Results by title
21 books match the query 'Price'
A Price to Pay
Alex Capus
Haus Publishing, 2014
A Price to Pay, the fourth of Capus’s novels to be published in English, tells the interwoven stories of three disparate figures from interwar Switzerland: pacifist Felix Bloch, who ends up working on the Manhattan Project; Laura d’Oriano, who wants to become a singer but instead becomes an Allied spy in fascist Italy; and Emile Gillieron, who accompanies Heinrich Schliemann to Troy and becomes one of art’s greatest forgers. Taking off from the only moment in history when all three were in the same place—a November day in 1924 at Zürich Station—Capus traces their diverging paths as they secure their places in the annals of history—but at what price?
Can Music Make You Sick?
Measuring the Price of Musical AmbitionSally Anne Gross and George Musgrave
University of Westminster Press, 2020
Grant Hutchison (Frightened Rabbit):‘This book should be mandatory reading for every label, booking agent, manager and tour manager in the business of music and touring so we can all better understand what’s really involved in living the life of a professional musician and the role we all have in making that life as liveable as possible’
Tim Shiel (Double J/Triple J Radio, Australia):‘The most important book I’ve ever read about music’
‘An eye-opening must read’ ****
Shaun Ryder (Happy Mondays): ‘Holding on to your mental health in this pressured environment is so important and at times so very difficult, I know that all too well. This book lays bare what it is like to live for your music and how it can feel to be a musician today’
The Wire magazine:‘Poses uncomfortable questions…[and] sheds light on complex issues with compelling thoroughness’
‘Musicians often pay a high price for sharing their art with us. Underneath the glow of success can often lie loneliness and exhaustion, not to mention the basic struggles of paying the rent or buying food. Sally-Anne Gross and George Musgrave raise important questions – and we need to listen to what the musicians have to tell us about their working conditions and their mental health’
Crispin Hunt (Multi-Platinum Songwriter/Record Producer & Chair of the Ivor’s Academy):‘In this important book, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave investigate the relationship between the well-being music brings to society and the well-being of those who create. It's a much needed reality-check, deglamorising the romantic image of the tortured artist’
Adam Ficek (Psychotherapist [Music and Mind]/BabyShambles):‘A critical and timely book’
Joe Muggs (DJ, Promoter, Journalist [Guardian, Telegraph, FACT, Mixmag, The Wire]):‘The best guide to what being a musician, and what "the music industry" actually are that I can remember reading’
Andreea Magdalina (Founder of shesaid.so):‘This book is extremely important....The pandemic is forcing our industry to reinvent itself, once again, and this book is a call to ensure these new systems are fairer for everyone and that they foster a healthier lifestyle’
It is often assumed that creative people are prone to psychological instability, and that this explains apparent associations between cultural production and mental health problems. In their detailed study of recording and performing artists in the British music industry, Sally Anne Gross and George Musgrave turn this view on its head.
By listening to how musicians understand and experience their working lives, this book proposes that whilst making music is therapeutic, making a career from music can be traumatic. The authors show how careers based on an all-consuming passion have become more insecure and devalued. Artistic merit and intimate, often painful, self-disclosures are the subject of unremitting scrutiny and data metrics. Personal relationships and social support networks are increasingly bound up with calculative transactions.
Drawing on original empirical research and a wide-ranging survey of scholarship from across the social sciences, their findings will be provocative for future research on mental health, wellbeing and working conditions in the music industries and across the creative economy. Going beyond self-help strategies, they challenge the industry to make transformative structural change. Until then, the book provides an invaluable guide for anyone currently making their career in music, as well as those tasked with training and educating the next generation.
Paying the Price
College Costs, Financial Aid, and the Betrayal of the American DreamSara Goldrick-Rab
University of Chicago Press, 2016
Not necessarily, says Sara Goldrick-Rab, and with Paying the Price, she shows in damning detail exactly why. Quite simply, college is far too expensive for many people today, and the confusing mix of federal, state, institutional, and private financial aid leaves countless students without the resources they need to pay for it.
