| Search | About | Preferences | Interact | Help | |
| 150 million books. 1 search engine. | ||
books tagged “social science”
books tagged “social science”
›› Find signed collectible books by ''
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclassby Douglas S. Massey, Nancy A. DentonISBN 0674018214 (0-674-01821-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass'Book summary:"During the 1970s and 1980s a word disappeared from the American vocabulary," begins American Apartheid ". . . That word was segregation." But the practice of segregation certainly has not disappeared, as Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton glaringly expose. One-third of all American blacks live in one of just 16 urban areas, in neighborhoods so racially segregated they have almost no chance at interracial contact. The authors argue that segregation--and disassocation from not only other cultures, but other ways of life--is at the root of many problems facing African-Americans today. [via]
More editions of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass:
-
The Anatomy of Disgustby William I. MillerISBN 0674031547 (0-674-03154-7)
Hardcover, Harvard University Press
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Anatomy of Disgust'Book summary:The title of William Ian Miller's book is a play on Robert Burton's 17th-century classic The Anatomy of Melancholy, an examination of human emotion. In his modern Anatomy, Miller narrows the focus to the function of disgust in human life. Disgust, Miller posits, is a kind of protection; just as fear causes us to flee danger or loyalty prompts us to support one another, disgust draws boundaries and insulates the individual from outside incursions--anything from the unhygienic hair in our soup to the frightening explosion of homelessness in our cities. Among his theories is one that democracy depends on the even distribution of disgust across class lines.
Mr. Miller is not afraid to explore the darker side of disgust as well--the fact that we may feel it in conjunction with contempt toward people, objects, or concepts that do not warrant it. Nevertheless, disgust serves an important role in humanity's complex emotional and social makeup, and The Anatomy of Disgust is novel in its approach to uncovering just what that role might be. [via]
More editions of The Anatomy of Disgust:
The Anatomy of Disgustby William Ian MillerISBN 0674031555 (0-674-03155-5)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Anatomy of Disgust'More editions of The Anatomy of Disgust:
-
An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Talesby Oliver W. SacksISBN 0679437851 (0-679-43785-1)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales'Book summary:Detailed and fascinating portraits of seven neurological patients, including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette's syndrome unless he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.
"Among doctors who write with acuity and grace, Sacks ( The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat) takes a higher place with each successive book.... enlarges our view of the nature of human experience." --Publisher's Weekly
"... Dr. Sacks's best book to date." --The New York Time Book Review [via]
More editions of An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales:
-
Aristotle: Politicsby AristotleISBN 0674992911 (0-674-99291-1)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Aristotle: Politics'Book summary:Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias's relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 3432 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip's death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of 'Peripatetics'), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander's death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.
Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows: I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices. II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica. III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc. IV Metaphysics: on being as being. V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics. VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship. VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.
[via]More editions of Aristotle: Politics:
-
Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethicsby H. RackhamISBN 0674990811 (0-674-99081-1)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics'Book summary:Aristotle, great Greek philosopher, researcher, reasoner, and writer, born at Stagirus in 384 BCE, was the son of Nicomachus, a physician, and Phaestis. He studied under Plato at Athens and taught there (367-347); subsequently he spent three years at the court of a former pupil, Hermeias, in Asia Minor and at this time married Pythias, one of Hermeias's relations. After some time at Mitylene, in 343-2 he was appointed by King Philip of Macedon to be tutor of his teen-aged son Alexander. After Philip's death in 336, Aristotle became head of his own school (of 'Peripatetics'), the Lyceum at Athens. Because of anti-Macedonian feeling there after Alexander's death in 323, he withdrew to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322.
Nearly all the works Aristotle prepared for publication are lost; the priceless ones extant are lecture-materials, notes, and memoranda (some are spurious). They can be categorized as follows: I Practical: Nicomachean Ethics; Great Ethics (Magna Moralia); Eudemian Ethics; Politics; Economics (on the good of the family); On Virtues and Vices. II Logical: Categories; Analytics (Prior and Posterior); Interpretation; Refutations used by Sophists; Topica. III Physical: Twenty-six works (some suspect) including astronomy, generation and destruction, the senses, memory, sleep, dreams, life, facts about animals, etc. IV Metaphysics: on being as being. V Art: Rhetoric and Poetics. VI Other works including the Constitution of Athens; more works also of doubtful authorship. VII Fragments of various works such as dialogues on philosophy and literature; and of treatises on rhetoric, politics and metaphysics.
The Loeb Classical Library edition of Aristotle is in twenty-three volumes.
[via]More editions of Aristotle: The Nicomachean Ethics:
-
The Awakening of the Soviet Unionby Geoffrey HoskingISBN 0674055519 (0-674-05551-9)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Awakening of the Soviet Union'Book summary:Hosking provides a unique perspective on the rapid changes the Soviet Union is experiencing. His lively analysis illuminates the social, cultural, and historical developments that have created the need for--and openness to--sweeping political and economic change. [via]
More editions of The Awakening of the Soviet Union:
Behind the Mask: Destruction and Creativity in Women's Aggressionby Dana Crowley JackISBN 0674005376 (0-674-00537-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Behind the Mask: Destruction and Creativity in Women's Aggression'More editions of Behind the Mask: Destruction and Creativity in Women's Aggression:
-
The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousnessby Paul GilroyISBN 0674076060 (0-674-07606-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness'Book summary:Afrocentrism. Eurocentrism. Caribbean Studies. British Studies. To the forces of cultural nationalism hunkered down in their camps, this bold hook sounds a liberating call. There is,Paul Gilroy tells us, a culture that is not specifically African, American, Caribbean, or British, but all of these at once, a black Atlantic culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and nationality to produce something new and, until now, unremarked. Challenging the practices and assumptions of cultural studies, The Black Atlantic also complicates and enriches our understanding of modernism.
Debates about postmodernism have cast an unfashionable pall over questions of historical periodization. Gilroy bucks this trend by arguing that the development of black culture in the Americas arid Europe is a historical experience which can be called modern for a number of clear and specific reasons. For Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave was integral to modernity, and Gilroy considers the implications of this idea for a transatlantic culture. In search of a poetics reflecting the politics and history of this culture, he takes us on a transatlantic tour of the music that, for centuries, has transmitted racial messages and feeling around the world, from the Jubilee Singers in the nineteenth century to Jimi Hendrix to rap. He also explores this internationalism as it is manifested in black writing from the "double consciousness" of W. E. B. Du Bois to the "double vision" of Richard Wright to the compelling voice of Toni Morrison.
In a final tour de force, Gilroy exposes the shared contours of black and Jewish concepts of diaspora in order both to establish a theoretical basis for healing rifts between blacks and Jews in contemporary culture and to further define the central theme of his book: that blacks have shaped a nationalism, if not a nation, within the shared culture of the black Atlantic.
[via]More editions of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness:
-
Born to Rebel : Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Livesby Frank J. SullowayISBN 0679442324 (0-679-44232-4)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Born to Rebel : Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives'Book summary:A landmark work that illuminates the crucial influence of birth order on personality and the far-reaching consequences of sibling competition--not only within individual families but on society as a whole.
