social stratification

"The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power--which groups have it and which do not. In this book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through a . . . narrative and stories about real people, how America . . . throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a . . . caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, [she] explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using . . . stories about people--including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball's Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others--she shows the ways that the . . . undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the . . . logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the . . . health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the . . . separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity"--Provided by the publisher.

"In the wake of a highly contagious virus, California is under quarantine. Sequestered in high rise towers, the living can't go out, but the dead can come in--and they come in all forms, from sad rolling cans to manufactured bodies that can pass for human. Wealthy participants in the 'companionship' program choose to upload their consciousness before dying, so they can stay in the custody of their families. The less fortunate are rented out to strangers upon their death, but all companions become the intellectual property of Metis Corporation, creating a new class of people--a command-driven product-class without legal rights or true free will."--Provided by publisher.

Argues that humans will have to keep pace with machines in order to become prosperous in the future and identifies strategies and policies for businesses and individuals to use to combine digital processing power with human ingenuity.

"Wilkerson [presents] . . . a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more, . . . shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day, . . . [and] points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity"--Provided by publisher.

Resurrected cyborg Alita, protector of a band of innocents in a utopian city where parents with artificial intelligence have begun hunting their children, faces off with a crazed, gigantic robot with the mind of a three-year-old.

Alita protests the bombing of innocent children by stealing the flags that lure them into combat, and she joins forces with some new allies to compete in a tournament where the hosts have less-than-friendly intentions.

Struggling to save Lou's brain from becoming a computer component, cyborg martial artist Alita battles a vampire in the rigged Zenith of Things tournament and later regains telling memories in Ketheres.

Argues that humans will have to keep pace with machines in order to become prosperous in the future and identifies strategies and policies for businesses and individuals to use to combine digital processing power with human ingenuity.

Explores the many ways in which inequality is structured within our society, along with the social mechanisms that support systems of inequality, and focuses on the consequences of stratification for individuals' lives and society as a whole.

"From the beloved award-winning author of Native Speaker and The Surrendered, a highly provocative, deeply affecting story of one woman's legendary quest in a shocking, future America. On Such a Full Sea takes Chang-rae Lee's elegance of prose, his masterly storytelling, and his long-standing interests in identity, culture, work, and love, and lifts them to a new plane. Stepping from the realistic and historical territories of his previous work, Lee brings us into a world created from scratch. Against a vividly imagined future America, Lee tells a stunning, surprising, and riveting story that will change the way readers think about the world they live in. In a future, long-declining America, society is strictly stratified by class. Long-abandoned urban neighborhoods have been repurposed as highwalled, self-contained labor colonies. And the members of the labor class-descendants of those brought over en masse many years earlier from environmentally ruined provincial China-find purpose and identity in their work to provide pristine produce and fish to the small, elite, satellite charter villages that ring the labor settlement. In this world lives Fan, a female fish-tank diver, who leaves her home in the B-Mor settlement (once known as Baltimore), when the man she loves mysteriously disappears. Fan's journey to find him takes her out of the safety of B-Mor, through the anarchic Open Counties, where crime is rampant with scant governmental oversight, and to a faraway charter village, in a quest that will soon become legend to those she left behind"--.