Work hard in school, graduate from a top college, establish a high-paying professional career, enjoy the long-lasting reward of happiness. This is the American Dream—and yet basic questions at the heart of this competitive journey remain unanswered. Does competitive success, even rarified entry into the Ivy League and the top one percent of earners in America, deliver on its promise? Does realizing the American Dream deliver a good life? In Redefining Success in America, psychologist and human development scholar Michael Kaufman develops a fundamentally new understanding of how elite undergraduate educations and careers play out in lives, and of what shapes happiness among the prizewinners in America. In so doing, he exposes the myth at the heart of the American Dream. Returning to the legendary Harvard Student Study of undergraduates from the 1960s and interviewing participants almost fifty years later, Kaufman shows that formative experiences in family, school, and community largely shape a future adult’s worldview and well-being by late adolescence, and that fundamental change in adulthood, when it occurs, is shaped by adult family experiences, not by ever-greater competitive success. Published research on general samples shows that these patterns, and the book’s findings generally, are broadly applicable to demographically varied populations in the United States. Leveraging biography-length clinical interviews and quantitative evidence unmatched even by earlier landmark studies of human development, Redefining Success in America redefines the conversation about the nature and origins of happiness, and about how adults develop. This longitudinal study pioneers a new paradigm in happiness research, developmental science, and personality psychology that will appeal to scholars and students in the social sciences, psychotherapy professionals, and serious readers navigating the competitive journey.

Follow a path cut by a country doctor who examines the lives of men and women who choose to live close to work to pursue a dream, a lifestyle, or even a practical reality. When people make the decision to work close to home, they say good-bye to the hassles of commuting, but along with that, all other aspects of life change. Family and community become enhanced with a strong sense of belonging through compromises that require a redefinition of success. A person finds him or herself frequently in a peer group of one, walking a sharper edge and more susceptible to the bipolarities of life. Anyone contemplating work closer to home will find much of value in this book. See how a community, regardless of location, functions as a community. Enter the intimate lives of these people. Crowd them into mind and hold them in thought and discover the courage to do things never thought possible.

Have you ever had a dream dashed by a challenge or mental illness? Have you ever felt like giving in or gripped by fear that all is lost? Have you defined success in your life or have you let others define it? Have you failed to meet someones expectations? Success can be defined in many different ways. Or success can be redefined based on current circumstances. Part I of this book is about my struggle with mental health issues that challenged a dream and required me to redefine success for my life. This book takes you through my journey and also provides tips for succeeding in aspects of everyday life. In my work as a Peer Support Specialist I have encountered consumers who have been committed to the largest forensic state hospital in Texas. Many of them have been convicted of crimes. The mental illness these consumers experience and the crimes they have committed are only part of who they are and do not define them as a person. They have dreams like anyone else. Their dreams may be on a different scale. For them, success may come in small steps toward wholeness and reconciliation with self and society. My job is to instill hope in their lives as someone who has been through the mental health system and who has emerged from the other side experiencing recovery. Part II of this book is a collection of inspirational devotions on the topic of success in different practical areas. Some examples include success with anxiety, success with depression, and success with loneliness. They are each based on the Christian Scriptures and are filled with an abundance of relevant illustrations. Anyone who has wondered about how their faith is related to real life will be able to identify with these inspirational pieces.

The United States has no good options for resolving the North Korean and Iranian nuclear challenges. Incentives, pressures, and threats have not succeeded. A military strike would temporarily set back these programs, but at unacceptable human and diplomatic costs, and with a high risk of their reconstitution and acceleration. For some policymakers, therefore, the best option is to isolate these regimes until they collapse or pressures build to compel negotiations on U.S. terms. This option has the veneer of toughness sufficient to make it politically defensible in Washington. On closer scrutiny, however, it actually allows North Korea and Iran to continue their nuclear programs unrestrained. It also sacrifices more achievable short-term goals of improving transparency and securing vulnerable nuclear materials to the uncertain long-term goal of denuclearization. Yet these short-term goals are deemed critical to U.S. national security in the 2010 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) and Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). This comparative study of U.S. nuclear diplomacy toward North Korea and Iran suggests that the North Korea case offers policymakers crucial lessons applicable to Iran. It provides policy recommendations based on four key conclusions: that a common paradigm (nuclear pause) must be applied to both states; that nuclear deals negotiated with international outliers like North Korea and Iran must draw on widely accepted policy or practice; that these deals should be linked to political/diplomatic strategies relevant to the domestic and regional policy context of each state; and that the success of a nuclear pause must be judged by whether it accomplishes nuclear policy goals, not broader policy goals.

