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A nuanced take on how carceral expansions are changing labor and social life.
 
In Carceral Citizens, anthropologist Caroline M. Parker offers an ethnographic portrait of therapeutic communities in Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the Americas. As nonprofits nested within the carceral state, therapeutic communities serve as reeducation and recovery centers for the mostly male drug offenders who serve out their sentences engaged in manual labor and prayer. The most surprising aspect of these centers, however, is that their “graduates” often remain long after the completion of their term, working as self-appointed peer counselors in a mixture of volunteer and low-wage positions.
 
Parker seeks to explain this dynamic by showing how, in these therapeutic communities, criminalized men find new and meaningful ways of living in the shadow of the prison. Through their participation in the day-to-day functioning of the centers, they discover and cultivate alternative forms of belonging, livelihood, and citizenship, despite living within the restrictions of the carceral state. Situating her study against the backdrop of Puerto Rico’s colonial history, and with findings that extend across Latin America, Parker challenges common assumptions about confinement, labor, and rehabilitation. By delving into lives shaped by the convergence of imperialism, the carceral state, and self-help, she offers a fresh understanding of the transformations of labor and social life brought about by mass incarceration.

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

Chicago has been called by many names. Nelson Algren declared it a “City on the Make.” Carl Sandburg dubbed it the “City of Big Shoulders.” Upton Sinclair christened it “The Jungle,” while New Yorkers, naturally, pronounced it “the Second City.”

At last there is a book for all of us, whatever we choose to call Chicago. In this magisterial biography, historian Dominic Pacyga traces the storied past of his hometown, from the explorations of Joliet and Marquette in 1673 to the new wave of urban pioneers today. The city’s great industrialists, reformers, and politicians—and, indeed, the many not-so-great and downright notorious—animate this book, from Al Capone and Jane Addams to Mayor Richard J. Daley and President Barack Obama. But what distinguishes this book from the many others on the subject is its author’s uncommon ability to illuminate the lives of Chicago’s ordinary people. Raised on the city’s South Side and employed for a time in the stockyards, Pacyga gives voice to the city’s steelyard workers and kill floor operators, and maps the neighborhoods distinguished not by Louis Sullivan masterworks, but by bungalows and corner taverns.

 Filled with the city’s one-of-a-kind characters and all of its defining moments, Chicago: A Biography is as big and boisterous as its namesake—and as ambitious as the men and women who built it.

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

City of Dignity illuminates how liberal Protestants quietly, yet indelibly, shaped the progressive ethics of postwar Los Angeles.
 
Contemporary Los Angeles is commonly seen as an American bulwark of progressive secular politics, a place that values immigration, equity, diversity, and human rights. But what accounts for the city’s embrace of such staunchly liberal values, which are more hotly contested in other parts of the country? The answer, Sean Dempsey reveals, lies not with those frequent targets of credit and blame—Democrats in Hollywood—but instead with liberal Protestants and other steadfast religious organizations of the postwar era.

As the Religious Right movement emerged in the 1970s, progressive religious activists quietly began promoting an ethical vision that made waves worldwide but saw the largest impact in its place of origin: metropolitan Los Angeles. At the center of this vision lay the concept of human dignity—entwining the integral importance of political and expressive freedom with the moral sanctity of the human condition—which suffused all of the political values that arose from it, whether tolerance, diversity, or equality of opportunity. The work of these religious organizations birthed such phenomena as the Sanctuary Movement—which provided safe haven for refugees fleeing conflict-torn Central America—and advocacy for the homeless, both of which became increasingly fraught issues amid the rising tides of neoliberalism and conservatism. City of Dignity explores how these interwoven spiritual and theological strands found common ground—and made common impacts—in the humanitarian ecosystem of one of America’s largest and most dynamic metro areas.

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

Unearths the religious and cultural roots of a powerful political machine that empowered some everyday Chicagoans but ruled all of the city for decades.

In politics, clout is essential. Too often, it determines whether insider access is granted or denied, favors are given or withheld, and payoffs are made or received. But Chicago clout, as we know it today, is even more potent than that—it’s the absolute currency of a social, cultural, and political order that is self-reinforcing and self-dealing. Or, at least, it was.
 
