sociology

Softcover. University of Chicago Press, 5th pr., 1997, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 333 pages. Pierre Bourdieu is one of the world's most important social theorists and is also one of the great empirical researchers in contemporary sociology. However, reading Bourdieu can be difficult for those not familiar with the French cultural context, and until now a comprehensive introduction to Bourdieu's oeuvre has not been available. David Swartz focuses on a central theme in Bourdieu's work--the complex relationship between culture and power--and explains that sociology for Bourdieu is a mode of political intervention. Swartz clarifies Bourdieu's difficult concepts, noting where they have been misinterpreted by critics and where they have fallen short in resolving important analytical issues. The book also shows how Bourdieu has synthesized his theory of practices and symbolic power from Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, and how his work was influenced by Sartre, Levi-Strauss, and Althusser. Clean copy.

Softcover. New Brunswick NJ, Rutgers University Press, reprint, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 321 pages. Culture Builders deals primarily with the ways in which ideas about the good and proper life were anchored in the trivialities and routines of everyday life in Sweden, in the sharing of a meal, in holiday-making, and in the upbringing of children. The authors describe how the attitudes of the bourgeoisie toward time and time-keeping set them apart from the peasantry. Uses and perceptions of naturals increasingly divided the classes. For peasants, nature consisted of natural resources to be used. Fr the bourgeoisie, nature had only non-productive connotations. Another change was the growing importance of home over the community. Life became a romantic ideal, not an economic necessity. For the first time, parents became self-conscious about how to raise their children. Clean copy.

Softcover. Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea, 1983, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 198 pages, bibliography, index. Mild fade to part of cover wrapper, otherwise clean.

Softcover. Chapel Hill NC, University of North Carolina Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 235 pages, b&w illustrations. Focusing on the porkpacking industry in Iowa, Fink investigates the experience of the rural working class and highlights its significance in shaping the state's economic, political, and social contours. Fink draws both on interviews and on her own firsthand experience working on the production floor of a pork-processing plant. She weaves a fascinating account of the meatpacking industry's history in Iowa--a history, she notes, that has been experienced differently by male and female, immigrant and native-born, white and black workers. Like new.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 207 pages. D. S. Halacy defines "cyborg" as a man who uses machines to increase his power; cyborg was born when humans began to make tools, no matter how primitive. Cyborg applies equally well to a laborer using an ordinary shovel and to an investigator handling radioactive material by manipulating giant pincers. The term even includes people with pacemakers, nylon blood vessels, and reinforced bones. The author does not limit himself only to surgery; he also writes about psychic drugs, myo-electric control, hypothermia, tissue culture, and space medicine.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 365 pages. A fascinating and poignant exploration of wartime America and of one generation's odyssey from childhood to middle age. The author views the experiences of ordinary children through the lens of developmental psychology and argues that WW II left an indelible imprint on the dreams and nightmares of an American generation, not only in childhood, but in adulthood as well. Clean copy.

UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st, 1980, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket, 233 pages. Anthropologists, in studying other cultures, are often tempted to offer their own explanations of strange customs when they feel that the people involved have not given a good enough reason for these customs. The question how the anthropologist can justify interpretations of customs which go beyond those offered by the people themselves runs through this book. The book focuses on the various interpretations that have been offered by anthropologists of ritual and symbolism. It offers a critical discussion of theories in this field in general, identifying their strengths and weaknesses when applied to the particular case of puberty rituals in a West Sepik village in Papua New Guinea. It then goes on to suggest an alternative approach, which draws on aesthetic as well as anthropological theory, and pays particular attention to the emotional and aesthetic experiences of people as they perform the rites. Pencil marking to about 25 pages, name on inside front cover.

Softcover. Berkeley CA, University of California Press, reprint, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 614 pages, b&w illustrations. When lives are dominated by hunger, what becomes of love? When assaulted by daily acts of violence and untimely death, what happens to trust? Set in the lands of Northeast Brazil, this is an account of the everyday experience of scarcity, sickness and death that centres on the lives of the women and children of a hillside "favela". Bringing her readers to the impoverished slopes above the modern plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata, where she has worked on and off for 25 years, Nancy Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women as they struggle to survive through hard work, cunning and triage. It is a story of class relations told at the most basic level of bodies, emotions, desires and needs. Most disturbing - and controversial - is her finding that mother love, as conventionally understood, is something of a bourgeois myth, a luxury for those who can reasonably expect, as these women cannot, that their infants will live. Clean copy.

Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 1st pbk, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 325 pages. How do dictators stay in power? When, and how, do they use repression to do so? Dictators and their Secret Police explores the role of the coercive apparatus under authoritarian rule in Asia - how these secret organizations originated, how they operated, and how their violence affected ordinary citizens. Greitens argues that autocrats face a coercive dilemma: whether to create internal security forces designed to manage popular mobilization, or defend against potential coup. Violence against civilians, she suggests, is a byproduct of their attempt to resolve this dilemma. Drawing on a wealth of new historical evidence, this book challenges conventional wisdom on dictatorship: what autocrats are threatened by, how they respond, and how this affects the lives and security of the millions under their rule. It offers an unprecedented view into the use of surveillance, coercion, and violence, and sheds new light on the institutional and social foundations of authoritarian power. ^ pages with dog earred crease, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Oxford University Press, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 418 pages. The first book to show how the Civil War transformed gender roles and attitudes toward sexuality among Americans. This unique volume brings together a wide spectrum of critical viewpoints by newly emerging scholars as well as distinguished authors in the field to show how gender became a prism through which the political tensions of antebellum America were filtered and focused. Through the course of the book, many fascinating subjects are explored, from new "manly" responsibilities both black and white men had thrust upon them as soldiers, to women's roles in the guerrilla fighting, to the wartime dialogue on interracial sex. In addition, an incisive introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian James McPherson helps place these various subjects within an overall historical context. Copyright page states first edition, but no price on dj says Book Club. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Macmillan, reprint, 1929, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, blue cloth with gilt letterng on spine and front cover, 242 pages. Does Civilization Need Religion? sets out from the fact that religion's inability to make its ethical and social resources available for the solution of the moral problems of modern civilization is one, and the neglected one, of the two chief causes responsible for its debilitated condition. It is convinced that if Christian idealists are to make religion socially effective they will be forced to detach themselves from the dominant secular desires of the nations as well as from the greed of economic groups. It aims to show that though neither the orthodox nor the modern wing of the Christian Church seems capable of initiating a genuine revival which will evolve a morality capable of challenging and maintaining itself against the dominant desires of modern civilization's needs, there are resources in the Christian religion which make it the inevitable basis of any spiritual regeneration of Western civilization. Does Civilization Need Religion? maintains that the task of redeeming Western society rests in a peculiar sense upon Christianity, which has reduced the eternal conflict between self-assertion and self-denial to the paradox of self-assertion through self-denial and made the Cross the symbol of life's highest achievement. It is persuaded that the idea of a potent but yet suffering divine ideal which is defeated by the world but gains its victory in the defeat must continue to remain basic in any morally creative worldview. Names on front fly leaf otherwise a clean copy.

Softcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2nd pr., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 288 pages. Little fascinates New Yorkers more than doormen, who know far more about tenants than tenants know about them. Doormen know what their tenants eat, what kind of movies they watch, whom they spend time with, whether they drink too much, and whether they have kinky sex. But if doormen are unusually familiar with their tenants, they are also socially very distant. In Doormen, Peter Bearman untangles this unusual dynamic to reveal the many ways that tenants and doormen negotiate their complex relationship. Combining observation, interviews, and survey information, Doormen provides a deep and enduring ethnography of the occupational role of doormen, the dynamics of the residential lobby, and the mundane features of highly consequential social exchanges between doormen and tenants. Here, Bearman explains why doormen find their jobs both boring and stressful, why tenants feel anxious about how much of a Christmas bonus their neighbors give, and how everyday transactions small and large affect tenants' professional and informal relationships with doormen. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, McGraw-Hill, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Unpaginated. Hardcover with dust jacket. Clean, unmarked copy with only minor wear to dust jacket. Photographs in black-and-white portray residents in the Town of Camden and Wilcox County, Alabama in the early 1970s, with accompanying text by photographer Bob Adelman and editor Susan Hall. A remarkable document by the photographer renowned for his photographic portraits of the Civil Rights Movement.

