A callous young hustler living in California finds his father has died and left him only rose bushes and a '49 Buick convertible. Feeling cheated out of what he thinks should be his 3 million dollar inheritance, he kidnaps the autistic brother he never knew he had, and takes him on the ride of his life.

During the 1990s the United States undertook the greatest social policy reform since the Social Security Act of 1935. In Welfare Reform: Effects of a Decade of Change, Jeffrey Grogger and Lynn Karoly assemble evidence from numerous studies, including nearly three dozen social experiments, to assess how welfare reform has affected behavior. To broaden our understanding of this wide-ranging policy reform, the authors evaluate the evidence in relation...

It is common knowledge that televised political ads are meant to appeal to voters' emotions, yet little is known about how or if these tactics actually work. Ted Brader's innovative book is the first scientific study to examine the effects that these emotional appeals in political advertising have on voter decision-making.  At the heart of this book are ingenious experiments, conducted by Brader during an election, with truly eye-opening results...

Fifty years after the US Supreme Court ruled that ""separate but equal"" was ""inherently unequal, "" Paul Street argues that little progress has been made to meaningful reform America's schools. In fact, Street considers the racial make-up of today's schools as a state of de facto apartheid. With an eye to historical development of segregated education, Street examines the current state of school funding and investigates disparities in teacher quality,...

Robert H. Jackson was one of the giants of the Roosevelt era: an Attorney General, a still revered Supreme Court Justice and, not least important, one of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's close friends and advisers. His intimate memoir of FDR, written in the early 1950s before Jackson's untimely death, has remained unpublished for fifty years. Here is that newly discovered memoir. Written with skill and grace, this is truly a unique account of the personality,...

A former Newsweek senior writer tells the story behind the scandal of Jayson Blair, a mediocre former Times reporter who had made up stories, faked datelines, and plagiarized on a massive scale, rocked the Times to its core and revealed fault lines in a fractious newsroom that was already close to open revolt. Staffers were furious about the shoddy reporting that was infecting the most revered newspaper in the world, and the executive editor who had...

A gay man in New York searches for love, respect, and tradition in a world that seems not especially made for him.