ENDORSEMENTS

Cars and Jails: Freedom Dreams, Debt, and Carcerality

“As cornerstones of life under racial capitalism, the automobile and the prison exemplify the ease with which the quotidian can become deadly. Livingston and Ross, with the support of formerly incarcerated peer researchers, have produced an extraordinary example of how critical carceral studies can enlighten, complicate and inspire.”
—Angela Y. Davis, author of Are Prisons Obsolete?

“I’ve dreamed for years that somebody would write this book. It’s not only a brilliant intervention but a necessary one. Livingston and Ross explore the profound antisociality of automotive life in a society configured by racial hierarchy. They have thoughtfully illuminated the mutual articulation of automotivity and carcerality in provocative ways that have enormous practical value.”
—Paul Gilroy, author of The Black Atlantic

“Reading Cars and Jails was an ‘ah ha’ experience for me. The clarity and urgency of the research by Livingston, Ross, and The NYU Prison Education Lab make glaringly evident how the automobile is a carceral trap that impoverishes and captures with devastating consequences for all life.” —Nicole R. Fleetwood, author of Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing

“Andrew Ross cruises Florida’s Route 192, a motel hell where Disney World’s low-wage service workers struggle desperately for shelter. This microcosm, vividly and compassionately observed, is the portal to a commanding analysis of the national housing crisis that has pushed millions to the brink of homelessness. Ross particularly targets the vampire-like role played by private equity firms in constricting the supply of affordable housing in the wake of the Great Recession. This powerful exposé should be required reading for all progressives.”
—Mike Davis,author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear

“Sunbelt Blues is a must-read—gripping and engrossing, analytically illuminating, and unflinchingly humane. By focusing on one strip of highway in Florida and its diverse and fascinating inhabitants, Andrew Ross offers a vivid and compelling portrait of the whole country at a crossroads. The American dream of owning a home is fading away, replaced by a geography of extremes: luxury homes, second homes, and part-time vacation rentals on one side; Wall Street–owned rental units, downscale extended-stay motels, and homeless encampments on the other. The stories of the people Ross meets and their struggles to find a place to live and rest bring the housing crisis to life, revealing the folly and cruelty of treating shelter as a speculative asset.”
—Astra Taylor,author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone

“Written from the front lines of the housing crisis, amid the motels and homeless camps that constitute shelter for a growing number of Americans, this book is a painfully beautiful exposition of social insecurity. Not only is such housing precarity systematically produced by the inequalities of the new economy, but also it serves as an opportunity for real-estate grabs by Wall Street investors. What is needed, Ross argues, is a breadth of vision that pivots away from market models and reimagines housing as a human right.”
—Ananya Roy, director, Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA

Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel

“Poignant, poetic, and illuminating, this book exposes a chief paradox of Israeli settler colonialism: that skilled Palestinian laborers built modern Israel—its homes, offices, shopping malls, prisons, border walls—while their own homes were demolished or seized. This is history, sensitive and somber, written in stone.”

– Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

“Meet ‘Michelangelo of Beit Fajjar’ and the other Palestinian stone-masons whose superb craft has fashioned Israel’s famous ‘white cities.’ Their hidden labor is the starting point for Ross’s brilliantly original exploration of how dispossession and exploitation continue to define the relationship of Israeli and Palestinian societies. This is radical journalism at its best—and I mean Pulitzer-Prize-quality best.” 

– Mike Davis, author of Planet of Slums

“When a writer as original and committed as Andrew Ross turns his attention to Palestine, we know we are up for a unique set of observations. Ross uses the stone quarries of Palestine to weave a story that brings together geology, politics, military occupation, water, and environment. It is a story that is at once specific in its attention to details of matter and place and expansive as it takes us across the tragic history of this late manifestation of colonial domination.”

 – Eyal Weizman, author of Hollow Land

“Andrew Ross sheds a brilliant light on what he calls the ‘sweat equity’ of Palestinian laborers who were deprived by Israel’s system of occupation and apartheid of their land and livelihood and pushed as a result to build Israeli housing and infrastructure to survive and to resist ethnic cleansing. Ross enriches us not just with a meticulously researched dose of history and a logical argument for a postcolonial reality of ethical coexistence in historic Palestine. He takes us on a perspicacious journey of human stories, ethical arguments and socioeconomic realities, consciously refraining from speaking on behalf of Palestinians or depicting us as pitiful victims, as many well-meaning white academics still do, and thus contributing to understanding what justice in this land truly means and entails.”

—Omar Barghouti, Palestinian human rights defender

“Just when you thought that there was no other way to amplify the atrocity of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, along comes Andrew Ross with Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel. Here is a refreshingly clear picture of the labour that it takes to produce and reproduce Israeli society and the Israeli occupation. Ordinary Palestinians who break and lay the stones tell Andrew Ross their stories, and he offers them to us as a gift of their resilience.”

—Vijay Prashad, author of the Poorer Nations

Creditocracy and the Case for Debt Refusal

“Andrew Ross is the very model for a scholar-activist, and Creditocracy, his latest book, is as compelling as it is important. Let’s hope this makes a difference in the world. It really should.”

