Bandon Public Library

"Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? How did the legalization of abortion affect the rate of violent crime? These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much-heralded scholar who studies the riddles of everyday life--from...

The novel "Little Dorrit", published originally between 1855 and 1857, is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period. Much of Dickens' ire is focused upon the institutions of debtor's prisons-in which people who owed money were imprisoned, unable to work, until they have repaid their debts. The representative prison in this case is the Marshalsea where the author's own father had been imprisoned. Most of Dickens'...

What are the differences in how your grandmother, your mother, and your daughter experience the world? Compare the story of your grandmother's first date with you mother's, your mother's volunteer work with your own career, your great-grandmother's education and expectations with those of a teen today. The women in this landmark work of oral history are from diverse ethnic, geographic, and social backgrounds, and they tell stories about all aspects...

A major collection of Harlan Ellison's incomparable, troublemaking, uncompromising, confrontational essays and newspaper columns, The Harlan Ellison Hornbook mines deep into the author's colorful past. Failed love affairs, departed pets, a defense of comic books-in lesser hands, these subjects would be pabulum or treacle. When Harlan Ellison is behind the typewriter, the mundane becomes an all-out intellectual brawl. Emotionally moving and verbally...

A journalist explores the homogenization of American culture and the impact of the fast food industry on modern-day health, economy, politics, popular culture, entertainment, and food production.

This early work by G. K. Chesterton was originally published in 1908. Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in 1874. He studied at the Slade School of Art, and upon graduating began to work as a freelance journalist. Over the course of his life, his literary output was incredibly diverse and highly prolific, ranging from philosophy and ontology to art criticism and detective fiction. However, he is probably best-remembered for his Christian...

"Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis--that of white working-class Americans. 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, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you...

"A critical assessment of feminism today by the founding editor and creative director of Bitch magazine draws on the stories of institutions and everyday women to illuminate how feminism has been compromised by market forces, subversive politics and popular culture, sharing strategic recommendations for how to reverse marginalizing trends,"--NoveList.

Hilda Ransome's well-documented and copiously illustrated study of bees points out that no creature has provided man with so much wholesome food; nor has any inspired so many beliefs and superstitions. Illustrations depict bees, hives, and beekeepers as they appear in paintings and sculpture, on coins, jewelry, and Mayan glyphs; and carved into African tree trunks. Chapters cover the folklore of bees and bee culture - from Egyptian, Babylonian, and...

Pure, hundred-proof distillation of Ellison. A righteous verbal high. Here you will find twenty of his very best stories and essays, including the four-part 'Scenes from the Real World," an anecdotal history of the doomed TV series, The Starlost, that he created for NBC; "Tales from the Mountains of Madness"; and his hilariously brutal reportage on the three most important things in life, sex, violence, and labor relations. With an absolutely killer...