Book picks similar to
Social Problems by Joel Best


sociology
nonfiction
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Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal


Eric Schlosser - 2001
    That's a lengthy list of charges, but here Eric Schlosser makes them stick with an artful mix of first-rate reportage, wry wit, and careful reasoning.Schlosser's myth-shattering survey stretches from California's subdivisions where the business was born to the industrial corridor along the New Jersey Turnpike where many fast food's flavors are concocted. Along the way, he unearths a trove of fascinating, unsettling truths -- from the unholy alliance between fast food and Hollywood to the seismic changes the industry has wrought in food production, popular culture, and even real estate. (back cover)

Psychology in Everyday Life


David G. Myers - 2008
    Students of all kinds are comfortable with Myers' manageable chapters, which include careful connections to associated visuals, comparative tables, and research-based pedagogy. For this edition, there is something completely new to a Myers text: David Myers personally selected new coauthor. Nathan DeWall's enthusiasm for teaching and writing about psychological science makes him uniquely suited to join the worlds bestselling psychology textbook author. And with about 30 more pages of coverage, this edition has become an even stronger and more complete introduction to the science of psychology for courses of all kinds.

Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest & Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics


Henry Hazlitt - 1946
    But it is also much more, having become a fundamental influence on modern “libertarian” economics of the type espoused by Ron Paul and others.Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication.  Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson, his seminal work, in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy.Many current economic commentators across the political spectrum have credited Hazlitt with foreseeing the collapse of the global economy which occurred more than 50 years after the initial publication of Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt’s focus on non-governmental solutions, strong — and strongly reasoned — anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson, every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication.

Down to Earth Sociology: Introductory Readings


James M. Henslin - 1975
    Now in its fourteenth edition, the most popular anthology in sociology includes new articles on our changing world while also retaining its classic must-read essays. Focusing on social interaction in everyday life, the forty-six selections bring students face-to-face with the twin projects of contemporary sociology: understanding the individual's experience of society and analyzing social structure. The fourteenth edition's exceptional new readings include selections on the role of sympathy in everyday life, mistaken perceptions of the American family, the effects of a criminal record on getting a job, and the major social trends affecting our future. Together with these essential new articles, the selections by Peter Berger, Herbert Gans, Erving Goffman, Donna Eder, Zella Luria, C. Wright Mills, Deborah Tannen, Barrie Thorne, Sidney Katz, Philip Zimbardo, and many others provide firsthand reporting that gives students a sense of "being there." Henslin also explains basic methods of social research, providing insight into how sociologists explore the social world. The selections in Down to Earth Sociology highlight the most significant themes of contemporary sociology, ranging from the sociology of gender, power, politics, and religion to the contemporary crises of racial tension, crime, rape, poverty, and homelessness.

The Unfinished Nation: A Concise History of the American People: Volume I: To 1877


Alan Brinkley - 1992
    Balancing social and cultural history with traditional political and diplomatic themes, it tells the story of the diversity and complexity of the United States and the forces that have enabled it to survive and flourish despite division. This fifth edition of Volume 1 includes coverage of events and developments through the year 1877 and features two new essays.

The Interpretation of Cultures


Clifford Geertz - 1973
    This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past


John Lewis Gaddis - 2002
    The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today.Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain. Like cartographers mapping landscapes, historians represent what they can never replicate. In doing so, they combine the techniques of artists, geologists, paleontologists, and evolutionary biologists. Their approaches parallel, in intriguing ways, the new sciences of chaos, complexity, and criticality. They don't much resemble what happens in the social sciences, where the pursuit of independent variables functioning with static systems seems increasingly divorced from the world as we know it. So who's really being scientific and who isn't? This question too is one Gaddis explores, in ways that are certain to spark interdisciplinary controversy.Written in the tradition of Marc Bloch and E.H. Carr, The Landscape of History is at once an engaging introduction to the historical method for beginners, a powerful reaffirmation of it for practitioners, a startling challenge to social scientists, and an effective skewering of post-modernist claims that we can't know anything at all about the past. It will be essential reading for anyone who reads, writes, teaches, or cares about history.

