Social Sciences Books

I was a bit surprised at the small size of the book, but it makes up for it in content. Currently an MBA student who needed some guidance on the specific nature of doing case study research for a research methodology course assignment. Highly recommended by the lecturer and the text is very helpful in outlining the differences in the approach needed for case studies.

I read this book to help me understand how to conduct case studies for a project I was doing, that eventually turned into a book. I did a pretty good canvas of other books about case study research and was impressed with the other reviews here on Amazon, and ended up buying this book as a result.

I used the advice from the book about preparing consistent questions and following a protocall throughout my research. This helped when I had to ask some pointed questions of some interviewees, if only to be consistent across the board. This work is accessible even to non-academics, who wish to use this research method to gather information for non profit research. For me, the case study research for my project became the most statisfying part. In the end the case studies made the manuscript into something more valuable to the reader and therefore publishable. Take a look at New Solutions for House Museums, published by AltaMira Press in 2007.New Solutions for House Museums: Ensuring the Long-Term Preservation of America's Historic Houses (American Association for State and Local History)

I read this book to help me understand how to conduct case studies for a project I was doing, that eventually turned into a book. I did a pretty good canvas of other books about case study research and was impressed with the other reviews here on Amazon, and ended up buying this book as a result.

I used the advice from the book about preparing consistent questions and following a protocall throughout my research. This helped when I had to ask some pointed questions of some interviewees, if only to be consistent across the board. This work is accessible even to non-academics, who wish to use this research method to gather information. For me, the case study research for my project became the most statisfying part. In the end the case studies made the manuscript into something more valuable to the reader and therefore publishable as New Solutions for House Museums, by AltaMira Press in 2007.New Solutions for House Museums: Ensuring the Long-Term Preservation of America's Historic Houses (American Association for State and Local History)

I read this book to help me understand how to conduct case studies for a project I was doing, that eventually turned into a book. I did a pretty good canvas of other books about case study research and was impressed with the other reviews here on Amazon, and ended up buying this book as a result.

I used the advice from the book about preparing consistent questions and following a protocall throughout my research. This helped when I had to ask some pointed questions of some interviewees, if only to be consistent across the board. This work is accessible even to non-academics, who wish to use this research method to gather information. For me, the case study research for my project became the most statisfying part. In the end the case studies made the manuscript into something more valuable to the reader and therefore publishable as New Solutions for House Museums, by AltaMira Press in 2007.New Solutions for House Museums: Ensuring the Long-Term Preservation of America's Historic Houses (American Association for State and Local History)

This book is an excellant resource for qualitative research. It is written logically and is easy to follow. In particular, the sections on case study design, how to address validity and reliability, and justification of methods are very helpful. But it and plan to keep it as a reference.

Although this book was listed by the vendor, it was out of stock so I never got it. My account was credited, but why list the book when it isn't available.?

I recieved the book promptly. The book is in good condition. I am currently enjoying the book and it is alway nice to see history thru a woman's eyes. Thank You Cokie Roberts

One of the most sophomoric books to hit the market in a while, the prose is bad, the content is mere filler of cute stories of women doing very little, and the author can't stay on the subject at all.

Ms. Roberts did a fine job on sharing the little known history of our founding mothers. It opens one's eyes to the role women really did play in the war for independence.

"Founding Mothers" by Cokie Roberts provides a welcome feminist perspective on a vital period in American history. Ms. Roberts' status as a well-known news commentator draws much-needed attention to the underreported story of the women who struggled to help found our nation. Displaying the professionalism for which she is held in high regard in media circles, Ms. Roberts thoroughly researched the subject matter and has written her book in a clear and engaging style. Her discovery of numerous personal letters are excerpted in a popular work here for the first time, bringing to life a compelling and dramatic perspective on the American Revolution that should be of great interest to all history readers.

I had the privilege of attending a lecture where Ms. Roberts discussed this book and her follow-up, "Ladies of Liberty". Ms. Roberts was born the daughter of a U.S. Congressman and has spent her entire life immersed in the Washington, D.C. political scene where she has observed first-hand the important role that women play both behind the scenes and, increasingly, on the public stage (including her own mother, who won a special election to fill her father's seat in the House following his untimely death). No doubt, Ms. Roberts' interest in history and her unique life experiences have amply prepared her to write an insightful book that intelligently and sensitively discusses the role of women during the nation's formative years.

