During the first half of the twentieth century, Atlantic City was the nation's most popular middle-class resort--the home of the famed Boardwalk, the Miss America Pageant, and the board game Monopoly. By the late 1960s, it had become a symbol of urban decay and blight, compared by journalists to bombed-out Dresden and war-torn Beirut. Several decades and a dozen casinos later, Atlantic City is again one of America's most popular tourist spots, with thirty-five million visitors a year. Yet most stay for a mere six hours, and the highway has replaced the Boardwalk as the city's most important thoroughfare. Today the city doesn't have a single movie theater and its one supermarket is a virtual fortress protected by metal detectors and security guards. In this wide-ranging book, Bryant Simon does far more than tell a nostalgic tale of Atlantic City's rise, near death, and reincarnation. He turns the depiction of middle-class vacationers into a revealing discussion of the boundaries of public space in urban America. In the past, he argues, the public was never really about democracy, but about exclusion. During Atlantic City's heyday, African Americans were kept off the Boardwalk and away from the beaches. The overly boisterous or improperly dressed were kept out of theaters and hotel lobbies by uniformed ushers and police. The creation of Atlantic City as the "Nation's Playground" was dependent on keeping undesirables out of view unless they were pushing tourists down the Boardwalk on rickshaw-like rolling chairs or shimmying in smoky nightclubs. Desegregation overturned this racial balance in the mid-1960s, making the city's public spaces more open and democratic, too open and democratic for many middle-class Americans, who fled to suburbs and suburban-style resorts like Disneyworld. With the opening of the first casino in 1978, the urban balance once again shifted, creating twelve separate, heavily guarded, glittering casinos worlds walled off from the dilapidated houses, boarded-up businesses, and lots razed for redevelopment that never came. Tourists are deliberately kept away from the city's grim reality and its predominantly poor African American residents. Despite ten of thousands of buses and cars rolling into every day, gambling has not saved Atlantic City or returned it to its glory days. Simon's moving narrative of Atlantic City's past points to the troubling fate of urban America and the nation's cultural trajectory in the twentieth century, with broad implications for those interested in urban studies, sociology, planning, architecture, and history.

Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America

History

Simon, Bryant

Americas

Oxford University Press

Everything but the Coffee casts a fresh eye on the world's most famous coffee company, looking beyond baristas, movie cameos, and Paul McCartney CDs to understand what Starbucks can tell us about America. Bryant Simon visited hundreds of Starbucks around the world to ask, Why did Starbucks take hold so quickly with consumers? What did it seem to provide over and above a decent cup of coffee? Why at the moment of Starbucks' profit-generating peak did the company lose its way, leaving observers baffled about how it might regain its customers and its cultural significance? Everything but the Coffee probes the company's psychological, emotional, political, and sociological power to discover how Starbucks' explosive success and rapid deflation exemplify American culture at this historical moment. Most importantly, it shows that Starbucks speaks to a deeply felt American need for predictability and class standing, community and authenticity, revealing that Starbucks' appeal lies not in the product it sells but in the easily consumed identity it offers.

Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks

Business & Money

Biography & History

University of California Press

In this book, Bryant Simon brings to life the politics of white South Carolina millhands during the first half of the twentieth century. His revealing and moving account explores how this group of southern laborers thought about and participated in politics and public power. 
 Taking a broad view of politics, Simon looks at laborers as they engaged in political activity in many venues--at the polling station, on front porches, and on the shop floor--and examines their political involvement at the local, state, and national levels. He describes the campaign styles and rhetoric of such politicians as Coleman Blease and Olin Johnston (himself a former millhand), who eagerly sought the workers' votes. He draws a detailed picture of mill workers casting ballots, carrying placards, marching on the state capital, writing to lawmakers, and picketing factories. These millhands' politics reflected their public and private thoughts about whiteness and blackness, war and the New Deal, democracy and justice, gender and sexuality, class relations and consumption. 
 Ultimately, the people depicted here are neither romanticized nor dismissed as the stereotypically racist and uneducated "rednecks" found in many accounts of southern politics. Southern workers understood the political and social forces that shaped their lives, argues Simon, and they developed complex political strategies to deal with those forces.

A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948

Economics

The University of North Carolina Press

The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

"Captivating and brilliantly conceived. . . [The Hamlet Fire] will provide readers with insights into our current national politics." The Washington Post A "gifted writer" (Chicago Tribune) uses a long forgotten factory fire in small-town North Carolina to show how cut-rate food and labor have become the new American norm For decades, the small, quiet town of Hamlet, North Carolina, thrived thanks to the railroad. But by the 1970s, it had become a postindustrial backwater, a magnet for businesses searching for cheap labor with little or almost no official oversight. One of these businesses was Imperial Food Products. The company paid its workers a dollar above the minimum wage to stand in pools of freezing water for hours on end, scraping gobs of fat off frozen chicken breasts before they got dipped in batter and fried into golden brown nuggets and tenders. If a worker complained about the heat or the cold or missed a shift to take care of their children or went to the bathroom too often they were fired. But they kept coming back to work because Hamlet was a place where jobs were scarce. Then, on the morning of September 3, 1991, the day after Labor Day, this factory that had never been inspected burst into flame. Twenty-five people—many of whom were black women with children, living on their own—perished that day behind the plant’s locked and bolted doors. Eighty years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, industrial disasters were supposed to have been a thing of the past. After spending several years talking to local residents, state officials, and survivors of the fire, award-winning historian Bryant Simon has written a vivid, potent, and disturbing social autopsy of this town, this factory, and this time that shows how cheap labor, cheap government, and cheap food came together in a way that was bound for tragedy.

The New Press

The good stuff has moved into the spotlight - vegies, grains and pulses are now the stars of the plate - and there's no better guide to this veg-led revolution than chef Simon Bryant. Simon's recipes are delicious proof that vegies (and co) are never boring. Here, he shares his original takes on everyday dishes - Smoky kale carbonara and Pumpkin, chickpea and tahini soup - as well as recipes for when you're inspired to take things up a notch- Baked cauliflower fregola with hazelnuts and preserved lemon- Squash, taleggio and quinoa balls- and Salt-baked celeriac with apple remoulade. And there's good sweet stuff too, including cocoa, lentil and spelt brownies, and Passionfruit and coconut water jelly. What's more, Simon gives you the lowdown on legumes, ancient grains, seaweed and sprouting, all while revealing how to shop wisely and with heart. Vegetables, Grains and Other Good Stuff is vegie-forward cooking at its very best - honest, inventive and full of flavour.

Vegetables, Grains & Other Good Stuff

Lantern

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Simon, Bryant. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Simon, Bryant

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Simon, Bryant. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America

Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America

Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks

Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks

A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948

A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948

The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Government, and Cheap Lives

Vegetables, Grains & Other Good Stuff