Differences That Matter or Kennedys

Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada

Author: Dan Zuberi

This book shines a spotlight on the causes and consequences of working poverty, revealing how the lives of low-wage workers are affected by differences in health care, labor, and social welfare policy in the United States and Canada. Dan Zuberi's conclusions are based on survey data, eighteen months of participant observation fieldwork, and in-depth interviews with seventy-seven hotel employees working in parallel jobs on both sides of the border. Two hotel chains, each with one union and one non-union hotel in Seattle and Vancouver, provide a vivid crossnational comparison because they are similar in so many regards, the one major exception being government policy.

Zuberi demonstrates how labor, health, social welfare, and public investment policy affect these hotel workers and their families. His book challenges the myth that globalization necessarily means hospitality jobs must be insecure and pay poverty wages and makes clear the critical role played by government policy in the reduction of poverty and creation of economic equality. Zuberi shows exactly where and how the social policies that distinguish the Canadian welfare state from the U.S. version make a difference in protecting Canadian workers from the hardships that burden low-wage workers in the United States. Differences that Matter, which is filled with first-person accounts, ends with policy recommendations and a call for grassroots community organizing.

About the Author:
Dan Zuberi is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of British Columbia.

New interesting textbook: A Walk in the Woods or Eyewitness Travel Rome

Kennedys: An American Drama

Author: Peter Collier

The Kennedys are the most photographed, written about, admired, hated and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing family members and people close to the Kennedys. An immediate classic, The Kennedys: An American Drama brings the story of four generations of "America's family" fully into view.

Collier and Horowitz capture the fiery ambition, the mythic identity, the dynastic ebb and flow, and the corrosive underside of Camelot that led one young Kennedy to say, "We broke the rules and in turn we were broken by them." The Kennedys is a fascinating and brilliantly comprehensive history that brings together, for the first and only time, all the complex strains of the story of the Kennedys' rise and fall. The authors have updated the story with new material showing the effect of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. and the other family tragedies of the last few years on the Kennedys and their mythic role in American life.

Table of Contents:

	Prologue	1
Part 1	Architect of Their Lives	5
Part 2	The Stand-In	117
Part 3	Brothers Within	231
Part 4	The Lost Boys	317
	Epilogue	405
	Afterword, 2001	414
	Bibliographic Note	424
	Reference Notes	429
	Index	514