Best of
Sociology

2006

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism


Naomi Klein - 2006
    She called it "disaster capitalism." Covering Sri Lanka in the wake of the tsunami, and New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed something remarkably similar. People still reeling from catastrophe were being hit again, this time with economic "shock treatment" losing their land and homes to rapid-fire corporate makeovers. The Shock Doctrine retells the story of the most dominant ideology of our time, Milton Friedman's free market economic revolution. In contrast to the popular myth of this movement's peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies in so many parts of the world from Latin America and Eastern Europe to South Africa, Russia, and Iraq. At the core of disaster capitalism is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. By capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, Klein argues that the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, and is the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.

White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era


Shelby Steele - 2006
    Forty years later, despite the strong DNA evidence against him, accused murderer O. J. Simpson went free after his attorney portrayed him as a victim of racism. The age of white supremacy has given way to an age of "white guilt" and neither has been good for African Americans.Through articulate analysis and engrossing recollections, acclaimed race relations scholar Shelby Steele sounds a powerful call for a new culture of personal responsibility.

The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe V. Wade


Ann Fessler - 2006
    Wade In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Away is their story.

What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets


Peter Menzel - 2006
    Featuring a Japanese sumo wrestler, a Massai herdswoman, world-renowned Spanish chef Ferran Adria, an American competitive eater, and more, these compulsively readable personal stories also include demographic particulars, including age, activity level, height, and weight. Essays from Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, journalist Michael Pollan, and others discuss the implications of our modern diets for our health and for the planet. This compelling blend of photography and investigative reportage expands our understanding of the complex relationships among individuals, culture, and food.

The Authoritarians


Bob Altemeyer - 2006
    Bob Altemeyer—author of Atheists and The Authoritarian Specter —gives a readable analysis of the nature of authoritarianism and its current impact on American politics.Full text available at theauthoritarians.org.

Nature and the Human Soul: Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World


Bill Plotkin - 2006
    Depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin presents a model for a human life span rooted in the cycles and qualities of the natural world, a blueprint for individual development that ultimately yields a strategy for cultural transformation.With evocative language and personal stories, including those of elders Thomas Berry and Joanna Macy, this book defines eight stages of human life - Innocent, Explorer, Thespian, Wanderer, Soul Apprentice, Artisan, Master, and Sage - and describes the challenges and benefits of each. Plotkin offers a way of progressing from our current egocentric, aggressively competitive, consumer society to an ecocentric, soul-based one that is sustainable, cooperative, and compassionate. At once a primer on human development and a manifesto for change, Nature and the Human Soul fashions a template for a more mature, fulfilling, and purposeful life - and a better world.

The Ancient City: A Study of the Religion, Laws, and Institutions of Greece and Rome


Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges - 2006
    Fustel de Coulanges' 1864 masterpiece, La Cité antique, drew upon physical evidence as well as ancient documents rather than the usual post-Classical histories. The result is a fresh, accurate, and detailed portrait of the religious, family, and civic life of Periclean Athens and Rome during the time of Cicero.This fascinating sociological account reveals the significance of kinship and the cult of the family hearth and ancestors to ancient Hellenic and Latin urban culture. It chronicles the rise of family-centered pagan belief systems, tracing their gradual decline to the spread of Christianity. Fustel cites ancient Indian and Hebrew texts as well as Greek and Roman sources. The ingenuity of his interpretations, along with his striking prose style, offer readers a vital and enduring historic survey.

Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice


Raymond Arsenault - 2006
    In the spring and summer of 1961, they put their lives on the line, riding buses through the American South to challenge segregation in interstate transport. Their story is one of the most celebrated episodes of the civil rights movement, yet a full-length history has never been written until now. In these pages, acclaimed historian Raymond Arsenault provides a gripping account of six pivotal months that jolted the consciousness of America.The Freedom Riders were greeted with hostility, fear, and violence. They were jailed and beaten, their buses stoned and firebombed. In Alabama, police stood idly by as racist thugs battered them. When Martin Luther King met the Riders in Montgomery, a raging mob besieged them in a church. Arsenault recreates these moments with heart-stopping immediacy. His tightly braided narrative reaches from the White House--where the Kennedys were just awakening to the moral power of the civil rights struggle--to the cells of Mississippi's infamous Parchman Prison, where Riders tormented their jailers with rousing freedom anthems. Along the way, he offers vivid portraits of dynamic figures such as James Farmer, Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Fred Shuttlesworth, recapturing the drama of an improbable, almost unbelievable saga of heroic sacrifice and unexpected triumph.The Riders were widely criticized as reckless provocateurs, or outside agitators. But indelible images of their courage, broadcast to the world by a newly awakened press, galvanized the movement for racial justice across the nation. Freedom Riders is a stunning achievement, a masterpiece of storytelling that will stand alongside the finest works on the history of civil rights.

The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and and How All Men Can Help


Jackson Katz - 2006
    His book explains carefully and convincingly why--and how--men can become part of the solution, and work with women to build a world in which everyone is safer." --Michael Kimmel, author of Manhood in America, spokesperson, National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS)"If only men would read Katz's book, it could serve as a potent form of male consciousness-raising."--Publishers Weekly"This book leaves no man behind when it comes to taking violence against women personally....After reading this book you can see how important it is to be a stand-up guy and not a standy-by guy, no matter what race or culture you come from."--Alfred L. McMichael, 14th Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps and now serving as the Sergeant Major of NATO"A candid look at the cultural factors that lend themselves to tolerance of abuse and violence against women."--Booklist"These pages will empower both men and women to end the scourge of male violence and abuse. Katz knows how to cut to the core of the issues, demonstrating undeniably that stopping the degradation of women should be every man's priority."--Lundy Bancroft, author of Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men

Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism


Sheldon S. Wolin - 2006
    But what if the country is no longer a democracy at all? In "Democracy Incorporated," Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"?Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive--and where elites are eager to keep them that way. At best the nation has become a "managed democracy" where the public is shepherded, not sovereign. At worst it is a place where corporate power no longer answers to state controls. Wolin makes clear that today's America is in no way morally or politically comparable to totalitarian states like Nazi Germany, yet he warns that unchecked economic power risks verging on total power and has its own unnerving pathologies. Wolin examines the myths and mythmaking that justify today's politics, the quest for an ever-expanding economy, and the perverse attractions of an endless war on terror. He argues passionately that democracy's best hope lies in citizens themselves learning anew to exercise power at the local level."Democracy Incorporated" is one of the most worrying diagnoses of America's political ills to emerge in decades. It is sure to be a lightning rod for political debate for years to come."

Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle


Katherine McKittrick - 2006
    In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

Ancient Tales of Wit and Wisdom: 5 in 1 (Amar Chitra Katha)


Anant Pai - 2006
    Collection of the following titles: A Bag of Gold Coin, Choice of Friends, How Friends are Parted, Tiger and the Woodpecker, Friends and Foes

Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization


Derrick Jensen - 2006
    Accepting the increasingly widespread belief that industrialized culture inevitably erodes the natural world, Endgame sets out to explore how this relationship impels us towards a revolutionary and as-yet undiscovered shift in strategy. Building on a series of simple but increasingly provocative premises, Jensen leaves us hoping for what may be inevitable: a return to agrarian communal life via the disintegration of civilization itself.

Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice


Jack Holland - 2006
    Misogyny encompasses the Church, witch hunts, sexual theory, Nazism, pro-life campaigners, and finally, today's developing world, where women are increasingly and disproportionately at risk because of radicalized religious beliefs, famine, war, and disease. Extensively researched, highly readable and provocative, this book chronicles an ancient, pervasive and enduring injustice. The questions it poses deal with the fundamentals of human existence — sex, love, violence — that have shaped the lives of humans throughout history, and ultimately limn an abuse of human rights on a nearly unthinkable scale.

War in Human Civilization


Azar Gat - 2006
    In the process, the book generates an astonishing wealth of original and fascinating insights on all major aspects of humankind's remarkable journey through the ages, engaging a wide range of disciplines.