—David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“In this lucid and accessible book, Andrew Ross argues that we are increasingly oppressed by the rule of credit and that ever more people must go into debt just to access life’s necessities. But Ross not only names the problem; more importantly, he points toward solutions. Read this book and join a debt resistors movement.”

 —Michael Hardt, co-author of Empire

“Andrew Ross’s Creditocracy is the middle finger to our economy’s debt vultures: he lays out a masterful case that we must tell the creditor class to stick it where the repo man don’t shine. Ross is particularly good at picking apart that new form of indentured servitude, the student loan. Creditocracy calls for resistance to our nationwide virtual debtors prison, and it’s about time.”

 —Greg Palast, reporter, BBC’s Newsnight and author of Vultures’ Picnic

Bird On Fire: Lessons from the World’s Least Sustainable City

“Books by Andrew Ross are always exhilarating adventures at the cutting edge of social thought, but Bird on Fire is particularly fascinating. Rather than recounting the green virtues of some demi-paradise like Vermont or San Francisco, he descends directly into the ecological and economic hell fires of Phoenix. The result is a landmark study of the micropolitics of the struggle for urban sustainability where the stakes are the highest.”

—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

“Bird on Fire is a stunning report from the front lines. Ross vividly shows how and why our big cities are one of the top places where the fight to contain climate change will either be won or lost.”

—James Gustave Speth, author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World and co-founder of the National Resources Defense Council

“This is a superb and important book. With a sweeping command of the subject, Andrew Ross reads from the entrails of Phoenix a story with hopeful insights for all of humane civilization. His graceful prose and political clarity make Bird on Fire not only useful but also very compelling and pleasurable to read.”

—Christian Parenti, author of Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence

“Bird on Fire is a triumph. The future and sustainability of Phoenix are not local questions, but ones of national and global importance. Andrew Ross examines them with a keen radar for the interplay of power, class, greed, prejudice and the mythology of both the American West and the great Sunbelt migration. In the process, he has also given us the finest history we have yet of modern Phoenix, a massive metropolis whose consequence is cloaked by its reputation for sun, golf and right-wing politics. This is a must-read.”

—Jon Talton, author of South Phoenix Rules and former columnist for The Arizona Republic

Fast Boat to China: Corporate Outsourcing and the Consequences of Free Trade–Lessons from Shanghai

“Highly readable. . . . With his clear ideas about fair trade and internationalized labor rights, [Ross] lays out concrete alternatives to the common wisdom that globalization is unstoppable.”
—Time Out New York

“A fresh look at exactly what we should be making of . . . the increasing number of U.S. and European companies that are relocating their factories and work force in China.”
—The Asian Review of Books

“A skeptical take on pro-China boosterism, gained through the same participant-observer techniques the author brought to his Celebration Chronicles.”
—The Atlantic Monthly

No-Collar: The Humane Workplace and Its Hidden Costs

“In this fascinating book, Andrew Ross goes deep inside the no-collar workplace and finds it both liberating and stressful. A clear-eyed look at working life in the emerging creative age.” 

—Richard Florida, author of The Creative Class

“Andrew Ross has given us a keen-eyed and provocative analysis of a workplace that many people have dreamed of entering.” 

—Jill Andresky Fraser, author of White Collar Sweatshops

The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and Property Values in Disney’s New Town

“Entertaining . . . Insightful . . . Ross is a raconteur with delicious–and telling–anecdotes.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Our first astronaut-in-residence on Planet Disney returns with astonishing tales of its strange life-forms and customs. As an explorer of brave new worlds, Ross is a shrewd cross between Jonathan Swift and C. Wright Mills.”

—Mike Davis

Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice

“Andrew Ross, our irreverent de Tocqueville, is a sheer delight. Real Love assures his place as one of the most incisive commentators on American culture.”   

—Patricia Williams, author of The Alchemy of Race and Rights

“Andrew Ross’s intellectual range, analytic power, and elegant writing are all on rich display in this extraordinary book about culture and justice. Real Love solidifies his standing as a singularly generative cultural critic and as a courageous opponent of the increasingly indecent and unjust social order of your time.”

—George Lipsitz, author of The Possessive Investment in Whiteness

Low Pay, High Profile: The Global Push for Fair Labor

“An excellent survey of the world of work today…All the fatuous theorists of post-industrialism should be required to read it as a reminder of how much the nineteenth century survives in the twenty-first.” 

—Doug Henwood, author of Wall Street

Abounds in insights…Must reading for those concerned with the new world of globalization.”  

—Stanley Aronowitz, author of The Death and Life of American Labor

“A terrific book that is the opposite of Beltway thinking…a testament to the peoples’ power to effect positive change.” 

—Charles Kernaghan, founder of National Labor Committee

Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits

“A marvellous, sceptical history of the culture of prediction. Between the technocrat’s theme-park dreams and the catastrophist’s ominous signs, he sees futures that we can live in.” 

—Meaghan Morris, author of The Pirate’s Fiancée

“Sharply critical yet generously appreciative, Strange Weather will stand as the definitive study of the technoculture which increasingly dominates our lives.”

—Joel Kovel, author of The Enemy of Nature