Caste as Social Capital


R. Vaidyanathan - 2019
    The establishment and running of businesses tap into caste networks, both in terms of arranging finance and providing access to a ready workforce.By and large, caste has only been studied from a religious, social and political angle. Though it is widely accepted that caste has economic ramifications, any study of this aspect has been limited to looking at caste groups in terms of their per capita income, their representation in various professions, and other statistical details.Caste as Social Capital examines the workings of caste through the lens of business, economics and entrepreneurship. It interrogates the role caste plays in the economic sphere in terms of facilitating the nuts and bolts of business and entrepreneurship: finance, markets and workforce. Through this qualitative view of caste, an entirely new picture emerges of caste which forces one to view this age-old institution in new light.

Hunting Evil: Inside the Ipswich Serial Murders


Paul Harrison - 2008
    For the quiet town of Ipswich it was fifty days of fear and soul seatching, from the disappearance of the first victim to the dramatic arrest of the lead suspect, Steve Wright.Journalist Paul Harrison and Professor of Criminology David Wilson arrived in Ipswich just as the first body was discovered. Their on-the-scene access, and Professor Wilson's unique experience as a profiler, meant that they were first to put forward the explosive theory that a serial killer was at large.In 'Hunting Evil' Harrison and Wilson take the reader to the heart of the story. Both visited the sites where the killer disposed of his victims' bodies; both walked the red-light area of Ipswich; and both talked to those who were closest to the victims and to Steve Wright. They explore the reasons why someone will kill and kill again and, perhaps most important of all, explain how serial killers target the most vulnerable in our society, and what can be done to make our communities safer for everyone.With sensitive portraits of the victims, a close examination of the police investigation, and full details of the trial, 'Hunting Evil' is the definitive account of a national tragedy.

Hunting the President: Threats, Plots and Assassination Attempts--From FDR to Obama


Mel Ayton - 2014
    Presidents have been murdered at the hands of an assassin. In each case the assassinations changed the course of American history.But most historians have overlooked or downplayed the many threats modern presidents have faced, and survived. Author Mel Ayton sets the record straight in his new book Hunting the President: Threats, Plots and Assassination Attempts—From FDR to Obama, telling the sensational story of largely forgotten—or never-before revealed—malicious attempts to slay America’s leaders.Supported by court records, newspaper archives, government reports, FBI files, and transcripts of interviews from presidential libraries, Hunting the President reveals: How an armed, would-be assassin stalked President Roosevelt and spent ten days waiting across the street from the White House for his chance to shoot himHow the Secret Service foiled a plot by a Cuban immigrant who told coworkers he was going to shoot LBJ from a window overlooking the president’s motorcade routeHow a deranged man broke into Reagan’s California home and attempted to strangle the former president before he was subdued by Secret Service agents.In early 1992 a mentally deranged man stalking Bush turned up at the wrong presidential venue for his planned assassination attemptThe relationships presidents held with their protectors and the effect it had on the Secret Service’s missionHunting the President opens the vault of stories about how many of our recent Presidents have come within a hair’s breadth of assassination, leaving America’s fate in the balance. Most of these stories have remained buried—until now. Includes glossy photo signature of historic pictures and documents

Gray Ghost: The Life of Col. John Singleton Mosby


James A. Ramage - 1999
    This book provides an analysis of his impact on the Civil war from the Union viewpoint.

China Survival Guide: How to Avoid Travel Troubles and Mortifying Mishaps


Larry Herzberg - 2008
    Readers will learn essential skills like how to haggle, exchange currencies, cross the street, decipher menus, say useful phrases in Chinese, and more. The guide comes complete with survival tips on etiquette, a map, and resource lists. Don’t leave home for China without it!Veteran travelers Qin and Larry Herzberg are Chinese language and culture professors at Calvin College in Michigan.

In These Days of Prohibition


Caroline Bird - 2017
    As always, she is a poet of dark hilarity and telling social comment. Shifting between poetic and vulgar registers, the surreal imagery of her early work is re-deployed to venture into the badlands of the human psyche. Her poems hold their subjects in an unflinching grip, addressing faces behind the veneer, asking what it is that keeps us alive. These days of prohibition are days of intoxication and inebriation, rehab in a desert and adultery for atheists, until finally Bird edges us out of danger, ‘revving on a wish’.

