Category

Sociology

How societies sort people, and how they change. Isabel Wilkerson's Caste and Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us examine racial hierarchy in America; Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation shows how schools reproduce inequality, and Jeannette Walls's memoir The Glass Castle shows poverty from inside a family. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed are classics of social thought, Annie Ernaux's The Years tracks a generation's changing world, and David Wallace-Wells's The Uninhabitable Earth asks what climate change will do to society. For readers who want to understand the forces behind everyday life.