Sociology Faculty Books

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  Unraveling Time: Thirty Years of Ethnography in Cuenca, Ecuador

  Ann M. Miles

  Ann Miles has been chronicling life in the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca for more than thirty years. In that time, she has witnessed change after change. A large regional capital where modern trains whisk residents past historic plazas, Cuenca has invited in the world and watched as its own citizens risk undocumented migration abroad. Families have arrived from rural towns only to then be displaced from the gentrifying city center. Over time, children have been educated, streetlights have made neighborhoods safer, and remittances from overseas have helped build new homes and sometimes torn people apart. Roads now connect people who once were far away, and talking or texting on cell phones has replaced hanging out at the corner store. Unraveling Time traces the enduring consequences of political and social movements, transnational migration, and economic development in Cuenca. Miles reckons with details that often escape less committed observers, suggesting that we learn a good deal more when we look back on whole lives. Practicing what she calls an ethnography of accrual, Miles takes a long view, where decades of seemingly disparate experiences coalesce into cultural transformation. Her approach not only reveals what change has meant in a major Latin American city but also serves as a reflection on ethnography itself.

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  Secularization, Desecularization, and Toleration: Cross-Disciplinary Challenges to a Modern Myth

  Vyacheslav G. Karpov

  This book challenges the modern myth that tolerance grows as societies become less religious. The myth inseparably links the progress of toleration to the secularization of modern society. This volume scrutinizes this grand narrative theoretically and empirically, and proposes alternative accounts of the varied relationships between diverse interpretations of religion and secularity and multiple secularizations, desecularizations, and forms of toleration. The authors show how both secular and religious orthodoxies inform toleration and persecution, and how secularizations and desecularizations engender repressive or pluralistic regimes. Ultimately, the book offers an agency-focused perspective which links the variation in toleration and persecution to the actors of secularization and desecularization and their cultural programs.

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  Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes (Critical Issues in Crime and Society)

  Ronald C. Kramer and Rob White

  Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes analyzes the looming threats posed by climate change from a criminological perspective. It advances the field of green criminology through a examination of the criminal nature of catastrophic environmental harms resulting from the release of greenhouse gases. The book describes and explains what corporations in the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. government, and the international political community did, or failed to do, in relation to global warming. Carbon Criminals, Climate Crimes integrates research and theory from a wide variety of disciplines, to analyze four specific state-corporate climate crimes: continued extraction of fossil fuels and rising carbon emissions; political omission (failure) related to the mitigation of these emissions; socially organized climate change denial; and climate crimes of empire, which include militaristic forms of adaptation to climate disruption. The final chapter reviews policies that could mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, adapt to a warming world, and achieve climate justice.

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  Spatial Policing: The Influence of Time, Space, and Geography on Law Enforcement Practices

  Charles E. Crawford

  The inner city, rural community, border town, and the college campus. Each of these terms reflects a unique space. For citizens and police officers, these spaces may seem familiar and welcoming to some, or represent a dangerous foreign place to others even though they may be only blocks or a few miles apart. The exploration of the spatial differences raises important questions: what is it about an area of the city that makes it unsafe? How does race and ethnicity become enmeshed in a space? Why do the police act, speak, and patrol so differently across segments of the city and with different groups in these spaces? At their core these questions all show an awareness of the power of space. This new edition of Spatial Policing continues the fascinating look at how the context of space influences policing.Two new chapters to the second edition include Policing Cyberspace and Policing Borders. Additionally, each of the original chapters has been updated and discusses the most relevant current issues for space and law enforcement from urban settings, to rural, to the space of minorities, and surveillance in the city. Each environment represents a unique challenge for individual officers, departments, and their enforcement efforts in our society. Recognizing how space is used and defined provides the missing context that conditions the interactions between citizens and the police, and is the foundation of Spatial Policing.Each chapter in Spatial Policing is written by leading experts in law enforcement, spatial, and cultural issues in criminal justice providing a highly readable text, and offers an in-depth discussion of theory, legal issues, research findings, as well as real world examples of the most important spatial contexts for police actions.

