Book picks similar to
Social Entropy Theory by Kenneth D. Bailey


systems
after-today-before-tomorrow
civilizational-collapse
disintegrations

Psychology and Social Sanity


Hugo Münsterberg - 1914
    

Social Change in Modern India


M.N. Srinivas - 2000
    While concepts like Sanskritization and Westernization have helped the understanding of complex, often seemingly contradictory trends in society, Prof. Srinivas' essay on the study of one's own society continue to engage scholars, opening the way to an understanding of sociological writing itself as a text. This revised edition of the 1966 original includes these classic essays, as also an appendix where Prof. Srinivas deals with the problem of changing values in Indian society today.

Laws of Form


George Spencer-Brown - 1969
    The work is powerful and has established a passionate following as well as harsh critics.

Winds of Skilak 2: The Continuing Saga of one couple's adventures and survival in the Alaskan wilderness


Bonnie Rose Ward - 2018
     Imagine canning a whole moose. One thousand pounds of meat, critical to survival through the brutal winter on an island in Alaska. And doing it in a home with no electricity, no plumbing, and no refrigeration. For the Wards, this is just another ordinary task in an environment that can be unforgiving of mistakes but immensely rewarding to those willing to embrace the work of creating a home in a harsh but beautiful land. In this sequel, Sam and Bonnie are thriving, building getaway cabins and continuing to joyfully tackle life on a remote, isolated island on Skilak Lake, where williwaw winds can whip up suddenly and without warning, and wicked storms can blow for weeks. In an era before cell phones and internet, their ability to communicate with the rest of the world, accessible only by boat or plane, is at the whim of the temperamental lake. Then, just as they are about to achieve a new dream, one of the largest man-made, environmental disasters strikes, altering their lives and threatening their livelihood and idyllic life. Will the love and devotion between Bonnie and Sam be enough for them to survive, or will Alaska finally win? From the awe-inspiring beauty of the Northern Lights, to terrifying accidents and strangers, to a Christmas miracle, this is a testament of courage and inspiration to anyone born with a wild longing in their hearts. Through sorrows and joys, love and loss, God’s hand is always present in their lives as Bonnie shares her chronicle of faith, survival, and beauty in an untamed land few others will ever know.

Fringe Florida: Travels among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles


Lynn Waddell - 2013
    If you’re looking for the outer orbits of America, come to Florida, and if you seek the Sunshine State’s funky-drumbeat fringe, you can do no better than Lynn Waddell.”—Tim Dorsey, New York Times best-selling author “Waddell takes readers to Florida’s wild side, where strippers, swingers, bikers, exotic animals, and carnies enjoy sun-kissed lives in America’s strangest state.”?Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism “Lynn Waddell’s riveting you-are-there reporting lives at the intersection where Florida’s wacky subcultures and seamy undersides meet up. When you read this book, make sure you’re standing over carpet—that way you won’t hurt your jaw from dropping it so many times.”—Craig Pittman, author of The Scent of Scandal: Greed, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Beautiful Orchid “A fast, fascinating read. Waddell delivers ten surprising subcultures you might not dare visit on your own.”?Lyn Millner, Florida Gulf Coast UniversityFlorida has a titillating underbelly that few tourists ever see. Beyond the theme parks and the beaches lies a periphery most residents know about but—out of decorum or discomfort?prefer not to discuss. In Fringe Florida, Lynn Waddell explores the exotic, sensational, and sometimes illicit worlds of the oddest state in the nation.Waddell takes the reader on a colorful journey to meet the most unconventional of Floridians in unbelievable and spectacular places. At Fetish Con, she befriends furries and pony girls. She travels to Cassadaga, the oldest active Spiritualist community in the South, where trained mediums converse with the dead, and to the Holy Land Experience theme park in Orlando, where one can eat a hot dog while watching a reenactment of the Crucifixion. She interviews the founder of the Leather & Lace Motorcycle Club, a Daytona Beach-area grandmother who hosts the club’s annual gathering, welcoming scores of lady bikers to camp out on the lawn of her subdivision home. At an Animal Amnesty Day outside Busch Gardens, Waddell meets exotic reptile owners who give up their beloved-but no-longer-manageable pets and others who vie to take home the cast-offs.If you’ve ever wanted to parade around on a pimped-out swamp buggy amidst a couple thousand beer-swigging mud boggers or fall asleep with a python hissing in your ear, been tempted to bring a Capuchin monkey in a stroller to a Little League game, or contemplated sitting on the beach waiting to be picked up by a UFO but couldn’t quite bring yourself to such extremes, Fringe Florida is for you.