The book is organized chronologically. Ms. Roberts profiles a number of prominent women in the years before, during and after the Revolution, including Abigail Adams, Eliza Pinckney, Martha Washington and many others. Ms. Roberts also introduces lesser-known women such as Phyllis Wheatley, an African-American slave who wrote patriotic poetry and Peggy Arnold, who Ms. Roberts believes almost certainly aided the work of her traitorous husband, Benedict Arnold. Ms. Roberts' narrative covers all of the major events that one would expect but supplements her story with many overlooked facts, including how women organized to secure funding for the war effort at a time when the revolution might well have collapsed; how Sally Jay helped to charm Spain and France into supporting the American cause; and dozens of other interesting and entertaining anecdotes.

Importantly, as we gain an understanding of the challenges these mostly elite women faced during the Revolution, it is evident that the Enlightenment ideal of progress was achieved in no small part as the result of significant material, emotional and intellectual sacrifice by women. By lifting the voices of these women out of obscurity, Ms. Roberts has implicitly reminded us how truth can be spoken to power and how revolutions dedicated to the betterment of people and society are possible.

I highly recommend this book to everyone.

This was a great book with a perfect lesson about bullying. I read it with my daughters aged 5, 7 and 9. They really got the lesson.

Estes, Eleanor, author. Slobodkin, Louis, illustrator. (1972). The Hundred Dresses
A Realistic Fiction story. Small chapter book. It is a Newberry Honor book.

Ending somewhat sadly with no real resolution, this story tells the problems faced by many young school girls. Wanda and Peggy are worlds apart. Wanda is a poor girl with no mother and Peggy is a rich girl with everything she wants. In between is Maggie, a girl who wants to relate with Peggy, but sees her life more like Wanda's.
The realistic characterization is recognized in the story's language. "Goodby, Wanda," said Peggy. "Your hundred dresses sound bee-yoo-tiful" (pg. 32), gives readers an immediate connection with the honest message portrayed in the story. At first, Wanda does appear strange to Maggie. In the end, however, Maggie finds she knows more about Wanda than first thought. It is this connection from author to reader that creates the realism in this story.
The illustrations are designed in colored pencils. There is unique shading to the illustrations that gives a touching effect. While the illustrations are not "to date" they are simple and provide readers with a portrait of another time. They help to support the story's realistic theme. The drawings of the dresses revealed on pages 42 and 43, create the needed picture for students to see the story come to life.
For early to middle elementary students, a personal and social discussion on the relationships we have with others, the affect we have on others, and our responsibility to think of others in regard to ourselves might me utilized. The theme of the story is central to teaching how this book can cause us to think and grow as a person.

When she was young --- this was almost a century ago --- Eleanor Estes went to school with a Polish girl who was so poor that she wore the same dress every day. Kids are cruel; the girl got teased. And then she moved away.

In 1944, Eleanor Estes took that memory and turned it into The Hundred Dresses, a short novel --- 80 big-print pages, with many illustrations --- for children. It was named a Newberry Honor Book. It has never gone out of print.

Unlike children's book authors who get cute or write down to kids, Eleanor Estes is blunt as a police reporter. As the book begins, Wanda Petronski --- poor, motherless, foreign --- is not in school, and that means Peggy and Madeline have no one to tease.

It's not that Peggy and Madeline are witches-in-training. Peggy's the most popular girl in school. "She protected small children from bullies. And she cried for hours if she saw an animal mistreated." And Madeline, her best friend, really had no reason to be mean. She was just going along.

And yet, in the schoolyard, they'd corner Wanda: "How many dresses did you say you had hanging up in your closet?"

"A hundred," Wanda would say. And she'd describe them. Silk. Velvet. In all colors.

"A hundred dresses?" the girls would repeat. "Nobody could have a hundred dresses."

But Wanda would hold her ground: "I have."

There's an art competition. Long before the winners are announced, Wanda's father decides he's had enough and moves his kids away from the town where his daughter is tormented. And so the announcement of the winner --- the never-to-be-seen-again Wanda, for her beautiful sketches of a hundred dresses --- has a double wallop. Because the teacher goes right on to read a note from Wanda's father: "No more holler Polack. No more ask why funny name. Plenty of funny names in the big city."

A long silence follows.