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  On the Frontlines of the Welfare State: How the Fire Service and Police Shape Social Problems

  Barry Goetz

  Although public safety agencies protect our well-being, they also shape social problems and community inequities.

  Public safety protections promote what T.H. Marshall called "social rights" of equitable citizenship. Frontlines of Welfare State shows how public safety agencies function as welfare state agencies, responsible for a range of essential public functions including emergency service, criminal investigation, regulatory oversight and social service outreach. Furthermore, this volume shows how public safety agencies are being asked to absorb more social welfare functions amidst cut-backs in other areas of the welfare state. Two areas of public safety are examined: arson control and fire prevention, especially within the contexts of urban change and gentrification, and community policing, especially as a mechanism of expanding drug treatment service and prevention programs.

  Facilitating a greater understanding of institutional biases within the state built around organizational structures, procedures and cultures and their impact on social outcomes, this original and exciting book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners and undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of Policing and Fire Control, Public Policy and Administration, Drugs and Substance Abuse and White Collar Crime.

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  Teaching Criminology at the Intersection: A How-To Guide for Teaching about Gender, Race, Class and Sexuality

  Rebecca M. Hayes, Kate Luther, and Susan Caringella

  Teaching about gender, race, social class and sexuality in criminal justice and criminology classrooms can be challenging. Professors may face resistance when they ask students to examine how gender impacts victimization, how race affects interactions with the police, how socioeconomic status shapes experiences in court or how sexuality influences treatment in the criminal justice system. Teaching Criminology at the Intersection is an instructional guide to support faculty as they navigate teaching these topics.

  Bringing together the experience and knowledge of expert scholars, this book provides time-strapped academics with an accessible how-to guide for the classroom, where the dynamics and discrimination of gender, race, class and sexuality demographics intersect and permeate criminal justice concerns. In the book, the authors of each chapter discuss how they teach a particular contemporary criminal justice issue and provide their suggestions for best practice, while grounding their ideas in pedagogical theory. Chapters end with a toolkit of recommended activities, assignments, films, readings or websites.

  As a teaching handbook, Teaching Criminology at the Intersection is appropriate reading for graduate level criminology, criminal justice and women’s and gender studies teaching instruction courses and as background reading and reference for instructors in these disciplines.

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  Living with Lupus: Women and Chronic Illness in Ecuador

  Ann Miles

  Once associated only with the wealthy and privileged in Latin America, lifelong illnesses are now emerging among a wider cross section of the population as an unfortunate consequence of growing urbanization and increased life expectancy. One of these diseases is the chronic autoimmune disorder lupus erythematosus. Difficult to diagnose and harder still to effectively manage, lupus challenges the very foundations of women's lives, their real and imagined futures, and their carefully constructed gendered identities. While the illness is validated by medical science, it is poorly understood by women, their families, and their communities, which creates multiple tensions as women attempt to make sense of an unpredictable, expensive, and culturally suspect medically managed illness. Living with Lupus vividly chronicles the struggles of Ecuadorian women as they come to terms with the experience of debilitating chronic illness. Drawing on years of ethnographic research, Ann Miles sensitively portrays the experiences and stories of Ecuadorian women who suffer with the intractable and stigmatizing disease. She uses in-depth case histories, rich in ethnographic detail, to explore not only how chronic illness can tear at the seams of women's precarious lives, but also how meanings are reconfigured when a biomedical illness category moves across a cultural landscape. One of the few books that deals with the meanings and experiences of chronic illness in the developing world, Living with Lupus contributes to our understanding of a significant global health transition.