The Other Side of America" is an unflinching exploration of the hidden realities that often go unspoken in the American narrative. This thought-provoking book dives deep into the nation's most pressing issues, from the rise of homelessness and the mental health crisis to the rampant consumerism and growing divide between the rich and the poor. It exposes the often-overlooked struggles that everyday Americans face and challenges the widely accepted myth of the 'American Dream.' With sharp analysis, real-life examples, and hard-hitting facts, this book peels back the layers of the American experience, revealing how policies, cultural attitudes, and systemic inequalities have shaped the country. Each chapter unpacks a different aspect of America’s darker side, offering a comprehensive look at topics like the country’s war policies, the failings of the education system, racial inequalities, and the influence of media. "The Other Side of America" isn’t just a critique; it’s a call to action. It encourages readers to question, reflect, and ultimately, rethink what it means to live in the 'land of the free.' Whether you’re an American or an observer from afar, this book offers an eye-opening perspective that will challenge your understanding of the world’s most powerful na tion.

This collection includes groundbreaking essays, and interviews with scholars and writers which reveal that despite pressures of assimilation, personal goals, and in some cases, anti-Semitism, they have never been able to divorce their lives or literature from their heritage.

"Success is never so interesting as struggle," Willa Cather wrote in 1932, but the idea of success apparently "interested" Willa Cather a good deal during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it did many of her contemporaries. Redefining the American Dream examines Cather's interest throughout her life in the version(s) of success that pervaded American culture and that were (and often still are) identified as the American Dream. Sally Peltier Harvey studies the forces in America that shaped Cather's attitudes about success as Cather was growing up and the forces that reshaped her attitudes during the years that Cather wrote her novels, causing her to reassess the relationship between material success, personal fulfillment, individual autonomy, and commitment to community. Harvey traces Cather's shifting views and her struggle to redefine the American Dream rather than abandon it, as many of her contemporaries did. Cather's efforts in this regard involved a repeated confrontation with the concepts of individualism and community. Cather in her novels moves away from the traditional pairing of self-fulfillment and material success, so common in nineteenth-century thought - a pairing that valorized individualism and viewed competition as a natural law. Cather seems to work toward a redefinition of success that sees a fulfilled self grounded in community, though still struggling to balance community's demands and the individual's needs. What begins for Cather as a troubled ambivalence about the success ethic in America becomes in her later novels an acceptance - even a celebration - of the tension between individual and community that underlies the struggle toward success.

Contributions by Robert J. Butler, Ginevra Geraci, Yoshinobu Hakutani, Floyd W. Hayes III, Joseph Keith, Toru Kiuchi, John Lowe, Sachi Nakachi, Virginia Whatley Smith, and John Zheng Critics in this volume reassess the prescient nature of Richard Wright's mind as well as his life and body of writings, especially those directly concerned with America and its racial dynamics. This edited collection offers new readings and understandings of the particular America that became Wright's focus at the beginning of his career and was still prominent in his mind at the end. Virginia Whatley Smith's edited collection examines Wright's fixation with America at home and from abroad: his oppression by, rejection of, conflict with, revolts against, and flight from America. Other people have written on Wright's revolutionary heroes, his difficulties with the FBI, and his works as a postcolonial provocateur; but none have focused singly on his treatment of America. Wherever Wright traveled, he always positioned himself as an African American as he compared his experiences to those at hand. However, as his domestic settlements changed to international residences, Wright's craftsmanship changed as well. To convey his cultural message, Wright created characters, themes, and plots that would expose arbitrary and whimsical American policies, oppressive rules which would invariably ensnare Wright's protagonists and sink them more deeply into the quagmire of racial subjugation as they grasped for a fleeting moment of freedom. Smith's collection brings to the fore new ways of looking at Wright, particularly his post-Native Son international writings. Indeed, no critical interrogations have considered the full significance of Wright's masterful crime fictions. In addition, the author's haiku poetry complements the fictional pieces addressed here, reflecting Wright's attitude toward America as he, near the end of his life, searched for nirvana—his antidote to American racism.

Psychobiography is the study, through a psychological lens, of influential and important figures in history, politics, literature, and other fields. A psychological approach is necessary to reveal what moves and motivates these people. Many psychobiographies have been faulty because they throw psychological jargon at their subjects and treat them simplistically. Anderson shows how to study psychobiographical subjects sensitively and compellingly.

State and Local Public Finance provides a comprehensive and sophisticated analysis of state and local government public finance practices and issues, using the basic tools of economics. This fifth edition maintains its focus on key local services such as education, health care, and transportation and brings in new coverage of land use and housing, applications from behavioral economics, and more international comparisons. This textbook provides an examination and analysis of public finance practices and problems in a federal fiscal system, focusing on the fiscal behavior and policies of state and local governments. Modern economic theory is applied to examine the way key institutions are used to produce and finance services and to provide evaluation of alternative policies. This stalwart text will continue to be invaluable reading for those who study public finance, local government finance, urban economics, public policy, and public administration.