Nine Days in Heaven: A True Story


Dennis Prince - 2006
    When she finally regained consciousness, she described with almost supernatural perception how angels had escorted her spirit to Heaven and hell.Her vision made her the talk of the community and a legend for generations to come.Nine Days in Heaven brings the story of Marietta Davis to a new generation of readers. The nineteenth-century language of the original has been updated for readability, but the detailed portrayal of her vision remains intact.Journey with Marietta to the shimmering reaches of PARADISE, where the redeemed enjoy the beauties of the new creation. Observe children who died on earth as they are taught the MYSTERIES of God in infants' Heaven. Grieve at the PLIGHT of the lost as they suffer the wages of sin. Supported by biblical references and practical observations, Nine Days in Heaven is more than the fanciful creation of a young woman's imagination. It is a travel guide to the life to come.Praise for Nine Days in Heaven "THANK YOU for such insight and wisdom with Nine Days in Heaven. It is profoundly written and easy to understand. I get overwhelmed reading it and at times have to put it down because it is so meaty. I need time to digest it and allow the Holy Spirit to reveal the power of it all to me." Via email, United States"I feel like I was Marietta in the story - as though I had gone through the whole thing. I am so grateful for this book - it is as though someone has given me a ruby. I so want to go to heaven. It has encouraged me to live a more godly life." JC, Melbourne Australia"My daughter Alexandra was born prematurely. God let me hold, sing to and comfort her for 90 minutes before she left. Nine Days in Heaven was a big help to me. It has been almost six years since my angel left and when I start to get selfish again I reread Nine Days in Heaven to remind me what her life is like now. She receives more love and nurturing than any earthly father could ever give her. Thank you. God Bless You." J. C. C. 2nd, USA"I was absolutely and utterly inspired. I am not usually a voracious reader but I could not put it down." Pastor, Melbourne, Australia

Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class - And What We Can Do about It


Thom Hartmann - 2006
    This book asks: How did this happen? Who's benefiting? And how can we stop it?

Help at Any Cost: How the Troubled-Teen Industry Cons Parents and Hurts Kids


Maia Szalavitz - 2006
    And the growing number of programs that make up this industry are today finding more customers than ever. Maia Szalavitz's Help at Any Cost is the first in-depth investigation of this industry and its practices, starting with its roots in the cultlike sixties rehabilitation program Synanon and Large Group Awareness Training organizations likeest in the seventies; continuing with Straight, Inc., which received Nancy Reagan's seal of approval in the eighties; and culminating with a look at the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs-the leading force in the industry today-which has begun setting up shop in foreign countries to avoid regulation. Szalavitz uncovers disturbing findings about these programs' methods, including allegation of physical and verbal abuse, and presents us with moving, often horrifying, first-person accounts of kids who made it through-as well as stories of those who didn't survive. The book also contains a thoughtfully compiled guide for parents, which details effective treatment alternatives. Weaving careful reporting with astute analysis, Maia Szalavitz has written an important and timely survey that will change the way we look at rebellious teens-and the people to whom we entrust them. Help at Any Cost is a vital resource with an urgent message that will draw attention to a compelling issue long overlooked.

Harry Potter and International Relations


Daniel H. Nexon - 2006
    A wide range of historical and sociological sources shows how Harry's world contains aspects of our own. Practices such as quidditch dovetail quite clearly with _muggle_ sports, and the very British-ness of the books has, in translation into languages such as Turkish and Arabic, been transformed to reflect these unique cultures. Chapters on the political economy of the franchise as well as the scholarly problems of studying popular culture frame what is essentially a highly info-taining read.

Spiral Dynamics Integral: Learn to Master the Memetic Codes of Human Behavior


Don Edward Beck - 2006
    Don Beck has taught people at all levels how to stop clashing and start communicating. His method is called Spiral Dynamics Integral, a revolutionary new way of perceiving human nature that lets us understand, predict, and resolve even the most difficult conflicts. In his effort to map the genome of the mind, Dr. Beck has created a tool he calls the Spiral, which charts the underlying reasons for virtually everything that human beings think, believe, and do. Breaking down the "complexity codes" that lie at the heart of a problem, he explains, is the first step toward coming up with a real, lasting solution.

And Still I Rise


Doreen Lawrence - 2006
    May you never experience what I have experienced.'In April 1993, Stephen Lawrence was murdered by a group of young white men on a street in south-east London. From the first police investigation onwards, the case was badly mishandled. In the end, long after the case against the five suspects had been dropped, the government had to give in to mounting pressure and hold a public inquiry, which became the most explosive in British legal history.These facts leave the reader unprepared for Doreen Lawrence's own story of her son's murder. In this raw, honest book, she writes frankly about her childhood, about her struggle for a decent life for herself and her children and her hopes for her bright, motivated son. Her account of the murder and the botched and insensitive investigation by the Metropolitan Police is deeply moving. She recreates the pain, frustration and bafflement she experienced as she realised that there might never be a moment when she could say to herself that justice had been done.A cold case review led to the discovery of DNA evidence in 2009. In November 2011, two of the alleged members of the gang that killed Stephen were finally brought to trial at the Old Bailey. A guilty verdict was pronounced on 3 January 2012.'To be put alongside Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom or the works of Maya Angelou.' Andrew Billen, The Times

Thin


Lauren Greenfield - 2006
    Greenfield's photographs are paired with extensive interviews and journal entries from twenty girls and women who are suffering from various afflictions. We meet 15-year-old Brittany, who is convinced that being thin is the only way to gain acceptance among her peers; Alisa, a divorced mother of two whose hatred of her body is manifested in her relentless compulsion to purge; Shelly, who has been battling anorexia for six years and has had a feeding tube surgically implanted in her stomach; as well as many others. Alongside these personal stories are essays on the sociology and science of eating disorders by renowned researchers Joan Jacobs Brumberg, Dr. David Herzog, and Dr. Michael Strober. These intimate photographs, frank voices, and thoughtful discussions combine to make Thin not only the first book of its kind but also a portrait of profound understanding.

An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets


Donald Angus MacKenzie - 2006
    These new, Nobel Prize-winning theories, based on elegant mathematical models of markets, were not simply external analyses but intrinsic parts of economic processes.Paraphrasing Milton Friedman, MacKenzie says that economic models are an engine of inquiry rather than a camera to reproduce empirical facts. More than that, the emergence of an authoritative theory of financial markets altered those markets fundamentally. For example, in 1970, there was almost no trading in financial derivatives such as "futures." By June of 2004, derivatives contracts totaling $273 trillion were outstanding worldwide. MacKenzie suggests that this growth could never have happened without the development of theories that gave derivatives legitimacy and explained their complexities.MacKenzie examines the role played by finance theory in the two most serious crises to hit the world's financial markets in recent years: the stock market crash of 1987 and the market turmoil that engulfed the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. He also looks at finance theory that is somewhat beyond the mainstream -- chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbrot's model of "wild" randomness. MacKenzie's pioneering work in the social studies of finance will interest anyone who wants to understand how America's financial markets have grown into their current form.

From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism


Patricia Hill Collins - 2006
    A provocative analysis of the new contours of Black nationalism and feminism in the context of the changing politics of race in America.

How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America: Freedom, Politics, and the War on Sex


Cristina Page - 2006
    As activist and writer Cristina Page shows, the gains made by birth-control advocates (historically) and pro-choice organizations (currently) have formed the bedrock of freedoms few Americans would choose to live without. Now, not only is the future of legal abortion far from guaranteed, in many parts of the country ready access to many forms of contraception is in jeopardy as well. And that development, Page argues, should have everyone, regardless of moral or political persuasion, deeply concerned. For these basic freedoms are not just for the freewheeling gals of "Sex and the City," but are central to the lives of working mothers and fathers from Phoenix to Duluth, churchgoers and nonbelievers alike. Page crystallizes the thoughts and attitudes of a generation of women and men whose voices are seldom heard in the political arena. How the Pro-Choice Movement Saved America is the first book to address the positive transformation our society has undergone because of our ability to plan when and if to have children. It also exposes the anti-choice movement's far-reaching-and dangerous-agenda. Fresh, bold, and stocked with counterintuitive arguments, this is a book bound to form the basis for heated conversations nationwide.

Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs


Joan Sinclair - 2006
    Unrivaled in their creativity and the sheer number of choices, the clubs featured in this book offer their clientele every fantasy imaginable. Subway groping, visits to the nurse's office, and comic book character encounters are just the beginning of the immense list of possibilities that are played out in colorful playrooms for adults where no detail is overlooked. Sinclair's photographs capture it all, while an introduction by sociologist James Farrer provides a brief history of commercial sex in Japan and places the images in the context of contemporary Japanese culture.

