Robert MaxJackson.Destined for Equality: The Inevitable Rise of Women's Status (Harvard University Press, 1998). Seeks to explain women's changing status over the past two centuries.
2.
CharlesTilly.Durable Inequality (University of California Press, 1999). A challenging effort by one of the great living sociologists to understand persistent inequalities.
3.
Erik OlinWright.Approaches to Class Analysis (Cambridge University Press, 2005). From the premier Marxist sociologist working on class in recent decades, a consideration of alternative approaches to class.
4.
William JuliusWilson.The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (University of Chicago Press, 1978). The most influential study of race in America in the past several decades.
