Best of
Social

1999

The Cornel West Reader


Cornel West - 1999
    Whether he is writing a scholarly book or an article for Newsweek, whether he is speaking of Emerson, Gramsci, or Marvin Gaye, his work radiates a passion that reflects the rich traditions he draws on and weaves together: Baptist preaching, American transcendentalism, jazz, radical politics. This anthology reveals the dazzling range of West's work, from his explorations of ”Prophetic Pragmatism” to his philosophizing on hip-hop.The Cornel West Reader traces the development of West's extraordinary career as academic, public intellectual, and activist. In his essays, articles, books, and interviews, West emerges as America's social conscience, urging attention to complicated issues of racial and economic justice, sexuality and gender, history and politics. This collection represents the best work of an always compelling, often controversial, and absolutely essential philosopher of the modern American experience.

Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the-Century Lynching That Launched a Hundred Years of Federalism


Mark Curriden - 1999
    Two black lawyers, not even part of the original defense, appealed to the Supreme Court for a stay of execution, and the stay, incredibly, was granted. Frenzied with rage at the deision, locals responded by lynching Johnson, and what ensued was a breathtaking whirlwind of groundbreaking legal action whose import, Thurgood Marshall would claim, "has never been fully explained." Provocative, thorough, and gripping, Contempt of Court is a long-overdue look at events that clearly depict the peculiar and tenuous relationship between justice and the law.

Martin Luther King, Jr., on Leadership: Inspiration and Wisdom for Challenging Times


Donald T. Phillips - 1999
    Bernice King.Martin Luther King Jr. is known for famous speeches such as I Have a Dream, and his ability to inspire the people of the United States to demand equality, regardless of the color of their skin. His ability to lead has cemented himself as one of America's greatest civil rights advocates.And in today's world, his wisdom and teachings are needed more than ever. Martin Luther King Jr., On Leadership chronicles the actions of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and identifies the key leadership skills he displayed such as:Practice what you preachTake direct action without waiting for other agencies to actGive credit where credit is dueLaws only declare rights, they do not deliver themAnd much more . . . This book is part history and part guide to becoming a great leader, inspired by Martin Luther King Jr., an advocate to peaceful change while never wavering in making the opposition listen and give in.

Huye, hombre, huye. Diario de un preso F.I.E.S.


Xosé Tarrío González - 1999
    His story travels from the boarding school to the reformatory and then to prison. Due to additional punishments, Xosé was never released from prison, and instead spent the rest of his life fighting desperately to escape by any means necessary. This is the first-hand account of one man’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of the privileged’s judgement of the less privileged, a story of collective struggle against an inhumane system, and of the limitless depths that those in power will sink to when challenged. It is the powerful story of an unbreakable spirit.(This) is the life of a man who survives in subhuman conditions not far from us and who, in these circumstances, has been able to compose an honest and stark testimony about the reality of imprisonment today... I do not foresee a more human horizon, or a more respectful criminal or prison policy, simply because prison is the ultimate container for a quite specific political-economic project. In the context of a State that is abandoning many of its former tasks, of the privatization of important public services, the precarization of the labor market, and economic globalization, etc., I don’t think that there are many spaces left where we could discuss overcoming or even restricting the use of incarceration. This does not mean paralysis or doing nothing, but the other way around: from the highest skepticism a “culture of resistance” can begin, one that keeps critical thinking alive.-From the Prologue by Iñaki Rivera Beiras

Gentleman's Guide to Grooming and Style


Bernhard Roetzel - 1999
    Here is all one needs to assume the mantle that epitomises civilized man. Here is richness indeed - for here is the gentleman's handbook.

Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together


William Isaacs - 1999
    Reveals how problems between managers and employees, and between companies or divisions within a larger corporation, stem from an inability to conduct a successful dialogue.

Fear of Intimacy


Robert W. Firestone - 1999
    Related issues such as interpersonal ethics and the role of stereotyping are also discussed.

