Best of
Society

1986

Essays on Woman


Edith Stein - 1986
    Teresa Benedicta of the Cross O.C.D.) 2d ed., revised (1996), translated by Freda Mary Oben, Ph.D. Eight essays on the theme of woman and her vocation, with index.  With reason Edith Stein has been called "the most significant German woman of this century." Her writings on woman are the fruit of both reflection and debate with other leaders of the Catholic feminist movement in German-speaking countries between the World Wars.      This second revised edition of Essays on Woman includes textual corrections, important new supplementary data, and previously unavailable material on the spirituality of the lay and religious woman. These essays crystallize long hours of experience teaching in the classroom and on the speaker's platform in the pursuit of fulfilling roles for women in all walks of life. Reviews      "Every page of these essays reveals a mind, never doctrinaire or ruffled, but rather serene, graceful, wide-ranging, fearless, and deeply dedicated to a search for truth." - Keith J. Egan, Horizons      "This newly revised edition…is a valuable text." - Review of Metaphysics      "One would hope that these essays will be read widely and carefully by both men and women." - The Thomist

Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour


Maria Mies - 1986
    It gives a history of the related processes of colonization and "housewifization" and extends this analysis to the contemporary new international division of labor and the role that women have to play as the cheapest producers and consumers. First published in 1986, it was hailed as a major paradigm shift for feminist theory. Eleven years on, Maria Mies' theory of capitalist patriarchy has become even more relevant; this new edition includes a substantial new introduction in which she both applies her theory to the new globalized world and answers her critics.

Nomadology: The War Machine


Gilles Deleuze - 1986
    Far from being a part of the state, warriers (the army) are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state.In this daring essay inspired by Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari redefine the relation between the state and its war machine. Far from being a part of the state, warriers (the army) are nomads who always come from the outside and keep threatening the authority of the state. In the same vein, nomadic science keeps infiltrating royal science, undermining its axioms and principles. Nomadology is a speedy, pocket-sized treatise that refuses to be pinned down. Theorizing a dynamic relationship between sedentary power and schizophrenic lines of flight, this volume is meant to be read in transit, smuggled into urban nightclubs, offices, and subways. Deleuze and Guattari propose a creative and resistant ethics of becoming-imperceptible, strategizing a continuous invention of weapons on the run. An anarchic bricolage of ideas uprooted from anthropology, aesthetics, history, and military strategy, Nomadology carries out Deleuze's desire to leave philosophy, but to leave it as a philosopher.

Men and Marriage


George Gilder - 1986
    He examines the deterioration of the family, the well-defined sex roles it offered, and how this change has shifted the focus of our society. Poverty, for instance, stems from the destruction of the family when unmarried parents are abandoned by their lovers or older women are divorced because society approves of their husbands' younger girlfriends.Gilder claims that men will only fulfill their paternal obligations when women lead them to do so, and that this civilizing influence, balanced with proper economic support, is the most important part of maintaining a productive, healthy, loving society.He offers a concrete plan for rebuilding the family in America. His solutions challenge readers to return to these roles and reestablish the family values that were once so crucial in staving off the ills that plague our country. Gilder insists that it is time to reexamine what "liberation" has wrought and at what cost. Only a return to traditional family values, he contends, can stem the tide of disaster.George Gilder is the author of Wealth and Poverty, the best-selling critique of Reaganomics, The Spirit of Enterprise, Visible Man, Naked Nomads, and The Party That Lost Its Head . He was a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and now writes regularly for The Wall Street Journal and National Review about material advances and their effect on society. His most recent books include two other well-known social commentaries, Microcosm and Life After Television. Also available in paperback.

Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental


Drew Friedman - 1986
    is a collection of Drew Friedman’s earliest comic strips and illustrations, featuring his most obsessively stippled black-and-white panels and his most hilarious wise-guy takes on the stars and demi-stars and never-quite-stars of that swamp we like to call showbiz.In these strips, many of them written by his brother Josh Alan Friedman (both are sons of the legendary Bruce Jay Friedman: humor genes will tell!), the artist works out his obsession with such celebrities as Jim Nabors, Frank Sinatra Jr., Joe Franklin, Bob Hope, Andy Griffith... and Ed Wood, Jr. film star Tor Johnson, whom Friedman actually catapulted back into some sort of semi-fame when these strips were first published in the 1980s.Friedman is the kind of pop-culture aficionado whose Three Stooges worship is focused not on Moe, Larry or Curly but on Shemp (whose unmistakable mug graces the new cover of this edition), and whose teasing adoration can often be mistaken for mockery or contempt. But who but a worshipful fan would lavish quite so many dots on the loving delineation of these greats’ every pimple and wrinkle?

