Book picks similar to
Living Buddhism: Mind, Self, and Emotion in a Thai Community by Julia Cassaniti
non-fiction
anthropology
asia
science-social
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
Judith Butler - 1989
This is the text where Judith Butler began to advance the ideas that would go on to take life as "performativity theory," as well as some of the first articulations of the possibility for subversive gender practices, and she writes in her preface to the 10th anniversary edition released in 1999 that one point of Gender Trouble was "not to prescribe a new gendered way of life [...] but to open up the field of possibility for gender [...]" Widely taught, and widely debated, Gender Trouble continues to offer a powerful critique of heteronormativity and of the function of gender in the modern world.
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.
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution
Adrienne Rich - 1976
The experience is her own - as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother - but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed in its many variations on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.One of our most distinguished poets, ADRIENNE RICH was born in Baltimore in 1929. Over the last forty years she has published more than seventeen volumes of poetry and five books of nonfiction prose, including Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations; On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Blood, Bread, and Poetry; and What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. She has received numerous awards, including the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Lambda Book Award, the National Book Award, and the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. She lives in California.
Social Work Macro Practice
F. Ellen Netting - 1993
'Social Work Macro Practice' focuses on work with organizations and communities, including planned change approaches and implementation.
Three Guineas
Virginia Woolf - 1938
The author received three separate requests for a gift of one guinea-one for a women’s college building fund, one for a society promoting the employment of professional women, and one to help prevent war and “protect culture, and intellectual liberty.” This book is a threefold answer to these requests-and a statement of feminine purpose.
As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl
John Colapinto - 2000
The case would become one of the most famous in modern medicine—and a total failure. As Nature Made Him tells the extraordinary story of David Reimer, who, when finally informed of his medical history, made the decision to live as a male. A macabre tale of medical arrogance, it is first and foremost a human drama of one man's—and one family's—amazing survival in the face of terrible odds.
The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction
Matthew B. Crawford - 2015
Crawford explored the ethical and practical importance of manual competence, as expressed through mastery of our physical environment. In his brilliant follow-up, The World Beyond Your Head, Crawford investigates the challenge of mastering one's own mind.We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self.Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature.The World Beyond Your Head makes sense of an astonishing array of common experience, from the frustrations of airport security to the rise of the hipster. With implications for the way we raise our children, the design of public spaces, and democracy itself, this is a book of urgent relevance to contemporary life.
Events of October: Murder-Suicide on a Small Campus
Gail Griffin - 2010
In the wake of this tragedy, the community of the small, idyllic liberal arts college struggled to characterize the incident, which was even called "the events of October" in a campus memo. In this engaging and intimate examination of Maggie and Neenef's deaths, author and Kalamazoo College professor Gail Griffin attempts to answer the lingering question of "how could this happen?" to two seemingly normal students on such a close-knit campus. Griffin introduces readers to Maggie and Neenef--a bright and athletic local girl and the quiet Iraqi-American computer student--and retraces their relationship from multiple perspectives, including those of their friends, teachers, and classmates. She examines the tension that built between Maggie and Neenef as his demands for more of her time and emotional support grew, eventually leading to their breakup. After the deaths take place, Griffin presents multiple reactions, including those of Maggie's friends who were waiting for her to return from Neenef's room, the students who heard the shotgun blasts in the hallway of Neenef's dorm, the president who struggled to guide a grieving campus, and the facilities manager in charge of cleaning up the crime scene. Griffin also uses Maggie and Neenef's story to explore larger issues of intimate partner violence, gun accessibility, and depression and suicide on campus as she attempts to understand the lasting importance of their tragic deaths. Griffin's use of source material, including college documents, official police reports, Neenef's suicide note, and an instant message record between perpetrator and victim, puts a very real face on issues of violence against women. Readers interested in true crime, gender studies, and the culture of colleges and universities will appreciate "The Events of October."
Myers' Psychology for AP*
David G. Myers - 2010
Myers introduce this new text here.Watch instructor video reviews here.David G. Myers is best known for his top-selling college psychology texts, used successfully across North America in thousands of AP* courses. As effective as Myers’ college texts have been for the AP* course, we believe his new text will be even better, because Myers’ Psychology for AP* has been written especially for the AP* course!
Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled--and More Miserable Than Ever Before
Jean M. Twenge - 2006
In this provocative new book, headline-making psychologist and social commentator Dr. Jean Twenge explores why the young people she calls "Generation Me" -- those born in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s -- are tolerant, confident, open-minded, and ambitious but also cynical, depressed, lonely, and anxious.Herself a member of Generation Me, Dr. Twenge uses findings from the largest intergenerational research study ever conducted -- with data from 1.3 million respondents spanning six decades -- to reveal how profoundly different today's young adults are. Here are the often shocking truths about this generation, including dramatic differences in sexual behavior, as well as controversial predictions about what the future holds for them and society as a whole. Her often humorous, eyebrow-raising stories about real people vividly bring to life the hopes and dreams, disappointments and challenges of Generation Me.GenMe has created a profound shift in the American character, changing what it means to be an individual in today's society. The collision of this generation's entitled self-focus and today's competitive marketplace will create one of the most daunting challenges of the new century. Engaging, controversial, prescriptive, funny, "Generation Me" will give Boomers new insight into their offspring, and help those in their teens, 20s, and 30s finally make sense of themselves and their goals and find their road to happiness.
Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States
Eduardo Bonilla-Silva - 2003
Bonilla-Silva documented how beneath the rhetorical maze of contemporary racial discourse lies a full-blown arsenal of arguments, phrases, and stories that whites use to account for and ultimately justify racial inequities.In the new edition Bonilla-Silva has added a chapter dealing with the future of racial stratification in America that goes beyond the white / black dichotomy. He argues that the U.S. is developing a more complex and apparently "plural" racial order that will mimic Latin American patterns of racial stratification. Another new chapter addresses a variety of questions from readers of the first edition. And he has updated the book throughout with new information, data, and references where appropriate. The book ends with a new Postscript, "What is to be Done (For Real?)". As in the highly acclaimed first edition, Bonilla-Silva continues to challenge color-blind thinking.
Epistemology of the Closet
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick - 1990
What is at stake in male homo/heterosexual definition? Through readings of Melville, Nietzsche, Wilde, James and Proust, the author argues that the vexed imperatives to specify straight and gay identities have become central to every important form of knowledge of the 20th century.
The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters
B.R. Myers - 2010
Myers, a North Korea analyst and a contributing editor of The Atlantic, presents the first full-length study of the North Korean worldview. Drawing on extensive research into the regime’s domestic propaganda, including films, romance novels and other artifacts of the personality cult, Myers analyzes each of the country’s official myths in turn—from the notion of Koreans’ unique moral purity, to the myth of an America quaking in terror of “the Iron General.” In a concise but groundbreaking historical section, Myers also traces the origins of this official culture back to the Japanese fascist thought in which North Korea’s first ideologues were schooled.What emerges is a regime completely unlike the West’s perception of it. This is neither a bastion of Stalinism nor a Confucian patriarchy, but a paranoid nationalist, “military-first” state on the far right of the ideological spectrum.Since popular support for the North Korean regime now derives almost exclusively from pride in North Korean military might, Pyongyang can neither be cajoled nor bullied into giving up its nuclear program. The implications for US foreign policy—which has hitherto treated North Korea as the last outpost of the Cold War—are as obvious as they are troubling. With North Korea now calling for a “blood reckoning” with the “Yankee jackals,” Myers’s unprecedented analysis could not be more timely.
Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940
George Chauncey - 1994
Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New Yorkforever changed how we think about the history of gay life in New York City, and beyond.
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears
Stephen T. Asma - 2009
Beginning at the time of Alexander the Great, the monsters come fast and furious--Behemoth and Leviathan, Gog and Magog, Satan and his demons, Grendel and Frankenstein, circus freaks and headless children, right up to the serial killers and terrorists of today and the post-human cyborgs oftomorrow. Monsters embody our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities, Asma argues, but they also symbolize the mysterious and incoherent territory beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring sources as diverse as philosophical treatises, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma unravelstraditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of an era's fears and fascinations. In doing so, he illuminates the many ways monsters have become repositories for those human qualities that must be repudiated, externalized, and defeated.