In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio


Philippe Bourgois - 1995
    For the first time, an anthropologist had managed to gain the trust and long-term friendship of street-level drug dealers in one of the roughest ghetto neighborhoods--East Harlem. This new edition adds a prologue describing the major dynamics that have altered life on the streets of East Harlem in the seven years since the first edition. In a new epilogue Bourgois brings up to date the stories of the people--Primo, Caesat, Luis, Tony, Candy--who readers come to know in this remarkable window onto the world of the inner city drug trade. Philippe Bourgois is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology, History and Social Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. He has conducted fieldwork in Central America on ethnicity and social unrest and is the author of Ethnicity at Work: Divided Labor on a Central American Banana Plantation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). He is writing a book on homeless heroin addicts in San Francisco. 1/e hb ISBN (1996) 0-521-43518-8 1/e pb ISBN (1996) 0-521-57460-9

An Essay on the Principle of Population


Thomas Robert Malthus - 1798
    In many countries, supplies of food and water are inadequate to support the population, so the world falls deeper and deeper into what economists call the "Malthusian trap."Here, Malthus examines the tendency of human numbers to outstrip their resources, and argues that poverty, disease, and starvation are necessary to keep societies from moving beyond their means of subsistence.Public Domain (P)2013 Audible Ltd

Constitutional Law and Politics, Volume 2


David M. O'Brien - 2002
    This comprehensive text presents a wide range of excerpts and opinions from the most significant Supreme Court cases and provides the contextual material students need to interpret their historical significance. The Sixth Edition adds material on dozens of important recent cases, current through June 2004, and features carefully updated and refined pedagogy.Author Biography: David M. O'Brien is Leone Reaves and George W. Spicer Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs at the University of Virginia, where he teaches the popular constitutional law course on which his book Constitutional Law and Politics (now in its Sixth Edition) is based. Professor O'Brien is a regular commentator on the Supreme Court's activities and rulings. He is the author of over fifteen books and regularly contributes op-ed pieces on the Court to the Los Angeles Times.

Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches: The Riddles of Culture


Marvin Harris - 1974
    The author shows that no matter how bizarre a people's behavior may seem, it always stems from concrete social and economic conditions. It is by isolating and identifying these conditions that we will be able to understand and cope with some of our own apparently senseless life styles. In a devastating attack on the shamans of the counterculture, the author states the case for a return to objective consciousness and a rational set of political commitments.

Theories of the Information Society


Frank Webster - 1995
    This third edition brings the book right up to date with both new theoretical work and, social and technological changes (such as the rapid growth of the Internet and accelerated globalization), reassessing the work of key theorists in light of these changes.This book is essential reading for students of contemporary social theory and anybody interested in social and technological change in the post-war era. It addresses issues of central concern to students of sociology, politics, communications, information science, cultural studies, computing and librarianship.

The Essential Chomsky


Noam Chomsky - 2008
    The Essential Chomsky brings together selections from his most important writings since 1959-from his groundbreaking critique of B.F. Skinner to his bestselling works Hegermony or Survival and Failed States-concerning subjects ranging from critiques of corporate media and U.S. interventionism to intellectual freedom and the political economy of human rights. With a foreword by Anthony Arnove, The Essential Chomsky is an unprecedented, comprehensive overview of Chomsky's thought.

The Prince


Niccolò Machiavelli
    Hence: Can Machiavelli, who makes the following observations, be Machiavellian as we understand the disparaging term? 1. So it is that to know the nature of a people, one need be a Prince; to know the nature of a Prince, one need to be of the people. 2. If a Prince is not given to vices that make him hated, it is unsusal for his subjects to show their affection for him. 3. Opportunity made Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and others; their virtue domi-nated the opportunity, making their homelands noble and happy. Armed prophets win; the disarmed lose. 4. Without faith and religion, man achieves power but not glory. 5. Prominent citizens want to command and oppress; the populace only wants to be free of oppression. 6. A Prince needs a friendly populace; otherwise in diversity there is no hope. 7. A Prince, who rules as a man of valor, avoids disasters, 8. Nations based on mercenary forces will never be solid or secure. 9. Mercenaries are dangerous because of their cowardice 10. There are two ways to fight: one with laws, the other with force. The first is rightly man’s way; the second, the way of beasts.

Global Problems and the Culture of Capitalism


Richard H. Robbins - 1998
    This third edition takes a student-oriented, problem-based approach, focusing on social problems, such as hunger, poverty, environmental devastation, disease, gender issues, and social conflict.