The Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies and Sociology Department at The New School for Social Research invite you to join us to celebrate Rachel Sherman’s newest book:
Monday, September 11, at 6pm – 63 Fifth Ave, Room 700
Rachel Sherman is Associate Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research. Uneasy Street is her second book. She is the author of Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (University of California Press).
Book Description: From TV’s Real Housewives to The Wolf of Wall Street, our popular culture portrays the wealthy as materialistic and entitled. But what do we really know about those who live on “easy street”? Rachel Sherman draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with fifty affluent New Yorkers—including hedge fund financiers and corporate lawyers, professors and artists, and stay-at-home mothers—to examine their lifestyle choices and their understanding of privilege. Sherman upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing and displaying social advantages for themselves and their children. They
wish to be “normal,” describing their consumption as reasonable and basic and comparing themselves to those who have more than they do rather than those with less. As the distance between rich and poor widens, Uneasy Street not only explores the real lives of those at the top but also sheds light on how extreme inequality comes to seem ordinary and acceptable to the rest of us.