Drawing on an unprecedented study of 3,000 young adults who entered public colleges and universities in Wisconsin in 2008 with the support of federal aid and Pell Grants, Goldrick-Rab reveals the devastating effect of these shortfalls. Half the students in the study left college without a degree, while less than 20 percent finished within five years. The cause of their problems, time and again, was lack of money. Unable to afford tuition, books, and living expenses, they worked too many hours at outside jobs, dropped classes, took time off to save money, and even went without adequate food or housing. In many heartbreaking cases, they simply left school—not with a degree, but with crippling debt. Goldrick-Rab combines that shocking data with devastating stories of six individual students, whose struggles make clear the horrifying human and financial costs of our convoluted financial aid policies.
America can fix this problem. In the final section of the book, Goldrick-Rab offers a range of possible solutions, from technical improvements to the financial aid application process, to a bold, public sector–focused “first degree free” program. What’s not an option, this powerful book shows, is doing nothing, and continuing to crush the college dreams of a generation of young people.
Paying the Price
Ignacio Ellacuría and the Murdered Jesuits of El SalvadorTeresa Whitfield
Temple University Press, 1994
On November 16, 1989, on the campus of El Salvador's University of Central America, six Jesuits and two women were murdered by members of the Salvadoran army, an army funded and trained by the United States. One of the murdered Jesuits was Ignacio Ellacuría, the university's Rector and a key, although controversial, figure in Salvadoran public life. From an opening account of this terrible crime, Paying the Price asks, Why were they killed and what have their deaths meant? Answers come through Teresa Whitfield's detailed examination of Ellacuría's life and work. His story is told in juxtaposition with the crucial role played by the unraveling investigation of the Jesuits' murders within El Salvador's peace process.
A complex and nuanced book, Paying the Price offers a history of the Church in El Salvador in recent decades, an analysis of Ellacuría's philosophy and theology, an introduction to liberation theology, and an account of the critical importance of the University of Central America. In the end, Whitfield's comprehensive picture of conditions in El Salvador suggest that the Jesuits' murders were almost inevitable. A crime that proved a turning point in El Salvador's civil war, the murders expressed the deep tragedy of the Salvadoran people beyond suffering the heartless cruelty, violence, and deceitfulness of a corrupt military and their patrons in the U.S. government.
Whitfield draws on her extensive research of Jesuit archives and private papers, Ellacuría's diaries, documents declassified by the U.S. government, and 200 interviews conducted with sources ranging from Jesuits to Salvadoran military officers, U.S. officials and congressmen to human rights campaigners.
So Unimaginable a Price
Baldwin and the Black AtlanticJohn E. Drabinski
Northwestern University Press, 2026
James Baldwin’s nonfiction offers some of the most important and challenging thinking on the experience of race, history, and memory in the Black Atlantic world. Yet much of the scholarly literature on Baldwin’s writing reads his work from inside the sociocultural context of the United States, alongside key interlocutors like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and Lorraine Hansberry. So Unimaginable a Price: Baldwin and the Black Atlantic shifts the critical frame, examining Baldwin’s work as part of a midcentury moment across the wider Atlantic world and tying his reflections to those of thinkers in the Caribbean and Africa to underscore the widening sense, as well as the particularity, of his critical claims. Who is Baldwin to the Atlantic world? And who, then, is Baldwin to the United States? John E. Drabinski recasts Baldwin as a Black Atlantic writer whose unique qualities as a thinker are enhanced by their similarities and differences with fellow writers of liberation in the global Black world.