Indigenous Healing: Exploring Traditional Paths


Rupert Ross - 2014
    In his second book, Returning to the Teachings, Ross went on to examine the aboriginal preference for “peacemaker justice.”In Indigenous Healing, the former crown prosecutor Rupert Ross shares the lessons and insight acquired from years of working with, and learning from, aboriginal communities across Canada. He shares a vision of justice and healing—a way of seeing that existed long before Europeans came to this continent—that persists today, albeit often in conflict with western culture. He examines the effects of colonization and assimilation and how social trauma is in fact magnified over the years, passed down to new generations.Perhaps most difficult for Ross was accepting the aboriginal view that justice is about healing, not punishment. With the lessons here, Ross looks to the future to how health and happiness can be created.

Fat City


Karen Hitchcock - 2015
    “Nothing,” he says. I look him in the eye. Nothing? He nods. I ask him about his chronic skin infections, his diabetes. He tears up: “I eat hot chips and fried dim sims and drink three bottles of Coke every afternoon. The truth is I’m addicted to eating. I’m addicted.” He punches his thigh.In Fat City, Karen Hitchcock unpicks the idea of obesity as a disease. In a riveting blend of story and analysis, she explores chemistry, psychology and the impulse to excess to explain the West’s growing obesity epidemic.

An Introduction to Cybernetics


William Ross Ashby - 1956
    

Blossom: What Scotland Needs to Flourish


Lesley Riddoch - 2013
    A term given to flowers of stone fruit trees and some other plants that flower profusely in Spring. Blossoms provide pollen to bees, and initiate cross-pollination necessary for trees to reproduce by producing fruit. 2. A peak period or stage of development. Covering topics including housing, health, language and culture, Riddoch looks at the way in which Scots identify themselves and how this needs to change in order for the country to blossom u as an independent nation or a strongly devolved one. Arguing that limited access to security and wealth has left Scots feeling like outsiders in their own country, this book tackles fundamental and personal issues of identity that matter to ordinary Scots. Designed to incite discussion and debate, this book will appeal to those who believe larger issues of self esteem and power lurk beneath the complexities of the independence debate and want to delve deeperBACK COVERWhat will it take for Scotland to blossom? "Imagine Scotland as a beautifully-knitted, warmth-providing sweater caught on a snag. Its wearer tries to move forward u but cannot. A pause is needed to lift the garment clear. Scotland is thus snagged. And no amount of tugging will free it from the stubborn, progress-inhibiting three-headed hook of inequality, distant control and top-down governance." Weeding out vital components of Scottish identity from decades of political and social tangle is no mean task, but itOCOs one journalist Lesley Riddoch has undertaken. Dispensing with the tired, yo-yoing jousts over fiscal commissions, Devo Something and EU in-or-out, "Blossom" pinpoints both the buds of growth and the blight thatOCOs holding Scotland back. Drawing from its people, history, and the authorOCOs own passionate and outspoken perspective this is a plain-speaking but incisive call to restore control to local communities and let Scotland flourish.

Those Children Are Ours


David Burnett - 2015
    Twelve years later, she petitions the family court for visitation with her daughters, Alexis and Christa.Her attorney tells Jennie that, ordinarily, she could not imagine that some type of visitation would not be granted. But, she warns, the situation is hardly ordinary.True, Jennie suffered from a bipolar disorder when she began to drink heavily, abandoned her family, and moved in with another man. True, she has turned her life around: leaving her boyfriend, returning to school, entering therapy, taking medication, finding a job, and joining a church. But she pressed no claim for her children when her husband divorced her, and she has made no attempt to contact them in any way since then. Her daughters, now sixteen and fourteen, live four hundred miles away. They have busy lives that do not include her, lives that will be totally disrupted by the visitation that she requests. Their father is engaged to be married to a woman who has taken the role of their mother for a decade. Alexis remembers nothing good about Jennie. Christa recalls nothing at all. Conflict ensues as soon as Jennie’s petition is served: her former husband does not want to share his children with the woman who deserted him; her children have no interest in knowing the mother who abandoned them, and her father insists that she is being timid and ought to demand full custody, not simply visitation. As court convenes, Jennie’s past is dredged up− the desertion, the men, her drinking, her mental health − and paraded before the judge. Her claim to be a different person, now, is attacked. The judge hesitates to grant Jennie’s request, but reluctantly agrees to order three trial visits.If persuading the judge to let her see her children was difficult, convincing them to allow her to be a part of their lives seems to be almost impossible. She struggles through two visits and is almost. What happens next tests her confidence in herself, her love for her children, and, ultimately, threatens her life, itself.