Social Work with Groups


Thelma Lee-Mendoza - 1999
    

Tom Brown's Science and Art of Tracking


Tom Brown Jr. - 1999
    Tom Brown was taught the ancient skills of survival by a Native American he called Grandfather. His most advanced lessons were those of the scouts, members of a secret society who were highly attuned to nature. The scouts refined tracking to a disciplined science and art form. With these physical skills came enhanced perception and true enlightment. "Tracking was their doorway to the universe," Tom Brown writes, "where they could know all things through the tracks..."Now Tom Brown, Jr. shares generations of wisdom through one of the most rewarding pursuits to be found in nature. Tracking lets us unlock the secrets of each animal we follow, and in turn, to become more aware of our own place in nature and the world. It is a journey of discovery that engages the senses, awakens the spirit, and enlightens the soul.

The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas Into History


Emma Pérez - 1999
    it will certainly be read seriously in Chicano/a studies." --Women's Review of BooksEmma Perez discusses the historical methodology which has created Chicano history and argues that the historical narrative has often omitted gender. She poses a theory which rejects the colonizer's methodological assumptions and examines new tools for uncovering the hidden voices of Chicanas who have been relegated to silence.

Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism


Muhammad Yunus - 1999
    But traditional capitalism cannot solve problems like inequality and poverty, because it is hampered by a narrow view of human nature in which people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with profit. In fact, human beings have many other drives and passions, including the spiritual, the social, and the altruistic. Welcome to the world of social business, where the creative vision of the entrepreneur is applied to today's most serious problems: feeding the poor, housing the homeless, healing the sick, and protecting the planet.Creating a World Without Poverty tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social businesses, including Yunus's own Grameen Bank. It reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already under way--and in the worldwide effort to eliminate poverty by unleashing the productive energy of every human being.

Prisons of Poverty


Loïc Wacquant - 1999
    The author argues that the policies have their roots in a network of Reagan-era conservative think tanks, which used them as weapons in their crusade to dismantle the welfare state and, in effect, criminalise poverty.

Failure to Quit: Reflections of an Optimistic Historian


Howard Zinn - 1999
    In this lively collection of essays, now with a new afterword, Zinn discusses a wide range of historical and political topics, from the role of the Supreme Court in U.S. history to the nature of higher education today.

Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace


Noa Davenport - 1999
    Some flee from jobs they love, forced out by mean-spirited co-workers, subordinates or superiors -- often with the tacit approval of higher management. The authors, Dr. Noa Davenport, Ruth Distler Schwartz, and Gail Pursell Elliott have written a book for every employee and manager in America. The book deals with what has become a household word in Europe: Mobbing. Mobbing is a "ganging up" by several individuals, to force someone out of the workplace through rumor, innuendo, intimidation, discrediting, and particularly, humiliation. Mobbing is a serious form of nonsexual, nonracial harassment. It has been legally described as status-blind harassment. Mobbing affects the mental and physical health of victims. It extracts staggering costs from victims, their families, and from organizations. With this new book, Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace, there is a name for the problem and help for the victims. The book helps readers to understand what mobbing is, why it occurs, how it affects a victim and organizations, and what people can so. The authors have interviewed victims from across the U.S. and the book contains many quotes that poignantly illustrate the gravity of the mobbing experience. An overview of the literature and research is provided as well as many practical strategies to help the victims, managers, healthcare and legal professionals. Original drawings by Sabra Vidali express the depth of the experience and enhance the authors' work.

Cassell's Dictionary of Classical Mythology


Jennifer R. March - 1999
    It covers all the principal stories, characters (divine, human, and animal), sacred sites, and important events that shaped past civilizations...and our own. Extensive quotations from the original sources and over 100 illustrations enliven more than 400 articles.

Social Dominance: An Intergroup Theory of Social Hierarchy and Oppression


James Sidanius - 1999
    Using social dominance theory, it is presumed that it is also a basic grammar of social power shared by all societies in common. We use social dominance theory in an attempt to identify the elements of this grammar and to understand how these elements interact and reinforce each other to produce and maintain group-based social hierarchy.

Another Country: Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Our Elders


Mary Pipher - 1999
    They are our parents and grandparents, our aunts and uncles and in-laws. They are living longer, but in a culture that has come to worship youth--a culture in which families have dispersed, communities have broken down, and older people are isolated. Meanwhile, adults in two-career families are struggling to divide their time among their kids, their jobs, and their aging parents--searching for the right words to talk about loneliness, forgetfulness, or selling the house.Another Country is a field guide to this rough terrain for a generation of baby boomers who are finding themselves unprepared to care for those who have always cared for them. Psychologist and bestselling writer Mary Pipher maps out strategies that help bridge the gaps that separate us from our elders. And with her inimitable combination of respect and realism, she offers us new ways of supporting each other--new ways of sharing our time, our energy, and our love.