The Price of Copper
Labor, Race and Suicide in a New Mexico Mining TownRone Tempest
University Press of Colorado, 2027
The Price of Copper is a veteran journalist’s unflinching investigation of a family tragedy and long-standing mystery—the sensational 1938 suicide of powerful New Mexico copper mine boss Rone B. Tempest Sr. on the eve of his scheduled testimony before a federal labor board. From this dramatic opening, the book paints a vivid portrait of open-pit copper mining, labor conflicts, and corporate-sponsored racism in company mining towns across the Mountain West from the early years of the twentieth century to the first successes of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
The author’s paternal grandfather, Rone Tempest Sr., was the general manager of the Chino Copper Mine in Santa Rita, New Mexico, which was owned by the Kennecott Copper Corporation and under investigation over labor practices. His boss was Salt Lake City copper baron and ruthless anti-union strikebreaker Daniel C. Jackling—the “Prophet of Porphyry,” who pioneered the industrial mining of low-grade copper ores by introducing the use of dynamite, steam shovels, rail, and giant mill works. After detailing the saga around Tempest Sr.’s death, the story follows the trajectory of the Chino mine over time, including the rise of predominantly Hispanic labor unions and the advancement of Hispanic workers to senior management roles—gains in civil rights that would have made the labor environment entirely unrecognizable to those fighting for reform in 1938.
A compelling and dramatic history of the great early twentieth-century advances in western copper mining that provided the essential metal needed to electrify the continent and the world, The Price of Copper is a unique personal story that connects to the broader history of copper mining in the West, as well as a valuable social history offering a new narrative about the dynamics of corporate management and giving additional insight into the formation of the “Copper Age” in the United States.
The Price of Independence
The Economics of Early AdulthoodSheldon Danziger
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
The Price of Literature
The French Novel's Theoretical TurnPatrick M. Bray
Northwestern University Press, 2019
Literary thought, or the theory produced by the text, can only function by exploring what escapes dominant representations. The Price of Literature analyzes how certain iconic texts from the nineteenth century (by Mme de Staël, Hugo, Balzac, Flaubert, and Proust) perform a theoretical turn to claim the freedom to represent anything in the world, but also literature’s ability to transform the world it represents. The conclusion advances a new way of thinking about literary scholarship—one based on how literature redistributes ways of writing by lending form to thought.
The Price of Living
The Stories We Tell About the PoorS. Shankar
Duke University Press, 2027
The Price of Misfortune
Rights and Wrongs in Indebted AmericaDaniel Platt
University of Chicago Press, 2023
What can be taken from someone who has borrowed money and cannot repay? What do the victims of misfortune owe to their lenders, and what can they keep for themselves? The answers to those questions, immensely important for debtors, creditors, and society at large, have changed over time. The Price of Misfortune examines the cause of debtors’ rights in the modern United States and the struggles of reformers who fought to establish financial freedoms in law.
Daniel Platt shows how, in the wake of the Civil War, a range of advocates drew potent analogies between slavery, imprisonment for debt, and the experiences of wage garnishment and property foreclosure. He traces the ways those analogies were used to campaign for bold new protections for debtors, keeping them secure in their labor, property, and personhood. Yet, as Platt demonstrates, those reforms tended to assume as their ideal borrower someone who was white, propertied, and male. In subsequent decades, the emancipatory promise of debtors’ rights would be tested as women, wage earners, and African Americans seized on their language to challenge other structural inequalities: the dependency of marriage, the exploitation of industrial capitalism, and the oppression of Jim Crow. By reconstructing these forgotten developments—and recovering the experiences of indebted farmwives, sharecroppers, and wage workers—The Price of Misfortune narrates a new history of inequality, coercion, and law amid the early financialization of American capitalism.
The Price of Misfortune
Rights and Wrongs in Indebted AmericaDaniel Platt
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A history of the struggle for debtors’ rights from the Civil War to the Great Depression
What can be taken from someone who has borrowed money and cannot repay? What do the victims of misfortune owe to their lenders, and what can they keep for themselves? The answers to those questions, immensely important for debtors, creditors, and society at large, have changed over time. The Price of Misfortune examines the cause of debtors’ rights in the modern United States and the struggles of reformers who fought to establish financial freedoms in law.