In Clout City, award-winning historian Dominic A. Pacyga reveals how cultural, ethnic, and religious forces created this distinctive system—and ultimately led to its collapse. Tracing clout’s origins in the Irish Catholic–dominated working-class neighborhood of Bridgeport, shaped by De La Salle Institute and home to the legendary Daley family, Pacyga shows how communal ties can be a force for good and also the deepest wellspring of corruption. He maps Chicago’s unique politics to its remarkable history, from the Great Fire of 1871 through its rise and decline as an industrial center to its emergence as a global city in the early twenty-first century. With deep research and firsthand experience from a lifetime in the city, Pacyga argues that Chicago’s politics is understood best as a mixture of cultural and religious influences and more worldly pursuits, exploring how both Jewish and Catholic communalism played central roles in the creation and sustenance of the Chicago machine.
 
Chicago’s politics today aren’t as defined by its distinctive brand of clout. But they are shaped by clout’s decline and the ghost of the machine. Pacyga’s tour of the city’s multilayered past is an indispensable guide to its present and future.

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

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

The story of how Yellowstone, established in 1872 as the world’s first national park, has become synonymous with nature conservation—and an examination of today’s challenges to preserve the region’s wilderness heritage.
 
For more than 150 years, the Yellowstone region—now widely known as the twenty-three million acre Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—has played a prominent role in the United States’ nature conservation agenda. In this book, Robert B. Keiter, an award-winning public land law and policy expert, traces the evolution and application of fundamental ecological conservation concepts tied to Yellowstone.
 
Keiter’s book highlights both the conservation successes and controversies connected with this storied region, which has been enmeshed in change. During the 1980s, leaders in Yellowstone embraced ecosystem management concepts to recover a dwindling grizzly bear population and to support wolf reintroduction. Since then, management policies in the region’s two national parks and adjacent national forests have largely followed suit, prioritizing ecosystem-level conservation over industrial activity. Groundbreaking efforts are currently afoot to protect elk, deer, and pronghorn migration corridors and to maintain the park’s bison population, effectively expanding the scope of regional conservation initiatives. But in the face of explosive human population growth and related development pressures, new efforts must also account for the region’s privately owned lands along with accelerating recreational activities that present quite different problems.
 
Indeed, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—extending across three states and twenty counties and embracing more than sixteen million acres of federal land as well as private and tribal lands —can only be characterized as a complex, jurisdictionally fragmented landscape. As Keiter makes clear, the quest for common ground among federal land managers, state officials, local communities, conservationists, ranchers, Indigenous tribes, and others is a vital, enduring task.
 
Exploring both notable conservation accomplishments and the ongoing challenges confronting this special place, Keiter’s book explains the many forces—scientific, political, economic, legal, cultural, climatic, and more—at work driving controversy and change across the region. But more than this, Conserving Nature in Greater Yellowstone shows us that the lessons gleaned from Yellowstone’s expansive nature conservation efforts are profoundly important for both the country and the world.

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

A strong and lively defense of substantive due process.
 
From reproductive rights to marriage for same-sex couples, many of our basic liberties owe their protection to landmark Supreme Court decisions that have hinged on the doctrine of substantive due process. This doctrine is controversial—a battleground for opposing views around the relationship between law and morality in circumstances of moral pluralism—and is deeply vulnerable today.  
 
Against recurring charges that the practice of substantive due process is dangerously indeterminate and irredeemably undemocratic, Constructing Basic Liberties reveals the underlying coherence and structure of substantive due process and defends it as integral to our constitutional democracy. Reviewing the development of the doctrine over the last half-century, James E. Fleming rebuts popular arguments against substantive due process and shows that the Supreme Court has constructed basic liberties through common law constitutional interpretation: reasoning by analogy from one case to the next and making complex normative judgments about what basic liberties are significant for personal self-government. 
 
Elaborating key distinctions and tools for interpretation, Fleming makes a powerful case that substantive due process is a worthy practice that is based on the best understanding of our constitutional commitments to protecting ordered liberty and securing the status and benefits of equal citizenship for all.