To Live Outside the Law: Caught by Operation Julie, Britain's Biggest Drugs Bust


Leaf Fielding - 2011
    The book opens with Leaf Fielding's arrest in a pre-dawn police raid and ends five years later with his release from jail.The narrative moves back and forth between the harsh world of prison and his previous life - from a childhood at a brutal boarding school onto undergraduate days and his LSD epiphany in the summer of love, 1967.Acid transformed him in an instant from nerdy scholar to footloose freak. His ten years of adventures in the hippie underground gave the title to this book - a quote from a Bob Dylan song - they also took him across Europe, to the Andes, to Indochina and on to the edge of the known universe. They also led inexorably to his downfall.

Just Say Yes: A Marijiuana Memoir


Catherine Hiller - 2015
    With ruthless honesty and deadpan humor, the author observes the effect of weed upon every aspect of her life: marriage, motherhood, friendship, work, sport, sex. Phillip Lopate, Nonfiction Director of Columbia University's MFA Writing Program, lauds JUST SAY YES: "This funny, wry and very candid memoir purports to be a Confession of an American Pot-Smoker but is really a cultural/personal history of the past fifty years. The narrative progresses backward and not only the past but innocence itself is recaptured." John Updike wrote about Hiller's short story collection, SKIN, this is "good, brave and joyful writing." For more reviews of JUST SAY YES, please see the Kindle page and www.marijuanamemoir.com.

Designing Freedom


Stafford Beer - 1974
    His writing is as much art as it is science. He is the most viable system I know." Dr Russell L Ackoff, The Institute for Interactive Management, Pennsylvania, USA. "If anyone can make it [Operations Research] understandably readable and positively interesting it is Stafford Beer everyone in management should be grateful to him for using clear and at times elegant English and even elegant diagrams." The Economist Based on the Massey Lectures, this book examines the reasons why the institutions of our society may well be failing, and opens a discussion as to what could be done. Drawing on the science of effective organization, which is his definition of cybernetics, Stafford Beer explains key cybernetic principles in words and pictures that all can understand. He concludes that our society commits more and more resources to plastering over the cracks in the system which simply reappear while freedom itself is increasingly eroded. The institutions must be redesigned, and returned to the people, to whom the scientific tools for doing this ought to belong.

The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy's Own Story


Clifford R. Shaw - 1966
    The Jack-Roller helped to establish the life-history or "own story" as an important instrument of sociological research. The book remains as relevant today to the study and treatment of juvenile delinquency and maladjustment as it was when originally published in 1930.

The Politics of Glory: How the Baseball's Hall of Fame Really Works


Bill James - 1994
    In The Politics of Glory, bestselling author Bill James takes a hard look at the Hall - not only at the traditional questions of who is in and who is out and why, but at how the Hall of Fame operates, who operates it, how they make decisions, and why those decisions sometimes go awry. Using the endless battle over onetime Yankee shortstop - and new Hall of Famer - Phil Rizzuto as a recurring theme, James analyzes the perennial debate over Hall of Fame qualifications: players who should be in, and aren't, as well as players who shouldn't be, and are. Who is more deserving of induction, Catfish Hunter or Luis Tiant? Whatever happened to Vern Stephens, the St. Louis Browns shortstop who began in the majors the same year as Stan Musial . . . and during his first eight years had more home runs and RBIs than Musial? Can you name the shortstop who is the very best player in baseball history who is not in the Hall of Fame? (Hint: It wasn't Rizzuto.). Was Don Drysdale a qualified Hall of Famer? From Ron Santo to Joe Tinker, from Joe Gordon to Richie Ashburn, and (of course) from Shoeless Joe Jackson to Pete Rose, here are the fascinating stories, the profound dilemmas, and the raucous controversies that make up the history of baseball's Hall of Fame.