At the heart of this pioneering inquiry is a fundamental insight into human behavior: that the personalities of first-born children differ from those of their younger siblings not because of cultural differences but because common human instincts play themselves out differently in the universal quest for parental favor. Frank Sulloway's most important finding--that eldest children support the status quo and youngest children rebel against it--provides the foundation for startling analyses of the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, and Darwin's theory of evolution.
Concerning first borns--Did you know that:
First borns are more frequently defenders of the status quo, more accepting of parental or conventional values.
In their support of authority they will use either brains or violence to resolve conflict.
More first borns--Albert Einstein, Ivan Pavlov, Linus Pauling--are Nobel Laureates.
First borns--like Stalin, Robespierre, and Carlos the Jackal--will not shy away from tactics of terrorism.
Concerning later-borns--Did you know that:
Most later-borns more frequently turn over convention and champion reform, revolution and upheaval.
Later-borns have been the catalysts of change supporting free speech, free worship, civil rights and women's rights.
They are the creators of revolutionary ideas--Voltaire, Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson-- were all later-borns.
Those who pressed for the absolution of slavery--Frederick Douglass, John Brown and Harriet Tubman--were all later-borns.
Born to Rebel is a path-breaking study, a solid confirmation of the belief that a scientific, empirical basis exists for our understanding of human behavior. [via]More editions of Born to Rebel : Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives:
Catholic Schools and the Common Goodby Anthony S. Bryk, Valerie E. Lee, Peter B. HollandISBN 0674103114 (0-674-10311-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Catholic Schools and the Common Good'More editions of Catholic Schools and the Common Good:
Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspectiveby Rosabeth Moss KanterISBN 0674145763 (0-674-14576-3)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Commitment and Community; Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective.'More editions of Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective:
Comparative Politics: A Theoretical Frameworkby Gabriel A. Almond, Robert J. Mundt, G. Bingham PowellISBN 0673522822 (0-673-52282-2)
Softcover, Addison-Wesley
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Comparative Politics: A Theoretical Framework'More editions of Comparative Politics: A Theoretical Framework:
Comparative Politics: A Theoretical Frameworkby Gabriel Abraham Almond, Powell, G. Bingham, Jr., Robert J. MundtISBN 0673524809 (0-673-52480-9)
Softcover, Longman Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Comparative Politics: A Theoretical Framework'More editions of Comparative Politics: A Theoretical Framework:
Comparative Politics Today: A World Viewby G. Bingham Powell, Gabriel Abraham AlmondISBN 0673524744 (0-673-52474-4)
Softcover, Addison-Wesley
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Comparative Politics Today: A World View'More editions of Comparative Politics Today: A World View:
-
Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropologyby David W. McCurdy, James P. SpradleyISBN 0673525104 (0-673-52510-4)
Softcover, Addison-Wesley
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology'Book summary:Designed to complement standard cultural anthropology texts, "Conformity and Conflict" offers students an in-depth look at how anthropology is a powerful way to study human behavior and events. Thirty-six accessible articles - seventeen of which are new or updated - were selected to cover a broad range of theoretical perspectives as well as demonstrate basic concepts. This ninth edition includes pedagogical materials that set the context for the articles and increase their value to introductory students: part openers with key terms and study questions and locator maps for each article. Carefully chosen for their instructional value and topical interest, articles address issues such as the Militia Movement, crack dealers, gangs, and environmental destruction. [via]
More editions of Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology:
Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropologyby James P. Spradley, David W. McCurdyISBN 0673523128 (0-673-52312-8)
Softcover, Addison-Wesley
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology'More editions of Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology:
-
Consilience : The Unity of Knowledgeby Edward O. WilsonISBN 0679450777 (0-679-45077-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge'Book summary:The biologist Edward O. Wilson is a rare scientist: having over a long career made signal contributions to population genetics, evolutionary biology, entomology, and ethology, he has also steeped himself in philosophy, the humanities, and the social sciences. The result of his lifelong, wide-ranging investigations is Consilience (the word means "a jumping together," in this case of the many branches of human knowledge), a wonderfully broad study that encourages scholars to bridge the many gaps that yawn between and within the cultures of science and the arts. No such gaps should exist, Wilson maintains, for the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give understanding a purpose, to lend to us all "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws." In making his synthetic argument, Wilson examines the ways (rightly and wrongly) in which science is done, puzzles over the postmodernist debates now sweeping academia, and proposes thought-provoking ideas about religion and human nature. He turns to the great evolutionary biologists and the scholars of the Enlightenment for case studies of science properly conducted, considers the life cycles of ants and mountain lions, and presses, again and again, for rigor and vigor to be brought to bear on our search for meaning. The time is right, he suggests, for us to understand more fully that quest for knowledge, for "Homo sapiens, the first truly free species, is about to decommission natural selection, the force that made us.... Soon we must look deep within ourselves and decide what we wish to become." Wilson's wisdom, eloquently expressed in the pages of this grand and lively summing-up, will be of much help in that search. [via]
More editions of Consilience : The Unity of Knowledge:
The Creationistsby Ronald M. NumbersISBN 0679401040 (0-679-40104-0)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Creationists'More editions of The Creationists:
-
The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Designby Ronald L. NumbersISBN 0674023390 (0-674-02339-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design'Book summary:In light of the embattled status of evolutionary theory, particularly as "intelligent design" makes headway against Darwinism in the schools and in the courts, this now classic account of the roots of creationism assumes new relevance. Expanded and updated to account for the appeal of intelligent design and the global spread of creationism, The Creationists offers a thorough, clear, and balanced overview of the arguments and figures at the heart of the debate.
Praised by both creationists and evolutionists for its comprehensiveness, the book meticulously traces the dramatic shift among Christian fundamentalists from acceptance of the earth's antiquity to the insistence of present-day scientific creationists that most fossils date back to Noah's flood and its aftermath. Focusing especially on the rise of this "flood geology," Ronald L. Numbers chronicles the remarkable resurgence of antievolutionism since the 1960s, as well as the creationist movement's tangled religious roots in the theologies of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Baptists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Adventists, among others. His book offers valuable insight into the origins of various "creation science" think tanks and the people behind them. It also goes a long way toward explaining how creationism, until recently viewed as a "peculiarly American" phenomenon, has quietly but dynamically spread internationally--and found its expression outside Christianity in Judaism and Islam.
[via]More editions of The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design:
-
Dark Age Aheadby Jane JacobsISBN 0679313109 (0-679-31310-9)
Softcover, Random House of Canada Ltd
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dark Age Ahead'Book summary:Optimistic despite its author's central premise that North American culture may be headed into a cataclysmic decline, Jane Jacobs's Dark Age Ahead presents a lucid examination of just how easily a thriving culture can squander its most precious resources. Crime, racism, environmental destruction, distrust of the political process, and the widening gap between rich and poor are not, Jacobs lucidly argues, the key causes of concern when a civilization starts to collapse, but merely symptoms of more pervasive threats.