Just before Christmas, their teacher gets a nice note from Wanda, giving Peggy and Maddie each a sketch.

Maddie takes her drawing home. That night, she looks hard at it and sees something she hadn't noticed --- the face is hers. Wanda had drawn it just for her. And it turned out that Peggy's sketch is also a portrait of Peggy.

The book ends with Maddie and Peggy admiring their pictures:

"What did I say!" said Peggy. "She must have really liked us anyway."

"Yes, she must have," agreed Maddie, and she blinked away the tears that came every time she thought of Wanda standing alone in that sunny spot in the school yard close to the wall, looking stolidly over at the group of laughing girls after she had walked off, after she had said, "Sure, a hundred of them --- all lined up..."

Our daughter goes to a school where the very first thing kindergarteners are taught is the power of words. She's lucky. At many schools, I'm sure, that lesson isn't taught --- and the small, the sensitive and the different do get teased, and pushed around, and hurt.

"The Hundred Dresses" can teach young readers that bullies aren't just mean boys who threaten their targets physically. A racial or ethnic slur will do just as well. And the kid who watches it happen and says nothing is just as guilty as the kid who talked that trash.

Dress styles change, but this book is endlessly fresh and accessible. Thank racism, prejudice and human nature for that. And then bless the little girl who inspired Eleanor Estes to write such a smart, simple antidote.

Every child at one time or another has been teased or mocked by other children, particularly in public schools. Those of us who have witnessed it, suffered it, or may have even done it, will remember the experience as painful, humiliating, and regrettable. The Hundred Dresses helps children see from another child's perspective this damaging behavior. Even thought this story was written over six decades ago, the materialistic theme of judging others by their clothing is still prevalent today. Throughout the story, the author has a cunning way of developing the theme so that the reader can relate to each of the characters: Wanda and how it feels to be the outcaste, Peggy and it feels to be the bully, and finally Maddie and how it feels to be guilty for letting the mistreatment go so far.

This book has a lot of build up surrounding the dresses... are they real, imaginary, did she make them, buy them, or inherit them? Teasing from the main character's peers made me as the reader wait in suspense to find out what the dresses really were and to look forward to the girl standing up for herself. When we finally find out about the dresses, however, I found it to be a bit anticlimactic with very little resolution to the issues of bullying, teasing, gossiping, and stereotyping. Not impressed by this apparent "classic."

This book is insightful, detailed, and interesting. I actually didn't fall asleep reading it- now if only that were true for my history textbooks! This was my textbook for an AP Human Geography class I took at my school. The teacher was barely adequate, and I basically taught myself everything from this book. H.J. de Blij knows how to write well. He doesn't just give you facts, either. You're taught how to spacially analyze worldwide phenomena, not just to memorize place names. He covers everything from political geography to urban landscapes to environmental science.

This textbook is also great if you simply want to know more about the world we live in, and wish to learn from a more international, rather than American-centric, point of view.

This book should not be used to teach. It's full of Liberal, Politically Correct, Multiculturialism, etc. garbage. Evan Sayet explains this mess in a video called "How Modern Liberals Think." You will see why Liberals invented PC and Multiculturalism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

Make sure you watch the Q&A at the end.

This book was listed by Dantes as a recommended book for their Human/Cultural Geography exam. This book was full of PC claptrap, and factual inaccuracies. 30% of the exam is on climate & topography, and those subjects barely covered in this book. Thankfully, I already knew a lot of the information on the exam so I passed with a high score. I'd suggest Geography for Dummies. Good luck.

I used this text in my Cultural Geography course last semester. I'm not usually one to read my textbooks, but this one was really interesting, reader friendly, and filled with lots of current examples (there's even photos of Lindsay Lohan and Tony Hawk). I'm not selling this one back (and for a starving college student--that's really saying something!)

As someone who holds Masters degrees in both History and Social Studies Education and actually TEACHES AP Human Geography to high school freshmen, I can safely say that DeBlij and co. have come up with a winner in the new edition. I'll admit the 7th edition was filled with misrepresentations, but the new version is such an improvement, that I have discarded the often inaccurate Rubinstein book for this one.

For those who suggest buying "Geography for Dummies" be my guest. I'll just let the title speak for itself. If you look at AP Central- the home of the College Board tests, the AP Human Geography test contains about 9-10% on the basic fundamentals of geography including physical geography. DeBlij covers more than its adequate share of the subject- outside of the instructor teaching the course.

