" Squeezed weaves together intimate reporting with sharp and lively critique to show how the high cost of parenthood and our increasingly unstable job market have imploded the middle-class American Dream for many families, and offers surprising solutions for how we might change things Families today are squeezed on every side--from high childcare costs and harshemployment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular working hours. Many realize that attaining the standard of living their parents managed has become impossible. Alissa Quart, executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, examines the lives of many middle-class Americans who can now barely afford to raise children. Through gripping firsthand storytelling, Quart shows how our country has failed its families. Her subjects--from professors to lawyers to caregivers to nurses--have been wrung out by a system that doesn't support them, and enriches only a tiny elite. Interlacing her own experience with close-up reporting on families that are just getting by, Quart reveals parenthood itself to be financially overwhelming, except for the wealthiest. She offers real solutions to these problems, including outlining necessary policy shifts, as well as detailing the DIY tactics some families are already putting into motion, and argues for the cultural reevaluation of parenthood and caregiving. Written in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich and Jennifer Senior, Squeezedis an eye-opening page-turner. Powerfully argued, deeply reported, and ultimately hopeful,itcasts a bright, clarifying light on families struggling to thrive in an economy that holds too few options. It will make readers think differently about their lives and those of their neighbors"--

"We have always believed that Queen Victoria defined the mores of the nineteenth century. Yet Peter Gay, one of our most eminent cultural historians, asserts in this radical work that it is the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), the most influential Austrian writer of his time, who provides a better symbol for the age." "In a set of nine closely linked chapters, each focusing on major topics of bourgeois life, Gay synthesizes three decades of far-ranging research, presenting a lucid reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century middle class - its passions, politics, religion, and anxieties - that we can only think we know well. Extending his examination back to 1815, at the close of the age of Napoleon, Gay chronicles a hundred-year period that witnessed not only the emergence of the middle class but also the birth of a culture that remains vital today. Throughout Schnitzler's Century, he does justice to the complexity of the era, showing that there was superstition as well as science, cruelty as well as humanity, anxiety as well as Eros. But digging deep into bourgeois life all the way from Philadelphia to Moscow, London to Rome, he has recognized a general Victorian style through the Western world, however colored each country was by characteristic local habits." "Schnitzler's Century is not revision for its own sake, but for the sake of the truth about the past. With the daring Viennese playwright Arthur Schnitzler as his companion, Gay provides startling perspectives on once-familiar subjects. Schnitzler's Century provides astonishing insights into an age that made us largely what we are today."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved