This film systematically resists conventional solutions to juvenile delinquency and poverty in order to dramatize the need for more radical solutions. Characters are treated pitilessly, not as ideas, but as morally responsible human beings. A study of street gangs, set in the outskirts of Mexico City; part social commentary, part surealistic art.

"Herbert Powyss lives in an estate in the Welsh Marches, with enough time and income to pursue a gentleman's fashionable investigations and experiments in botany. But he longs to make his mark in the field of science--something consequential enough to present to the Royal Society in London. He hits on a radical experiment in isolation: For seven years a subject will inhabit three rooms in the basement of the manor house, fitted out with rugs, books,...

Decay is unavoidable. It's everywhere around us, physically, socially, spiritually. In our crumbling inner cities and foreclosure-ravaged suburbs. In the widening chasms of our politics. In the erosion of the social contract that once governed how we treat each other. In our own aging bodies and diminishing ambitions. Decay is a powerfully meaningful subject in the context of Las Vegas, a city devoted to gleaming surfaces, the glamour of youth and...

Publisher's description: The Victorian age is much closer to us in time than we might believe. Yet at that time, in the most technologically advanced nation in the world, people buried meat in fresh earth to prevent mold forming and wrung sheets out in boiling water with their bare hands. Such household drudgery was routinely performed by the grandparents of people still living, but the knowledge of it has passed as if it had never been. Judith Flanders's...

"Great Expectations" is at once a superbly constructed novel of spellbinding mastery and a profound examination of moral values. Here, some of Dickens's most memorable characters come to play their part in a story whose title itself reflects the deep irony that shaped Dickens's searching reappraisal of the Victorian middle class.

Vance, a former marine and Yale Law School graduate, provides an account of growing up in a poor Rust Belt town that offers a broader, probing look at the struggles of America's white working class. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm. J.D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like...