Leaving America

Today more than ever, large numbers of Americans are leaving the United States. It is estimated that by the end of the decade, some 10 million of the brightest and most talented Americans, representing an estimated $136 billion in wages, will be living and working overseas. This emigration trend contradicts the internalized myth of America as the land of affluence, opportunity, and freedom. What is behind this trend? Wennersten argues that many people these days, from college students to retirees, are uncertain or ambivalent about what it means to be an American. For example, many are uncomfortable with that they believe America has come to represent to the rest of the world. At the same time, globalization and advances in technology have enabled the growth of a telecommuting work force whose members can live in one country and work in another, and this trend, among other factors, has encouraged a new generation of people to respond to the pull of global citizenship. Leaving America is an important reexamination of one of the most central stories in the history of American culture—the story of the immigrant coming to the Promised Land. While millions still come to America and millions more still wish to do so, there is an important counterflow of emigration from America to distant parts of the planet. This book focuses on modern American expatriates as a significant and heretofore largely ignored counterpoint phenomenon every bit as central to understanding modern America as is the image of a nation of immigrants. The greatest irony in America today may well be that while argument and discord prevail in the edifice of American democracy about diversity, economic justice, equality, and the Iraq War, many of the most thoughtful citizens have already left the building.

Part of the Process Self-Reliance Series, this volume shows readers where they can most easily gain residence and citizenship, where they can live for a fraction of the cost of where they're living now and what countries would be most compatible with their lifestyle, gender, age or political beliefs. Getting Out is the ultimate guide to the world of the expat: the reasons, the rules, the resources, the tricks of the trade and compelling stories and expertise from expatriate Americans on every continent.

Take it from Erica - you can travel alone and live the life you've always wanted, and it doesn't need to be a complicated or scary process. In fact, becoming a solo traveler and claiming your personal adventure is one of the best things you can do for your life. People will tell you you're crazy, but do you really want to live your life according to what other people think? Are you really going to let fear stop you from reaching your dreams? You only have one life to live and it's up to you whether you're going to live it to the fullest or not. Now is the time to have the adventure you've always wanted!

Dream Hoarders sparked a national conversation on the dangerous separation between the upper middle class and everyone else. Now in paperback and newly updated for the age of Trump, Brookings Institution senior fellow Richard Reeves is continuing to challenge the class system in America. In America, everyone knows that the top 1 percent are the villains. The rest of us, the 99 percent—we are the good guys. Not so, argues Reeves. The real class divide is not between the upper class and the upper middle class: it is between the upper middle class and everyone else. The separation of the upper middle class from everyone else is both economic and social, and the practice of “opportunity hoarding”—gaining exclusive access to scarce resources—is especially prevalent among parents who want to perpetuate privilege to the benefit of their children. While many families believe this is just good parenting, it is actually hurting others by reducing their chances of securing these opportunities. There is a glass floor created for each affluent child helped by his or her wealthy, stable family. That glass floor is a glass ceiling for another child. Throughout Dream Hoarders, Reeves explores the creation and perpetuation of opportunity hoarding, and what should be done to stop it, including controversial solutions such as ending legacy admissions to school. He offers specific steps toward reducing inequality and asks the upper middle class to pay for it. Convinced of their merit, members of the upper middle class believes they are entitled to those tax breaks and hoarded opportunities. After all, they aren't the 1 percent. The national obsession with the super rich allows the upper middle class to convince themselves that they are just like the rest of America. In Dream Hoarders, Reeves argues that in many ways, they are worse, and that changes in policy and social conscience are the only way to fix the broken system.

Adam Gordon is a brilliant, if highly unreliable, young American poet on a prestigious fellowship in Madrid, struggling to establish his sense of self and his relationship to art. What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader's projections? Instead of following the dictates of his fellowship, Adam's "research" becomes a meditation on the possibility of the genuine in the arts and beyond: are his relationships with the people he meets in Spain as fraudulent as he fears his poems are? A witness to the 2004 Madrid train bombings and their aftermath, does he participate in historic events or merely watch them pass him by? In prose that veers between the comic and tragic, the self-contemptuous and the inspired, Leaving the Atocha Station is a portrait of the artist as a young man in an age of Google searches, pharmaceuticals, and spectacle. Born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1979, Ben Lerner is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.