Softcover. NY, NYU Press, 3rd pr., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 292 pages. Over two million people are incarcerated in America's prisons and jails, eight times as many since 1975. Mandatory minimum sentencing, parole agencies intent on sending people back to prison, three-strike laws, for-profit prisons, and other changes in the legal system have contributed to this spectacular rise of the general prison population. After overseeing the largest city jail system in the country, Michael Jacobson knows first-hand the inner workings of the corrections system. In Downsizing Prisons, he convincingly argues that mass incarceration will not, as many have claimed, reduce crime nor create more public safety. Simply put, throwing away the key is not the answer. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, B. T. Batsford, 1st, 1984, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Many b&w plates, some color, 216 pages. In this beautiful book, Aileen Ribeiro surveys the clothing worn by the middle and upper classes throughout Europe in the eighteenth century and discusses what this meant in terms of social definition and identity. Ribeiro, one of the world's premier historians of dress, also looks at such subjects as developments in retailing and distribution, etiquette, the rise of the dress designer and couturier, the evolution of ready-made clothes, fancy dress and the masquerade. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1994, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 268 pages. The question of what it takes "to be a man" comes under scrutiny in this sharp, often playful, cultural critique of the German duel--the deadliest type of one-on-one combat in fin-de-siecle Europe. At a time when dueling was generally restricted to swords or had been abolished altogether in other nations, the custom of fighting to the death with pistols flourished among Germany's upper-class males, who took perverse comfort in defying their country's weakly enforced laws. From initial provocation to final death agony, Kevin McAleer describes with ironic humor the complex protocol of the German duel, inviting his reader into the disturbing mindset of its practitioners and the society that valued this socially important but ultimately absurd pastime. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 237 pages. Economism: an ideology that distorts the valid principles and tools of introductory college economics, propagated by self-styled experts, zealous lobbyists, clueless politicians, and ignorant pundits. In order to illuminate the fallacies of economism, James Kwak first offers a primer on supply and demand, market equilibrium, and social welfare: the underpinnings of most popular economic arguments. Then he provides a historical account of how economism became a prevalent mode of thought in the United States--focusing on the people who packaged Econ 101 into sound bites that were then repeated until they took on the aura of truth. He shows us how issues of moment in contemporary American society--labor markets, taxes, finance, health care, and international trade, among others--are shaped by economism, demonstrating in each case with clarity and elan how, because of its failure to reflect the complexities of our world, economism has had a deleterious influence on policies that affect hundreds of millions of Americans. Remainder mark to bottom edge, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press , 1st, 1937, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 849 pages, b&w illustrations. Tan cloth covers with dark brown decoration. Previous owner's stamp on both end papers.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1972, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust dacket with minor wear, unclipped. Durkheim was a turn of the century French sociologist who argued that society is largely responsible for shaping an individual's moral values. He was largely critical of laissez-faire capitalism, arguing that society needed to be morally reconstructed. Lukes' comprehensive biography tells the story of Durkheim's life: how he responded to his critics, and how he tried to make his way in the academic world of pre-WWI Europe. Lukes examines Durkheim's work in its historical context, and offers a critical examination of it as well. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Cambridge University, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 321 pages. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. London, Routledge, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 210 pages, b&w illustrations. Beard examines the English country house life, its gentry, and the changes they undertook through the century in order to survive. The author shows how after World War Two, their political power had eroded and they began to run their estates as businesses, instead of paternalistic rural communities. Clean copy.

Softcover. Oxford UK, Cambridge University Press, 2nd Ed., 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 580 pages. INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on inside front cover. This classic work of recent historiography broke the hold of the "old guard" on this key period of English history. It has now been extensively rewritten, and in its updated form reinforces its arguments with new evidence and addresses some of the historical preoccupations of the past fifteen years.

Softcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, reprint, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 291 pages with index. A social history of Europe in all its aspects: economic, political, diplomatic military, colonial-expansionist. Crisply and succinctly written, it describes Europe not through a history of individual countries, but in a common context during the three quarters of a century between the death of Louis XIV and the industrial revolution in England and the social and political revolution in France. It presents the development of government, institutions, cities, economies, wars, and the circulation of ideas in terms of social pressures and needs, and stresses growth, interrelationships, and conflict of social classes as agents of historical change, paying particular attention to the role of popular, as well as upper- and middle-class, protest as a factor in that change. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, The New Press, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 402 pages. Ann Oakley came to widespread attention as part of the new school of British feminists to emerge in the 1960s, and has since earned a reputation as one of the most innovative feminist thinkers and social scientists writing today. In Experiments in Knowing, a major new work, Oakley integrates her personal and professional thinking to examine the historical development of methodology in the social and natural sciences, demonstrating how both fields have been subject to a process of "gendering." Oakley not only reconciles the long-standing opposition between the quantitative and the qualitative methods but shows that the experimental and intuitive approaches must be used in tandem to provide a full understanding of any subject of scientific inquiry. Clean copy.