A surprising and revealing look at how today's elite view their own wealth and place in society 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"? In this penetrating book, 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. Instead, these liberal elites, who believe in diversity and meritocracy, feel conflicted about their position in a highly unequal society. 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. These New Yorkers also want to see themselves as hard workers who give back and raise children with good values, and they avoid talking about money. Although their experiences differ depending on a range of factors, including whether their wealth was earned or inherited, these elites generally depict themselves as productive and prudent, and therefore morally worthy, while the undeserving rich are lazy, ostentatious, and snobbish. Sherman argues that this ethical distinction between "good" and "bad" wealthy people characterizes American culture more broadly, and that it perpetuates rather than challenges economic inequality. 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.

A surprising and revealing look at how today's elite view their wealth and place in society 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"? In this penetrating book, Rachel Sherman draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with fifty affluent New Yorkers-from hedge fund financiers and artists to stay-at-home mothers-to examine their lifestyle choices and understanding of privilege. Sherman upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing social advantages for themselves and their children. Instead, these liberal elites, who believe in diversity and meritocracy, feel conflicted about their position in a highly unequal society. As the distance between rich and poor widens, Uneasy Street not only explores the 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.

"Sherman's insightful ethnography sheds light on the interactional dimension of symbolic boundaries and class relations as they are lived by luxury hotel clients and the workers who serve them. We learn how both groups perform class through emotion work and deepen our understanding of the role played by "niceness" in constituting equality and reversing hierarchies. As such, "Class Acts" is a signal contribution to a growing literature on the place of the self concept in class boundaries. It will gain a significant place in a body of work that broadens our understanding of class by moving beyond structural determinants and taking into consideration the performative, emotional, cognitive, and expressive dimensions of inequality."--Michele Lamont, author of "The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration"
"Eye-opening, amusing, and appalling, Rachel Sherman's "Class Acts "explains how class inequality is normalized in the refined atmosphere of luxury hotels. This beautifully observed and engagingly written ethnography describes what kinds of deference and personal recognition money can buy. Moreover, it shows how workers who provide luxury service avoid seeing themselves as subordinate and how those whose whims are catered to are made comfortable with their privilege. "Class Acts" is a sobering and timely account of the legitimation of extreme inequality in a culture that prizes egalitarianism."--Robin Leidner, University of Pennsylvania
"Rachel Sherman provides a penetrating and engrossing study of workers and guests in luxury hotels. Do workers resent the guests? Do guests disdain the workers? Sherman argues neither is true-and explainswhy."--Julia Wrigley, author of "Other People's Children"

This Is A New Release Of The Original 1894 Edition.

1894. With Portraits. Introduction: Soon after beginning the work of arranging my father's papers for publication, I found a series of letters which awoke my deepest interest. They covered a period extending from 1837 to 1891, and proved to be the complete correspondence between my father and his brother John during those more than fifty years. These letters, exchanged by two brothers of such eminence, and many of them written during the most stirring events of our country's history, seem to me unique. They form a collection, complete in itself; they are of great historical value, and the expressions of opinion which they obtain are so freely given as to furnish an excellent idea of the relations that existed between my father and his brother. Realizing all this, I have decided to publish the correspondence by itself; and in so doing, my chief desire has been to let the letters speak for themselves, and to put them such form that they may be easily understood.

1894. With Portraits. Introduction: Soon after beginning the work of arranging my father's papers for publication, I found a series of letters which awoke my deepest interest. They covered a period extending from 1837 to 1891, and proved to be the complete correspondence between my father and his brother John during those more than fifty years. These letters, exchanged by two brothers of such eminence, and many of them written during the most stirring events of our country's history, seem to me unique. They form a collection, complete in itself; they are of great historical value, and the expressions of opinion which they obtain are so freely given as to furnish an excellent idea of the relations that existed between my father and his brother. Realizing all this, I have decided to publish the correspondence by itself; and in so doing, my chief desire has been to let the letters speak for themselves, and to put them such form that they may be easily understood.

1894. With Portraits. Introduction: Soon after beginning the work of arranging my father's papers for publication, I found a series of letters which awoke my deepest interest. They covered a period extending from 1837 to 1891, and proved to be the complete correspondence between my father and his brother John during those more than fifty years. These letters, exchanged by two brothers of such eminence, and many of them written during the most stirring events of our country's history, seem to me unique. They form a collection, complete in itself; they are of great historical value, and the expressions of opinion which they obtain are so freely given as to furnish an excellent idea of the relations that existed between my father and his brother. Realizing all this, I have decided to publish the correspondence by itself; and in so doing, my chief desire has been to let the letters speak for themselves, and to put them such form that they may be easily understood.