ISSI Books

How to Sell a Poison: The Rise, Fall, and Toxic Return of DDT

Elena Conis
2022

By Elena Conis - The story of an infamous poison that left toxic bodies and decimated wildlife in its wake is also a cautionary tale about how corporations stoke the flames of science denialism for profit. The chemical compound DDT first earned fame during World War II by wiping out insects that caused disease and boosting Allied forces to victory. Americans granted it a hero’s homecoming, spraying it on everything from crops and livestock to cupboards and curtains. Then, in 1972, it was banned in the US. But decades after that, a cry arose to demand its return.

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Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

J. Bradford DeLong
2022

By J. Bradford DeLong - Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.

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Potholes in the Road: Transition Problems for Low-Income Youth in High School

Martín Sánchez-Jankowski
2022

By Martín Sánchez-Jankowski - Education has been increasingly lauded as the path to achieving the American Dream, and in this book Martín Sánchez-Jankowski uses extensive ethnographic research to explore the dynamics of the interrelated barriers that low-income students must surpass in order to make transitions successfully from high school to college. With rigor and compassion, and engaging in participant observation to examine how individual students confront the education system, Potholes in the Road shows how obstacles related to issues of structure,...

Consuelo Jimenez Underwood: Art, Weaving, Vision

Laura E. Pérez
Ann Marie Leimer
2022

By Laura E. Perez - Consuelo Jimenez Underwood’s artwork is marked by her compassionate and urgent engagement with a range of pressing contemporary issues, from immigration and environmental precarity to the resilience of Indigenous ancestral values and the necessity of decolonial aesthetics in art making. Drawing on the fiber arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s, Chicana feminist art, and Indigenous fiber- and loom-based traditions, Jimenez Underwood’s art encompasses needlework, weaving, painted and silkscreened pieces, installations, sculptures, and performance....

Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion in Silicon Valley

Carolyn Chen
2022

By Carolyn Chen - Silicon Valley is known for its lavish perks, intense work culture, and spiritual gurus. Work Pray Code explores how tech companies are bringing religion into the workplace in ways that are replacing traditional places of worship, blurring the line between work and religion and transforming the very nature of spiritual experience in modern life.