Great for AP

I was very please with my book purchase. Great discount price, unbelieveable prompt delivery, and the book itself is well written.

I am very disappointed in Amazon and the seller that they allowed to sell on their site. It has been two months and I still have NOT received the textbook: Methods in Behvioral Research!!!....very very poor service and unprofessional. Would not use Amazon again!....This service does not even deserve one star-the service I received does not deserve any stars..

I thought the content was going to help me understand better the hard copy version and test me on the information. It did explain some things better, but it didn't test me on the hard cover book. So, there's really no point in buying this one if you have the hardcover. Oh well.

The book was clean, covered and just what I asked for. The biggest thing was that I didn't have any shipping problems with this order.

At first the title of the book may appear daunting, but a look inside reveals a very well written book. Takes confusing topics and helps explain them in ways that a student will understand. I found it incredibly useful in my course!

Daniel B. Schuster says:
I was entranced by this book. Mr Patel discusses the micro effects of our agriculture system as well as the macro effects and shows their interaction.. On both farmers and consumers. Every claim or fact in the book is footnoted. And the graphs. The geek part of me could finally understand relationships between farmers, processors and consumers based on the charts of Mr Patel. I've read several books that tried to explain this but failed. Mr. Patel was able to take a complex topic and break it down step by step. Great book.

I agree with the previous reviewer - this book will cause indigestion with mega producers of food.

A very digestible read for the consumer that's liable to provoke dyspepsia in the bellies of food giants and governments alike.
In taking a moralistic view of starvation and obesity, our media, governments and many NGOs have condemned those suffering to more of the same. While the institutional causes remain unaddressed - in large part thanks to public sector responsibility being abdicated to private sector interests - we can only expect more headlines about food riots and editorials on farmer suicides, just as diabetes (II) continues apace.
The resounding conclusion is that `free market' policies remain accountable only to shareholders - not to farmers, not to consumers, and certainly not to the governments that unleashed them.
But Stuffed & Starved is as prescriptive as it is diagnostic. By identifying the grassroots organisations that have come to terms with the problems and begun to enact the social changes necessary for remedy, Patel brings to the page a message of hope and understanding with great clarity. To his credit, he is no less objective or critical in examining these social movements (as they struggle to develop) than he is of the corporations, WTO, and World Bank.
If you're interested in a comprehensive overview of what's behind the headlines, of what's causing the paradox of starvation at the same time as an epidemic of obesity, this is the book.

I bought this book with high hopes and was disappointed within 50 pages.

I will share general reasons as well as specific instances.

First, the title is misleading. Throughout the book the author hints at people in developed countries having a poor choice and quality of food. However, you wont find anywhere an explicit and sustained narrative about the conditions that would link the "stuffed" north to the "starved" south.

Secondly, we are left with the impression that the Anglo-Saxons (UK and now the US) are the sole culprits in the presumed debacle of the world food system.

This leads me to point three and the main contradiction in this book. Free-trade and capitalism are made guilty by association, they are borne of the Anglo-Saxon culture which we are told is bad. However, Mr Patel states that what ails the world food system, is the distortion and near monopoly that cartels and single companies may have e.g. corn-syrup producers or supermarkets. So the problem, which is the logical conclusion of the case studies that Raj Patel highlights, is not fair trade but indeed, the lack of it. Corn subsidies in the US hurt sugar producers in poorer countries because the subsidy prevents the latter from selling their product in the US at a competitive price.

Fourth, the problems highlighted by Mr Patel are old news. Monopolies lead to higher prices and poor quality, chemicals in food are bad for your health, small producers are being overwhelmed by larger producers and distributors.

Now here are the details.

The most interesting insight takes place in the introduction. There are millions of producers and millions of consumers yet, connecting the two are very few intermediaries. These intermediaries, precisely because they are few, have the power to dictate their terms to both producers and consumers.

The English and then the Americans are blamed for all that is going wrong today. Colonialism in general should have been a target of critique. There is no mention of either other colonial powers; France, Spain, Portugal; nor is there mention of the USSR and the communist system and the fact that by the early 1970's the USSR stopped providing demographic data to the U.N.. (This in turn lead French researchers at the CNRS to predict accurately the eventual collapse of the system.) The picture seems completely one-sided against the UK and US.

