Stock Up on New Releases

Every CEO aims to deliver sustainable growth. But as the impacts of climate risk escalate, this challenge will intensify in the years ahead. To succeed, the board must enhance its sustainability fluency and own the climate agenda.

Navigating Sustainable Growth addresses anyone grappling with how leading companies can thrive in an emerging future that prioritizes decarbonization and dematerialization. With over 300 examples of practices by 180 leading global companies, this timely book explores two major themes:

• To deliver sustainable growth, companies cannot rely on strong financials alone. They must also demonstrate a track record of reducing negative impacts and creating value through sustainable offerings — and help suppliers and customers do the same.
• The board owns the critical 5-7-year planning horizon that is key to how successful companies create long-term value. As climate risks amplify, the short-term focus of most executive teams leads to missing new opportunities while facing new perils.

As a bonus, the book offers The Climate Story. This eight-step, data-rich synopsis explains how we arrived at this crossroads, and where it will take us.

This book will help investors, citizens, students, and educators discover proven strategies for sustainable growth; CEOs and corporate secretaries to reframe board agendas; and boards to measure performance and chart a course to transform climate risk into opportunity.

Take a road trip through deep time and California history, with a friendly expert geologist at the wheel.

From its epic earthquakes to its famed epithet "the Golden State," California as we know it would not exist without geology. Gary L. Prost, an expert geologist born and raised in California, embarked on a quest to better understand the state's rocky history. His road trips have culminated in Rocks and Riches, an accessible and entertaining look at the land that has shaped the lives of all Californians. With humor and abiding curiosity, Prost examines the workings of deep time, the fascinating and troubled legacies of the Gold Rush, and the ways geology continues to influence life in California today. Visiting 56 stops of geologic interest, he traverses the Marin and Sonoma coasts, the Central Valley, the Sierra Foothills, Yosemite, and the Basin and Range country, ending with an extended journey through Death Valley to meditate on the awe-inspiring intensity of California's deserts. Including dozens of illustrations and road maps, as well as guidance for fellow travelers, Rocks and Riches is both a practical handbook and an invitation to see California's landscapes with wonder.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

​Immigrant residents seeking legal status in the United States face a catch-22: the documents that they must present to immigration officials—bank records, paycheck stubs, and contracts in their own names—are often challenging for undocumented people to obtain. In this book, Susan Bibler Coutin analyzes how undocumented immigrants and the attorneys and paralegals who represent them attempt to surmount this and other documentary challenges. Based on four years of fieldwork and volunteer work in the legal services department of an immigrant-serving nonprofit and in-depth interviews with those seeking status, On the Record explores these complex dynamics by taking seriously both documents themselves and the legal craft that has developed around their use.

Diversity and racial integration efforts are not sufficient to address educational inequality

New York City schools are among the most segregated in the nation. Yet over seven decades after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, New Yorkers continue to argue about whether school segregation matters. Amid these debates, Alexandra Freidus dives deep into the roots of racial inequality in diversifying schools, asking how we can better understand both the opportunities and the limits of school diversity and integration.

Unequal Lessons is based on six years of observations and interviews with children, parents, educators, and district policymakers about the stakes of racial diversity in New York City schools. The book examines what children learn from diversity, exploring both the costs and benefits of school integration. By drawing on students’ first-hand experiences, Freidus makes the case that although a focus on diversity offers many benefits to students, it often reinscribes, rather than diminishes, existing inequalities in school policy and practice. The idea of diversity for its own sake is frequently seen as the solution, with students of color presumed to benefit from their experiences with white students, while schools fail to address structural inequality. Though educators and advocates often focus on diversity out of a real desire to make a positive difference in students’ lives, this book makes clear the gaps between good intentions and educational injustice.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

Leftover Women in China offers an intimate empirical and theoretical analysis of the lived experience and legal consciousness of China's "leftover women," women who remain unmarried in their late twenties and beyond. Drawing on in-depth interviews and focus groups, Qian Liu examines how leftover women—including women who prefer to remain single, those who are waiting for the right husband, and queer women—deal with parental and social pressures, as well as the denial of their right to have children outside of heterosexual marriage. Sensitively exploring the distinctive patterns of parent-child interactions in Chinese families, Liu invites readers to understand leftover women's observance, evasion, and manipulation of the law in the context of intergenerational relationships and obligations.

From an interdenominational group of preachers and scholars, a queer commentary to address recent concerns around LGBTQ+ rights.

This preaching resource features commentaries on every Sunday and feast day reading in the Revised Common Lectionary from an interdenominational group of scholars and homeleticians. Offering queer interpretations of biblical texts, the series will appeal to scholars of queer theology and will support preachers in crafting sermons that convey a message of liberation, rather than one that reinforces the power structures of the world. 