Vanishing Ireland


James Fennell - 2006
    Through their own words and memories, 64 men and women transport readers to a time when people lived off the land and the sea, music and storytelling were essential parts of life, and a person was defined by their trade. Divided into five parts—Children of the Field, Children of the Music, Children of the Horse, Children of the Trade, and Children of the Water—this collection brings together the stories of those who lived through Ireland’s formative years. We hear of children harassed by the Black and Tans, céilís in kitchens, the rigors of working in the fields, the wonder of electricity, and the devastation of emigration. From coalminers to saddlers, farmers to fishermen, along with horse dealers, publicans, housemaids, and musicians, these remarkably poignant interviews and photographs, in their simplicity and honesty, will make readers laugh and cry but, above all, will provide a valuable chronicle that connects the 21st century Irish to a rapidly disappearing world.

Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism


bell hooks - 2006
    In Witness, Amalia Mesa-Bains and bell hooks invite us to reexamine this politically popular binary and consider which differences are manufactured and which are real.In Witness, Mesa-Bains and hooks explore their own similarities and differences, sharing the ways their childhoods, families, and work have shaped their political activism, teaching, and artistic expression. Drawing on shared experiences of sexism, classism, and racism, hooks and Mesa-Bains show how people from divergent cultural backgrounds can work together for radical social change.While the black/Latino divide and the increasing cross-community political collaboration has been addressed in progressive newspapers and magazines, Witness, an inclusive call to reflect and act, is the first of its kind to look at these issues in depth. And Amalia Mesa-Bains, a pioneer scholar and producer of Chicana art, with bell hooks, one of the most acclaimed of African American theorists—prove an unparalleled match for the job.bell hooks is one of the leading public intellectuals of her generation. She has written extensively on the emotional impact of racism and sexism, particularly on black women, as well as the importance of political engagement with art and the media. In her recent work on love, relationships, and community, she shows how emotional health is a necessary component to effective resistance and activism.Amalia Mesa-Bains is an artist, curator, and writer who has initiated comprehensive exhibitions of Latino art, including Chicano Art: Resistance and Affirmation and Mi Alma, Mi Tierra, Mi Gente: Contemporary Chicana Art. Her artwork incorporates various aspects of Chicano/a history, culture, and folk traditions, exploring religion, ritual, and female rites of passage. She won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1992.

Robert Polidori: After the Flood


Robert Polidori - 2006
    He found the streets deserted, and, without electricity, eerily dark. The next day he began to photograph, house by house: -All the places I went in, the doors were just open. They had been opened by what I collectively call Ithe army, ' of maybe 20 National Guards from New Hampshire, 15 policemen from Minneapolis, 20 firefighters from New York... On maybe half of them or a third of them that I went in, I think that the occupants had been there prior. And some of them did leave certain funeral-like mementos before they left. Maybe right after the waters receded they had the chance to just--to go back to their place and just see, and realize there's nothing worth saving.- Amidst all this, Polidori has found something worth saving, has created mementos for those who could not return, documenting the paradoxically beautiful wreckage. In classical terms, he has found ruins. The abandoned houses he recorded were still waterlogged as he entered and as he learned (by trial and error, a process that including finding a dead body) the language of signs and codes in which rescue workers had spray-painted each house's siding. He sees the resulting photographs as the work of a psychological witness, mapping the lives of the absent and deceased through what remains of their belongings and their homes.

Typecasting: On the Arts and Sciences of Human Inequality


Elizabeth Ewen - 2006
    In this groundbreaking exploration of the growth of stereotyping amidst the rise of modern society, authors Ewen & Ewen demonstrate "typecasting" as a persistent cultural practice. Drawing on fields as diverse as history, pop culture, racial science, and film, and including over one hundred images, many published here for the first time, the authors present a vivid portrait of stereotyping as it was forged by colonialism, industrialization, mass media, urban life, and the global economy.

Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation


Robert Keith Sawyer - 2006
    In the last 50 yearss, psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists have increasingly studied creativity, and we now know more about creativity that at any point in history. Explaining Creativity considers not only arts like painting and writing, but also science, stage performance, and business innovation. Until about a decade ago, creativity researchers tended to focus on highly valued activities like fine art painting and Nobel prize winning science. Sawyer brings this research up to date by including movies, music videos, cartoons, videogames, hypertext fiction, and computer technology. For example, this is the first book on creativity to include studies of performance and improvisation. Sawyer draws on the latest research findings to show the importance of collaboration and context in all of these creative activities.Today's science of creativity is interdisciplinary; in addition to psychological studies of creativity, Explaining Creativity includes research by anthropologists on creativity in non-Western cultures, and research by sociologists about the situations, contexts, and networks of creative activity. Explaining Creativity brings these approaches together within the sociocultural approach to creativity pioneered by Howard Becker, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Howard Gardner. The sociocultural approach moves beyond the individual to consider the social and cultural contexts of creativity, emphasizing the role of collaboration and context in the creative process.

Chicken Soup for the Mother and Son Soul: Stories to Celebrate the Lifelong Bond (Chicken Soup for the Soul)


Jack Canfield - 2006
    From the moment she hears, "It's a boy!" a special love blossoms in the

Not a Genuine Black Man: Or, How I Claimed My Piece of Ground in the Lily-White Suburbs


Brian Copeland - 2006
    At the time, San Leandro was 99.4 percent white, known nationwide as a racist enclave. This reputation was confirmed almost immediately: Brian got his first look at the inside of a cop car, for being a black kid walking to the park with a baseball bat. Brian grew up to be a successful comedian and radio talk show host, but racism reemerged as an issue -- only in reverse -- when he received an anonymous letter: "As an African American, I am disgusted every time I hear your voice because YOU are not a genuine Black man!" That letter inspired Copeland to revisit his difficult childhood, resulting in a hit one-man show that has been running for nearly two years -- which has now inspired a book. In this funny, surprising, and ultimately moving memoir, Copeland shows exactly how our surroundings make us who we are.

Geographies of New Orleans: Urban Fabrics Before the Storm


Richard Campanella - 2006
    "Geographies of New Orleans" integrates hundreds of historical sources with custom-made maps, graphs, photos, and satellite images to explore the intricate urban fabrics of one of the world's most fascinating cities from its fragile deltaic terrain to its striking built environment, from its diverse ethnic makeup to its devastation by Hurricane Katrina.

What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat


Louise Richardson - 2006
    Having grown up in rural Ireland and watched her friends join the Irish Republican Army, Richardson knows from firsthand experience how terrorism can both unite and destroy a community. As a professor at Harvard, she has devoted her career to explaining terrorist movements throughout history and around the globe. From the biblical Zealots to the medieval Islamic Assassins to the anarchists who infiltrated the cities of Europe and North America at the turn of the last century, terrorists have struck at enemies far more powerful than themselves with targeted acts of violence. Yet Richardson understands that terrorists are neither insane nor immoral. Rather, they are rational political actors who often deploy carefully calibrated tactics in a measured and reasoned way. What is more, they invariably go to great lengths to justify their actions to themselves, their followers, and, often, the world.Richardson shows that the nature of terrorism did not change after the attacks of September 11, 2001; what changed was our response. She argues that the Bush administration’s “global war on terror” was doomed to fail because of an ignorance of history, a refusal to learn from the experience of other governments, and a fundamental misconception about how and why terrorists act. As an alternative, Richardson offers a feasible strategy for containing the terrorist threat and cutting off its grassroots support. The most comprehensive and intellectually rigorous account of terrorism yet, What Terrorists Want is a daring intellectual tour de force that allows us, at last, to reckon fully with this major threat to today’s global order.

Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide Through Qualitative Analysis


Kathy C. Charmaz - 2006
    In this important and essential new textbook, she introduces the reader to the craft of using grounded theory in social research, and provides a clear, step-by-step guide for those new to the field. Using worked examples throughout, this book also maps out an alternative vision of grounded theory put forward by its founding thinkers, Glaser and Strauss. To Charmaz, grounded theory must move on from its positivist origins and must incorporate many of the methods and questions posed by constructivists over the past twenty years to become a more nuanced and reflexive practice.

