When individuals from working-class backgrounds seek entry into the upper-middle-class world of academia, they often encounter difficulties. Examining the professional and personal lives of a group of sociologists from working class backgrounds, this extensive study finds that despite their successes as Ph.D. recipients, these scholars have suffered structural, interpersonal, and personal consequences that are linked to that class background. Many are uncomfortable with the academic role and the authority structure of the university, and see themselves as outsiders both within the academy and its larger cultural environment. The authors' conclusion, is that upward social mobility is never complete and that these upwardly mobile professionals appear to be caught in the middle between the world of their childhoods and the very different world that they must confront daily as members of the academy.

Other Voices, Other Times...Hungry Hill Remembered is about travelers in time who spent part of their journey and in some cases, all of it, on Hungry Hill in Springfield, Massachusetts. It covers a 50-year span in a neighborhood that was home to both native and foreign born who coexisted peacefully. Common themes in that time period were hard work, sacrifice and personal responsibility, tempered by a strong faith and sense of humor.

Life and Times of three generations, a lighthearted look back at coming of age in a place where the past and the present overlapped.