Written when this legendary author of classics including The Death and Life of Great American Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations had already entered her 80s, Dark Age Ahead draws on a lifetime of astute observation to identify factors such as the erosion of community and family and the lack of public fiscal accountability as the true harbingers of an unhealthy cultural base. Jacobs, whose own formal education ended with a high school diploma and a year-long unpaid Depression-era apprenticeship at a Pennsylvania newspaper, identifies the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next as vitally important, and sees the trend towards replacing intellectual mentorship with what she calls "credentialing" at universities and other institutions of higher education as very dangerous indeed. "My impression is that university-educated parents or grandparents of students presently in university do not realize how much the experience has changed since their own student days, nor do the students themselves, since they have not experienced anything else," Jacobs writes. "Only faculty who have lived through the loss realize what has been lost. A vigorous culture capable of making corrective, stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding."
These and other factors are discussed with formidable clarity and insight in Jacobs's trademark elegant, plain-language prose. Rather than disrupting the flow of her extensively indexed main narrative analysis with dense notes, the Toronto-based visionary presents her references in a 47-page parallel text following the book's initial 176 pages. "This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book," the modern-day Cassandra notes; reading it is a pleasure. --Deirdre Hanna [via]
More editions of Dark Age Ahead:
The De-Moralization of Society : From Victorian Virtues to Modern Valuesby Gertrude HimmelfarbISBN 0679438173 (0-679-43817-3)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The De-Moralization of Society : From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values'More editions of The De-Moralization of Society : From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values:
-
Dead Man Walking : An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United Statesby Helen PrejeanISBN 0679403582 (0-679-40358-2)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Dead Man Walking : An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States'Book summary:In 1982, Sister Helen Prejean became the spiritual advisor to Patrick Sonnier, the convicted killer of two teenagers who was sentenced to die in the electric chair of Louisiana's Angola State Prison. In the months before Sonnier's death, the Roman Catholic nun came to know a man who was as terrified as he had once been terrifying. At the same time, she came to know the families of the victims and the men whose job it was to execute him--men who often harbored doubts about the rightness of what they were doing.
Out of that dreadful intimacy comes a profoundly moving spiritual journey through our system of capital punishment. Confronting both the plight of the condemned and the rage of the bereaved, the needs of a crime-ridden society and the Christian imperative of love, Dead Man Walking is an unprecedented look at the human consequences of the death penalty, a book that is both enlightening and devastating.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]More editions of Dead Man Walking : An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States:
Deaf in America: Voices from a Cultureby Carol Padden, Tom HumphriesISBN 0674194241 (0-674-19424-1)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture'More editions of Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture:
-
The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating Americaby Philip K. HowardISBN 0679429948 (0-679-42994-8)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America'Book summary:Distressing, disturbing, devastatingly detailed - this stunning examination of how modern laws are diminishing America exposes the drawbacks of rule-bound government, tells why nothing gets done, reveals the phony pretensions of law, and shows why well-intentioned laws have actually devalued rights. In short, The Death of Common Sense demonstrates how the buck never stops and how well-meaning laws are creating a nation of enemies. [via]
More editions of The Death of Common Sense: How Law Is Suffocating America:
-
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Tasteby Pierre Bourdieu, Richard NiceISBN 0674212770 (0-674-21277-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste'Book summary:No judgement of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. France's leading sociologist focusses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind.
In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a Frenchperson's choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions-that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the "California sports" such as jogging and cross-country skiing. The social world, he argues, functions simultaneously as a system of power relations and as a symbolic system in which minute distinctions of taste become the basis for social judgement.
The topic of Bourdieu's book is a fascinating one: the strategies of social pretension are always curiously engaging. But the book is more than fascinating. It is a major contribution to current debates on the theory of culture and a challenge to the major theoretical schools in contemporary sociology.
[via]More editions of Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste:
The Dustbin of Historyby Greil MarcusISBN 0674218582 (0-674-21858-2)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Dustbin of History'Book summary:Noted critic Greil Marcus contemplates the connections between history and popular culture in this thoughtful collection of essays. He writes about how the Beat Generation is marketed in a three-CD boxed set and ponders the meaning of John Wayne. He recounts his own personal discovery of the work of blues legend Robert Johnson, provoking the reader to consider how one small thing -- in this case an old phonograph record -- can profoundly change a life. And those who marvel at Marcus' ability for close analysis of the seemingly simple may marvel at his brilliant essay, "Dylan as Historian," which analyzes just one apparently simple yet deeply layered song, Bob Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell." [via]
More editions of The Dustbin of History:
Elites and the Idea of Equality: A Comparison of Japan, Sweden, and the United Statesby Sidney Verba, Steven Kelman, Gary R. Orren, Ichiro Miyake, Joji WatanukiISBN 0674246861 (0-674-24686-1)
Softcover, Harvard University Press
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Elites and the Idea of Equality: A Comparison of Japan, Sweden, and the United States'More editions of Elites and the Idea of Equality: A Comparison of Japan, Sweden, and the United States:
Equality in America: The View from the Topby Sidney Verba, Gary OrrenISBN 0674259610 (0-674-25961-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Equality in America: The View from the Top'More editions of Equality in America: The View from the Top:
-
Exit Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and Statesby Albert O. HirschmanISBN 0674276604 (0-674-27660-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Exit Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States'Book summary:An innovator in contemporary thought on economic and political development looks here at decline rather than growth. Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, exit, is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other, voice, is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change from within.
The efficiency of the competitive mechanism, with its total reliance on exit, is questioned for certain important situations. As exit often undercuts voice while being unable to counteract decline, loyalty is seen in the function of retarding exit and of permitting voice to play its proper role.
The interplay of the three concepts turns out to illuminate a wide range of economic, social, and political phenomena. As the author states in the preface, having found my own unifying way of looking at issues as diverse as competition and the two-party system, divorce and the American character, black power and the failure of unhappy top officials to resign over Vietnam, I decided to let myself go a little.
[via]More editions of Exit Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States:
-
Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Centuryby Naomi WolfISBN 067942718X (0-679-42718-X)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century'Book summary:Most women embrace equality, but reject "feminism." In clear and brilliant prose, the author of the best-selling The Beauty Myth shows how this rift came about, and how to close it. A practical and inspiring road map for personal and political equality in our time. [via]
More editions of Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century:
-
Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedomby Frederick NeuhouserISBN 0674011244 (0-674-01124-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom'Book summary:The author's purpose is to understand the philosophical foundations of Hegel's social theory by articulating the normative standards at work in his claim that the three central social institutions of the modern era--the nuclear family, civil society, and the constitutional state--are rational or good. Its central question is: what, for Hegel, makes a rational social order rational? In addressing this question the book aspires to be faithful to Hegel's texts and to articulate a compelling theory of rational social institutions; its aim is not only to interpret Hegel correctly but also to demonstrate the richness and power that his vision of the rational social order possesses.
Frederick Neuhouser's task is to understand the conceptions of freedom on which Hegel's theory rests and to show how they ground his arguments in defense of the modern social world. In doing so, the author focuses on Hegel's most important and least understood contribution to social philosophy, the idea of "social freedom."