The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr: Selected Essays and Addresses


Reinhold Niebuhr - 1986
    Now newly repackaged, this important book gathers the best of Niebuhr’s essays together in a single volume. Selected, edited, and introduced by Robert McAfee Brown—a student and friend of Niebuhr’s and himself a distinguished theologian—the works included here testify to the brilliant polemics, incisive analysis, and deep faith that characterized the whole of Niebuhr’s life.“This fine anthology makes available to a new generation the thought of one of the most penetrating and rewarding of twentieth-century minds. Reinhold Niebuhr remains the great illuminator of the dark conundrums of human nature, history and public policy.”—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.“Sparkling gems. . . brought from the shadows of history into contemporary light. Beautifully selected and edited, they show that Niebuhr’s fiery polemics and gracious assurances still speak with power to us today.”—Roger L. Shinn“An extremely useful volume.”—David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books“This collection, which brings together Niebuhr’s most penetrating and enduring essays on theology and politics, should demonstrate for a new generation that his best thought transcends the immediate historical setting in which he wrote. . . . [Brown’s] introduction succinctly presents the central features of Niebuhr’s life and thought.”—Library Journal

The Search for Common Ground


Howard Thurman - 1986
    He calls us at once to affirm our own identity, but also to look beyond that identity to that which we have in common with all of life.

Psychological Trauma


Bessel van der Kolk - 1986
    Covers the psychological consequences of overwhelming life experiences, the psychobiology of trauma response, traumatic antecedents of borderline personality disorder, trauma in the family, amnesia, dissociation, and the return of the repressed.

Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics


Thomas Ferguson - 1986
    

The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History


Leo Braudy - 1986
    . . an impressive tour de force." --Washington Post Book WorldFor Alexander the Great, fame meant accomplishing what no mortal had ever accomplished before. For Julius Caesar, personal glory was indistinguishable from that of Rome. The early Christians devalued public recognition, believing that the only true audience was God. And Marilyn Monroe owed much of her fame to the fragility that led to self-destruction. These are only some of the dozens of figures that populate Leo Braudy's panoramic history of fame, a book that tells us as much about vast cultural changes as it does about the men and women who at different times captured their societies' regard.  Spanning thousands of years and fields ranging from politics to literature and mass media, The Frenzy of Renown explores the unfolding relationship between the famous and their audiences, between fame and the representations that make it possible. Hailed as a landmark at its original publication and now reissued with a new Afterword covering the last tumultuous decade, here is a major work that provides our celebrity-obsessed, post-historical society with a usable past. "Expansive . . . Braudy excels at rocketing a general point into the air with the fuel of drama. " --Harper's

The Anatomy of Self


Takeo Doi - 1986
    The author is as quick to explode the myths the Japanese have about themselves as he is to defend what he sees as the genius of theirsociety. He spreads his net wide, drawing his conclusions from an extensive knowledge of his own culture but that of the West: Freud, Weber, Max Picard, and George Orwell are every bit as influential here as sources from his own tradition.The Anatomy of Self is a sequel to Doi's pioneering and acclaimed bestseller, The Anatomy of Dependence in which he set out his theory of passive, dependent love as the key to understanding the Japanese. More than 100,000 foreign readers have been intrigued by this work. With The Anatomy of Self,Japanese society again serves as the subject of an analysis by one of its most original thinkers.Like Doi's renowned Anatomy of Dependence, The Anatomy of Self addresses the question of the Japanese individual and his or her integration into Japanese society. Its approach is based on an analysis of the Japanese perception of public and private. What kind of society is made up of individualscapable of a constant traversing between behavior based on two simultaneously held, mutually contradictory modes of perception? Doi discusses this feature of the Japanese psyche, often referring to Western psychology. He compares the individual trauma that classic Western psychology believes toresult from such a split, to the Japanese sense that adulthood is only achieved by acknowledging and accommodating the difference. Finally, the wide-ranging references to history and psychology serve to provoke thought on Freudian notions of the unconscious.

Sustainable Communities: A New Design Synthesis for Cities, Suburbs, and Towns


Paul Hawken - 1986
    Presents four case studies that serve as illustrations for discussions of land use, building design, and service systems, all shaped to promote limited dependence on fossil fuels.

Individual Interests and Collective Action: Studies in Rationality and Social Change


James Samuel Coleman - 1986
    Coleman on problems of collective action. Coleman's work has formed a consistent and highly distinguished attempt to find an account of the workings of social and political processes rooted in the rationality of the individual participants. The chapters address in various ways the fundamental Hobbesian problem of order; the question of how a set of self-interested individuals can arrive at some kind of social order. The volume is organised in three parts. The essays in Part I address the problem of social choice as a fundamental problem of the functioning of social systems. Those in Part II deal with relations of power as a crucial aspect of the relations between individual actions and their social consequences. Part III considers the question of the creation of collectivities and the rights that are allocated under them. As a whole, the volume demonstrates the integration and force of the views Coleman has developed.

South Light: A Journey to the Last Continent


Michael Parfit - 1986
    A sharply observed narrative of the author's full season in Antarctica, in paperback for the first time.

In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space


Douglas Curran - 1986
    I am tempted to suggest that he also qualifies as an anthropologist, but I think I will leave it at 'reporter.' To be a reporter of Douglas Curran's caliber is a lofty enough achievement. He has discovered an exotic world, and for eight years he has traveled remote terrains throughout the United States and Canada exploring it. This book is the culmination of a quest that, by terrestrial standards, is as extraordinary as that of the people he brings to life".In the course of that long quest, Curran recorded -- in sympathetic words and perceptive photographs -- the ideas and experiences of individuals whose obsession with outer space inspired them to create elaborate homemade spaceships and even more elaborate belief systems. Now updated with several new photographs and an expanded text -- and more relevant than ever, given the popularity of The X-Files and other investigations of alien life -- In Advance of the Landing remains the definitive probe of a singularly fascinating subculture.