Encountering 'The Other'


Jean Vanier - 2006
    For Vanier the whole question of peacemaking is centered on trust. He points out that peace cannot be imposed by politicians or churches--to endure it must grow within each person. Therefore, Vanier urges that we come together to encounter, explore, and celebrate our differences. He shows that what we encounter we come to know and, thereby, understand. And--when we understand--healing and peace can truly follow. Our society can only be healed when each person in it is healed. And that healing comes not from avoidance or separation, but from encountering. The fundamental principle of peace is a belief that each person is important. For Vanier, the glory of human beings is not...the power to control someone else; the glory of human beings is he ability to let what is deepest within us grow. +

Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary


Veena Das - 2006
    Veena Das examines case studies including the extreme violence of the Partition of India in 1947 and the massacre of Sikhs in 1984 after the assassination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. In a major departure from much anthropological inquiry, Das asks how this violence has entered "the recesses of the ordinary" instead of viewing it as an interruption of life to which we simply bear witness. Das engages with anthropological work on collective violence, rumor, sectarian conflict, new kinship, and state and bureaucracy as she embarks on a wide-ranging exploration of the relations among violence, gender, and subjectivity. Weaving anthropological and philosophical reflections on the ordinary into her analysis, Das points toward a new way of interpreting violence in societies and cultures around the globe. The book will be indispensable reading across disciplinary boundaries as we strive to better understand violence, especially as it is perpetrated against women.

Mad Sheep: The True Story Behind the USDA's War on a Family Farm


Linda Faillace - 2006
    Mad Sheep is the account of one familyis struggle against a bullying and corrupt government agency

Static: Government Liars, Media Cheerleaders, and the People Who Fight Back


Amy Goodman - 2006
    Kidnapping. Bogus wars. Illegal wiretapping. Propaganda. Spies in the newsrooms. Oil profiteers. Soldiers who won't fight. Mothers of fallen soldiers Who will. In Static, the bestselling brother-sister team of Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!, and investigative journalist David Goodman takes on government liars, corporate profiteers, and the media that have acted as their cheerleaders. The authors cut through the official static to show the truth about war, torture, and government control of the media. Static breaks the sound barrier to present the voices of dissidents, activists, and others who are often frozen out of official debate. Read Static. Become informed. Fight back. Defend democracy.

Political Ponerology


Andrew M. Lobaczewski - 2006
    The second copy, reassembled painfully by scientists working under impossible conditions of repression, was sent via a courier to the Vatican. Its receipt was never acknowledged, no word was ever heard from the courier - the manuscript and all the valuable data was lost. The third copy was produced after one of the scientists working on the project escaped to America in the 1980s. Zbigniew Brzezinski suppressed it. Political Ponerology was forged in the crucible of the very subject it studies. Scientists living under an oppressive regime decide to study it clinically, to study the founders and supporters of an evil regime to determine what common factor is at play in the rise and propagation of man's inhumanity to man. Shocking in its clinically spare descriptions of the true nature of evil, poignant in the more literary passages where the author reveals the suffering experienced by the researchers who were contaminated or destroyed by the disease they were studying, this is a book that should be required reading by every citizen of every country that claims a moral or humanistic foundation. For it is a certainty that morality and humanism cannot long withstand the predations of Evil. Knowledge of its nature, how it creates its networks and spreads, how insidious is its guileful approach, is the only antidote.

The Black Hole


Latif Yahia - 2006
    The Black Hole has been banned in Irish and American Book Shops. The Book the American CIA don't want you to read. In an extraordinary twist of fate and because of his uncanny resemblance to Uday Saddam Hussein, Latif Yahia is forced to work as the "double or fiday" of the despots son. During his training, he witnesses the true evil of the man that he is forced to imitate and the brutality of the Iraqi regime at first hand. While attending state functions and royal audiences as his loathsome master, Latif ponders his escape strategy. Undeniably the life of wealth and excess is enticing but he is no more than a bird in a gilded cage. After several assassination attempts against Latif/Uday fail and during Gulf War 1, Latif makes his escape from his life of hell through the Northern Kurdish Territories, with the help of the CIA he is flown out of Iraq to a "New Life" in the West and this is where "The Black Hole" picks up his remarkable story. On the 9th of March 1992 Latif Yahia emerged from behind the walls of the Kingdom of Terror. Vowing to settle his account with the Baghdadi regime he bolsters himself for the battle ahead. Knowing his adversaries well he was prepared for the fight but nothing prepared him for the reaction he would receive from the Western Intelligence Services. The game of cat and mouse that ensued would take him across the breadth of Europe, find him imprisoned in a covert CIA prison and see him survive four assassination attempts and the brutal murder of his beloved Saudi Princess. A compelling true story that has been played out in the world's media. Latif Yahia the man that broke the news to the world of Saddam Hussein's inner circle, he remains stateless since his flight from Iraq in 1992 until this day. When the news of covert CIA prisons in Europe broke in 2006, Latif quietly laughed to himself, he knew this in 1994.

Weak Links: The Universal Key to the Stability of Networks and Complex Systems


Peter Csermely - 2006
    The author (recipient of several distinguished science communication prizes) uses weak (low affinity, low probability) interactions as a thread to introduce a vast variety of networks from proteins to economics and ecosystems. Many people, from Nobel Laureates to high-school students have helped to make the book understandable to all interested readers. This unique book and the ideas it develops will have a significant impact on many, seemingly diverse, fields of study."

A Different Kind of Perfect: Writings by Parents on Raising a Child with Special Needs


Cindy Dowling - 2006
    What happens when these dreams are shattered by a physical or cognitive disability? A Different Kind of Perfect offers comfort, consolation, and wisdom from parents who have been there--and are finding their way through.The writings collected here are grouped into chapters reflecting the progressive stages of many parents' emotional journeys, starting with grief, denial, and anger and moving towards acceptance, empowerment, laughter, and even joy. Each chapter opens with an introduction by Neil Nicoll, a child and family psychologist who specializes in development disorders.

Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems


Hans-Georg Moeller - 2006
    This book introduces his social systems theory which explains specific functions like economy and mass media from a cybernetic perspective, integrating various schools of thought including sociology, philosophy, and biology. Luhmann Explained explores the great thinker’s radical analysis of “world society.” The book gives special attention to the present-day relevance of Luhmann's theory with respect to globalization, electronic mass media, ethics, and new forms of protest.

The Culture Struggle


Michael Parenti - 2006
    Drawing from cultures around the world, Parenti shows that beliefs and practices are readily subjected to political manipulation, and that many parts of culture are being commodified, separated from their group or communal origins, to be packaged and sold to those who can pay for them. Folk culture is giving way to a corporate market culture. Art, science, medicine, and psychiatry can be used as instruments of cultural control, and even marriage, the "foundation of society," has been misused by heterosexuals across the centuries.Using vivid examples and riveting arguments throughout, ranging from the everyday to the esoteric, and penned with eloquence and irony, The Culture Struggle presents a collection of snapshots of our time.

Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900-1950


Haiyan Lee - 2006
    It examines a wide range of texts, including literary, historical, philosophical, anthropological, and popular cultural genres from the late imperial period to the beginning of the socialist era. It traces the process by which love became an all-pervasive subject of representation and discourse, as well as a common language in which modern notions of self, gender, family, sexuality, and nation were imagined and contested.Winner of the Association for Asian Studies 2009 Joseph Levenson Book Prize for the best English-language academic book on post-1900 China

The End of All Evil


Jeremy Locke - 2006
    Evil is found in words such as force, compulsion, tax, violence, theft, censure, and politics. Notice that in such things, there is no joy. None have any value to humanity. This book defines the doctrine of liberty, and teaches you why choices that affect your life can only rightfully be made by you.