In fact Mr Patel informs us that the USSR was so short on food that it traded oil for food with the US. Surprisingly, Mr Patel portrays this deal as being shameful to the US.

Mr Patel also overlooks several topics which should have been mentioned given the title. For instance, have we chosen to forsake quality for quantity thus being able to feed more people?

What other system would allow products, say oranges, to be eaten and benefit people, say in northern Europe, whose immediate ecosystem does not support such variety.

What evidence does he have to state that local produce is cheaper than what you find at supermarkets? Economies of scale enable low prices. The Wall Street Journal reported that, in Southern France, tomato paste is cheaper to import from China to Southern France than to buy it there directly. In addition, how much more are people willing to pay for healthier products.

Perhaps this book should be recast as the tragic impact a distorted world food production and distribution system has on local farmers. The evidence Mr Patel gives in that respect is quite comprehensive and heartbreaking.

I will end with Mr Patel's own reflection which I will recast to a grander scale; this maybe a transitory period towards better food.

Wahyd Vannoni
www.vannoni.com

Further reading:
New Yorker Magazine
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2008/05/19/080519crat_atlarge_wilson

I won't cover the same ground as Mr. Vannoni did. His review is spot on. I wish I had seen it before I bought this book.

Readers should know first that the book's title is cleverly misleading. The book is only tangentially about the unhealthy make-up of the modern diet and the agribusiness oligopolies that have created it.

Instead, author Patel seems to be mainly concerned with fixing blame for the world's food problems, and that blame rests almost exclusively with Britain and the U.S. We are told over and over that even when they were seemingly doing good, it was with evil motives. He "proves" this by selective quotations which he dredges up and takes as representing whole nations, and by assuming that if multiple motives are possible, only the worst one can be true. Thus, for example, it was with wholly evil intent that the U.S. led the Green Revolution (which much of the world enthusiastically followed) by developing high-yield fast-growing crop strains. The rich and well-off are always bad, and the poor are always innocent and good. And if governments of poorer countries do wrong by their people, it is only because the rich bad countries made them do it. These are not unlike the views I had when I was 15. But when you grow up you learn that the world is a much more complex place than that.

Patel grossly misuses statistics. Everything is twisted to support a predetermined result. He calls this "teasing out" the truth. Twisting is more like it. The book is basically a collection of whatever he can find, however obscure, to support his agenda, while ignoring or twisting anything that contradicts his view. Thus he tells us Mexicans living near the border are less healthy because they are now compelled to eat processed junk, while at the same time he notes that they are better off economically the closer to the border they are. It never occurs to him that they are eating junk for the same reason people in the U.S. do: not because they have no choice, but because, just like us, they like cheap fatty sugary unhealthy junk food.

This is not to say that Mr. Patel is wrong about everything. Far from it. But he has an agenda and it isn't to inform. It's to inflame, and that spoils the book. I read half of it before I decided that there are better books I can read, and since I won't live forever, I'll spend my time on them.

The price of food is skyrocketing. There are food riots emerging across the globe. It's a crisis that threatens the stability of some governments. Why is this happening? Raj Patel explains how we got here in this remarkably prophetic book. And he's not afraid to name the bad guys. Patel has deservedly emerged as one of the top experts on this crisis, and he writes with an abundance of passion and wit.
-Kemble Scott, editor, SoMa Literary Review

Definitely worth reading. This is in my top-five of all time. Well written. Great research. Easy to read. Compelling story. Read it.

Luis paints the scary picture of crossing the desert. He puts humans behind the names of the crossers, border protrol, and the cyotes. Based on true events that happen everyday. This is a must read for everyone in the United States.

Excellent story. Highly recommend to others. Great eye opener to be thankful for everything we have. Great book!!

I was assigned this book for a college English class. I was not looking forward to reading it, but found myself very glad I did.

It is a very interesting account of a true life happening told in a poetic(almost florid) way. The word pictures are amazing! I appreciate the way the author "shows" not "tells".

I especially enjoyed the way each person's point of view is explained. Immigration is a very complicated problems with no easy solutions. This book did a good job of making me empathize with and understand the various characters whose lives are very removed and different from my own.
(In that way it reminded me of "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down" by Anne Fadiman.)

