Synopses & Reviews
The Housing Divide examines the generational patterns in New York City's housing market and neighborhoods along the lines of race and ethnicity. The book provides an in-depth analysis of many immigrant groups in New York, especially providing an understanding of the opportunities and discriminatory practices at work from one generation to the next. Through a careful read of such factors as home ownership, housing quality, and neighborhood rates of crime, welfare enrollment, teenage pregnancy, and educational achievement, Emily Rosenbaum and Samantha Friedman provide a detailed portrait of neighborhood life and socio-economic status for the immigrants of New York.
The book paints an important, if disturbing, picture. The authors argue that not only are Blacks—regardless of generation—disadvantaged relative to members of other racial/ethnic groups in their ability to obtain housing in high-quality neighborhoods, but that housing and neighborhood conditions actually decline over generations. Rosenbaum and Friedman's findings suggest that the future of racial inequality in this country will increasingly isolate Blacks from all other groups. In other words, the “color line” may be shifting from a line separating Blacks from Whites to one separating Blacks from all non-Blacks.
Review
"This is literary criticism at its most perceptive. Theory is subservient to a deeply engaged reading of works Professor Paris clearly loves. To read his analysis of Emma Bovary or Hedda Gabler is to gain an enriched insight into characters whom we thought we knew so well." -Phyllis Grosskurth,author of Byron, The Flawed Angel
Review
“Casts much light on longstanding debates over the assimilation and economic advancement of foreign immigrants in the USA.”
-Society,
Review
"The Housing Divide is a very good book. It accomplishes the admirable feat of evaluating assimilation theory, using a combination of archival and quantitative data, within the intrinsically important New York city context."-Milton Vickerman,Urban Studies Journal
Review
“Well organized, tightly written and full of interesting and provocative information. The authors produced a very good piece of scholarship that is theoretically grounded and attentive to detail, especially concerning methodological issues including the potential limitations of their study.”
-Victoria Basolo,University of California, Irvine
Review
“This well written book makes a major contribution to urban sociology and race/ethnic studies.”
-Choice,
Review
“[W]ill be fascinating for policy makers and scholars concerned with housing patterns and racial discrimination.”
-Jewish Book World,
Synopsis
One of literature's greatest gifts is its portrayal of realistically drawn characters--human beings in whom we can recognize motivations and emotions. In
Imagined Human Beings, Bernard J. Paris explores the inner conflicts of some of literature's most famous characters, using Karen Horney's psychoanalytic theories to understand the behavior of these characters as we would the behavior of real people.
When realistically drawn characters are understood in psychological terms, they tend to escape their roles in the plot and thus subvert the view of them advanced by the author. A Horneyan approach both alerts us to conflicts between plot and characterization, rhetoric and mimesis, and helps us understand the forces in the author's personalty that generate them. The Horneyan model can make sense of thematic inconsistencies by seeing them as the product of the author's inner divisions. Paris uses this approach to explore a wide range of texts, including Antigone, "The Clerk's Tale," The Merchant of Venice, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Wuthering Heights, Madame Bovary, The Awakening, and The End of the Road.
About the Author
Bernard J. Paris is the author of seven books, including Karen Horney: A Psychoanalyst's Search for Self-Understanding (selected by the New York Times as a Notable Book for 1994), and director of the International Karen Horney Society.