Death by Theory: A Tale of Mystery and Archaeological Theory


Adrian Praetzellis - 2000
    A large stone Venus. Nothing unusual about it_except that it was found on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Archaeologist Hannah Green and her shovelbum nephew find themselves in a tangled web of competing interests avaricious land owners, hungry media, and a cult of goddess worshippers while investigating one of the finds of the century. In untangling the mystery of the Washington Venus, Hannah and Sean have to confront questions of archaeological evidence, of ethics, of conflicting interpretation of data, and of the very nature of archaeological truths. Helping them are a cadre of disdainful graduate students who propose various theories processualist, marxist, feminist, postmodernist to explain the bizarre events. Teach your students archaeological theory in a fashion they'll enjoy, while they solve the mystery in Adrian Praetzellis's delightful textbook-as-novel.

Happy Hormones, Slim Belly


Jorge Cruise - 2013
    Contrary to the conventional wisdom of slashing calories and spending hours at the gym, breakthrough science has confirmed that cutting sugar for two days, then adding it back for five days, will keep your insulin low, which cuts belly fat, and your serotonin high, which makes you happy. Slim, Happy Belly is the perfect guide to balance your hormones, turn your metabolism to fat-burning mode, and get your mood soaring day after day with the proven Carb Cycling Plan. This book will uncover why weight loss for women has been difficult and give you the solution that matches your hormonal stage.

Crossing Into Medicine Country: A Journey In Native American Healing


David Carson - 2005
    Through her teachings and his own mind-bending experiences, he gives us a glimpse into an alternate reality.

Wayward Women: Sexuality and Agency in a New Guinea Society


Holly Wardlow - 2006
    Focusing on Huli “passenger women,” (women who accept money for sex) Wayward Women explores the socio-economic factors that push women into the practice of transactional sex, and asks how these transactions might be an expression of resistance, or even revenge. Challenging conventional understandings of “prostitution” and “sex work,” Holly Wardlow contextualizes the actions and intentions of passenger women in a rich analysis of kinship, bridewealth, marriage, and exchange, revealing the ways in which these robust social institutions are transformed by an encompassing capitalist economy. Many passenger women assert that they have been treated “olsem maket” (like market goods) by their husbands and natal kin, and they respond by fleeing home and defiantly appropriating their sexuality for their own purposes. Experiences of rape, violence, and the failure of kin to redress such wrongs figure prominently in their own stories about becoming “wayward.” Drawing on village court cases, hospital records, and women’s own raw, caustic , and darkly funny narratives, Wayward Women provides a riveting portrait of the way modernity engages with gender to produce new and contested subjectivities.

Sociology


Richard T. Schaefer - 1983
    Known for its balanced coverage of the 3 perspectives, this text continues to encourage students to think about their world with a sociological imagination. Through its strong coverage of globalization, race and ethnicity, careers in sociology, and current topics like mass media and social policy, Sociology provides students with knowledge they can use on campus, at work, in their neighborhoods, and in the global community. The new 12th edition features updated sections in various chapters reflecting recent sociological changes like the impact of the current economic downturn on social class and the global culture war. New Research Today boxes provide students with relevant examples of sociological research.

The Last of the Giants: How Christ Came to the Lumberjacks


Harry Rimmer - 2015
    Men were employed as lumberjacks and worked like beasts, only to be tossed aside like used equipment when no longer needed. The grand forests were raped for their prime timber, the balance burned wastefully. The men were coarse and hard, but they had to be to survive. More than any other people that ever lived in our land, these old-time lumberjacks could truthfully say, “No man cared for my soul.” That is, until God sent three men to the great Northwoods of our country ¬– Frank Higgins, John Sornberger, and Al Channer. These men blazed new trails of the Spirit and founded an empire for God. They reached a sector of humanity for which no spiritual work had ever been done before, storming the Northwoods with a consuming passion for Christ. And with that passion, they also brought a heart as big as all outdoors, a love for men that burned like a flame, and a desperate desire to see these men saved.