The conflict of the story is there are 26 Mexicans from different parts of Mexico that cross the boarder illegally. They cross the boarder into a desert they call hell. The desert is the Sonoran desert and is part of southern Arizona. In this desert there is no water also there are deadly animals and spirits. Some are left behind waiting for the return of others.


I liked the book because its real and I could never picture myself going threw the desert with no food or water. I also liked the book because it described the surrounding and face to face things in that Arizona desert. I didn't like it because it made me think about people starving in the desert. I would recommend this book to people that like reading long stories. I also recommend this to people that like the setting of a harsh place.

I heard this author interviewed on the radio and ordered the book from the library. Three pages in I knew I had to own the book so I could underline and write in the margins. It's a book to dialog with.

This is one of the most difficult 'popular science' books I've ever read. But as much as my brain meat hurts while my neurons are busy trying to cram everything into their speculated quantum semi-coherent computational system, I'm really enjoying the lasting effects of digesting Dr. Kauffman's perspective.

I haven't quite finished yet; I'm on the philosophical payload at the end of the book right now, and as a humanities guy who works with scientists I couldn't agree more with Kauffman's assessment of the relationship between the two fields. We've gained a lot over the past few centuries by parsing and segregating our fields of study & endeavor. Books like this demonstrate that we've reached a point in the evolution of intellect that re-integrating, on some level, will well serve to push our understanding of the world even further.

I will start by saying that this is one of the most inspiring reads I have had in a while on the borderlands between 'faith' and science. A difficult read; at times a perplexing read--yet Kauffman always returns to the point he is trying to make, and each time adds something to the offer. I will qualify this accolade by saying that Kauffman only ever gets to the trailhead in this book; he doesn't define "the sacred" very articulately at any point in the book, and he doesn't delve very deeply into his idea of "God." Yet the journey he takes you on is well-worth the effort it takes to follow his erudite analyses of cosmological, evolutionary, cultural and even economic case studies in "emergence."

He uses these case studies to urge that we need a new concept of God, and a new concept of the sacred. Kauffman is trying, here, to build a bridge between religious and scientific worldviews, and attempts to do this by embracing important concepts from the religious traditions of our species. He makes the very resonant point that "new religions" have always built new temples upon the sacred sites of older religions and reinterpreted them. He urges that a scientific understanding of "the sacred" should be built upon earlier religious concepts, and not reject the traditions of the past out of hand. He is for re-interpreting the ideas of "God" and "the sacred," not rejecting them as anathema to the scientific worldview. This is a courageous step; one that may do some good toward healing the rift between science and religions in our culture.

Kauffman has taken some very important steps, here, I think, and has given other thinkers new platforms from which to launch out into deeper explorations of the "sacred" dimension of reality from a naturalistic, scientific point of view.

REINVENTING THE SACRED: A NEW VIEW OF SCIENCE, REASON AND RELIGION comes from a pioneer in the field of complexity theory, and here offers a radical new world view: that of the natural universe as a ceaseless creativity which is unpredictable - and which should be considered divine in itself. This concept of 'sacred' can be recreated, Kauffman writes - and his title shows how to refine a view of God into a different kind of system entirely. Perfect for both spirituality and college-level science holdings, it offers a challenging new way of perceiving spirituality and deity.

The pretense is that emergence provides an unambiguous account of evolution. I will argue that ambiguity remains, even after a close read of Kauffman's "Reinventing the Sacred."

First note that alone natural selection is found to be a fixture that operates on a space-time fabric that is impacted by emergence. Why do I write this? Well, because natural selection is context dependent; i.e., random mutations and the associated phenotypic bio-forms are represented by a presumed sample space; and because the success of natural selection depends on a fitness landscape. It is emergence that is found associated with "ceaseless creativity" that is closer to being context independent, but ambiguity betrays this interpretation. Nevertheless, natural selection is found beholding to emergence and the unspecified context that lurks behind the ambiguity. Therefore, natural selection is provisional, and indeed, the space-time fabric can be coopted by an agency that turns natural selection into artificial selection. Gone now is the concept of the "blind watchmaker," invented by Richard Dawkins. And say hello to ambiguity again. Only a context independent natural selection would permit Dawkins's leap to an evolution that lacks foresight, otherwise Dawkins cannot speak for the context. Emergence provides a loop-hole that neither Darwin or Dawkins anticipated. This loop-hole is present because emergence carries its own ambiguity, as we will see.