The Hollow Men: A Study in the Politics of Deception


Nicky Hager - 2006
    

Punishment and Inequality in America


Bruce Western - 2006
    For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought. Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting tough on crime with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime. The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men's lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.i

Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships


Daniel Goleman - 2006
    Now, once again, Daniel Goleman has written a groundbreaking synthesis of the latest findings in biology and brain science, revealing that we are “wired to connect” and the surprisingly deep impact of our relationships on every aspect of our lives.Far more than we are consciously aware, our daily encounters with parents, spouses, bosses, and even strangers shape our brains and affect cells throughout our bodies—down to the level of our genes—for good or ill. In Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman explores an emerging new science with startling implications for our interpersonal world. Its most fundamental discovery: we are designed for sociability, constantly engaged in a “neural ballet” that connects us brain to brain with those around us.Our reactions to others, and theirs to us, have a far-reaching biological impact, sending out cascades of hormones that regulate everything from our hearts to our immune systems, making good relationships act like vitamins—and bad relationships like poisons. We can “catch” other people’s emotions the way we catch a cold, and the consequences of isolation or relentless social stress can be life-shortening. Goleman explains the surprising accuracy of first impressions, the basis of charisma and emotional power, the complexity of sexual attraction, and how we detect lies. He describes the “dark side” of social intelligence, from narcissism to Machiavellianism and psychopathy. He also reveals our astonishing capacity for “mindsight,” as well as the tragedy of those, like autistic children, whose mindsight is impaired.Is there a way to raise our children to be happy? What is the basis of a nourishing marriage? How can business leaders and teachers inspire the best in those they lead and teach? How can groups divided by prejudice and hatred come to live together in peace? The answers to these questions may not be as elusive as we once thought. And Goleman delivers his most heartening news with powerful conviction: we humans have a built-in bias toward empathy, cooperation, and altruism–provided we develop the social intelligence to nurture these capacities in ourselves and others.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The American Dream and the Power of Wealth: Choosing Schools and Inheriting Inequality in the Land of Opportunity


Heather Beth Johnson - 2006
    Yet Americans continue to hold deep-rooted beliefs in the principles of individualism, equal opportunity, and meritocracy. Education, the "Great Equalizer," is supposed to level the playing field, ensuring that every child--regardless of family of origin--gets an equal chance at success. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 200 black and white families, The American Dream and the Power of Wealth starkly reveals the enormous extent to which parents defend their beliefs in the values that lie at the heart of the American Dream. Yet the way wealth is acquired and the way it is used categorically puts children from different families on vastly different educational trajectories, leaving them with uneven sets of opportunities.

The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, and Belonging


Kym Ragusa - 2006
    Ragusa's working-class white father, who grew up only a few streets (and an entire world) away in Italian East Harlem, had never seen anyone like her. At home their families despaired at the match, while in the streets the couple faced taunting threats from a city still racially divided—but they were mesmerized by the differences between them. From their volatile, short-lived pairing came a sensitive child with a filmmaker's observant eye. Her two powerful grandmothers gave her the love and stability to grow into her own skin. Eventually, their shared care for their granddaughter forced them to overcome their prejudices. Rent parties and religious feste, baked yams and baked ziti—Ragusa's sensuous memories are a reader's delight, as they bring to life the joy, pain, and inexhaustible richness of a racially and culturally mixed heritage.

The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory


John S. Dryzek - 2006
    This volume, The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory, provides comprehensive and critical coverage of the lively and contested field of political theory, and will help set the agenda for the field for years to come. Long recognized as one of the main branches of political science, political theory has in recent years burgeoned in many different directions. Forty-five chapters by distinguished political theorists look at the state of the field, where it has been in the recent past, and where it is likely to go in future. They examine political theory's edges as well as its core, the globalizing context of the field, and the challenges presented by social, economic, and technological changes.

Vintage T-Shirts: MORE THAN 500 AUTHENTIC TEES FROM THE '70S AND '80S


Lisa Kidner - 2006
    With more than 500 uncommon examples, this book documents history by examining this ubiquitous and affordable article of clothing. With full color photographs throughout, Vintage T-Shirts is a must have for t-shirt collectors, fashion buffs, and pop culture junkies alike.

A Bag Of Gold Coins


Anant Pai - 2006
    

The Structure and Dynamics of Networks


Mark Newman - 2006
    But what exactly is a network? What different types of networks are there? Why are they interesting, and what can they tell us? In recent years, scientists from a range of fields--including mathematics, physics, computer science, sociology, and biology--have been pursuing these questions and building a new science of networks. This book brings together for the first time a set of seminal articles representing research from across these disciplines. It is an ideal sourcebook for the key research in this fast-growing field.The book is organized into four sections, each preceded by an editors' introduction summarizing its contents and general theme. The first section sets the stage by discussing some of the historical antecedents of contemporary research in the area. From there the book moves to the empirical side of the science of networks before turning to the foundational modeling ideas that have been the focus of much subsequent activity. The book closes by taking the reader to the cutting edge of network science--the relationship between network structure and system dynamics. From network robustness to the spread of disease, this section offers a potpourri of topics on this rapidly expanding frontier of the new science.

Culture and Materialism


Raymond Williams - 2006
    Aside from his more directly theoretical texts, however, case-studies of theatrical naturalism, the Bloomsbury group, advertising, science fiction, and the Welsh novel are also included as illustrations of the method at work. Finally, Williams’s identity as an active socialist, rather than simply an academic, is captured by two unambiguously political pieces on the past, present and future of Marxism.

Strategies of Commitment and Other Essays


Thomas C. Schelling - 2006
    All of the essays in this new collection by Thomas Schelling convey his unique perspective on individuals and society.

Institutional Ethnography as Practice


Dorothy E. Smith - 2006
    As institutional ethnography embraces the actualities of people's experiences and lives, the contributors utilize their research to reveal how institutional relations and regimes are organized. As a whole, the book aims to provide readers with an accurate overview of what it is like to practice institutional ethnography, as well as the main varieties of approaches involved in the research.

In Search of the Lost Feminine: Decoding the Myths That Radically Reshaped Civilization


Craig S. Barnes - 2006
    Here, for the first time, an author weaves together threads that explain the mysterious disappearance of ancient cultures in which women and the environment were at the center, a loss that has dramatically influenced 3,500 years of Western history.

The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis


Robert E. Goodin - 2006
    The work in the volume has a common aim in being sensitive to thethoughts of contextual nuances that disappear from large-scale quantitative modeling or explanations based on abstract, general, universal laws of human behavior. It shows that 'context matters' in a great many ways: philosophical context matters; psychological context matters; cultural andhistorical contexts matter; place, population, and technology all matter. By showcasing scholars who specialize in the analysis of all these contexts side-by-side, The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis shows how political scientists can take those crucial contextual factorssystematically into account.

Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race


Jennifer Ritterhouse - 2006
    Jennifer Ritterhouse asks how children learned this racial "etiquette," which was sustained by coercion and the threat of violence. More broadly, she asks how individuals developed racial self-consciousness. Parental instruction was an important factor--both white parents' reinforcement of a white supremacist worldview and black parents' oppositional lessons in respectability and race pride. Children also learned much from their interactions across race lines. The fact that black youths were often eager to stand up for themselves, despite the risks, suggests that the emotional underpinnings of the civil rights movement were in place long before the historical moment when change became possible. Meanwhile, a younger generation of whites continued to enforce traditional patterns of domination and deference in private, while also creating an increasingly elaborate system of segregation in public settings. Exploring relationships between public and private and between segregation, racial etiquette, and racial violence, Growing Up Jim Crow sheds new light on tradition and change in the South and the meanings of segregation within southern culture.

Systemic Racism: A Theory of Oppression


Joe R. Feagin - 2006
    Exploring the distinctive social worlds that have been created by racial oppression over nearly four centuries and what this has meant for the people of the United States, focusing his analysis on white-on-black oppression.Drawing on the commentaries of black and white Americans in three historical eras; the slavery era, the legal segregation era, and then those of white Americans. Feagin examines how major institutions have been thoroughly pervaded by racial stereotypes, ideas, images, emotions, and practices. He theorizes that this system of racial oppression was not an accident of history, but was created intentionally by white Americans. While significant changes have occurred in this racist system over the centuries, key and fundamentally elements have been reproduced over nearly four centuries, and US institutions today imbed the racialized hierarchy created in the 17th century.Today, as in the past, racial oppression is not just a surface-level feature of society, but rather it pervades, permeates, and interconnects all major social groups, networks, and institutions across society.