Neuhouser's strategy for making sense of social freedom is to show its affinities with Rousseau's conception of the general will. The main idea that Hegel appropriates from Rousseau is that rational social institutions must satisfy two conditions: first, they must furnish the basic social preconditions of their members' freedom; and, second, all social members must be able subjectively to affirm their freedom-conditioning institutions as good and thus to regard the principles that govern their social participation as coming from their own wills.
[via]More editions of Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom:
Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experienceby Erving GoffmanISBN 0674316568 (0-674-31656-8)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience'More editions of Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience:
-
The Haunted Wood : Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Eraby Allen Weinstein, Alexander VassilievISBN 0679457240 (0-679-45724-0)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Haunted Wood : Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era'Book summary:The Haunted Wood fills in a valuable part of cold war history: the Soviet Union's attempts to spy on the United States from the time of FDR's New Deal, through the Second World War, and into the 1950s. Allen Weinstein (author of a highly regarded history of the Hiss-Chambers case, Perjury) and Alexander Vassiliev (a KGB agent turned journalist) show that among the Americans caught in the Soviet orbit were many top government officials, including a Congressman from New York and a close advisor to President Roosevelt, as well as an American ambassador's daughter. Most of these early spies were leftists driven by ideology--as opposed to money, which seems to have motivated many of the later cold war traitors, such as Aldrich Ames. (The Congressman, interestingly, is an exception--he demanded so much compensation that the Soviets gave him the code name "Crook.") The greatest windfall for the U.S.S.R. during this period was the acquisition of atomic secrets, with contributions from agents like Ted Hall, Klaus Fuchs, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (the authors do not believe, however, that the scientist Robert Oppenheimer was a Soviet spook). Yet there were also notable failures, many brought on by Stalin's insatiable appetite for purges; defections by Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley also dealt several mortal blows. By the end of the 1940s, the Soviet spy ring in the United States was in serious breakdown. Weinstein and Vassiliev make use of both American sources and Soviet archives to deliver what will surely be an authoritative account for many years--or at least until more top-secret archives on both sides of the Atlantic become declassified. And don't expect that to happen anytime soon. --John J. Miller [via]
More editions of The Haunted Wood : Soviet Espionage in America - The Stalin Era:
-
History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantiumby Paul VeyneISBN 0674399749 (0-674-39974-9)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium'Book summary:First of the widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated series, this book reveals in intimate detail what life was really like in the ancient world. Behind the vast panorama of the pagan Roman empire, the reader discovers the intimate daily lives of citizens and slavesfrom concepts of manhood and sexuality to marriage and the family, the roles of women, chastity and contraception, techniques of childbirth, homosexuality, religion, the meaning of virtue, and the separation of private and public spaces.
The emergence of Christianity in the West and the triumph of Christian morality with its emphasis on abstinence, celibacy, and austerity is startlingly contrasted with the profane and undisciplined private life of the Byzantine Empire. Using illuminating motifs, the authors weave a rich, colorful fabric ornamented with the results of new research and the broad interpretations that only masters of the subject can provide.
[via]More editions of History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium:
-
History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantiumby Philippe Aries, Georges Duby, Paul VeyneISBN 0674399757 (0-674-39975-7)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium'Book summary:First of the widely celebrated and sumptuously illustrated series, this book reveals in intimate detail what life was really like in the ancient world. Behind the vast panorama of the pagan Roman empire, the reader discovers the intimate daily lives of citizens and slavesfrom concepts of manhood and sexuality to marriage and the family, the roles of women, chastity and contraception, techniques of childbirth, homosexuality, religion, the meaning of virtue, and the separation of private and public spaces.
The emergence of Christianity in the West and the triumph of Christian morality with its emphasis on abstinence, celibacy, and austerity is startlingly contrasted with the profane and undisciplined private life of the Byzantine Empire. Using illuminating motifs, the authors weave a rich, colorful fabric ornamented with the results of new research and the broad interpretations that only masters of the subject can provide.
[via]More editions of History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium:
-
Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaustby Daniel Jonah GoldhagenISBN 0679446958 (0-679-44695-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust'Book summary:In a work that is as authoritative as it is explosive, Goldhagen forces us to revisit and reconsider our understanding of the Holocaust and its perpetrators, demanding a fundamental revision in our thinking of the years between 1933-1945. Drawing principally on materials either unexplored or neglected by previous scholars, Goldhagen marshals new, disquieting primary evidence that explains why, when Hitler conceived of the "final solution" he was able to enlist vast numbers of willing Germans to carry it out. A book sure to provoke new discussion and intense debate. [via]
More editions of Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust:
-
In a Different Voiceby Carol GilliganISBN 0674445449 (0-674-44544-9)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development'Book summary:This is the little book that started a revolution. First published almost twenty years ago, it made women's voices heard, in their own right and with their own integrity, for virtually the first time in social scientific theorizing about women. Its impact was immediate and continues to this day, in the academic world and beyond. Translated into sixteen languages, with more than three-quarters of a million copies sold around the world. In a Different Voice has inspired new research, new educational initiatives, and political debate-and helped many women and men to see themselves and each other in a different light.
Carol Gilligan believes that psychology has persistently and systematically misunderstood women--their motives, their moral commitments, the course of their psychological growth, and their special view of what is important in life. Here she sets out to correct psychology's misperceptions and refocus its view of female personality. The result is truly a tour de force, which may well reshape much of what psychology now has to say about female experience.
[via] 
Into the Heart : One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge among the Yanomamiby Kenneth Good, David ChanoffISBN 0673982327 (0-673-98232-7)
Softcover, Prentice Hall PTR
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Into the Heart : One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge among the Yanomami'More editions of Into the Heart : One Man's Pursuit of Love and Knowledge among the Yanomami:
-
Japaneseby Edwin Oldfather ReischauerISBN 0674471784 (0-674-47178-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Japanese'Book summary:Japanese, The by Reischauer, Edwin O. [via]
King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Tableby Roger Lancelyn Green, Thomas Malory, Aubrey BeardsleyISBN 0679423117 (0-679-42311-7)
Hardcover, Everymans Library
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table'More editions of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table:
Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groupsby Mancur OlsonISBN 0674537513 (0-674-53751-3)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups'More editions of Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups:
-
Marcus Aureliusby C.R. HainesISBN 0674990641 (0-674-99064-1)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Marcus Aurelius'Book summary:Marcus Aurelius (121180 CE), Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, born at Rome, received training under his guardian and uncle emperor Antoninus Pius (reigned 138161), who adopted him. He was converted to Stoicism and henceforward studied and practised philosophy and law. A gentle man, he lived in agreement and collaboration with Antoninus Pius. He married Pius's daughter and succeeded him as emperor in March 161, sharing some of the burdens with Lucius Verus.
Marcus's reign soon saw fearful national disasters from flood, earthquakes, epidemics, threatened revolt (in Britain), a Parthian war, and pressure of barbarians north of the Alps. From 169 onwards he had to struggle hard against the German Quadi, Marcomani, Vandals, and others until success came in 174. In 175 (when Faustina died) he pacified affairs in Asia after a revolt by Avidius. War with Germans was renewed during which he caught some disease and died by the Danube in March 180.