Gladesmen: Gator Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers


Glen Simmons - 1998
    . . should have strong, immediate interest for the ecologists engaged in efforts to restore the Everglades."--William B. Robertson, research biologist for Everglades National ParkFrom the book--Pa built our house out of rough lumber that they got from Frazier’s sawmill . . . a one-room house about 16 to 18 feet long and 12 feet wide. We all slept on cots and sat on boxes or a trunk. The kitchen was in the corner, and Ma cooked on a four-hole stove, which cost six dollars. Me and my middle brother, Alvin, sat on a trunk to eat at the table. That trunk had some long cracks in it. My brother knew just how to move so the crack would pinch . . . .Years before the Park was established, when all the land and marsh seemed to belong to me, we would help ourselves to whatever we could see or trade for survival. Mostly we would sell gator and otter hides. . . . On this particular trip, after grunting awhile at the gator hole, I gave up and made tracks to the camp since I wanted to return by dark. . . . I was lying under my skeeter bar with a small tarp stretched between two cabbage palms. About midnight, I heard the dried cabbage fronds breaking in the path toward my camp. The night was pitch black . . .Few people today can claim a living memory of Florida's frontier Everglades. Glen Simmons, who has hunted alligators, camped on hammock-covered islands, and poled his skiff through the mangrove swamps of the glades since the 1920s, is one who can. Together with Laura Ogden, he tells the story of backcountry life in the southern Everglades from his youth until the establishment of the Everglades National Park in 1947. During the economic bust of the late ‘20s, when many natives turned to the land to survive, Simmons began accompanying older local men into Everglades backcountry, the inhospitable prairie of soft muck and mosquitoes, of outlaws and moonshiners, that rings the southern part of the state. As Simmons recalls life in this community with humor and nostalgia, he also documents the forgotten lifestyles of south Florida gladesmen. By necessity, they understood the natural features of the Everglades ecosystem. They observed the seasonal fluctuations of wildlife, fire, and water levels. Their knowledge of the mostly unmapped labyrinth of grassy water enabled them to serve as guides for visiting naturalists and scientists. Simmons reconstructs this world, providing not only fascinating stories of individual personalities, places, and events, but an account that is accurate, both scientifically and historically, of one of the least known and longest surviving portions of the American frontier.Glen Simmons has lived in the south Florida Everglades since his birth in 1916 in Homestead. In 1995 he was awarded a State of Florida Heritage Award for his unique contribution to Florida's history and folk culture. He has demonstrated and taught glades skiff building for the Florida Department of State, Bureau of Folklife, and the South Florida Historical Society; his boats are on permanent display at the Florida Folklife Museum in White Springs, Florida, and at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, Miami.Laura Ogden, also born in Homestead and a life-long friend of Glen Simmons, is assistant professor of anthropology at Florida International University.

Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City


Paul Stoller - 2002
    In Money Has No Smell, Paul Stoller offers us a more complete portrait of the complex lives of West African immigrants like Diallo, a portrait based on years of research Stoller conducted on the streets of New York City during the 1990s.Blending fascinating ethnographic description with incisive social analysis, Stoller shows how these savvy West African entrepreneurs have built cohesive and effective multinational trading networks, in part through selling a simulated Africa to African Americans. These and other networks set up by the traders, along with their faith as devout Muslims, help them cope with the formidable state regulations and personal challenges they face in America. As Stoller demonstrates, the stories of these West African traders illustrate and illuminate ongoing debates about globalization, the informal economy, and the changing nature of American communities.

Xenophobe's Guide to the Greeks


Alexandra Fiada - 1995
    They exhibit an extreme passion for freedom of choice—which has turned law circumvention into an art and has made them incapable of comprehending words like “discipline,” “co-ordination,” or “system.” There's no such thing as a meek GreekA Greek cannot talk unless he has his hands free, and a soft-spoken Greek is one who can be heard only as far as across the street. Two Greeks having an amiable conversation sound as if they are ready to murder each other, and a party of exuberant Greeks having a good time could be described as a pack of hounds that has just sighted the fox. Free spiritsMercurial in the extreme, the Greeks' temperament flourishes uninhibited throughout their waking hours. This is probably why the ancient sages saw fit to carve their maxims “Nothing in excess” and “Know thyself” on the portals of the Delphic Oracle, in an attempt to persuade their fellow Greeks to curb their emotions. They were not heeded then any more than they are now. How much does a Greek urn?In general, Greeks believe in free trade, fair dealing, and keeping one's word. They are quick at grasping (and inventing) complicated business and financial arrangements and they are past masters in acting as middlemen—which means that they are paid by both parties while risking nothing themselves.