Daniel Platt shows how, in the wake of the Civil War, a range of advocates drew potent analogies between slavery, imprisonment for debt, and the experiences of wage garnishment and property foreclosure. He traces the ways those analogies were used to campaign for bold new protections for debtors, keeping them secure in their labor, property, and personhood. Yet, as Platt demonstrates, those reforms tended to assume as their ideal borrower someone who was white, propertied, and male. In subsequent decades, the emancipatory promise of debtors’ rights would be tested as women, wage earners, and African Americans seized on their language to challenge other structural inequalities: the dependency of marriage, the exploitation of industrial capitalism, and the oppression of Jim Crow. By reconstructing these forgotten developments—and recovering the experiences of indebted farmwives, sharecroppers, and wage workers—The Price of Misfortune narrates a new history of inequality, coercion, and law amid the early financialization of American capitalism.
The Price of Nice
How Good Intentions Maintain Educational InequityAngelina E. Castagno
University of Minnesota Press, 2019
How being “nice” in school and university settings works to reinforce racialized, gendered, and (dis)ability-related inequities in education and society
Being nice is difficult to critique. Niceness is almost always portrayed and felt as a positive quality. In schools, nice teachers are popular among students, parents, and administrators. And yet Niceness, as a distinct set of practices and discourses, is not actually good for individuals, institutions, or communities because of the way it maintains and reinforces educational inequity.
In The Price of Nice, an interdisciplinary group of scholars explores Niceness in educational spaces from elementary schools through higher education to highlight how this seemingly benign quality reinforces structural inequalities. Grounded in data, personal narrative, and theory, the chapters show that Niceness, as a raced, gendered, and classed set of behaviors, functions both as a shield to save educators from having to do the hard work of dismantling inequity and as a disciplining agent for those who attempt or even consider disrupting structures and ideologies of dominance.
Contributors: Sarah Abuwandi, Arizona State U; Colin Ben, U of Utah; Nicholas Bustamante, Arizona State U; Aidan/Amanda J. Charles, Northern Arizona U; Jeremiah Chin, Arizona State U; Sally Campbell Galman, U of Massachusetts; Frederick Gooding Jr., Texas Christian U; Deirdre Judge, Tufts U; Katie A. Lazdowski; Román Liera, U of Southern California; Sylvia Mac, U of La Verne; Lindsey Malcolm-Piqueux, California Institute of Technology; Giselle Martinez Negrette, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Amber Poleviyuma, Arizona State U; Alexus Richmond, Arizona State U; Frances J. Riemer, Northern Arizona U; Jessica Sierk, St. Lawrence U; Bailey B. Smolarek, U of Wisconsin–Madison; Jessica Solyom, Arizona State U; Megan Tom, Arizona State U; Sabina Vaught, U of Oklahoma; Cynthia Diana Villarreal, U of Southern California; Kristine T. Weatherston, Temple U; Joseph C. Wegwert, Northern Arizona U; Marguerite Anne Fillion Wilson, Binghamton U; Jia-Hui Stefanie Wong, Trinity College; Denise Gray Yull, Binghamton U.
The Price of Nuclear Power
Uranium Communities and Environmental JusticeMalin, Stephanie A.
Rutgers University Press, 2015
The Price of Our Values
The Economic Limits of Moral LifeAugustin Landier and David Thesmar
University of Chicago Press, 2025
The economic case for self-interest at the outer limits of being morally good.
Modern life is an exercise in discomfort. In the face of endless injustice, how much selfishness is permissible? How do we square suffering elsewhere with our hope to thrive at home? How does one strive for the greater good while guarding one's personal interests? The Price of Our Values argues that the answers to these questions are economic: by weighing our sense of the personal costs associated with the outer limits of our moral beliefs.
These tradeoffs—the want to be good, the personal costs of being good, and the points at which people abandon goodness due to its costs—are somewhat unsettling. But as economists Augustin Landier and David Thesmar show, they are highly predictable, even justified. Our values guide us, but we are also forced to consider economic costs to settle decisions.