Chofetz Chaim: A Daily Companion


Michoel Rothschild - 1999
    The Chofetz Chaim's influence continues to grow, as thousands upon thousands adopt his message that the tongue can be a priceless tool or a lethal weapon.This new book is a vital gift for those who "wish to live" and "guard their tongues," and long to learn how.

The Lugano Report: On Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century


Susan George - 1999
    Fictional experts recruited by world leaders to discuss the future of global capitalism provide their assessment of the dire state of the current economy and put forward new ideas for ensuring the survival of the system. But at what cost? Susan George provides a brilliant and chilling vision of the way the winners in the globalisation game profit from poverty and reveals, with relentless logic, the dark future that lies ahead under capitalism. This new edition features a new introduction from the author.

New York Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archive


William Hannigan - 1999
    Capturing the faces of the century's most notorious criminals and their shocking handiwork, "New York Noir" showcases 40 years of crime with over 130 stunning photos from the archives of New York's "Daily News."

Mental Hygiene: Better Living Through Classroom Films 1945-1970


Ken Smith - 1999
    200 photos.

The Trouble with Principle


Stanley Fish - 1999
    A theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right, Fish here turns with customary gusto to the trouble with principle. Specifically, Fish has a quarrel with neutral principles. The trouble? They operate by sacrificing everything people care about to their own purity. And they are deployed with equal highmindedness and equally absurd results by liberals and conservatives alike.In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those who invoke one are always making a rhetorical and political gesture. In the end, it is history and context, the very substance against which a purportedly abstract principle defines itself, that determines a principle's content and power. In the course of making this argument, Fish takes up questions about academic freedom and hate speech, affirmative action and multiculturalism, the boundaries between church and state, and much more. Sparing no one, he shows how our notions of intellectual and religious liberty--cherished by those at both ends of the political spectrum--are artifacts of the very partisan politics they supposedly transcend. The Trouble with Principle offers a provocative challenge to the debates of our day that no intellectually honest citizen can afford to ignore.

The Origins of Unhappiness: A New Understanding of Personal Distress


David Smail - 1999
    On the whole, psychology has concerned itself very little with the field of power which stretches beyond our immediate relations with each other, and this has led to serious limitations on the explanatory power of the theories it has produced. To illustrate this, typical cases of patient distress in the 1980s are examined. The decade when the right-wing of politics proclaimed there was no such thing as society gave rise to psychological distress across social classes, as long-standing societal institutions were dismantled. This is as much a work of sociology, politics, and philosophy, as it is of psychology. Fundamentals of an environmental understanding of distress are outlined. A person is the interaction of a body with the environment.

Social Theory: A Historical Introduction


Alex Callinicos - 1999
    No longer would human beings invoke the authority of tradition; instead, modern societies emerging in the West justified themselves by their success at increasing, through the application of scientific knowledge, human control over the world. Ever since this notion of modernity was formulated it has provoked intense debate. In this wide-ranging historical introduction to social theory, Alex Callinicos explores the controversies over modernity and examines the connections between social theory and modern philosophy, political economy and evolutionary biology. He offers clear and accesssible treatments of the thought of Montesquieu, Adam Smith and the Scottish Enlightenment, Hegel, Marx, Tocqueville, Maistre, Gobineau, Darwin, Spencer, Kautsky, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Freud, Lukacs, Gramsci, Heidegger, Keynes, Hayek, Parsons, the Frankfurt School, Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Foucault, Habermas and Bourdieu, and concludes by surveying the state of contemporary social thought. A remarkably comprehensive and lucid primer, Social Theoryis essential reading for students of politics, sociology and social and political thought.

Scrapiron Blues


Dambudzo Marechera - 1999
    In the "Concentration Camp," Marechera gives a poetic, deeply felt voice to the dread experienced by former inhabitants of the "keeps," the restricted villages of Zimbabwe's War of Liberation. Often he takes a child's view to measure the horrors of adult society. Gentleness paired with sarcasm marks his hardly known children's stories.