The famous Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (not his title; he simply calls them 'The matters addressed to himself') represents reflections written in periods of solitude during the emperor's military campaigns. Originally intended for his private guidance and self-admonition, the Meditations has endured as a potent expression of Stoic belief. It is a central text for students of Stoicism as well as a unique personal guide to the moral life.
[via]More editions of Marcus Aurelius:
-
Meditationsby Marcus Aurelius, A.S.L. FarquharsonISBN 0679412719 (0-679-41271-9)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Meditations'Book summary:The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (a.d. 121180) embodied in his person that deeply cherished, ideal figure of antiquity, the philosopher-king. His Meditations are not only one of the most important expressions of the Stoic philosophy of his time but also an enduringly inspiring guide to living a good and just life. Written in moments snatched from military campaigns and the rigors of politics, these ethical and spiritual reflections reveal a mind of exceptional clarity and originality, and a spirit attuned to both the particulars of human destiny and the vast patterns that underlie it.
[via]More editions of Meditations:
-
Minds, Brains and Scienceby John SearleISBN 0674576330 (0-674-57633-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Minds, Brains and Science'Book summary:This is a text of the Reith lectures of 1984 in which John Searle challenged the pretentions of artificial intelligence and the idea that the brain is no more than a biological computer. John Searle also wrote "The Campus War", "Expression and Meaning" and "Intentionality". [via]
More editions of Minds, Brains and Science:
The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and Whiteby James W. LoewenISBN 0674576608 (0-674-57660-8)
Hardcover, Harvard University Press
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White'More editions of The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White:
-
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slaveby Frederick DouglassISBN 0674601017 (0-674-60101-7)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave'Book summary:Written more than a century ago by Frederick Douglass, a former slave who went on to become a famous orator, U.S. minister, and a leader of his people, this masterpiece is one of the most eloquent indictments of slavery ever recorded. Douglass [via]
More editions of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave:
-
A Natural History of Loveby Diane AckermanISBN 0679403477 (0-679-40347-7)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'A Natural History of Love'Book summary:The bestselling author of A Natural History of the Senses now explores the allure of adultery, the appeal of aphrodisiacs, and the cult of the kiss. Enchantingly written and stunningly informed, this "audaciously brilliant romp through the world of romantic love" (Washington Post Book World) is the next best thing to love itself.
From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]More editions of A Natural History of Love:
-
Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Livesby Anna FelsISBN 0679442448 (0-679-44244-8)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives'Book summary:In this groundbreaking book about how women perceive, are prepared for, and cope with ambition and achievement, psychiatrist Anna Fels examines ambition at the deepest psychological level. Cutting to the core of what ambition can providethe essential elements of a fulfilling lifeFels describes why, for women but not for men, ambition still remains fraught with often painful conflict. Fels draws on case studies, research, interviews, and autobiographies of accomplished and celebrated women past and presentwriters, artists, architects, politicians, actorsto explore the ways in which women are brought up to avoid recognition and visibility in favor of traditional feminine values and why they often choose to nurture and defer to rather than compete with men. She poses invaluable questions: What is the nature of ambition and how important is it in a womans life? What are the forces that promote or impede its development? To what extent does ambition go against a womans very nature? And she challenges currently held theories about the state of mind and the needs of men.
Incisive and highly readable, Necessary Dreams is a unique exploration of the options and obstacles women face in the pursuit of their goals. It is a book that every woman will wantand needto read. [via]More editions of Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women's Changing Lives:
-
No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bulliesby Naomi KleinISBN 067697130X (0-676-97130-X)
Hardcover, Knopf Canada
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies'Book summary:We live in an era where image is nearly everything, where the proliferation of brand-name culture has created, to take one hyperbolic example from Naomi Klein's No Logo, "walking, talking, life-sized Tommy [Hilfiger] dolls, mummified in fully branded Tommy worlds." Brand identities are even flourishing online, she notes--and for some retailers, perhaps best of all online: "Liberated from the real-world burdens of stores and product manufacturing, these brands are free to soar, less as the disseminators of goods or services than as collective hallucinations."
In No Logo, Klein patiently demonstrates, step by step, how brands have become ubiquitous, not just in media and on the street but increasingly in the schools as well. (The controversy over advertiser-sponsored Channel One may be old hat, but many readers will be surprised to learn about ads in school lavatories and exclusive concessions in school cafeterias.) The global companies claim to support diversity, but their version of "corporate multiculturalism" is merely intended to create more buying options for consumers. When Klein talks about how easy it is for retailers like Wal-Mart and Blockbuster to "censor" the contents of videotapes and albums, she also considers the role corporate conglomeration plays in the process. How much would one expect Paramount Pictures, for example, to protest against Blockbuster's policies, given that they're both divisions of Viacom?
Klein also looks at the workers who keep these companies running, most of whom never share in any of the great rewards. The president of Borders, when asked whether the bookstore chain could pay its clerks a "living wage," wrote that "while the concept is romantically appealing, it ignores the practicalities and realities of our business environment." Those clerks should probably just be grateful they're not stuck in an Asian sweatshop, making pennies an hour to produce Nike sneakers or other must-have fashion items. Klein also discusses at some length the tactic of hiring "permatemps" who can do most of the work and receive few, if any, benefits like health care, paid vacations, or stock options. While many workers are glad to be part of the "Free Agent Nation," observers note that, particularly in the high-tech industry, such policies make it increasingly difficult to organize workers and advocate for change.
But resistance is growing, and the backlash against the brands has set in. Street-level education programs have taught kids in the inner cities, for example, not only about Nike's abusive labor practices but about the astronomical markup in their prices. Boycotts have commenced: as one urban teen put it, "Nike, we made you. We can break you." But there's more to the revolution, as Klein optimistically recounts: "Ethical shareholders, culture jammers, street reclaimers, McUnion organizers, human-rights hacktivists, school-logo fighters and Internet corporate watchdogs are at the early stages of demanding a citizen-centered alternative to the international rule of the brands ... as global, and as capable of coordinated action, as the multinational corporations it seeks to subvert." No Logo is a comprehensive account of what the global economy has wrought and the actions taking place to thwart it. --Ron Hogan [via]
More editions of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies:
-
Nonzero : The Logic of Human Destinyby Robert WrightISBN 0679442529 (0-679-44252-9)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Nonzero : The Logic of Human Destiny'Book summary:Nonzero, from New Republic writer Robert Wright, is a difficult and important book--well worth reading--addressing the controversial question of purpose in evolution. Using language suggesting that natural selection is a designer's tool, Wright inevitably draws the conclusion that evolution is goal-oriented (or at least moves toward inevitable ends independently of environmental or contingent variables).
The underlying reason that non-zero-sum games wind up being played well is the same in biological evolution as in cultural evolution. Whether you are a bunch of genes or a bunch of memes, if you're all in the same boat you'll tend to perish unless you are conducive to productive coordination.... Genetic evolution thus tends to create smoothly integrated organisms, and cultural evolution tends to create smoothly integrated groups of organisms.
