Back Bay Books / Social science

To Hell with All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife

by Caitlin Flanagan

Having so many choices, Caitlin Flanagan maintains, has torn women away from what many of them want most: to raise a family and run a household. It's a nearly heretical statement today, and, like so many of...

Children of Crisis

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 1973

by Robert Coles

In the 1950s Robert Coles began studying, living among, and, above all, listening to American children. The results of his efforts--revealed in five volumes published between 1967 and 1977--constitute one of...

The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point

by Haynes Johnson & David S. Broder

Taking as an example the Clinton health care reform initiative, the authors show how a policy that aimed to please everyone ended by satisfying no one due to pressure groups, political gamesmanship and the inertia...

Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church

by The Investigative Staff

With this expose, The 'Boston Globe' aims to present the single most comprehensive account of the cover-ups, hush money and manipulation used by the Catholic Church to keep its history of sexual abuse secret....

The Devil's Highway: A True Story

by Luis Alberto Urrea

The author of "Across the Wire" offers brilliant investigative reporting of what went wrong when, in May 2001, a group of 26 men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona. Only...

McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope

by David Foster Wallace & Jacob Weisberg

Is John McCain "For Real?"

That's the question David Foster Wallace set out to explore when he first climbed aboard Senator McCain's campaign caravan in February 2000. It was a moment when Mccain was increasingly...

What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It

by Trish Wood & Bobby Muller

"A visceral account of the war . . . honest, agenda-free, and chilling." -New York Times Book Review

The Iraq war officially began on March 20, 2003, and since then more than one million young Americans have...

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

by Elizabeth Royte

Out of sight, out of mind ... Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels.... But where do these things...