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  A Guide to Surviving a Career in Academia : Navigating the Rites of Passage

  Emily Lenning, Sara Brightman, and Susan Caringella

  Navigating an academic career is a complex process – to be successful requires mastering several 'rites of passage.' This comprehensive guide takes academics at all stages of their career through a journey, beginning at graduate school and ending with retirement.

  A Guide to Surviving a Career in Academiais written from a feminist perspective, and draws on the information offered in workshops conducted at national meetings like the American Society of Criminology and the Society for the Study of Social Problems. Through the course of the book, an expert team of authors guide you through the obstacle course of finding effective mentors during graduate school, finding a job, negotiating a salary, teaching, collaborating with practitioners, successfully publishing, earning tenure and redressing denial and, finally, retirement.

  This collection is a must read for all academics, but especially women just beginning their careers, who face unique challenges when navigating through these age-old rites of passage.

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  Harmony and War : Confucian Culture and Chinese Power Politics

  Yuan-Kang Wang

  Confucianism has shaped a certain perception of Chinese security strategy, symbolized by the defensive, nonaggressive Great Wall. Many believe China is antimilitary and reluctant to use force against its enemies. It practices pacifism and refrains from expanding its boundaries, even when nationally strong.

  In a path-breaking study traversing six centuries of Chinese history, Yuan-kang Wang resoundingly discredits this notion, recasting China as a practitioner of realpolitik and a ruthless purveyor of expansive grand strategies. Leaders of the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) prized military force and shrewdly assessed the capabilities of China's adversaries. They adopted defensive strategies when their country was weak and pursued expansive goals, such as territorial acquisition, enemy destruction, and total military victory, when their country was strong. Despite the dominance of an antimilitarist Confucian culture, warfare was not uncommon in the bulk of Chinese history. Grounding his research in primary Chinese sources, Wang outlines a politics of power that are crucial to understanding China's strategies today, especially its policy of "peaceful development," which, he argues, the nation has adopted mainly because of its military, economic, and technological weakness in relation to the United States.

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  Spatial Policing: The Influence of Time, Space, and Geography on Law Enforcement Practices

  Charles E. Crawford

  The ghetto, the block, neighborhood, community, and hot spot are all terms that capture a particular space or a familiar location for citizens and law enforcement officers. These spaces may appear welcoming to some, or send waves of fear into others who have to enter. What is it about an area of the city that makes it a hot spot for crime at night? Why do the police act, speak, and patrol so differently across segments of the city? At their core these questions all show an awareness of the power of space. Spatial Policing is a fascinating look at how the contexts of space, location, and time influence law enforcement, which can result in differential treatment and controversial patrol practices. Each chapter in Spatial Policing, written by leading experts in law enforcement, spatial, and cultural issues in criminal justice provides a highly readable text, and offers an in depth discussion of theory, research findings, as well as real world examples of the most important spatial contexts for police actions. Spatial Policing explores in rich detail the numerous contexts of space, from urban settings, to rural, to the space of minorities, and international borders to examine how each represents a unique challenge for individual officers, departments, and their patrol efforts in our society. Recognizing how space is used and defined as well as how it conditions the interactions between citizens and the police is at the heart of Spatial Policing. Ultimately, for law enforcement, space matters.

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  Addressing Rape Reform in Law and Practice

  Susan Caringella

  The first comprehensive book on rape since Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will and Susan Estrich's Real Rape, this volume probes every aspect of rape law and the discrepancies between ideal law (on the books) and real law (in action). Susan Caringella canvasses the success and failure of reform in the United States, as well as Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, and assesses alternative perspectives on rape reform, making use of theoretical models, court cases and statistical data. She uniquely delineates a creative model for change while addressing the discretion that undermines efforts at change. This includes charging the accused and plea bargaining, confronting a lack of transparency and accountability in implementing law, and acquiring funding for such changes.

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  What If Medicine Disappeared?

  Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea

  In this thought-provoking book, sociologists Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea ask what would happen if Western medicine were to disappear. Using a rigorous and imaginative method--a thought experiment--Markle and McCrea evaluate medicine's impact on mortality and our national health. They examine various aspects of medicine, such as primary care, surgery, emergency medicine, pharmaceuticals, and mental illness treatment, and convincingly point out the problems that health care actually causes. Supporting their ideas with statistics and studies from medical and social science literature, Markle and McCrea argue that the medical model, despite its tremendous budget and hype, accomplishes far less than most would think. Their conclusions should promote critical review and lively discussion among medical consumers as well as among health care professionals and policy makers. *from the back cover

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  Discovering the Peoples of Michigan Reader

  Lewis Walker

  The DPOM Reader provides brief synopses for the first twenty-four books in the acclaimed Discovering the Peoples of Michigan series. Meant to be used as an overview and teaching tool for the series, this Reader provides a valuable entre into the Discovering the Peoples of Michigan Series, revealing the unique contributions that have been made by different and often unrecognized communities in Michigan's historical social identity

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  East Asia and the Global Economy: Japan's Ascent, with Implications for China's Future

  Stephen Bunker and Paul Ciccantell

  After World War II, Japan reinvented itself as a shipbuilding powerhouse and began its rapid ascent in the global economy. Its expansion strategy integrated raw material procurement, the redesign of global transportation infrastructure, and domestic industrialization. In this authoritative and engaging study, Stephen G. Bunker and Paul S. Ciccantell identify the key factors in Japan’s economic growth and the effects this growth had on the reorganization of significant sectors of the global economy.

  Bunker and Ciccantell discuss what drove Japan’s economic expansion, how Japan globalized the work economy to support it, and why this spectacular growth came to a dramatic halt in the 1990s. Drawing on studies of ore mining, steel making, corporate sector reorganization, and port/rail development, they provide valuable insight into technical processes as well as specific patterns of corporate investment.

  East Asia and the Global Economy introduces a theory of "new historical materialism" that explains the success of Japan and other world industrial powers. Here, the authors assert that the pattern of Japan’s ascent is essential for understanding China’s recent path of economic growth and dominance and anticipating what the future may hold.

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  Mental Health among Taiwanese Americans: Gender, Immigration, and Transnational Struggles

  Chien-Juh Gu

  Gu examines how Taiwanese Americans' immigration background, gender, and relations in the family and workplace affect their mental health. She argues that Taiwanese Americans' experience of distress is not only gendered but also transnational. Men's and women's experiences differ, and transnational culture influences how they interpret their worlds. While work situations frustrate men, family life bothers women. Their identities are multiple and fluid, and they struggle with their American-ness and Chinese-ness in everyday life. Men feel excluded by the majority culture in the workplace because they are "too Chinese." Women, in contrast, wonder if they should follow Chinese or American norms in dealing with their families.

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  State-Corporate Crime: Wrongdoing at the Intersection of Business and Government

  Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer

  Enron, Haliburton, ExxonValdez, "shock and awe"-their mere mention brings forth images of scandal, collusion, fraud, and human and environmental destruction. While great power and great crimes have always been linked, media exposure in recent decades has brought increased attention to the devious exploits of economic and political elites.
  
  Despite growing attention to crimes by those in positions of trust, however, violations in business and similar wrongdoing in government are still often treated as fundamentally separate problems. In State-Corporate Crime, Raymond J. Michalowski and Ronald C. Kramer bring together fifteen essays to show that those in positions of political and economic power frequently operate in collaboration, and are often all too willing to sacrifice the well-being of the many for the private profit and political advantage of the few.
  
  Drawing on case studies including the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, Ford Explorer rollovers, the crash of Valujet flight 592, nuclear weapons production, and war profiteering, the essays bear frank witness to those who have suffered, those who have died, and those who have contributed to the greatest human and environmental devastations of our time. This book is a much needed reminder that the most serious threats to public health, security, and safety are not those petty crimes that appear nightly on local news broadcasts, but rather are those that result from corruption among the wealthiest and most powerful members of society.