Kauffman's struggles with this apparent tension. Kauffman (page 32) writes: "I have spent decades muttering at Darwin that there may be powerful principles of self-organization at work in evolution as well, principles that Darwin knew nothing about and might well have delighted in." Kauffman (page 33) then writes: "With one sweeping idea he [Darwin] made sense of the geological record of fossils, the similarity of organisms on islands to those on nearby major land masses, and many other facts. This is the hallmark of outstanding science. I say this because many who believe in the Abrahamic God still deny evolution and attempt to justify their denial on scientific grounds. This is a fruitless exercise." But the fact remains that natural selection is nothing without emergence and the unspecified context that Kauffman fails to represent completely.

Kauffman lauds the "natural" God that is found associated with the apparent "ceaseless creativity," even while he rejects the "Creator God." I think the Creator God is Kauffman's abstraction that sees a God that is held separate from God's creation, perhaps like the presumed Abrahamic God that created the universe in six days and left us to our own devices. No doubt that some outspoken fundamentalists will see God this way. However, it seems unreasonable to say that God is separate from God's creation, in my view. Christians pray to God, and live by the golden rule, and this can only imply that God is again united with God's creation. Moreover, mystics from all religions report being united with God, and they report a non-dual awareness, and this is far from Kauffman's Creator God. The concept of "natural" in Kauffman's naturalistic God is equally ambiguous given that ambiguity cannot be removed from emergence. A good definition of "natural" depends on what is non-natural, and if "non-natural" is poorly defined then so is "natural" poorly defined.

Now Kauffman is a pretty smart fellow, and so it can't be that he is completely blind-sided by these issues. He is smart to point to L. Wittgenstein's "language game" and C.S. Peirce's "semiotics." Kauffman notes that teleological language (stated motivation) cannot be reduced to happenings (physical causal events); otherwise, we are left with a language game, like changing red to blue, and blue to red, and saying nothing useful. Kauffman notes that meaning cannot be removed from agency. He tells us that Darwin's theory cannot be reduced to physical laws that govern particles. Kauffman completely rejects reductionism, because things that come with meaning are found emerging in a way that cannot be denied. He writes that emergence must be "partially lawless," presumably coming from a criticality near chaos and order. But Kauffman only admits that this emergence is ambiguous enough to call intelligent design non-science, before stopping short.

Kauffman (page 146) writes: "Intelligent design is based on probability arguments. It says that the flagellar motor, for example, is too improbable to have arisen by chance. It is irreducibly complex and so improbable that there must be a designer. But we saw above that we cannot make probability statements about Darwinian preadaptations, for we do not know beforehand the full configuration space. ID simply cannot compute that a given irreducibly complex entity such as the flagellar motor could not have come about by a sequence of Darwinian preadaptations in reasonable time. Its probability calculations are entirely suspect. The sample space is, again, not known beforehand."

Darwin's theory did not anticipate life's extreme cooption of prior adaptations, a cooption that creates a novel function that is found emerging from the criticality. Darwin only predicted slow and gradual modifications of existing functionality, this is something Kuaffman corrects. However, it is this cooption that is found necessary, otherwise Darwin's theory would have found its refutation in the face of extreme cooption. Nearly all our very few 25,000 genes have been coopted from far distant ancestors that were clueless of humanity! Why has this evidence of teleology been ignored? Because what emerges from the criticality is open to ambiguity: representing emergence by a series of Darwinian preadaptations (followed by mindless opportunism) is ambiguous as noting the irreducible complexity of the apparent cooption that points to recognition. The ambiguity is present because evidence for recognition gets reinterpreted as a representation. We could note that this ambiguity remains irreducibly complex within language use, and this is enough to save both intelligent design and Darwin's theory as two aspects of one evolution.

Cooption is the discovery of new meaning from prior functions, and therefore, it is cooption that is subjected to Wittgenstein's language game. Darwin's theory fails (or is saved) for the very same reason that intelligent design fails (or is saved), because what feeling emerges from the criticality is subject to ambiguity. This is the ramification of the context dependency of natural selection. Without something connecting natural selection to concrete reality, natural selection generates only a series of happenings and the question of agency slips quietly away.

