'Crooks and Squares' is a study of crime as a way of life. By interviewing drug addicts and property criminals, Malin Akerstrom presents a study of the demands, attractions, and drawbacks of criminal lifestyles.
'Crooks and Squares' is a study of crime as a way of life. By interviewing drug addicts and property criminals, Malin Akerstrom presents a study of the demands, attractions, and drawbacks of criminal lifestyles.
This book is about the meanings of masculinities within the social networks of the streets of an American city (St Louis, Missouri), and how these shaped perceptions and enactments of violence. Based on a large number of interviews with offenders the author provides a rich description of life on the streets, contextualizing criminal violence within this deviant subculture, and with a specific focus on issues of gender. The book provides one of the most detailed descriptions yet of the forms masculinity takes in disadvantages communities in the United States. It establishes how street based gender identity motivated and guided men through violent encounters, exploring how men's relationships with women and their families instigated violence. One key issue addressed is why men resorted to violence in certain situations and not in others, exploring the range of choices open to them and how these opportunities were interpreted. The book makes a major contribution to the study of the relationship between masculinities and violence, making use of a much larger sample than elsewhere.
Charles Ponzi perpetrated his infamous scheme almost a hundred years ago. But his method of using new investments to pay existing investors and finance a highflying lifestyle is alive and well: just as much money is lost in the United States today from Ponzi schemes as from shoplifting. Somehow, con artists are able to dazzle wealthy, educated individuals and sophisticated institutions and convince them to hand over huge sums of money. How? In The Ponzi Scheme Puzzle, renowned legal scholar Tamar Frankel explores these con artists' fascinating power of persuasion and deception, uncovering the subtle signals that mimic truth and honesty. After years of close study of hundreds of cases, Frankel explains the striking patterns that emerge and the common characteristics of the con artists and their victims. She offers clear yet comprehensive descriptions of the various designs of Ponzi schemers' attractive offers and flags the ways in which they mask their deception through specialized methods of advertising and selling. She then constructs lucid profiles of the con artists and their victims, exposing the core nature of the people at the heart of the schemes and showing how over time the lines between predator and prey are blurred. There are indeed many lessons to learn from these stories, and Frankel brings them to light through the insightful results of her research. She shows how peoples' attitudes are ambivalent and uncertain toward con artists, perhaps because their behavior is so seemingly honest, because they act like the social leaders with whom they are likely to mingle, or perhaps because their actions are thought to shake up a complacent society. Frankel concludes by offering a surprising solution on how to prevent charming, dangerous con artists from perpetuating the enduring, disastrous legacy of Charles Ponzi.
Of Mice and Men es una novela escrita por el autor John Steinbeck. Publicado en 1937, cuenta la historia de George Milton y Lennie Small, dos trabajadores desplazados del rancho migratorio, que se mudan de un lugar a otro en California en busca de nuevas oportunidades de trabajo durante la Gran Depresión en los Estados Unidos.