Sociology

Softcover. NY, Simon and Schuster, 1st, 1964, Book: Fair, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 96 pages, illustrated wraps. A documentation and moving tribute to the Civil Rights activists of the 1960s, many b&w photographs by Danny Lyons. Stated First Printing. Wrappers have chipping, rubbing. Lorraine Hansberry, best known for her award-winning play A Raisin in the Sun, contributed the text.

Softcover. New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1st pbk, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 154 pages. Michael Harrington was a political scientist and activist best known for The Other America, an examination of poverty in the midst of affluence in the U.S. Here, he reexamines the state of the U.S. twenty years after his landmark book. Bob Adelman is a respected photojournalist, b&w photos throughout; 11 x 8.5 inches. SIGNED BY ADELMAN. "Adelman has moved beyond the familiar cliches of most documentary photography into that rare sphere wherein technical ability and social vision combine to create a great work of art." Quote by Ralph Ellison.

Hardcover. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1st, 2017, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 541 pages. b&w illustrations. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among John-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the 'white negro' and Black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Oxford University Press, reprint, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 425 pages, b&w illustrations. The word "prison" immediately evokes stark images: forbidding walls spiked with watchtowers; inmates confined to cramped cells for hours on end; the suspicious eyes of armed guards. They seem to be the inevitable and permanent marks of confinement, as though prisons were a timeless institution stretching from medieval stone dungeons to the current era of steel boxes. But centuries of development and debate lie behind the prison as we now know it--a rich history that reveals how our ideas of crime and practices of punishment have changed over time. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Malden MA, Blackwell , 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 311 pages, b&w illustrations. A succinct narrative of Iranian history from the time of Cyrus the Great in 558 BC to the present day. The book traces events from the rise of the Persian empire, through competition with Rome and conquest by the Arabs, through to the re-establishment of a Persian state in the sixteenth century, and finally the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the establishment of the current Islamic Republic. For each period, the author utilizes the most recent scholarship in order to examine Iran's political, social, and cultural history. He presents this history within an analytical framework which focuses on rulership as the central theme of identity for Iranians. He also considers the part played in Iranian identity by land, political culture, religion, and the arts. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co., 1st, 1993, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 281 pages, minor dust jacket edge wear and foxing on edges, otherwise, very clean and tight copy. A brilliant, daring, and utterly original book that analyzes (even as it exemplifies) the effect that the image saturation of a hundred years of moving pictures have had on human culture and consciousness.

Hardcover. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul , 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 366 pages. This book concerns itself with the different ways in which money is used, the relationships which then arise, and the institutions concerned in maintaining its various functions. Thomas Crump examines the emergence of institutions with familiar and distinctive monetary roles: the state, the market and the banking system. However, other uses of money - such as for gambling or the payment of fines - are also taken into account, in an exhaustive, encyclopedic treatment of the subject, which extends far beyond the range of conventional treatises on money. Clean copy.

Hardcover. UK, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press, 1st, 1971, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn yellow dust jacket with sunning to spine, 201 pages. Some pencil underlining to about 20 pages. Some b&w photos.

Hardcover. Oxford UK, Clarendon Press, 1st, 1986, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 412 pages including index. Dispelling the general assumption that social institutions survive because of their sophisticated adaptive advantages, this ground-breaking work asserts that the commonest customs and institutions may endure because of their very simplicity or as a result of simple human proclivity. Usingreligious, military, and kinship institutions to illustrate this argument, the author shows that a precise combination of these factors may lead to the emergence of new forms of social evolution. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Atheneum, 3rd pr., 1974, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 369 pages. Evans "tells of his grandparents' debate to leave Lithuania for America, the first few years in the Baltimore slums, and their decision to gamble on the South. He writes about the family store, and describes his boyhood in Durham, in the North Carolina tobacco belt, where his father was mayor from 1950 to 1962 during the stormiest years of the Civil Rights era. " Also a history of earlier German & Sephardic Jewish communities in the South & the role of Southern Jews in the Civil War & Reconstruction. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf otherwise clean.

Softcover. London/NY, Verso, 1st, 1990, Softcover, 397 pages. In this acclaimed historical study, Alexander Saxton establishes the centrality of white racism to American politics and culture. Examining images of race at a popular level - from blackface minstrels to the construction of the Western hero, from grassroots political culture to dime novels - as well as the philosophical constructions of the political elite, it is a powerful and comprehensive account of the ideological forces at work in the formation of modern America. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Ithaca NY, Cornell University Press, 2nd pr., 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 261 pages, previous owner's signature on front fly leaf. "Evil is the most serious of our moral problems. All over the world cruelty, greed, prejudice, and fanaticism ruin the lives of countless victims. Outrage provokes outrage. Millions nurture seething hatred of real or imagined enemies, revealing savage and destructive tendencies in human nature. Understanding this challenges our optimistic illusions about the effectiveness of reason and morality in bettering human lives. But abandoning these illusions is vitally important because they are obstacles to countering the threat of evil. The aim of this book is to explain why people act in these ways and what can be done about it." The first part of this book is a detailed discussion of six horrible cases of evil: the Albigensian Crusade of about 1210; Robespierre's Terror of 1793?94; Franz Stangl, who commanded a Nazi death camp in 1943?44; the 1969 murders committed by Charles Manson and his "family"; the "dirty war" conducted by the Argentinean military dictatorship of the late 1970s; and the activities of a psychopath named John Allen, who recorded reminiscences in 1975. John Kekes includes these examples not out of sensationalism, but rather to underline the need to hold vividly in our minds just what evil is. The second part shows why, in Kekes's view, explanations of evil inspired by Christianity and the Enlightenment fail to account for these cases and then provides an original explanation of evil in general and of these instances of it in particular.

Softcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, reprint, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 286 pages, b&w illustrations. This book examines the sense of smell in humans, comparing it with the known functions of the same sense in other animals. Odorous cues play a role in sexual physiology and behavior in animals and there are claims that odor can play the same role in humans. The place of odors and scents in aesthetics and in psychoanalysis serves to illustrate the link between the emotional centers and the brain. The book presents arguments to explain the way in which our ancestral past has given rise to our modern day olfactory enigmas. Contains a glossary and chapter summaries. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 2006, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a unclipped dust jacket with fading to spine, 260 pages. This fascinating and unusual book tells the story of an arguably catastrophic German habit - that of valuing cultural achievement above all else and envisioning it as a noble substitute for politics. Lepenies examines how this tendency has affected German history from the late eighteenth century to today. He argues that the German preference for art over politics is essential to understanding the peculiar nature of Nazism, including its aesthetic appeal to many Germans (and others) and the fact that Hitler and many in his circle were failed artists and intellectuals who seem to have practiced their politics as a substitute form of art. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 335 pages. In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1965, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover in a lightly worn dust jacket, 330 pages.

Softcover. Madras, Government Press, 1st, 1931, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, Heavy gray paper wraps, 158 pages. 12 plates of b/w photographs. A complete survey of the origin and development of the Brahmanas as well as an authoritative exposition of their liturgical codes and an accurate account of their cultural life. This work also deals with Vaishnavism of south India. Azhvars, Acharyas, Ramanuja, Visistadvaita philosophy, cardinal principles of Sri Vaishnavism. Some interesting illustrations enhance the beauty of this volume. Light wear to wrappers, clean copy.

Hardcover. Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press , 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Hardcover, blue clith with gilt lettering on spine, 328 pages. Dr Moore's enterprising book focuses on an apparent paradox: the failure of Sri Lanka's highly politicized smallholder electorate to place on the national political agenda issues relating to the public distribution of material resources. Sri Lanka has more than fifty years' history of pluralist democracy and such issues directly affect the interests of the smallholder population. Yet successive Sri Lankan governments have pursued economic policies favouring food consumers and the state itself at the expense of agricultural producers. In exploring the features of Sri Lanka's history, geography, politics and economy which explain this paradox, the author looks in detail at some of the dominant features of contemporary Sri Lanka: the political consequences of the plantation experience; the persistence of elite political leadership; and the causes and consequences of ethnic conflict. Clean copy, paper tanning slightly.

Hardcover. Princeton NJ, Princeton University Press, 1st, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 173 pages. Blandine Kriegel, at one time a collaborator with Michel Foucault, is one of France's foremost political theorists. This translation of her celebrated work L'Etat et les esclaves makes available for English-speaking readers her impassioned defense of the state. Published in France in 1979 and republished in 1989, this work challenged not only the anti-statism of the 1960s but also generations of romanticism in politics that, in Kriegel's view, inadvertently threatened the cause of liberty by refusing to distinguish between the despotic and the lawful state. In a work that addresses the urgent concerns of Europe and the contemporary world as a whole, Kriegel examines the background of modern liberal democracy in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and argues cogently for the future of constitutional social-democracy. Clean copy.

Softcover. State University of New York Press, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 285 pages. This book charts new directions in Egyptian social history, providing the first systematic account of adaptation and protest among crafts and service workers in Egypt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using a wealth of new sources, John T. Chalcraft challenges conventional notions of craft stagnation and decline by recovering the largely unknown histories of crafts workers' restructuring in the face of world economic integration, and their petitions, demonstrations, and strike-action at a time of state-building and colonial rule. Chalcraft demonstrates the economic importance of petty producers and service providers, and tells the story of widespread collective assertion couched in new discourses of citizenship and nationalism. He also gives a new interpretation of the end of the guilds in Egypt and addresses larger debates about unevenness under capitalism. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Doubleday Anchor Book, 1st US, 1968, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 298 pages. First published in 1917 and long regarded as a classic of English social history. Preface by Asa Briggs. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st US, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 522 pages, b&w illustrations. By the end of World War I, Britain had become a laboratory for modernity. Intellectuals, politicians, scientists, and artists-among them Arnold Toynbee, Aldous Huxley, and H. G. Wells-sought a vision for a rapidly changing world. Coloring their innovative ideas and concepts, from eugenics to Freud's unconscious, was a creeping fear that the West was staring down the end of civilization. In The Twilight Years, award-winning historian Richard Overy examines the paradox of this period and argues that the coming of World War II was almost welcomed by Britain's leading thinkers, who saw it as an extraordinary test for the survival of civilization- and a way of resolving their contradictory fears and hopes about the future. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A riveting examination of a nation in crisis, from one of the finest political journalists of our generation American democracy is beset by a sense of crisis. Seismic shifts during a single generation have created a country of winners and losers, allowing unprecedented freedom while rending the social contract, driving the political system to the verge of breakdown, and setting citizens adrift to find new paths forward. In The Unwinding, George Packer, author of The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq, tells the story of the United States over the past three decades in an utterly original way, with his characteristically sharp eye for detail and gift for weaving together complex narratives. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W W Norton, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 724 pages. Illustrated in b&w and color. A revisionist panorama of the nineteenth century examines the era's material and spiritual changes in the wake of emerging British capitalism and imperialism, as told through the writings of such figures as Darwin, Marks, George Eliot, and Kipling. Clean copy.