Admittedly, it's as hard to think clearly about natural selection as it is to think about God, but that makes it just as important to acknowledge our biases and try to exclude them from our conclusions. It is this that makes Nonzero potentially unsatisfying to the scientifically literate. Time after time we've seen thinkers try to find in biological evolution a "drive toward complexity" that might explain all sorts of other phenomena from economics to spirituality. Some authors, like Teilhard de Chardin, have much to offer the careful reader who takes pains to read metaphorically. Others--legions of cranks--provide nothing but opaque diatribes culminating in often-bizarre assertions proven to nobody but the author. Wright is much closer to de Chardin along this axis; his anthropological scholarship is particularly noteworthy, and his grasp of world history is excellent. Unfortunately, he has the advocate's willingness to blind himself to disagreeable facts and to muddle over concepts whose clarity would be poisonous to his positions: try to pin him down on what he means by complexity, for example. Still, his thesis that human cultures are historically striving for cooperative, nonzero-sum situations is heartening and compelling; even though it's not supported by biology, it's not knocked down, either. If the reader can work around the undefined assumptions, Wright's charm and obvious interest in planetary survival make Nonzero a worthy read. If the first chapter's title--"The Ladder of Cultural Evolution"--makes you cringe, the last one--"You Call This a God?"--will make you smile. --Rob Lightner [via]
More editions of Nonzero : The Logic of Human Destiny:
-
On the Origin of Species a Facsimile of the Firstby C. DarwinISBN 0674637526 (0-674-63752-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'On the Origin of Species a Facsimile of the First'Book summary:It is now fully recognized that the publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species in 1859 brought about a revolution in mans attitude toward life and his own place in the universe. This work is rightly regarded as one of the most important books ever published, and a knowledge of it should be part of the intellectual equipment of every educated person. The book remains surprisingly modern in its assertions and is also remarkably accessible to the layman, much more so than recent treatises necessarily encumbered with technical language and professional jargon.
This first edition had a freshness and uncompromising directness that were considerably weakened in later editions, and yet nearly all available reprints of the work are based on the greatly modified sixth edition of 1872. In the only other modern reprinting of the first edition, the pagination was changed, so that it is impossible to give page references to significant passages in the original. Clearly this facsimile reprint of the momentous first edition fills a need for scholars and general readers alike.
[via]More editions of On the Origin of Species a Facsimile of the First:
-
The Orchid Thief : A True Story of Beauty and Obsessionby Susan OrleanISBN 0679447393 (0-679-44739-3)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Orchid Thief : A True Story of Beauty and Obsession'Book summary:Orchidelirium is the name the Victorians gave to the flower madness that is for botanical collectors the equivalent of gold fever. Wealthy orchid fanatics of that era sent explorers (heavily armed, more to protect themselves against other orchid seekers than against hostile natives or wild animals) to unmapped territories in search of new varieties of Cattleya and Paphiopedilum. As knowledge of the family Orchidaceae grew to encompass the currently more than 60,000 species and over 100,000 hybrids, orchidelirium might have been expected to go the way of Dutch tulip mania. Yet, as journalist Susan Orlean found out, there still exists a vein of orchid madness strong enough to inspire larceny among collectors.
The Orchid Thief centers on south Florida and John Laroche, a quixotic, charismatic schemer once convicted of attempting to take endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee swamp, a state preserve. Laroche, a horticultural consultant who once ran an extensive nursery for the Seminole tribe, dreams of making a fortune for the Seminoles and himself by cloning the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii. Laroche sums up the obsession that drives him and so many others:
I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It's like I can't just have something--I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it.
Even Orlean--so leery of orchid fever that she immediately gives away any plant that's pressed upon her by the growers in Laroche's circle--develops a desire to see a ghost orchid blooming and makes several ultimately unsuccessful treks into the Fakahatchee. Filled with Palm Beach socialites, Native Americans, English peers, smugglers, and naturalists as improbably colorful as the tropical blossoms that inspire them, this is a lyrical, funny, addictively entertaining read. --Barrie Trinkle [via]More editions of The Orchid Thief : A True Story of Beauty and Obsession:
Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolisby Stephan ThernstromISBN 0674644964 (0-674-64496-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis'More editions of Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis:
The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970by Stephan ThernstromISBN 0674644956 (0-674-64495-6)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970'More editions of The Other Bostonians: Poverty and Progress in the American Metropolis, 1880-1970:
Out in the World: Gay and Lesbian Life from Buenos Aires to Bangkokby Neil MillerISBN 0679402411 (0-679-40241-1)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Out in the World: Gay and Lesbian Life from Buenos Aires to Bangkok'More editions of Out in the World: Gay and Lesbian Life from Buenos Aires to Bangkok:
Outing Yourself: How to Come Out to Your Family, Your Friends, and Your Coworkersby Michelangelo SignorileISBN 0679438386 (0-679-43838-6)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Outing Yourself: How to Come Out to Your Family, Your Friends, and Your Coworkers'More editions of Outing Yourself: How to Come Out to Your Family, Your Friends, and Your Coworkers:
People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistoryby Brian M. FaganISBN 0673521672 (0-673-52167-2)
Softcover, Addison-Wesley
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory'More editions of People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory:
Psychologyby Wade, Carol TavrisISBN 0673996476 (0-673-99647-6)
Hardcover, Addison-Wesley
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Psychology'More editions of Psychology:
Queer in America : Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Powerby Michelangelo SignorileISBN 067941309X (0-679-41309-X)
Hardcover, Random House Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Queer in America : Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power'More editions of Queer in America : Sex, the Media, and the Closets of Power:
Reflections on Exile and Other Essaysby Edward W. SaidISBN 0674009975 (0-674-00997-5)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Reflections on Exile and Other Essays'Book summary:With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983, reconfirms what no one can doubt--that Said is the most impressive, consequential, and elegant critic of our time--and offers further evidence of how much the fully engaged critical mind can contribute to the reservoir of value, thought, and action essential to our lives and our culture.
As in the title essay, the widely admired "Reflections on Exile," the fact of his own exile and the fate of the Palestinians have given both form and the force of intimacy to the questions Said has pursued. Taken together, these essays--from the famous to those that will surprise even Said's most assiduous followers--afford rare insight into the formation of a critic and the development of an intellectual vocation. Said's topics are many and diverse, from the movie heroics of Tarzan to the machismo of Ernest Hemingway to the shades of difference that divide Alexandria and Cairo. He offers major reconsiderations of writers and artists such as George Orwell, Giambattista Vico, Georg Lukacs, R. P. Blackmur, E. M. Cioran, Naguib Mahfouz, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Walter Lippman, Samuel Huntington, Antonio Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. Invigorating, edifying, acutely attentive to the vying pressures of personal and historical experience, his book is a source of immeasurable intellectual delight.