The Price of Our Values is an economic reckoning with the universal unease of contemporary moral life. Wielding insights from the philosophical founders of the field, Landier and Thesmar provide frameworks for thinking about the place of values—justice, freedom, beauty— in the decisions of modern life. They do so in terms that seek to be consistent with both our good intentions and their limits.
The Price of Power
America Since 1945Herbert Agar
University of Chicago Press, 1957
The Price of Prestige
Conspicuous Consumption in International RelationsLilach Gilady
University of Chicago Press, 2018
In The Price of Prestige, Gilady shows how many seemingly wasteful government expenditures that appear to contradict the laws of demand actually follow the pattern for what are known as Veblen goods, or positional goods for which demand increases alongside price, even when cheaper substitutes are readily available. From flashy space programs to costly weapons systems a country does not need and cannot maintain to foreign aid programs that offer little benefit to recipients, these conspicuous and strategically timed expenditures are intended to instill awe in the observer through their wasteful might. And underestimating the important social role of excess has serious policy implications. Increasing the cost of war, for example, may not always be an effective tool for preventing it, Gilady argues, nor does decreasing the cost of weapons and other technologies of war necessarily increase the potential for conflict, as shown by the case of a cheap fighter plane whose price tag drove consumers away. In today’s changing world, where there are high levels of uncertainty about the distribution of power, Gilady also offers a valuable way to predict which countries are most likely to be concerned about their position and therefore adopt costly, excessive policies.
The Price of Racial Reconciliation
Ronald W. Walters
University of Michigan Press, 2008
“In The Price of Racial Reconciliation, Ronald Walters offers an abundance of riches. This book provides an extraordinarily comprehensive and persuasive set of arguments for reparations, and will be the lens through which meaningful opportunities for reconciliation are viewed in the future. If this book does not lead to the success of the reparations movement, nothing will.”
—Charles J. Ogletree, Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
“The Price of Racial Reconciliation is a seminal study of comparative histories and race(ism) in the formation of state structures that prefigure(d) socioeconomic positions of Black peoples in South Africa and the United States. The scholarship is meticulous in brilliantly constructed analysis of the politics of memory, reparations as an immutable principle of justice, imperative for nonracial(ist) democracy, and a regime of racial reconciliation.”
—James Turner, Professor of African and African American Studies and Founder, Africana Studies and Research Center, Cornell University
“A fascinating and pathbreaking analysis of the attempt at racial reconciliation in South Africa which asks if that model is relevant to the contemporary American racial dilemma. An engaging multidisciplinary approach relevant to philosophy, sociology, history, and political science.”
—William Strickland, Associate Professor of Political Science, W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst
The issue of reparations in America provokes a lot of interest, but the public debate usually occurs at the level of historical accounting: “Who owes what for slavery?” This book attempts to get past that question to address racial restitution within the framework of larger societal interests. For example, the answer to the “why reparations?” question is more than the moral of payment for an injustice done in the past. Ronald Walters suggests that, insofar as the impact of slavery is still very much with us today and has been reinforced by forms of postslavery oppression, the objective of racial harmony will be disrupted unless it is recognized with the solemnity and amelioration it deserves. The author concludes that the grand narrative of black oppression in the United States—which contains the past and present summary of the black experience—prevents racial reconciliation as long as some substantial form of racial restitution is not seriously considered. This is “the price” of reconciliation.
The method for achieving this finding is grounded in comparative politics, where the analyses of institutions and political behaviors are standard approaches. The author presents the conceptual difficulties involved in the project of racial reconciliation by comparing South African Truth and Reconciliation and the demand for reparations in the United States.
Ronald Walters is Distinguished Leadership Scholar and Director, African American Leadership Program and Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland.
The Price of Safety
Hidden Costs and Unintended Consequences for Women in the Domestic Violence Service SystemSara Shoener
Vanderbilt University Press, 2017
Through detailed observations of services such as court procedures, public benefits processes, and community-based IPV programs as well as in-depth interviews with dozens of IPV survivors and practitioners, Shoener describes how our current institutional response to IPV is often not useful--and sometimes quite harmful--for IPV survivors with the least material, social, and cultural capital to spare. For these women, as the interviews vividly record, IPV has long-term economic and social consequences, disrupting career paths and creating social isolation.
The Price of Three Stories
Rare Folktales from JapanHiroko Fujita & Fran Stallings
Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2015
“This delightful compendium of short, savory, and highly tellable tales embodies the beliefs and folkways of rural Japan—specifically the area most impacted by the recent tsunami and nuclear disaster. It adds immeasurably to our insight into that endangered world.”
—Joseph Sobol, Ph.D., director, ETSU Storytelling Graduate Program
The Robotic Imaginary
The Human and the Price of Dehumanized LaborJennifer Rhee
University of Minnesota Press, 2018
Tracing the connections between human-like robots and AI at the site of dehumanization and exploited labor
The word robot—introduced in Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R.—derives from rabota, the Czech word for servitude or forced labor. A century later, the play’s dystopian themes of dehumanization and exploited labor are being played out in factories, workplaces, and battlefields. In The Robotic Imaginary, Jennifer Rhee traces the provocative and productive connections of contemporary robots in technology, film, art, and literature. Centered around the twinned processes of anthropomorphization and dehumanization, she analyzes the coevolution of cultural and technological robots and artificial intelligence, arguing that it is through the conceptualization of the human and, more important, the dehumanized that these multiple spheres affect and transform each other.
Drawing on the writings of Alan Turing, Sara Ahmed, and Arlie Russell Hochschild; such films and novels as Her and The Stepford Wives; technologies like Kismet (the pioneering “emotional robot”); and contemporary drone art, this book explores anthropomorphic paradigms in robot design and imagery in ways that often challenge the very grounds on which those paradigms operate in robotics labs and industry. From disembodied, conversational AI and its entanglement with care labor; embodied mobile robots as they intersect with domestic labor; emotional robots impacting affective labor; and armed military drones and artistic responses to drone warfare, The Robotic Imaginary ultimately reveals how the human is made knowable through the design of and discourse on humanoid robots that are, paradoxically, dehumanized.
The Visibility Bind
Being Seen, Getting Paid, and Paying the Price of Social Media SuccessBrooke Erin Duffy
University of Chicago Press, 0
A revelatory look at the people, platforms, and power struggles shaping work in the creator economy.
More than two decades after YouTube first invited scrappy amateurs to “broadcast yourself,” social media content creation has transformed into one of the fastest growing labor markets. Today, some two hundred million people work as platform-dependent content creators, influencers, or streamers. Social media platforms boldly tout the rewards of the digital creator economy: independence, flexibility, and the chance to convert one’s ingenuity into cash. Yet the image of work in this entrepreneurial Promised Land conceals a starker reality—one marked by labor precarity, exploitation, and entrenched structural inequalities.
In this essential work, award-winning communication scholar Brooke Erin Duffy analyzes the paradox of the “visibility bind.” On the one hand, labor devaluation and algorithmic suppression—where unseen forces and so-called “shadowbans” bury worker output—threaten to render creators invisible. On the other, excessive visibility introduces harms of its own, from scrutiny and surveillance to networked harassment. For creators at the margins—among them, creators of color, LGBTQ+ voices, and disability advocates—the bind is especially pronounced, belying the promise of a talent meritocracy.
Drawing on extensive, in-depth interviews and more than a decade of insight, Duffy situates creators’ experiences within the broader landscapes of self-commodification and platform capitalism. But while platforms hold immense power to structure the pathways to success, creators and influencers wield newfound sway in this high-stakes visibility game. They are organizing, building solidarity, and experimenting with new forms of labor consciousness.
Refuting conventional wisdom about creator careers, Duffy illuminates the hidden labor dynamics for a class of workers shaping everything from culture and commerce to civil liberties and geopolitical conflict. The Visibility Bind reveals the price and perils for anyone who “puts themselves out there.”