Social Cognition


Ziva Kunda - 1999
    In this book Ziva Kunda provides a comprehensive and accessible survey of research and theory about social cognition at a level appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers in the field.The first part of the book reviews basic processes in social cognition, including the representation of social concepts, rules of inference, memory, hot cognition driven by motivation or affect, and automatic processing. The second part reviews three basic topics in social cognition: group stereotypes, knowledge of other individuals, and the self. A final chapter revisits many of these issues from a cross-cultural perspective.

The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink


Mark Dery - 1999
    Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists: modern life seems to have become a "pyrotechnic insanitarium," Mark Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety-a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic Monthly has written, "Mark Dery confirms once again what writers and thinkers as disparate as Nathanael West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Oliver Sacks have already shown us: the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes."

Who I Was Supposed to Be


Susan Perabo - 1999
    In Susan Perabo's world, nothing can be taken for granted: here, a retired grocer takes up jewel theft in his twilight years; a data processor squanders her inheritance on one of Princess Diana's gowns; a mugging victim feigns amnesia to win back his wife. In the tradition of Lorrie Moore, Susan Perabo's slightly off-center lens looks hard at the banal and the bizarre, and at the human condition, where she finds extraordinary magic within the smallest of gestures. Sharply written and overlaid with a mischievous wit, Who I Was Supposed to Be is an unforgettable homage to laughter, love, and wonder.

Days of Defeat and Victory


Yegor Gaidar - 1999
    He offers his account of governing in the early 1990s, up to Yeltsin's cliffhanger re-election in 1996.

Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative


Michael Taussig - 1999
    It begins with the notion that such activity is attractive in its very repulsion, and that it creates something sacred even in the most secular of societies and circumstances. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface. This surfacing is made all the more subtle and ingenious, not to mention everyday, by the deliberately partial exposures involved in "the public secret"—defined as what is generally known but, for one reason or another, cannot easily be articulated.Arguing that this sort of knowledge ("knowing what not to know") is the most powerful form of social knowledge, Taussig works with ideas and motifs from Nietzsche, William Burroughs, Elias Canetti, Georges Bataille, and the ethnography of unmasking in so-called primitive societies in order to extend his earlier work on mimesis and transgression. Underlying his concern with defacement and the public secret is the search for a mode of truth telling that unmasks, but only to reenchant, thereby underlining Walter Benjamin's notion that "truth is not a matter of exposure of the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it."

Civil War Days: Discover the Past with Exciting Projects, Games, Activities, and Recipes


David C. King - 1999
    Along the way, they'll show you how to play the games they play and make the toys and crafts they make. Make your own apple pandowdy and whip up a batch of tasty gingerbread. Send top-secret messages in Morse code, gather materials for crafting evergreen wreaths and pinecone turkeys, and sculpt a miniature sheep out of homemade clay dough. Play the exciting African game of mankala--that is, if you have time after making your own potato-print wrapping paper, papier-mache bowl, and marzipan decorations. Civil War Days is filled with interesting historical information and facts about growing up in days gone by. Discover how different--and how similar--life was for American kids in history. Watch for Victorian Days, the next exciting book in the American Kids in History?(TM) series! Also available: Pioneer Days, Colonial Days, and Wild West Days For Children Ages 8 to 1

Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700-1775


Rebecca Larson - 1999
    Some of these women circulated throughout British North America; others crossed the Atlantic to deliver their inspired messages. In this public role, they preached in courthouses, meeting houses, and private homes, to audiences of men and women, to Quakers and to those of other faiths, to Native Americans and to slaves.Utilizing the Quakers' rich archival sources, as well as colonial newspapers and diaries, Rebecca Larson reconstructs the activities of these women. She offers striking insights into the ways their public, authoritative role affected the formation of their identities, their families, and their society. Extensively researched and compellingly written, Daughters of Light enriches our understanding of religion and women's lives in colonial America.