Now if you think I am being overly critical of Kauffman's book, think again. It is worth five stars. Kauffman at least pointed to the criticality from which evolution and reality emerged, yet he has not publically admitted that Darwin's theory is found beholding to the same criticality. His mistake is small, even as he limits his treatment (of the evolution war) to representations (transitions in state space) and ignores recognition; note, however, that Kauffman correctly treats recognition in his treatement of mind (chapter 12). I only note that the same criticality relates to our words, their meaning, it relates to our motives and desires, and the criticality is the doorway from which tomorrow (Kauffman's "adjacent possible") will come; I think Kauffman agrees with this. Kant called the criticality the "third antinomy," the apparent conflict between natural law and freedom, and it signifies the subject-object unity given by Kant's "synthetic." We can only explore the antinomy by way of a transcendental idealism; a kind invented by Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, or Husserl. The Chinese refer to the criticality as the Tao, and the early Greeks call it the Logos. The Christians call it the Holy Spirit. The criticality comes with a middle term, and it is strangely felt: so much so that Kauffman reinvents the sacred, and refers to a naturalistic God. Everything else is a language game, so pick your flavor.

Bridge End World A superb book that covers areas not addressed by other similar books.The author has vast experience in the subject area.Speth is aware of the magnitude of the problem but is persuaded it can be resolved.A good read ! John Cairns,Jr.

The ideas presented are excellent, logical, and thought provoking!!!
The book was sometimes hard for me to follow due to less than complete information. It is dull at times. The author is no Thomas Friedman.

The Bridge at the End of the World A highly readable, fact-filled, and convincing exposition of how market-profit-growth based corporate economy is destroying the eco-system on which it depends and what must and can be done to change it. There's little time before the damage is irreversible.

As do other current writers such as Thomas Homer-Dixon and David Korten, James Speth sees us heading for catastrophe in the way we're over-using and over-polluting the earth, but holds out hope that we may yet turn back from the brink of destruction. He attributes our predicament to an economic system based on little more than constant growth, which in turns requires ever more extraction from the earth; weak or nonexistent government leadership; and an environmental movement that has been less "movement" and more an insider operation that down deep believes a) the government can and will eventually do the right thing and b) there won't be need for drastic redirection of our economic and political systems or serious change in our way of living.

Speth calls for a rediscovery of the true meaning of life (relationships, service, enjoyment of leisure, etc.)--and orienting our economic pursuits around this; a new form of participatory democracy that takes back our country from the corporate-led government we currently "enjoy"; ending over $850 billion in annual global subsidies for "perverse" practices such as overfishing the seas; developing an economic model that incorporates environmental care, human rights and worker well-being at its core; and international treaties with "teeth" to enforce environmental protection of critical habitats and endangered species and ecosystems.

This is a depressing book in that it clearly lays out the challenges facing us; it is hopeful in that it does provide a "bridge" to get us from this world to the next. It's up to us to build it and then be ready to walk over it.

Telling quote: "When the crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, and to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."

The Bridge at the Edge of the World, by James Gustave Speth, is begins with an excellent review of the depth and immediacy of the environmental crisis that faces humanity. The initial graphs give a clear and sobering pictorial representation of the the growing calamity. Paper use, water consumption, species extinction, ozone depletion, CO2 concentration - all of these are on the rise along with our increasing population.

Speth lays out the argument that our overuse of the finite resources of the planet is driven by our increasing population and our economic systems which reward expansion. His descriptions and explanations are solid and well-referenced.

After laying out the problems, Professor Speth reviews some potential solutions. I was intrigued to read about "Promoting the Well-Being of People and Nature" rather than a continuing along our current paradigm of promoting the interests of huge corporations.

Speth proposes changing the fundamental legal frameworks that regulate corporations, thus making them more accountable to the long-term needs of the citizenry and generations to come. This is a fairly radical idea, but the author lays out his arguments very clearly and with deep support.

Still furthering his discussion of solutions, Speth discusses "a new consciousness" that we could achieve to view each other and our planet's resources in a whole new way. This discussion could have turned into new-age drivel, but Speth manages to keep the discussion rational and he reviews several examples of movements which have succeeded - e.g. the antislavery movement of the mid-1800s in the US and the civil rights movement in the same country.

In summary, this is a dense and far-ranging book. Unlike many other current environmental books, Speth points an accusing finger at capitalism as a major contributor to our crisis. He ends, though, with a thoughtful review of some potential solutions and pathways to avoid our drift into the abyss.