Let Every Breath... Secrets of the Russian Breath Masters


Vladimir Vasiliev - 2006
    This groundbreaking manual on Systema Breathing presents step-by-step training drills given to you in a thorough and comprehensive way. You will learn the unique methodology of Systema Breathing and get the foundation for every physical activity of your daily life. Whether you are looking to raise your athletic skills to the next level, or wish to increase your potential and to enjoy life, this is your tool to uncover the endless reserve of energy, health and happiness. At the same time, it is very easy reading, full of entertaining stories and thought provoking ideas.

Peasant Life In China


Fei Xiaotong - 2006
    Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Hesperides Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex


Amy T. Schalet - 2006
    In the Netherlands, where teenage pregnancies are far less frequent than in the United States, parents aim above all for family cohesiveness, often permitting young couples to sleep together and providing them with contraceptives. Drawing on extensive interviews with parents and teens, Not Under My Roof offers an unprecedented, intimate account of the different ways that girls and boys in both countries negotiate love, lust, and growing up.Tracing the roots of the parents’ divergent attitudes, Amy T. Schalet reveals how they grow out of their respective conceptions of the self, relationships, gender, autonomy, and authority. She provides a probing analysis of the way family culture shapes not just sex but also alcohol consumption and parent-teen relationships. Avoiding caricatures of permissive Europeans and puritanical Americans, Schalet shows that the Dutch require self-control from teens and parents, while Americans guide their children toward autonomous adulthood at the expense of the family bond.

Fletcher Street


Peggy Jean-Louis - 2006
    It has everything one would expect to find down an alley in the ghetto, with one addition: horses. The men and boys of Fletcher Street have used their passion for riding and bonds with their rides to build their and their community’s sense of worth. They describe their passion for horses as having kept them from the temptations of street life. Fletcher Street by Martha Camarillo documents the lives of these men and the boys they mentor, who board their horses in abandoned houses or makeshift stables, and ride them through the streets of Philly. Camarillo’s work is valuable not only because it illuminates a fascinating new aspect of culture, but also because it challenges those who see it. Her photographs force viewers to confront their own preconceptions of sport as representative of social status, and race as a demarcation of class. The power of Camarillo’s exploration of this underrepresented community is based on the strength of the men themselves: urban horsemen who have ridden away from the ’hood and toward a better future.

Race and the American Prospect: Essays on the Racial Realities of Our Nation and Our Time


Samuel T. Francis - 2006
    Each contributor examines the impact of racial differences on American society, from religion and politics to Southern history and sociobiology, and explains why biological racial differences are neither myth nor social invention, but significantly shape virtually every aspect of America's political, social, economic and cultural landscape. Race and the American Prospect punctures several "politically correct" myths about race. It refutes in meticulous detail the prevailing fallacies of racial egalitarian orthodoxy. The authors explore a range of important issues in which race is consistently absent in conventional parlance, topics such as differences in IQ, personality, temperament, violent crime rates, immigration patterns, demographic population trends, economic disparities, and the long-term national implications of uncontrolled multiculturalism and diversity. Edited by the late Sam Francis, award-winning national commentator, Race and the American Prospect sparkles with incisive, readable, original essays. Courageous, controversial, and provocatively thoughtful, Race and the American Prospect is the book for every American, Democrat or Republican, conservative or liberal, interested in vindicating our country's past, reclaiming its present, and securing its future.

In Those Days There was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural History (Tamil Culture)


A.R. Venkatachalapathy - 2006
    focus on consumption (coffee, cartoons, literature); second section, politics of language, literature. excellent on literary canon. by a leading Tamil scholar.

Over Here: How the G.I. Bill Transformed the American Dream


Edward Humes - 2006
    government feared the flood of returning World War II soldiers as much as it looked forward to peace. To avoid economic catastrophe, FDR, the American Legion, William Randolph Hearst, and others began crafting the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944. It would be the single most transformative bill of the twentieth century. Spun as the G.I. Bill of Rights, this program for vets included home loans, health care, educational funds, and career counseling. The effects were immediate and enduring--the suburbs, the middle class, America's ever-increasing number of college graduates, the lunar landing--all are tied to the G.I. Bill. The Greatest Generation would not exist without it: Norman Mailer, Bob Dole, John F. Kennedy, Paul Newman, Jimmy Carter, Clint Eastwood, and many others benefited from its provisions. Here are the stories of some of these men and women, how their lives changed because of the bill and how this country changed because of them.

Depression, War, and Cold War: Challenging the Myths of Conflict and Prosperity


Robert Higgs - 2006
    political economy from the early-1930s to the end of the Cold War, this resource refutes many popular myths about the Great Depression and New Deal, the World War II economy, and the postwar national-security state that is still so pervasive today. What accounts for the extraordinary duration of the Great Depression? How did the war alter relations between government and leaders of big business? What is Congress’s role in the military-industrial-congressional complex? This book answers these and other crucial questions by presenting new insights and analyses along with statistical evidence that defies mainstream interpretation of economic history.

Contemporary Social and Sociological Theory: Visualizing Social Worlds


Kenneth Allan - 2006
    This book introduces students to an array of social theories, each presented from the perspectives of these well-known theorists: Peter Blau, Janet Saltzman, Chafetz George Homans, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Talcott Parsons, Herbert Blumer, Harold Garfinkel, Dorothy E. Smith, Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, Immanuel Wallerstein, Judith Butler, Erving Goffman, William Julius Wilson, Manuel Castells, Jurgen Habermas, Cornel West Filled with examples drawn from daily life, this edition highlights diversity in contemporary society, exploring theories of race, gender, and sexuality that address today's most important social concerns. Students will learn to "think theoretically" and apply theory to their own lives.

Gendered Talk at Work: Constructing Gender Identity Through Workplace Discourse


Janet Holmes - 2006
     written accessibly by one of the field's foremost researchers explores the ways in which gender contributes to the interpretation of meaning in workplace interaction uses original and insightfully analyzed data to focus on the ways in which both women and men draw on gendered discourse resources to enact a range of workplace roles illustrates how a qualitative analysis of workplace discourse can throw light on the many ways in which workplace discourse provides a resource for constructing gender identity as one component of our complex socio-cultural identity

Hikoi: Forty Years of Maori Protest


Aroha Harris - 2006
    Included are demonstrations involving apartheid South Africa, the Land March of 1975, and the occupations of Raglan, Bastion Point, and Pakaitore. By and large the photographs chosen illustrate both the issues and the passions involved, and the book serves to remind the reader of the importanace of the right to protest and the influence which that right, responsibily exercised, can have.

Nonviolence: Twenty-Five Lessons from the History of a Dangerous Idea


Mark Kurlansky - 2006
    Nonviolence can and should be a technique for overcoming social injustice and ending wars, he asserts, which is why it is the preferred method of those who speak truth to power. 'Nonviolence' is a sweeping yet concise history that moves from ancient Hindu times to present - day conflicts raging in the Middle East and elsewhere. Kurlansky also brings into focus just why nonviolence is a “dangerous” idea, and asks such provocative questions as: Is there such a thing as a “just war”? Could nonviolence have worked against even the most evil regimes in history?Kurlansky draws from history twenty-five provocative lessons on the subject that we can use to effect change today. He shows how, time and again, violence is used to suppress nonviolence and its practitioners – Gandhi and Martin Luther King, for example; that the stated deterrence value of standing national armies and huge weapons arsenals is, at best, negligible; and, encouragingly, that much of the hard work necessary to begin a movement to end war is already complete. It simply needs to be embraced and accelerated.Engaging, scholarly, and brilliantly reasoned, 'Nonviolence' is a work that compels readers to look at history in an entirely new way. This is not just a manifesto for our times but a trailblazing book whose time has come.

Minds and Gods: The Cognitive Foundations of Religion


Todd Tremlin - 2006
    But why? What makes belief in supernatural beings so widespread? And why are the gods of so many different people so similar in nature? This provocative book explains the origins and persistence of religious ideas by looking through the lens of science at the common structures and functions of human thought.The first general introduction to the cognitive science of religion, Minds and Gods presents the major themes, theories, and thinkers involved in this revolutionary new approach to human religiosity. Arguing that we cannot understand what we think until we first understand how we think, the book sets out to study the evolutionary forces that modeled the modern human mind and continue to shape our ideas and actions today. Todd Tremlin details many of the adapted features of the brain -- illustrating their operation with examples of everyday human behavior -- and shows how mental endowments inherited from our ancestral past lead many people to naturally entertain religious ideas. In short, belief in gods and the social formation of religion have their genesis in biology, in powerful cognitive processes that all humans share.In the course of illuminating the nature of religion, this book also sheds light on human nature: why we think we do the things we do and how the reasons for these things are so often hidden from view. This discussion ranges broadly across recent scientific findings in areas such as paleoanthropology, primate studies, evolutionary psychology, early brain development, and cultural transmission. While these subjects are complex, the story is told here in a conversational style that is engaging, jargon free, and accessible to all readers. With Minds and Gods, Tremlin offers a roadmap to a fascinating and growing field of study, one that is sure to generate interest and debate and provide readers with a better understanding of themselves and their beliefs.

