"Steve Lopez is insightful, ingenious, and often hilarious as he navigates one of life's biggest questions." --Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Dark Hours Four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and longtime Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez explores the meaning of work and how it defines us in this captivating book that combines memoir, investigatory interviews, and practical application. Grappling with his own decision of whether to retire, Lopez uses his reporter skills not only to look inward but also to interview experts and peers to collect a variety of perspectives as he examines the true nature of a person’s time, identity, and ultimate life satisfaction. In Independence Day, Lopez talks to those who have chosen to extend their working life to its (il)logical extreme--people like Mel Brooks, still working at 94--those who have happily retired and reinvented themselves outside of the constraints of work, and those who would like to retire but can't because of financial constraints. He also turns to professionals on the matter, like two aging scientists, a geriatric specialist, and a psychiatrist, to understand the research-based reasons to retire. With his trademark poignancy, wisdom, and humor, Lopez establishes a useful polemic for himself and others in planning ahead, as he also evaluates questions of identity, financial limitations, and ultimately what to do with your life when the obituary pages are no longer filled with strangers.

The "New York Times" bestselling, "unforgettable tale of hope, heart and humanity" ("People")
The true story of journalist Steve Lopez's discovery of Nathanial Ayers, a former classical bass student at Julliard, playing his heart out on a two-string violin on Los Angeles' Skid Row. Deeply affected by the beauty of Ayers music, Lopez took it upon himself to change the prodigy's life-only to find that their relationship would have a profound change on his own life.
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"At last world.com meets ethnography.eudora. This book shows how ethnography can have a global reach and a global relevance, its humanistic and direct methods actually made more not less relevant by recent developments in global culture and economy. Globalisation is not a singular, unilinear process, fatalistically unfolding towards inevitable ends: it entails gaps, contradictions, counter-tendencies, and marked unevenness. And just as capital flows more freely around the globe, so do human ideas and imaginings, glimpses of other possible futures. These elements all interact in really existing sites, situations and localities, not in outer space or near-earth orbit. Unprefigurably, they are taken up into all kinds of local meanings-makings by active humans struggling and creating with conditions on the ground, so producing new kinds of meanings and identities, themselves up for export on the world market. This book, conceptually rich, empirically concrete, shows how global neo-liberalism spawns a grounded globalisation, ethnographically observable, out of which is emerging the mosaic of a new kind of global civil society. As this book so richly shows, tracing the lineaments of these possibilities and changes is the special province of ethnography."--Paul Willis, author of "Learning to Labor and editor of the journal "Ethnography

"The authors of "Global Ethnography" bring globalization 'down to earth' and show us how it impacts the everyday lives of Kerala nurses, U.S. homeless recyclers, Irish software programmers, Hungarian welfare recipients, Brazilian feminists, and a host of other protagonists in a global postmodern world. This is superb ethnography -- refreshing and vividdescriptions grounded in historical and social contexts with important theoretical implications."--Louise Lamphere, President of the American Anthropological Association

"The global inhabits and constitutes specific structuration of the political, economic, cultural, and subjective. How to study this is a challenge. "Global Ethnography" makes an enormous contribution to this effort."--Saskia Sassen, author of "Globalization and Its Discontents"

"This fascinating volume will quickly find its place in fieldwork courses, but it should also be read by transnationalists and students of the political economy, economic sociologists, methodologists of all stripes--and doubting macrosociologists."--Herbert J. Gans, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

"Not only matches the originality and quality of "Ethnography Unbound, but raises the ante by literally expanding the methodological and analytical repertory of ethnographic sociology to address the theoretical and logistical challenges of a globalized discipline and social world."--Judith Stacey, author of "In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age

"In the best traditions of radical Berkeley scholarship, Burawoy's collective recaptures the ground(s) of an engaged sociology embedded in the culturalpolitics of the global without losing the ethnographer's magic--the local touch."--Nancy Scheper-Hughes, author of "Death without Weeping

"Based on his immersion in heated campaigns, Lopez analyzes just how difficult organizing for today's trade unions can be. Still the Sisyphean effort goes on, led by unions, such as SEIU, which notch up victories despite the uphill struggle. Lopez's participant observation is a model of clarity, theoretical imagination and methodological innovation. It is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand why unions are so weak in the US, and how they could become stronger."--Michael Burawoy, President of the American Sociological Association

"Lopez's beautifully written, lucid analysis of the new labor movement bristles with insights. This rare insider's account of contemporary organizing consistently avoids the easy answers and relentlessly confronts the limitations of union achievements, even as he appreciates their transformative potential."--Ruth Milkman, Director, UC Institute for Labor and Employment and author of "Farewell to the Factory

""Reorganizing the Rust Belt is the best ethnography around of what it's like, day-to-day, to be inside an organizing campaign and contract mobilization. Lopez brings to life the limits and problems, the changes over time, the victories and ambiguities, experienced by workers and organizers in a progressive union."--Dan Clawson, author of "The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements

In the dark neighborhood known as the Badlands, a mother, Ofelia Santoro, rides her bicycle through the dark, decaying streets looking for her 14-year-old son, Gabriel. Set in a world where evil is so routine it becomes inevitable, Lopez's gritty novel brings home the violence that is scarring America's vast urban wastelands, and the humanity that might save them.