Selected by the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment Library University of California, Berkeley

• Published date: 01 October 2015
• Date: 01 October 2015
• Author: Terence K. Huwe,Janice Kimball
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12114

Recent Publications

Selected by the Institute for Research on Labor and

Employment Library University of California, Berkeley

TERENCE K. HUWE, Director of Library & Information Resources

JANICE KIMBALL, Library Assistant

Boom Towns: Restoring the Urban American Dream. Stephen J. K.

Walters. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. 978-0-

8047-8163-3. 224 pp. $27.95.

The author charts the constantly changing fortunes of American cities, drawing a direct con-

nection between Detroit’s years of decline and the resurgence of other cities such as San

Francisco, New York, and Boston. He argues that widely accepted explanations for urban

decay do not tell the complete story of the nature of cities. Instead, he reframes them as

dense “capital accumulations.”Cities attract people by making their labor more productive

and their leisure more pleasurable, he asserts. He further suggests that policymakers need to

focus more closely on how to define and enforce property rights as a way to preserve capital

and avoid its flight. Alongside these arguments in favor of ownership and capital preserva-

tion, Walters also asserts that public policy measures that aim to revitalize can often do more

harm than good.

Class Lives: Stories from across Our Economic Divide. Chuck Collins,

Jennifer Ladd, Maynard Seider, and Felice Yeskel. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 2014. 978-0-8014-5328-1. 224 pp. $75.00.

This collection of forty essays pulls together authors that represent a range of classes,

genders, races, ethnicities, ages, and occupations across the United States. The contributors

describe their individual class journeys in narrative form, sharing one or two key stories that

draw out awareness of their growing sense of class and their own place, changing or stable,

within the prevailing class system. Taken as a whole, this volume provides a thorough explo-

ration of the experience of class and the importance of increasing general awareness of class

cultures and the intersections of class, race, and gender.

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, Vol. 54, No. 4 (October 2015). ©2015 Regents of the University of California

Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington

Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

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