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  Globalization and the Race for Resources

  Stephen G. Bunker and Paul Ciccantell

  Globalization and the Race for Resources explores how five nations―Portugal, the Netherlands, Britain, the United States, and Japan―achieved trade dominance by devising technologies, social and financial institutions, and markets to enhance their access to raw materials.

  Through ecological and economic explanation of resource extraction and production, Stephen G. Bunker and Paul S. Ciccantell reveal globalization as the result of the progressive extension of systematically integrated material processes across cumulatively greater space. Drawing from extensive historical research into how economic and environmental dynamics interacted in the extraction of different materials in the Amazon, especially in the development of the iron mine of Carajas, the authors also illustrate the profound connection between global dominance and control of natural resources.

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  Nature, Raw Materials, and Political Economy

  Paul Ciccantell, David A. Smith, and Gay Seidman

  The papers in this volume push the study of the multifaceted nature-society relationship and the socioeconomic consequences of human dependence on nature forward in a variety of areas. In the first section, Theoretical Foundations, the five chapters lay out theoretical models for examining the nature-society relationship. The chapters examine the roles of material process, space, and time in shaping social processes of economic ascent and long term hegemonic change, as well as the role of the analysis of raw materials in environmental sociology. In the second section, Commodities, Extraction and Frontiers, a series of case studies covering a range of industries, locations and historical periods present a variety of applications of the political economy of natural resources to critical issues regarding commodities, extraction and frontiers. The case study industries include oil, steel, transport, furs, sugar and Brazil nuts, and the chapters examine regions in Latin America, North America, and Asia. In the third section, Connecting Political and Economic Change, four chapters focus on the relationship between raw materials, economic change, and socioeconomic change. relationship between political and economic change in Latin America and Africa.

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  Over the wall/after the fall: post-communist cultures through an East-West gaze

  Elena Gapova, Sibelan Forrester, and Magdalena J. Zaborowska

  "... a hot subject in today's scholarship... and a groundbreaking project of vital significance to the field of cultural studies at both 'western' and 'eastern' geographical locations." --Elwira Grossman Over the Wall/After the Fall maps a new discourse on the evolution of cultural life in Eastern Europe following the end of communism. Departing from traditional binary views of East/West, the contributors to this volume consider the countries and the peoples of the region on their own terms. Drawing on insights from cultural studies, gender theory, and postcolonial studies, this lively collection addresses gender issues and sexual politics, consumerism, high and popular culture, architecture, media, art, and theater. Among the themes of the essays are the Western pop success of Bulgarian folk choirs, the Czechs' reception of Frank Gehry's unconventional building in the center of Prague, bohemians in Lviv, and cryptographic art installations from Bratislava.

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  From Cuenca to Queens: An Anthropological Story of Transnational Migration

  Ann Miles

  Transnational migration is a controversial and much-discussed issue in both the popular media and the social sciences, but at its heart migration is about individual people making the difficult choice to leave their families and communities in hopes of achieving greater economic prosperity. Vicente Quitasaca is one of these people. In 1995 he left his home in the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca to live and work in New York City. This anthropological story of Vicente's migration and its effects on his life and the lives of his parents and siblings adds a crucial human dimension to statistics about immigration and the macro impact of transnational migration on the global economy.

  Anthropologist Ann Miles has known the Quitasacas since 1989. Her long acquaintance with the family allows her to delve deeply into the factors that eventually impelled the oldest son to make the difficult and dangerous journey to the United States as an undocumented migrant. Focusing on each family member in turn, Miles explores their varying perceptions of social inequality and racism in Ecuador and their reactions to Vicente's migration. As family members speak about Vicente's new, hard-to-imagine life in America, they reveal how transnational migration becomes a symbol of failure, hope, resignation, and promise for poor people in struggling economies. Miles frames this fascinating family biography with an analysis of the historical and structural conditions that encourage transnational migration, so that the Quitasacas' story becomes a vivid firsthand illustration of this growing global phenomenon.