The Denial of Aging: Perpetual Youth, Eternal Life, and Other Dangerous Fantasies


Muriel R. Gillick - 2006
    How do you prepare? What will you need? Skilfully incorporating insights from medicine, health policy and economics, she lays out action plans for individuals and for communities.

Herakles Gone Mad: Rethinking Heroism in an Age of Endless War


Robert Emmet Meagher - 2006
    To make his home safe, he does battle one last time—one time too many. He slays his enemies but then, unable in his rage to tell friend from foe, murders his wife and children. He blacks out, and, when his wits return, his only thoughts are of death. Then a friend whose life he once saved in battle arrives, offering his hand and his heart. The long road home begins. Story of post-traumatic stress disorder of soldiers returning from Iraq? No—Euripides. No playwright, ancient or contemporary, has written with greater power and poignancy about war and its enduring wounds than has this Greek who lived 24 centuries ago and was himself a veteran. Euripides’ misunderstood masterpiece, Herakles Gone Mad, a play for dark times, reveals both the wreckage of war and the luminous power of love. In this volume, the distinguished author, translator, educator, and playwright Robert Emmet Meagher presents a new eminently actable translation of Euripides’ Herakles along with a concise commentary on the play and an extensive essay on the trauma of war, the true face of heroism, and the healing power of friendship and community.

Texas in Her Own Words


Tweed Scott - 2006
    Included are interviews with Willie Nelson, Liz Carpenter, Darrell Royal and other famous (and some not so famous but grass root) Texans. These "Texan Words" are sprinkled throughout in a unique mix of fascinating factoids and photos characteristic of Texas pride along with articles about such things as the Texas State Cemetery, Rules for Moving to Texas and Showing Texas Pride. Discover the Texas mystique and catch a glimpse into the Texas psyche with your own copy of TEXAS IN HER OWN WORDS. Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman says, "Tweed Scott has done a great service to Texas. He might, I believe, even make a pretty fair Lt. Governor. But politics, of course, is never as important as people and places and the cowboy poetry of the heart. Texas In Her Own Words is chock-full of all of these things. It deserves a special place on your bookshelf. Say right between Larry McMurtry and J. Frank Dobie." The perfect gift, TEXAS IN HER OWN WORDS is a work of art that can be enjoyed by book enthusiasts of all ages.

Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History


Daniel Heath Justice - 2006
    In Our Fire Survives the Storm, Daniel Heath Justice traces the expression of Cherokee identity in that nation’s literary tradition. Through cycles of war and peace, resistance and assimilation, trauma and regeneration, Cherokees have long debated what it means to be Cherokee through protest writings, memoirs, fiction, and retellings of traditional stories. Justice employs the Chickamauga consciousness of resistance and Beloved Path of engagement—theoretical approaches that have emerged out of Cherokee social history—to interpret diverse texts composed in English, a language embraced by many as a tool of both access and defiance. Justice’s analysis ultimately locates the Cherokees as a people of many perspectives, many bloods, mingled into a collective sense of nationhood. Just as the oral traditions of the Cherokee people reflect the living realities and concerns of those who share them, Justice concludes, so too is their literary tradition a textual testament to Cherokee endurance and vitality. Daniel Heath Justice is assistant professor of aboriginal literatures at the University of Toronto.

Shadows of Reality: The Fourth Dimension in Relativity, Cubism, and Modern Thought


Tony Robbin - 2006
    Robbin explores the distinction between the slicing, or Flatland, model and the projection, or shadow, model. He compares the history of these two models and their uses and misuses in popular discussions. Robbin breaks new ground with his original argument that Picasso used the projection model to invent cubism, and that Minkowski had four-dimensional projective geometry in mind when he structured special relativity. The discussion is brought to the present with an exposition of the projection model in the most creative ideas about space in contemporary mathematics such as twisters, quasicrystals, and quantum topology. Robbin clarifies these esoteric concepts with understandable drawings and diagrams. Robbin proposes that the powerful role of projective geometry in the development of current mathematical ideas has been long overlooked and that our attachment to the slicing model is essentially a conceptual block that hinders progress in understanding contemporary models of spacetime. He offers a fascinating review of how projective ideas are the source of some of today’s most exciting developments in art, math, physics, and computer visualization.

Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics


Sarah Nuttall - 2006
    In Congo, a thriving popular music incorporates piercing screams and carnal dances. When these and other instantiations of the aesthetics of Africa and its diasporas are taken into account, how are ideas of beauty reconfigured? Scholars and artists take up that question in this invigorating, lavishly illustrated collection, which includes more than one hundred color images. Exploring sculpture, music, fiction, food, photography, fashion, and urban design, the contributors engage with and depart from canonical aesthetic theories as they demonstrate that beauty cannot be understood apart from ugliness.Highlighting how ideas of beauty are manifest and how they mutate, travel, and combine across time and distance, continental and diasporic writers examine the work of a Senegalese sculptor inspired by Leni Riefenstahl’s photographs of Nuba warriors; a rich Afro-Brazilian aesthetic incorporating aspects of African, Jamaican, and American cultures; and African Americans’ Africanization of the Santería movement in the United States. They consider the fraught, intricate spaces of the urban landscape in postcolonial South Africa; the intense pleasures of eating on Réunion; and the shockingly graphic images on painted plywood boards advertising “morality” plays along the streets of Ghana. And they analyze the increasingly ritualized wedding feasts in Cameroon as well as the limits of an explicitly “African” aesthetics. Two short stories by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto gesture toward what beauty might be in the context of political failure and postcolonial disillusionment. Together the essays suggest that beauty is in some sense future-oriented and that taking beauty in Africa and its diasporas seriously is a way of rekindling hope.Contributors. Rita Barnard, Kamari Maxine Clarke, Mia Couto, Mark Gevisser, Simon Gikandi, Michelle Gilbert, Isabel Hofmeyr, William Kentridge, Dominique Malaquais, Achille Mbembe, Cheryl-Ann Michael, Celestin Monga, Sarah Nuttall, Patricia Pinho, Rodney Place, Els van der Plas, Pippa Stein, Françoise Vergès

Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: Lessons from Medieval Trade


Avner Greif - 2006
    Institutions are invoked to explain why some countries are rich and others poor, some democratic and others dictatorial. But arguments of this sort gloss over the question of what institutions are, how they come about, and why they persist. This book seeks to overcome these problems, which have exercised economists, sociologists, political scientists, and a host of other researchers who use the social sciences to study history, law, and business administration.

Building Houses Out of Chicken Legs: Black Women, Food, and Power


Psyche A. Williams-Forson - 2006
    It has provided food and a source of income for their families, shaped a distinctive culture, and helped women define and exert themselves in racist and hostile environments. Psyche A. Williams-Forson examines the complexity of black women's legacies using food as a form of cultural work. While acknowledging the negative interpretations of black culture associated with chicken imagery, Williams-Forson focuses her analysis on the ways black women have forged their own self-definitions and relationships to the "gospel bird."Exploring material ranging from personal interviews to the comedy of Chris Rock, from commercial advertisements to the art of Kara Walker, and from cookbooks to literature, Williams-Forson considers how black women arrive at degrees of self-definition and self-reliance using certain foods. She demonstrates how they defy conventional representations of blackness in relationship to these foods and exercise influence through food preparation and distribution. Understanding these phenomena clarifies how present interpretations of blacks and chicken are rooted in a past that is fraught with both racism and agency. The traditions and practices of feminism, Williams-Forson argues, are inherent in the foods women prepare and serve.

Design Anarchy


Kalle Lasn - 2006
    It is this feeling, this emotional "conversation" with the page that fuels Adbusters' vision: to prevent the deadening of society, everyman, us, me. You.

