanitarian organizations and contemporary scholars has been resoundingly the latter. These children are most often seen as especially hideous examples of adult criminal exploitation.

In this provocative book, David M. Rosen argues that this response vastly oversimplifies the child soldier problem. Drawing on three dramatic examples-from Sierra Leone, Palestine, and Eastern Europe during the Holocaust-Rosen vividly illustrates this controversial view. In each case, he shows that children are not always passive victims, but often make the rational decision that not fighting is worse than fighting.

With a critical eye to international law, Armies of the Young urges readers to reconsider the situation of child combatants in light of circumstance and history before adopting uninformed child protectionist views. In the process, Rosen paints a memorable and unsettling picture of the role of children in international conflicts.

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Teenage Citizens

The Political Theories of the Young

Constance A. Flanagan

Harvard University Press, 2013

Most teenagers are too young to vote and are off the radar of political scientists. Teenage Citizens looks beyond the electoral game to consider the question of how this overlooked segment of our citizenry understands political topics. Bridging psychology and political science, Constance Flanagan argues that civic identities form during adolescence and are rooted in teens’ everyday lives—in their experiences as members of schools and community-based organizations and in their exercise of voice, collective action, and responsibility in those settings. This is the phase of life when political ideas are born.

Through voices from a wide range of social classes and ethnic backgrounds in the United States and five other countries, we learn how teenagers form ideas about democracy, inequality, laws, ethnic identity, the social contract, and the ties that bind members of a polity together. Flanagan’s twenty-five years of research show how teens’ personal and family values accord with their political views. When their families emphasize social responsibility—for people in need and for the common good—and perform service to the community, teens’ ideas about democracy and the social contract highlight principles of tolerance, social inclusion, and equality. When families discount social responsibility relative to other values, teens’ ideas about democracy focus on their rights as individuals.

At a time when opportunities for youth are shrinking, Constance Flanagan helps us understand how young people come to envisage the world of politics and civic engagement, and how their own political identities take form.

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Traps for the Young

Anthony Comstock

Harvard University Press

Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable

Chilean Exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 1973-2010

Francis Peddie

University of Manitoba Press, 2014

Young, White, and Miserable

Growing Up Female in the Fifties

Wini Breines

University of Chicago Press, 2001

Young, White, and Miserable is a critically acclaimed study that compellingly shows how the feminist movement of the 1960s found momentum in the seemingly peaceable time of the 1950s. Wini Breines explores white middle class America and argues that mixed messages given to girls during this decade lent fuel to the fire that would later become known as feminism. Concluding with a look at the life and suicide of social scientist Anne Parsons, this book is a poignant and important look into conditions that led to the women's movement.

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