Leaving Little Italy explores the various forces that have shaped and continue to mold Italian American culture. Early chapters offer a historical survey of major developments in Italian American culture, from the early mass immigration period to the present day, situating these developments within the larger framework of American culture as a whole. Subsequent chapters examine particular works of Italian American literature and film from a variety of perspectives, including literary history, gender, social class, autobiography, and race. Paying particular attention to how the individual artist's personality has intersected with community in the shaping of Italian American culture, the book reveals how and why Italian America was invented and why Little Italys must ultimately disappear.

The ambitious 15-year agenda known as the Sustainable Development Goals, adopted in 2015 by all members of the United Nations, contains a pledge that “no one will be left behind.” This book aims to translate that bold global commitment into an action-oriented mindset, focused on supporting specific people in specific places who are facing specific problems. In this volume, experts from Japan, the United States, Canada, and other countries address a range of challenges faced by people across the globe, including women and girls, smallholder farmers, migrants, and those living in extreme poverty. These are many of the people whose lives are at the heart of the aspirations embedded in the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. They are the people most in need of such essentials as health care, quality education, decent work, affordable energy, and a clean environment. This book is the result of a collaboration between the Japan International Cooperation Research Institute and the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings. It offers practical ideas for transforming “leave no one behind” from a slogan into effective actions which, if implemented, will make it possible to reach the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. In addition to policymakers in the field of sustainable development, this book will be of interest to academics, activists, and leaders of international organizations and civil society groups who work every day to promote inclusive economic and social progress.

This author not only identifies the major shortcomings of the American Public Elementary School, but makes thirty-three specific recommendations as to how to improve them. He does this because he fears America is falling behind other nations, particularly the Asian countries such as South Korea, Japan, and China. He decries the short teaching day and teaching year of the United States in comparison with those nations that are leaving us behind such as South Korea. He pulls no punches in taking on the politicians. In the process parents are not spared as they have exempted their children from walking to neighborhood schools and losing the exercise children experienced in walking by driving them. "Our drop out rate of one third is a disgrace when other nations graduate over 93% from high school," says Hedges. After describing Korean education and making recommendations in the first three chapters, the author then sets forth how modern elementary schools should be and can be organized and operated in contrast with the way so many of them are organized and operated today. This development would help them in contrast with Korean Schools which are more lockstep. He points out that one reason for so many home study children is that parents are not pleased with what the elementary public schools are providing. They want an education tailor made for their children and they set about doing it when the public schools come up short. Too many of our schools proceed in lock step, tracking children into dumb, average, above average, and bright groups when with modern computers this is no longer necessary. Hedges, an author of two books on testing and one on early childhood education, maintains that the testing going on is for all of the wrong reasons, i.e. (1) to evaluate teachers, (2) to compare students with one another, (3) to compare schools with one another. In his view tests should be used as the medical profession uses tests, i.e. to diagnose individual needs and thus to serve as a basis for how to help the student not just give him an A or an F. As he says, “What if when you go to the doctor he hands you a card which gives you a C- on your health. What the devil does that mean?” Instead, the doctor reviews the test data, analyzes it, and gives you a prescription. So why aren’t our schools doing that in education? The book is not only a clarion call to arms, but a practical How To. How to provide for individual differences. How to make sure your child will succeed in primary school. How to organize other than by grades. How to enable more independent study and encourage creativity in your youngster. How can parents tell if their school is any good? How to be clear on the objectives of the school. How should young children be graded and evaluated? This book is for superintendents and principals, as they are the leaders, for elementary teachers as they are the doers, for school board member as they are the policy makers, and for those parents, who want to know what an excellent elementary school should be like. It is not pie in the school dreaming, but a down to earth description of how things are versus how they might be in the modern up to date school. Consider just one of his practical tips for some parents. What can the parent of a a slightly immature child do to increase the probability his or her child will be a ‘smash hit?’ Here is how. Let us say that he can enter first grade at age six. Well, age six is 365 days. If this child was born January 1 he is 364 days younger than the child born on December 31. A whole year! Think what that means in terms of his growth, development, and readiness for first grade! So, throw in that many of the children will be more mature than his child. The result? His or her child is a failure in the eyes of the other kids who are doing so much better than he because America grades on the curve.