the black hole of $1 book carts

Living in Boston, Hanna and I have ample opportunity to peruse used bookstores, which could put a serious strain on our already-stretched budgets . . . except for the wonderful phenomenon known as $1 carts, which can provide brilliant finds for $1/each.

Last weekend, we stopped at the Brattle Bookshop near Downtown Crossing and I found five books that could be justified as having some scholastic thesis-related or otherwise worthy worth:

Appleby, Joyce Oldham, Lynn Avery Hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob. Telling the Truth About History. New York: Norton, 1994.

Cremin, Lawrence A. The Transformation of the School; Progressivism in American Education, 1876-1957. New York: Knopf, 1961.

Macedo, Stephen. Reassessing the Sixties: Debating the Political and Cultural Legacy. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997.

Roszak, Theodore. The Dissenting Academy. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968.

Wartzman, Rick. Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. New York, NY: PublicAffairs, 2008.

So far I've read parts of The Dissenting Academy and Reassessing the Sixties. The Sixties book mostly sucks (written largely by people who identify the evils of modern civilization as -- and I kid you not -- feminism, environmentalism, and rock music), but I'm pleased I paid the $1 because its one redeeming chapter is an essay on the children's rights movement of the early Seventies, written by law professor Martha Minow. Since the children's rights movement is chronically understudied from an historical perspective, I was pleased to see it represented therein -- and not in an unsympathetic though also not wholly uncritical light.

Happy book hunting, one and all.