Dios contra los dioses


Jonathan Kirsh - 2006
    The story of the suppression of polytheistic religions in the ancient world by the ever more powerful monotheistic religions is revisited in this groundbreaking comparative study of world religions. Defending the thesis that religious terrorism is neither exclusive to an individual faith nor a side effect of the times, this book studies the way in which the belief in one true God is inherently intolerant of other ways of viewing the world, and bases its existence in the suppression of any alternative perspective on the divine.

Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Reading Dalit Women's Testimonios


Sharmila Rege - 2006
    Featuring extensive extracts from eight Dalit women's life-narratives—or testimonios—on issues such as food, hunger, community, caste, labor, education, violence, resistance, and collective struggle, the book brings to vivid life voices that unequivocally show that Dalit feminism, far from being silent as so often presumed, is rich, powerful, and layered—as well as highly articulate.

Conundrum: The Evolution Of Homosexuality


N.J. Peters - 2006
    evolutionary biology suggests that individual living things are designed to reproduce. So why does homosexuality exist? Wouldn't a gay gene ensure its own demise? Conundrum pulls together information from biology, anthropology, and recent lesbian and gay history, and suggests that both nature and nurture are involved in the evolution of homosexuality.

Ogallala Blue: Water and Life on the Great Plains


William Ashworth - 2006
    A history of the Ogallala aquifer traces its formation after the retreat of the glaciers; its use by ancient tribes, center-pivot sprinkler systems, and sophisticated extraction technologies; and the risk factors for its eventual drying out.

Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation


Sali Tagliamonte - 2006
    Until now, however, the actual tools and methods have been largely passed on through 'word of mouth', rather than being formally documented. This is the first comprehensive 'how to' guide to the formal analysis of sociolinguistic variation. It shows step-by-step how the analysis is carried out, leading the reader through every stage of a research project from start to finish. Topics covered include fieldwork, data organization and management, analysis and interpretation, presenting research results, and writing up a paper. Practical and informal, the book contains all the information needed to conduct a fully-fledged sociolinguistic investigation, and includes exercises, checklists, references and insider tips. It is set to become an essential resource for students, researchers and fieldworkers embarking on research projects in sociolinguistics.

Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work


Curtis White - 2006
    We also find ourselves working more, living in fragmented communities, and neglecting our most basic spiritual and political values. As Curtis White puts it, "In order to live, you will be asked to do what is no good, what is absurd, trivial, demeaning, and soul killing." Although we belong to the world's most affluent society, somehow we never have the chance to ask: How shall we live?With his trademark humor and acerbic wit, White raises this impertinent question. He also debunks the conventional view that liberalism can answer it without drawing on spiritual values. Surveying American popular culture (including Office Space and The Da Vinci Code) to illustrate his points, White urges us to renew our commitment to "human fundamentals" as articulated by Henry David Thoreau-especially free time, home, and food-and to reclaim Thoreau's spirit of disobedience.Seeking imaginative answers to his central questions, White also interviews John De Graaf (Affluenza), James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency) and Michael Ableman (Fields of Plenty) about their views of the good life in our time.

Song for the Horse Nation: Horses in Native American Cultures


National Museum of the American Indian - 2006
    For many Native Americans, each animal and bird that surrounded them was part of a nation of its own, and none was more vital to both survival and culture than the horse.

Breaking Through: Essays, Journals, and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts


Edward F. Ricketts - 2006
    Ricketts (1897–1948) has reached legendary status in the California mythos. A true polymath and a thinker ahead of his time, Ricketts was a scientist who worked in passionate collaboration with many of his friends—artists, writers, and influential intellectual figures—including, perhaps most famously, John Steinbeck, who once said that Ricketts's mind “had no horizons.” This unprecedented collection, featuring previously unpublished pieces as well as others available for the first time in their original form, reflects the wide scope of Ricketts’s scientific, philosophical, and literary interests during the years he lived and worked on Cannery Row in Monterey, California. These writings, which together illuminate the evolution of Ricketts’s unique, holistic approach to science, include “Verbatim transcription of notes on the Gulf of California trip,” the basic manuscript for Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’s Log from the Sea of Cortez; the essays “The Philosophy of Breaking Through” and “A Spiritual Morphology of Poetry;” several shorter pieces on topics including collecting invertebrates and the impact of modernization on Mexican village life; and more. An engaging critical biography and a number of rare photographs offer a new and richly detailed view of Ricketts’s life.

Malaysia And The Club Of Doom: The Collapse Of The Islamic Countries


Syed Akbar Ali - 2006
    In this book, the author has reproduced or referred to media reports, books, research findings and speeches by Islamic leaders which clearly proves the same. And for those who would deny that the Islamic countries are collapsing, I have dedicated a whole chapter to deniers. But the fact is Islam CANNOT collapse.Syed Akbar Ali, 46 years old was a banker for 10 years from 1987 until 1997. Born in Ipoh, Perak the Author had his early education at the Anglo Chinese School and finished his schooling at the Penang Free School. The Author obtained his undergraduate degree from the United States of America.

The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England


Kate Retford - 2006
    Kate Retford probes this much-loved genre to trace the values and meanings behind these compositions.While early images by artists such as Arthur Devis depicted sitters stiffly posed, later in the century scenes of affection and intimacy were created by portraitists like Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds. In the country-house collections, portraits first emphasized ancestry and inherited virtue, but later emphasized the domestic merits of the family. The Art of Domestic Life contributes a wealth of visual evidence to the history of the family. It offers important insights into both the innovations and traditions in family portraiture of this period, drawing on in-depth research into paintings, the lives of the sitters depicted, and the domestic spaces in which portraits were hung.Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

The Black Middle Class: Social Mobility--And Vulnerability


Benjamin P. Bowser - 2006
    In strong contrast, Benjamin Bowser argues that the seemingly comparable black and white middle classes, while inextricably linked, in fact exist on entirely different economic planes. Probing the subtle inner workings of contemporary class dynamics, Bowser demonstrates that belief in comparability is based not in reality, but in hopes, sentiment, and ideology. His focus on the structural barriers that underlie differences in black and white achievement makes it clear that the national racial dilemma has not been solved, but only transformed, and that issues of race and class are inseparable in the United States.

Rugby League in Twentieth Century Britain: A Social and Cultural History


Tony Collins - 2006
    Tells the story of Rugby League through times of great social, political and economic upheaval, using previously unexplored archival sources to illuminate the class-conscious structures that shaped the development of the sport.

Understanding Poverty


Abhijit V. Banerjee - 2006
    Yet the lay public almost never gets to hear what leading professional economists have to say about it. This volume brings together twenty-eight essays by some of the world leaders in the field, who were invited to tell the lay reader about the most important things they have learnt from their research that relate to poverty. The essays cover a wide array of topics: the first essay is about how poverty gets measured. The next section is about the causes of poverty and its persistence, andthe ideas range from the impact of colonialism and globalization to the problems of excessive population growth, corruption and ethnic conflict. The next section is about policy: how should we fight poverty? The essays discuss how to get drug companies to produce more vaccines for the diseases ofthe poor, what we should and should not expect from micro-credit, what we should do about child labor, how to design welfare policies that work better and a host of other topics. The final section is about where the puzzles lie: what are the most important anomalies, the big gaps in the wayeconomists think about poverty? The essays talk about the puzzling reluctance of Kenyan farmers to fertilizers, the enduring power of social relationships in economic transactions in developing countries and the need to understand where aspirations come from, and much else. Every essay is writtenwith the aim of presenting the latest and the most sophisticated in economics without any recourse to jargon or technical language.

The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture


Wendy Wheeler - 2006
    This can be grasped from understanding the complex social processes of evolution. From looking at recent developments in other disciplines but particularly in science - and the biology of complex systems - she argues that we are currently going through a paradigm shift in the long revolution of modern thought, from 'The Age of Reduction' to 'The Age of Emergence'. Through looking at the complex emergence of human society and culture, we can get a better understanding of how 'the whole creature' operates. Such an understanding serves to undermine the neoliberal philosophy of possessive individualism, whose outlook could be seen to be underpinned by a crude Social Darwinism; but, equally, its sense of humans as evolved and embodied creatures also undermines those who believe there is no existence outside discourse.