A Queer Lectionary features commentators from a variety of liturgical traditions, including clergy and scholars from the Episcopal Church, United Church of Christ, African Methodist Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Metropolitan Community Churches, and beyond. Written to enable preachers to engage with every assigned text, each volume features sermons that respond to every lesson in each lectionary entry. 

The first book to tell the whole story of SNAP and to explain why all Americans should support it.
 
The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program is the nation’s largest government effort for helping low-income Americans obtain an adequate diet. How did SNAP, formerly the food stamp program, evolve from a Depression-era project to use up surplus goods into America’s foundational food assistance program? And how does SNAP survive? Incisive and original, Why SNAP Works is the first book to provide a comprehensive history and evaluation of the nation’s most important food insecurity and poverty alleviation effort.
 
Everyone has an opinion about SNAP, not all of them positive, but its benefits are felt broadly and across party lines. Christopher Bosso makes a clear, nuanced, and impassioned case for protecting this unique food program, exploring its history and breaking down the facts for readers across the political spectrum. Why SNAP Works is an essential book for anyone concerned about food access, poverty, and social welfare in the United States.

How race and capitalism shape education

School choice programs—such as vouchers, education savings accounts, and tax credit scholarships—are surrounded by controversy, raising questions about their impact on student diversity and inequality. In this book, Ryane McAuliffe Straus takes up a core part of this divisive debate, exploring why charter schools are reshaping America’s education system—and democracy—for the worse.

Drawing on interviews with elected officials, policy entrepreneurs, parents, and activists in Albany, NY, Straus argues that charter schools are a poor alternative to failing public schools, ultimately worsening racial segregation under the guise of providing underprivileged students with access to better education. Taking a wide-ranging view, the author explores why parents, elected officials, and community activists may or may not choose to leave the public education system by enrolling their children in charter schools.

Straus finds that when families of color leave public schools in favor of charter schools this removes their democratic voice and participation, diminishing their political power in a high-stakes area of public policy. Divided by Choice highlights the fundamental flaws of one solution to public education inequalities, at a time when racial tensions are at an all-time high.

Why can’t we seem to agree on facts? In this brief volume, sociologist Joel Best turns his inimitable eye toward the social construction of facts. He evaluates how facts emerge from our social worlds—including our beliefs, values, tastes, and norms—and according to those worlds’ standards. By developing a sociological perspective towards what we think we know, he argues, we can better parse the use of facts and untruths around us.
 
This book examines how facts are created and supported through science, government, law, and journalism, revealing that facts are all claims. These claims are malleable and can change over time through fact-checking, revision, and sometimes rejection. Best guides us through these processes so that we can question our assumptions and understand why disputes happen in the first place. In a time of increasing social and political divide, Just the Facts urges us to resist defensiveness over our facts and approach our disputes in critical new ways.

Society's most basic challenge is arguably to produce and distribute enough food for its citizens. In 2023, 733 million people faced hunger and 2.3 billion were moderately or severely food insecure. Feeding a growing world population is becoming more difficult as food demands rise in the face of climate change, pest resistance to traditional treatments, and misguided government policies that limit how much food ends up on our plates. Policies to support biofuels, organic agriculture, local foods, and small farms and to oppose genetically modified foods all reduce food production on existing land. This leads to higher food prices, increased carbon emissions, and less natural habitat as cropland expands. Food Fight documents the challenges to adequately feeding the world in the twenty-first century and illustrates the ways in which contemporary food policies in the United States, Europe, and beyond imperil food security. Richard J. Sexton provides a window into the world of modern agriculture and food-supply chains. He separates the wheat from the chaff to distinguish policies that will limit, or expand, the global food supply, and he explains how we can construct a food system that forestalls future hunger and environmental degradation.

The culinary landscape of Poland is significantly changing, reshaped by a new generation of food producers, chefs, and media personalities. The Pierogi Problem examines people's networks, places, material culture, and media to explain how Polish tastemakers embrace context-specific strategies to localize discourses, practices, and values amid an increasingly globalized foodie culture. The decades following the end of Poland's socialist regime were marked by a rising interest in foreign cuisines and Western forms of consumption. Today, however, ingredients, cooking techniques, and dishes that were once considered ordinary or part of the country's uncomfortable past are being refashioned to reflect transformations in cultural hierarchies. The Pierogi Problem chronicles how and why local, traditional, and artisanal foods are reemerging for changing cosmopolitan appetites.
 

At a time when the world demands profound change, transformation begins within. As part of a two-volume work, this first volume explores the personal journeys that fuel collective leadership, weaving together research, art, case studies, and practices from the global Inner Development Goals (IDG) community. Through deep reflection and shared wisdom, it invites readers to embrace a new paradigm of interconnectedness—where individual insight, systemic understanding, and empathy drive meaningful action.

The second volume From "We" to "Systems Change" builds on this foundation to explore transformation beyond the individual.