[via]More editions of Reflections on Exile and Other Essays:
-
The Republicby Plato, A.D. LindsayISBN 0679413308 (0-679-41330-8)
Hardcover, Alfred a Knopf Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Republic'Book summary:(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)Toward the end of the astonishing period of Athenian creativity that furnished Western civilization with the greater part of its intellectual, artistic, and political wealth, Plato wrote The Republic, his discussion of the nature and meaning of justice and of the ideal state and its ruler. All subsequent European thinking about these subjects owes its character, directly or indirectly, to this most famous (and most accessible) of the Platonic dialogues. Although he describes a society that looks to some like the ideal human community and to others like a totalitarian nightmare, in the course of his description Plato raises enduringly relevant questions about politics, art, education, and the general conduct of life.Translated by A. D. Lindsay [via]
More editions of The Republic:
-
The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His Worldby Daniel J. BoorstinISBN 0679434453 (0-679-43445-3)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World'Book summary:Renowned historian Daniel J. Boorstin completes the trilogy he began with The Discoverers and The Creators. The first volume covered explorers, scientists, and historians in their quest for raw knowledge, while the second book describes writers, painters, and composers in their pursuit of inspiring art; The Seekers describes people searching for an understanding of human existence--"Man is the asking animal," notes Boorstin. It's a big, bold theme, and although The Seekers is the shortest work in the trilogy, it's still vintage Boorstin: incredibly learned, richly anecdotal, and casually profound. It begins with the prophets of the Holy Land and the philosophers of ancient Greece, continues through the Renaissance, and concludes with the modern era of the social sciences. "In this long quest [for understanding], Western culture has turned from seeking the end or purpose to seeking causes--from the Why to the How," writes Boorstin. That's a neat summary of Western intellectual development over several thousand years. What other author could put it so succinctly? Boorstin is generally stronger with material that is more recent and more secular, but this is an accomplished book and a worthy capstone to an outstanding three-volume effort. --John J. Miller [via]
More editions of The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World:
-
The Social Construction of What?by Ian HackingISBN 0674004124 (0-674-00412-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Social Construction of What?'Book summary:Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Is it a person? An object? An idea? A theory? Each entails a different notion of social construction, Ian Hacking reminds us. His book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality.
Especially troublesome in this dispute is the status of the natural sciences, and this is where Hacking finds some of his most telling cases, from the conflict between biological and social approaches to mental illness to vying accounts of current research in sedimentary geology. He looks at the issue of child abuse--very much a reality, though the idea of child abuse is a social product. He also cautiously examines the ways in which advanced research on new weapons influences not the content but the form of science. In conclusion, Hacking comments on the "culture wars" in anthropology, in particular a spat between leading ethnographers over Hawaii and Captain Cook. Written with generosity and gentle wit by one of our most distinguished philosophers of science, this wise book brings a much needed measure of clarity to current arguments about the nature of knowledge.
[via]More editions of The Social Construction of What?:
The Social Contract and Discoursesby Jean-Jacques Rousseau, G.D.H. ColeISBN 0679423028 (0-679-42302-8)
Hardcover, Random House Inc
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Social Contract and Discourses'More editions of The Social Contract and Discourses:
-
The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Changeby Randall CollinsISBN 0674001877 (0-674-00187-7)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change'Book summary:In just under 900 pages (with another 100 or so pages of notes and bibliography), sociologist Randall Collins elaborates upon his proposed model for how intellectuals--"people who produce decontextualized ideas"--work among one another. Borrowing Erving Goffman's concept of the "interaction ritual," Collins discusses how "intellectuals gather, focus their attention for a time on one of their members, who delivers a sustained discourse. The discourse itself builds on elements from the past, affirming and continuing or negating." Or, to put it more simply, intellectuals attend a lot of lectures and have discussions afterwards.
General readers may be put off by a hefty tome with chapters given such titles as "The Post-revolutionary Condition: Boundaries and Philosophical Puzzles" (which includes the subsection "The Vienna Circle as a Nexus of Struggles"), but those with a dedicated interest in the history of philosophy will find much to enjoy in the multicultural examples Collins draws upon. Ancient China, classical Greece, medieval Islam, and the French existentialists are just the tip of the iceberg illustrating his theory that intellectual progress is made through the personal interaction of philosophers and other thinkers. "Great intellectual work," Collins writes, "is that which creates a large space on which followers can work," and The Sociology of Philosophies certainly qualifies. --Ron Hogan [via]
More editions of The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change:
Socratic Puzzlesby Robert NozickISBN 0674816544 (0-674-81654-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Socratic Puzzles'Book summary:One of the foremost philosophers of our time, Robert Nozick continues the Socratic tradition of investigation. This volume, which illustrates the originality, force, and scope of his work, also displays Nozick's trademark blending of extraordinary analytical rigor with intellectual playfulness. As such, Socratic Puzzles testifies to the great pleasure that both doing and reading philosophy can be.
Comprising essays and philosophical fictions, classics and new work, the book ranges from Socrates to W. V. Quine, from the implications of an Israeli kibbutz to the flawed arguments of Ayn Rand. Nozick considers the figure of Socrates himself as well as the Socratic method (why is it a "method" of getting at the truth?). Many of these essays bring classic methods to bear on new questions about choice. How should you choose in a disconcerting situation ("Newcomb's Problem") when your decisions are completely predictable? Why do threats and not offers typically coerce our choices? How do we make moral judgments when we realize that our moral principles have exceptions? Other essays present new approaches to familiar intellectual puzzles, from the stress on simplicity in scientific hypotheses to the tendency of intellectuals to oppose capitalism.
As up to date as the latest reflections on animal rights; as perennial as the essentials of aesthetic merit (doggerel by Isaac Newton goes to prove that changing our view of the world won't suffice); as whimsical as a look at how some philosophical problems might appear from God's point of view: these essays attest to the timeliness and timelessness of Nozick's thinking. With a personal introduction, in which Nozick discusses the origins, tools, and themes of his work, Socratic Puzzles demonstrates how philosophy can constitute a way of life.
[via]
Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequalityby Deborah L. RhodeISBN 0674831780 (0-674-83178-0)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequality'More editions of Speaking of Sex: The Denial of Gender Inequality:
-
Taking Rights Seriouslyby R. M. DworkinISBN 0674867114 (0-674-86711-4)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Taking Rights Seriously'Book summary:What is law? What is it for? How should judges decide novel cases when the statutes and earlier decisions provide no clear answer? Do judges make up new law in such cases, or is there some higher law in which they discover the correct answer? Must everyone always obey the law? If not, when is a citizen morally free to disobey?
A renowned philosopher enters the debate surrounding these questions. Clearly and forcefully, Ronald Dworkin argues against the ruling theory in Anglo-American lawlegal positivism and economic utilitarianismand asserts that individuals have legal rights beyond those explicitly laid down and that they have political and moral rights against the state that are prior to the welfare of the majority.
Mr. Dworkin criticizes in detail the legal positivists theory of legal rights, particularly H.L.A. Harts well-known version of it. He then develops a new theory of adjudication, and applies it to the central and politically important issue of cases in which the Supreme Court interprets and applies the Constitution. Through an analysis of John Rawlss theory of justice, he argues that fundamental among political rights is the right of each individual to the equal respect and concern of those who govern him. He offers a theory of compliance with the law designed not simply to answer theoretical questions about civil disobedience, but to function as a guide for citizens and officials. Finally, Professor Dworkin considers the right to liberty, often thought to rival and even pre-empt the fundamental right to equality. He argues that distinct individual liberties do exist, but that they derive, not from some abstract right to liberty as such, but from the right to equal concern and respect itself. He thus denies that liberty and equality are conflicting ideals.