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  Measuring Access to Learning Opportunities

  Willis D. Hawley and Timothy Ready

  Since 1968 the Elementary and Secondary School Civil Rights Compliance Report (known as the E&S survey) has been used to gather information about possible disparities in access to learning opportunities and violations of students civil rights. Thirty-five years after the initiation of the E&S survey, large disparities remain both in educational outcomes and in access to learning opportunities and resources. These disparities may reflect violations of students civil rights, the failure of education policies and practices to provide students from all backgrounds with a similar educational experience, or both. They may also reflect the failure of schools to fully compensate for disparities and current differences in parents education, income, and family structure.

  The Committee on Improving Measures of Access to Equal Educational Opportunities concludes that the E&S survey continues to play an essential role in documenting these disparities and in providing information that is useful both in guiding efforts to protect students civil rights and for informing educational policy and practice. The committee also concludes that the surveys usefulness and access to the survey data could be improved.

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  Policing and Violence

  Ronald G. Burns and Charles E. Crawford

  This comprehensive, accurate, and timely account of police violence provides readers with a complete understanding of the concept and all that it entails—covering its history to future directions, and ten different areas of police violence. Each chapter in the reader addresses police violence as it is used by and against officers, and all highly competent contributing authors (including both practitioners and academics) have a strong background in the various areas. Chapter topics examine the research surrounding violent acts, the reasons officers feel justified in using excessive force, an account of situational factors affecting an officer's likelihood to use or be the victim of violence, measurements of deadly force, training issues, the importance of officer pursuits, violence and the community policing philosophy, and international rates of violent police-citizen encounters and the differences between countries. For use in the police academy—and by the ACLU, citizen action groups, and civilian review boards.

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  Achieving High Educational Standards for All

  National Research Council; Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education; Cognitive, and Sensory Sciences Board on Behavioral; Catherine E. Snow; Christopher Edley Jr.; and Timothy Ready

  This volume summarizes a range of scientific perspectives on the important goal of achieving high educational standards for all students. Based on a conference held at the request of the U.S. Department of Education, it addresses three questions: What progress has been made in advancing the education of minority and disadvantaged students since the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision nearly 50 years ago? What does research say about the reasons of successes and failures? What are some of the strategies and practices that hold the promise of producing continued improvements? The volume draws on the conclusions of a number of important recent NRC reports, including How People Learn, Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, Eager to Learn, and From Neurons to Neighborhoods, among others. It includes an overview of the conference presentations and discussions, the perspectives of the two co-moderators, and a set of background papers on more detailed issues.

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  Gendernye Istorii Vostochnoi Evropy

  Andrea Pető, Elena Gapova, and A. R. Usmanova

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  Black Eden: The Idlewild Community

  Lewis Walker and Benjamin C. Wilson

  Black Eden chronicles the history of Idlewild, a Michigan black community founded during the aftermath of the Civil War. As one of the nation’s most popular black resorts, Idlewild functioned as a gathering place for African Americans, and more importantly as a touchstone of black identity and culture. Benjamin C. Wilson and Lewis Walker examine Idlewild’s significance within a historical context, as well as the town’s revitalization efforts and the need for comprehensive planning in future development. In a segregated America, Idlewild became a place where black audiences could see rising black entertainers. Profusely illustrated with photos from the authors’ personal collections, Black Eden provides a lengthy discussion about the crucial role that Idlewild played in the careers of artists such as Louis Armstrong, B. B. King, Sammy Davis Jr., Jackie Wilson, Aretha Franklin, and Della Reese. Fundamentally, the book explores issues involved in living in a segregated society, the consequences of the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent integration, and the consequences of integration vs. racial solidarity. The authors ask: Did integration kill Idlewild?, suggesting rather that other factors contributed to its decline.