The Essential Collection 10 vol. box set: A Clockwork Orange; Breakfast at Tiffany's; A Passage to India; The Heart of the Matter; On the Road; Lady Chatterley's Lover; One Hundred Years of Solitude; Animal Farm; Bonjour Tristesse; To the Lighthouse


Anthony BurgessVirginia Woolf - 1999
    A Clockwork Orange; Breakfast at Tiffany's; A Passage to India; The Heart of the Matter; On the Road; Lady Chatterley's Lover; One Hundred Years of Solitude; Animal Farm; Bonjour Tristesse; To the Lighthouse

Folk Linguistics


Nancy A. Niedzielski - 1999
    Introductory texts often disparage folkbelief in contrast to 'scientific truth'. In fact, language is a ubiquitous topic of discussion and general concern of the folk. They talk about grammar, pronunciation, first and second language learning, language disabilities, dialects, gender and language, and a host of other topics. This book approaches such beliefs as one of the most important aspects of ethnography. Surely what a people believe about their language is as important as any other key to an understanding of their culture.;

Félix d`Herelle and the Origins of Molecular Biology


William C. Summers - 1999
    Not only was he first to demonstrate the use and application of bacteria for biological control of insect pests, he also became a seminal figure in the history of molecular biology. This engaging book is the first full biography of d’Herelle, a complex figure who emulated Louis Pasteur and influenced the course of twentieth-century biology, yet remained a controversial outsider to the scientific community. Drawing on family papers, archival sources, interviews, and d’Herelle’s published and unpublished writings, Dr. William C. Summers tells the fascinating story of the scientist’s life and the work that took him around the globe. In 1917, d’Herelle published the first paper describing the phenomenon of the bacteriophage and its biological nature. A series of more than 110 articles and 6 major books followed, in which d’Herelle established the foundation for the later work of the Phage Group in molecular biology. Yet d’Herelle sometimes inspired animosity in others--he was drummed out of the Pasteur Institute, he held only one brief permanent position in the scientific establishment (at Yale University from 1928 to 1933), and he was bewildered by the social nuances of the world of international science. His story is more than the biography of a single brilliant scientist; it is also a fascinating chapter in the history of biology.

Hating Whitey: And Other Progressive Causes


David Horowitz - 1999
    A new brand of self-styled progressives threatens the very institutions that guarantee racial inclusion. Racial warlords and academic malcontents indict American democracy for racial oppression even as they themselves excuse intolerance to the point of murder. David Horowitz, whose ad campaign against reparations has provoked censorious rage on campuses across the country, delivers a powerful blow to contemporary race thinking.-- Why do some civil rights leaders condone murder?-- Has "progressivism" become a war against democracy?-- How has Martin Luther King been betrayed?

Red Flags: How to Know When You're Dating a Loser


Gary S. Aumiller - 1999
    Studies show that most women will try to justify these signs, excusing them so they don't interfere with their fantasy of having met the perfect man. Unfortunately, such signs are usually all too prophetic--they are the essence of what Gary Aumiller and Daniel Goldfarb call Red Flags. The question then becomes how to detect and respond to a Red Flag before it's too late.This first-of-its-kind book will help readers determine a man's all-important loser potential within the first three dates. Each chapter includes a profile of a different loser, a post-date quiz to help you determine if Mr. Right is Mr. Wrong, and important information about the best way to break up with him. Red Flags has all the fun of a magazine quiz combined with the expertise of psychologists who specialize in the techniques used by the police to profile criminals. They know how to spot the rejects--and now you will, too!

A Short History of Medical Ethics


Albert R. Jonsen - 1999
    The current argument over the role of physicians in assisting patients to die constantly refers to the ethical duties of the profession. References to the Hippocratic Oath are often heard. Many modern problems, from assisted suicide to accessible health care, raise questions about the traditional ethics of medicine and the medical profession. However, few know what the traditional ethics are and how they came into being. This book provides a brief tour of the complex story of medical ethics evolved over centuries in both Western and Eastern culture. It sets this story in the social and cultural contexts in which the work of healing was practiced and suggests that, behind the many different perceptions about the ethical duties of physicians, certain themes appear constantly, and may be relevant to modern debates. The book begins with the Hippocratic medicine of ancient Greece, moves through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and Enlightenment in Europe, and the long history of Indian 7nd Chinese medicine, ending as the problems raised modern medical science and technology challenge the settled ethics of the long tradition.

Sweet Talk: The Secret History Of Confectionery


Nicholas Whittaker - 1999
    The book also traces patterns of consumption and explores the murky world of the chemistry of sweet manufacturing.