Ronald Dworkins theory of law and the moral conception of individual rights that underlies it have already made him one of the most influential philosophers working in this area. This is the first publication of these ideas in book form.
[via]More editions of Taking Rights Seriously:
Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Centuryby Jeffrey P. MoranISBN 0674009827 (0-674-00982-7)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century'More editions of Teaching Sex: The Shaping of Adolescence in the 20th Century:
-
Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolutionby Frans B. M. De WaalISBN 0674010043 (0-674-01004-3)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution'Book summary:How did we become the linguistic, cultured, and hugely successful apes that we are? Our closest relatives--the other mentally complex and socially skilled primates--offer tantalizing clues. In Tree of Origin nine of the world's top primate experts read these clues and compose the most extensive picture to date of what the behavior of monkeys and apes can tell us about our own evolution as a species.
It has been nearly fifteen years since a single volume addressed the issue of human evolution from a primate perspective, and in that time we have witnessed explosive growth in research on the subject. Tree of Origin gives us the latest news about bonobos, the "make love not war" apes who behave so dramatically unlike chimpanzees. We learn about the tool traditions and social customs that set each ape community apart. We see how DNA analysis is revolutionizing our understanding of paternity, intergroup migration, and reproductive success. And we confront intriguing discoveries about primate hunting behavior, politics, cognition, diet, and the evolution of language and intelligence that challenge claims of human uniqueness in new and subtle ways.
Tree of Origin provides the clearest glimpse yet of the apelike ancestor who left the forest and began the long journey toward modern humanity.
[via]More editions of Tree of Origin: What Primate Behavior Can Tell Us About Human Social Evolution:
The Trouble With Scienceby Robin DunbarISBN 0674910192 (0-674-91019-2)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'The Trouble With Science'More editions of The Trouble With Science:
Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behaviorby Philip LiebermanISBN 0674921836 (0-674-92183-6)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior'More editions of Uniquely Human: The Evolution of Speech, Thought, and Selfless Behavior:
-
Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Tortureby John ConroyISBN 0679419187 (0-679-41918-7)
Hardcover, Knopf Publishing Group
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture'Book summary:A compelling investigation of three incidents of torture in the Western world and what they tell us about how ordinary people can become torturers, about the rationalizations societies adopt to justify torture, about the potential in each of us for acting unspeakably.
Using firsthand interviews, official documents, and newspaper accounts, John Conroy examines interrogation practices in a Chicago police station, two raids conducted by the Israeli army, and the case of Northern Ireland's "hooded men," who were tortured by British forces. He takes us inside the experience of the victim, the mind of the torturer, and the seeming indifference of the bystander.
In the spirit of Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, Conroy visits with former torturers, describes their training and family backgrounds, and examines the justifications they and their societies offer for the systematic abuse of men, women, and children. He interviews survivors of torture and learns of the coping mechanisms they deployed and the long-term effects of their ordeals. He draws on those meetings and on previous studies, such as Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority, to help us understand the dynamics of torture.
Recent events -- particularly the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and well-publicized cases of police brutality in our own country -- make it essential that we understand such acts of violence, as the first step in eradicating them. Lucid and unblinking, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary
People takes us further toward this goal than any book we have had yet. [via]More editions of Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture:
-
Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behaviorby Elliott Sober, David Sloan WilsonISBN 0674930479 (0-674-93047-9)
Softcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior'Book summary:In Unto Others, philosopher Elliott Sober and biologist David Sloan Wilson bravely attempt to reconcile altruism, both evolutionary and psychological, with the scientific discoveries that seem to portray nature as red in tooth and claw. The first half of the book deals with the evolutionary objection to altruism. For altruistic behavior to be produced by natural selection, it must be possible for natural selection to act on groups--but conventional wisdom holds that group selection was conclusively debunked by George Williams in Adaptation and Natural Selection. Sober and Wilson nevertheless defend group selection, instructively reviewing the arguments against it and citing important work that relies on it. They then discuss group selection in human evolution, testing their conclusions against the anthropological literature.
In the second half of the book, the question is whether any desires are truly altruistic. Sober and Wilson painstakingly examine psychological evidence and philosophical arguments for the existence of altruism, ultimately concluding that neither psychology nor philosophy is likely to decide the question. Fortunately, evolutionary biology comes to the rescue. Sober and Wilson speculate that creatures with truly altruistic desires are reproductively fitter than creatures without--altruists, in short, make better parents than do egoists.
Rich in information and insight, Unto Others is a book that will be seriously considered by biologists, philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists alike. The interested amateur may find it difficult in places but worth the effort overall. --Glenn Branch [via]
More editions of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior:
-
Xenophon: Anabasisby XenophonISBN 067499101X (0-674-99101-X)
Hardcover, Harvard Univ Pr
Find This Book
› Find signed collectible books: 'Xenophon: Anabasis'Book summary:Xenophon (ca. 430 to ca. 354 BCE) was a wealthy Athenian and friend of Socrates. He left Athens in 401 and joined an expedition including ten thousand Greeks led by the Persian governor Cyrus against the Persian king. After the defeat of Cyrus, it fell to Xenophon to lead the Greeks from the gates of Babylon back to the coast through inhospitable lands. Later he wrote the famous vivid account of this 'March Up-Country' (Anabasis); but meanwhile he entered service under the Spartans against the Persian king, married happily, and joined the staff of the Spartan king, Agesilaus. But Athens was at war with Sparta in 394 and so exiled Xenophon. The Spartans gave him an estate near Elis where he lived for years writing and hunting and educating his sons. Reconciled to Sparta, Athens restored Xenophon to honour but he preferred to retire to Corinth.
Xenophon's
Anabasis is a true story of remarkable adventures. Hellenica, a history of Greek affairs from 411 to 362, begins as a continuation of Thucydides' account. There are four works on Socrates (collected in Volume IV of the Loeb Xenophon edition). In Memorabilia Xenophon adds to Plato's picture of Socrates from a different viewpoint. The Apology is an interesting complement to Plato's account of Socrates' defense at his trial. Xenophon's Symposium portrays a dinner party at which Socrates speaks of love; and Oeconomicus has him giving advice on household management and married life. Cyropaedia, a historical romance on the education of Cyrus (the Elder), reflects Xenophon's ideas about rulers and government; the Loeb edition is in two volumes.We also have his Hiero, a dialogue on government; Agesilaus, in praise of that king; Constitution of Lacedaemon (on the Spartan system); Ways and Means (on the finances of Athens); Manual for a Cavalry Commander; a good manual of Horsemanship; and a lively Hunting with Hounds. The Constitution of the Athenians, though clearly not by Xenophon, is an interesting document on politics at Athens. These eight books are collected in the last of the seven volumes of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Xenophon.
[via]More editions of Xenophon: Anabasis:
![[powered by Muze Inc.]](http://i.bookfinder.com/images/site/muze/powered_by_muze.gif){kind=small}