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Private foundations have been the dynamo of social change since their invention at the beginning of the last century. Yet just over 10 percent of the public knows they even exist; and for those who are aware of them, as well as even those who seek grants from them, their internal workings remain a complete mystery

This is a beautiful description of Helen Keller's discoveries as she learns to appreciate, through the sense of touch, the world around her. Loss of sight and hearing only increase her joy of life and its treasures.

Climate change is with us, and we need to think about the next big disturbing idea - the potentially disastrous consequences of massive numbers of environmental refugees at large on the planet. In 2020, the United Nations projects that we will have 50 million environmental refugees mostly from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. How will people be relocated and settled? Is it possible to offer environmental refugees temporary or permanent asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit?

The United States remains the only industrialized nation in the world that does not provide paid family leave at the national level for either men or women. In the more than two decades since the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, there have been numerous unsuccessful attempts to expand family leave benefits nationally. However, in the United States, it is common for innovations in family policies to arise at the state level.

Government aid doesn't always go where it's supposed to. Foster care agencies team up with companies to take disability and survivor benefits from abused and neglected children. States and their revenue consultants use illusory schemes to siphon Medicaid funds intended for children and the poor into general state coffers. Child support payments for foster children and families on public assistance are converted into government revenue. And the poverty industry keeps expanding.

Unusual Punishment details the explosive story of failed reform at one Washington State penitentiary as well as the complex, challenging, and painful path back from chaos.

In a Queer Voice continues the critical conversation about LGBTQ youth issues - from bullying and suicide to other risks involving drug and alcohol abuse - by focusing on the factors that help young people develop positive, self-affirming identities. Using the participants' heartfelt, impassioned voices, we hear what schools, families, and communities can do to help LGBTQ youth become resilient, confident adults.

What government touches, it breaks. So why do we ask it to solve our most pressing and personal issues: abortion, schools, guns, and marriage? Has its failures with VA hospitals, the war on drugs, farm subsidies, the IRS, NSA leaks, and the war on poverty given us any reason to trust them? Yet we still do. Over and over. Because we think there's no alternative.

Just as the industrial capitalism of the 19th century gave way to corporate capitalism in the 20th, recent decades have witnessed corporate capitalism evolving into a new phase, which Ehrenreich calls "Third Wave Capitalism." Third Wave Capitalism is marked by apparent contradictions: Rapid growth in productivity and lagging wages; fabulous wealth for the one percent and the persistence of high levels of poverty; increases in the standard of living and increases in mental illness, and much more.

Right to DREAM makes a compelling argument for the DREAM Act and comprehensive immigration reform. William A. Schwab explores the key issues surrounding this legislation: What are the issues that divide? What do the proponents and opponents of the DREAM Act argue? Is there a middle ground? Is compromise possible?

America searched for an answer to "The Labor Question" during the Progressive Era in an effort to avoid the unrest and violence that flared so often in the late 19th and early 20th century.

After John R. Patrick's career at IBM, he took a seat on the board of a teaching hospital. He was surprised to learn how hospitals and physicians lagged at adopting information technology, and was appalled at the needless complexity of healthcare delivery processes. Instead of shaking his head and walking away, Patrick took action.

The American system is broken: our great nation has become corrupt, inefficient, and mired in ideological debate. The United States may be a global superpower, but every day we fail our own citizens. Our children do not learn what they need to in order to compete in the job market; our adults battle mental illness and addiction, and are imprisoned at staggering rates; and our elderly struggle for financial security and affordable healthcare.

Chelette, a trainer, coach, and speaker imparts her proprietary strategies that can take any woman from being overwhelmed to awesome. She deduces that women can have it all, just not at the same time. Instead she offers her original concept of ego-RHYTHM, which allows women to delve into defining what is most important during their various stages of life, then teaches them how to set a main focus, re-structure their lives for better work-life balance, and put an end to the crazy-making lifestyle.

Many believe that the War on Poverty, launched by President Johnson in 1964, ended in failure. In 2010, the official poverty rate was 15 percent, almost as high as when the War on Poverty was declared. Historical and contemporary accounts often portray the War on Poverty as a costly experiment that created doubts about the ability of public policies to address complex social problems. Legacies of the War on Poverty, drawing from fifty years of empirical evidence, documents that this popular view is too negative.

A collection of 19 essays on the constitutional, moral, philosophical, and practical aspects of the U.S. government's failed War on Drugs. For Vance, the fundamental issue in drug regulation is individual rights. He does not at all deny that these drugs can cause great harm; but the issue of regulation is not to be settled by balancing the benefits and harms of open access to drugs against the benefits and harms of their regulation or prohibition.

Over the past three decades, the contours of American social, economic, and political life have changed dramatically. The post-war patterns of broadly distributed economic growth have given way to stark inequalities of income and wealth, the GOP and its allies have gained power and shifted U.S. politics rightward, and the role of government in the lives of Americans has changed fundamentally. Remaking America explores how these trends are related, investigating the complex interactions of economics, politics, and public policy.

Congress passed it. President Obama signed it into law. The Supreme Court has ruled it constitutional. And Obama's re-election virtually ensures the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, will be implemented in full, with the prospects of wholesale repeal all but impossible. In fact, many provisions of the new law are already becoming a reality with major new regulations set to start soon.

A new group of Americans is challenging the reign of the Religious Right. Today, nearly one in five Americans are nonbelievers - a rapidly growing group at a time when traditional Christian churches are dwindling in numbers - and they are flexing their muscles like never before. Yet we still see almost none of them openly serving in elected office, while Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, and many others continue to loudly proclaim the myth of America as a Christian nation.

The crash of a U.S. reconnaissance plane into the Colombian jungle on February 13, 2003, set off a series of events that, five years later, would bring three South American countries on a collision course toward war, pit a giant government contractor against its employer - the U.S. government - and catapult a 40-year-old guerrilla army to the international stage as one of the most active and successful terrorist organizations in the world.