Social Sciences Books

no matter how experienced a person can be in sex, we all must read this book. it not only gives basic understanding of sexual behavior and act, it also goes over other ares like understanding transvestites, fetish, sexual diseases, etc...

This is a great textbook. It's clearly written, and it's actually enjoyable to read. The author appears to have had a good time writing it, and included many limericks, engaging examples, and other items that make this textbook anything but dry.

I had to buy this book for a class and expected it to be very dry and... well.. a textbook. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find humor from the authors of this book, allowing me to actually enjoy a required reading. The book is written in an easy to understand language that doesnt boggle the mind and overwhelm. Great book!

The textbook is well organized and informative. A wealth of information that is not only informative but very enlighten. With the addition of the CD-ROM and PowerWeb it becomes an excellent well rounded textbook.

This was the text used in my Human Sexuality course at Western Michigan University in the fall of 2007. I enjoyed reading it, very thorough and indepth, covering a wide range of sexual topics. The authors, who are also educators, use humor at times in the text, as well as paying respect to the seriousness of the topic. Very fair and unbiased in my opinion on it's take of sexual pathways taken in life. It includes a CD-ROM which has additional information from each chapter in the form of discussions and interviews the student can watch. A text that is user friendly, and incorporates a wide variety of psychological patheways and perspectives, without endorsing one as "correct." I would recommend it to any Professor teaching the course.

The workbook sent was not the 6th edition as advertised but rather the 4th edition and therefore I was force to buy another workbook. This was $50 wasted.

I was very dissatisfied with my purchase and I returned it. The number of the edition should be prominently displayed in the information about the book. I had to pay for S & H, and I have not received a refund jet.

I finished this book in two days. It's a great look at all types of real estate and what has fueled (and continues to fuel) our love of homes and real estate.

In his 2004 book "Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever And How It Changed America" Steve Gillon refers to a rather surprising observation from Paul Begala, hardly a conservative Republican, who opined that "baby boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self aggrandizing generation in American history." You will get no argument from me there and I was born in 1951! You remember the boomers don't you? These were the disaffected young people who were marching in the streets in the late 1960's. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to retirement. Millions of baby boomers have developed a condition that author Daniel McGinn refers to as "House Lust". And the epidemic is spreading to younger generations as well.
What are the symptoms of "House Lust"? If you are spending more than a few hours each week watching HGTV you are likely coming down with this highly contagious affliction. I hear that shows like "House Hunters", Designer's Challenge", "Flip This House" and "What You Get For The Money" can be extremely addicting. Daniel McGinn points to the meteoric rise in the popularity of HGTV over the past decade as a major factor in the real estate craze we have all experienced. Suddenly you realize that you are living in the wrong neighborhood or that your house just doesn't cut it anymore. Another symptom of "House Lust" is an aversion to anything small, outdated or used. Many of those in the market for a house today are looking for a home at least 3 or 4 times the size of the houses they grew up in. They also want homes loaded with just about every amenity imaginable. Daniel McGinn goes on ad nauseum about the myriad of options available to buyers today. Have you heard those commercials on the radio explaining how much happier life will be if you install new Corian counter tops in your kitchen? And then there is the debate about buying a brand new home as opposed to purchasing an existing dwelling and renovating. You will learn the pros and cons of each of these options. Perhaps the most disturbing thing I read in "House Lust" is the story of Dr. Debi Warner, the "Renovation Psychologist" hailing from the great state of New Hampshire. Dr. Warner has evidently carved out a niche for herself assisting embattled couples as they navigate the difficult road of home renovation. Renovating can be s-o-o-o stressful! Apparently there is a TV show in the works as well! In the latter chapters of "House Lust" there is much practical information to he had about other issues surrounding the housing industry. You will learn why so many individuals take a shot at a career in real estate and why so many of these folks drop out of the business after just a short time. McGinn also explores the issues surrounding vacation homes and time-shares. Finally, Dan McGinn examines the pros and cons of investing in real estate. I was quite surprised to learn how many people purchase investment properties they have never seen in states that are hundreds or even thousands of miles away. Sounds awfully risky to me.
At the end of the day I found "House Lust: America's Obsession With Our Homes" to be a fairly well-written and pretty informative book. Yet much of the subject matter greatly disturbs me. More than once I found myself muttering "What the heck were these people thinking?" when reading about some of the obscene amounts of money that people are willing to spend on building and renovating their homes. I hate the conspicuous consumption that seems to be in evidence everywhere you turn these days. And as author Robert Putnam so aptly points out in his seminal book "Bowling Alone" we all pay a price for such self absorption. Clearly, civic participation is at an all-time low as people withdraw from the public square and retreat into their not so humble abodes. It would appear that a growing number of us seem perfectly willing to sit back and "let the other guy do it." As their numbers continue to dwindle, once vibrant civic and religious organizations like the Elks, Knights of Columbus and the American Legion to name but a few are struggling to survive. Our communities are the big losers because many of the volunteer services that once were provided by these organizations have either totally disappeared or have had to be assumed by the government. Another extremely disturbing trend is that political parties are finding it more and more difficult to attract talented people to run for political office.
In the final analysis the American constitution guarantees each one of us the "freedom to be foolish". People who choose to spend outlandish sums on their homes should do so at their own risk. If things go awry these people have no right to expect the government to bail them out. Perhaps the painful lessons we are learning today will help to us all to curb our appetites just a bit in the future. "House Lust" is a great way to get up to speed on these fascinating issues. Recommended.

Great book! Easy read and very interesting. While I don't agree with some of his conclusions, this is a behind the scenes look at HGTV and what makes us so house focused. I love looking at houses, comparing houses, reading listings, etc . .. and therefore, I loved this book! Easy to read, fun read. For anyone that is looking to buy, looking to sell, looking to build, or looking to remodel.

The first thing that strikes me about Daniel McGinn's excellent first book, "House Lust," is how supremely organized it is. We get a very well-organized tour through the housing bubble via separate, tidy, punchy chapters concerning up-sizing mania, the new-house phenomena driving booms in locales like Las Vegas, fix-up fever, real-estate investing as a watching sport, rental properties, Realtor conventions and vacation homes/time shares. Each chapter gets just the right gist of what that particular piece adds to the overall market.

Furthermore, McGinn's effort is awash in credibility. Not only did he research house lust, he lived it. Among his many participatory exploits are his eyebrow-raising purchase of a rental property in Pocatello, Idaho (he used his book advance, much to the, umm, chagrin of his wife) and his pursuit of a Realtor license. In each case, the author's first-hand involvement greatly enriches the tale.

Of additional note are McGinn's efforts to keep the book relevant at the time of the sub-prime-fueled, foreclosure-laden bust of the bubble. The book was conceived mid-bubble. The market had clearly turned prior to publication. McGinn notes this dramatic shift and adds what I feel is an appropriate level of commentary about the implications. To that end, in his Acknowledgements section he mentions that esteemed economist and Newsweek colleague Robert Samuelson "provided generous advice on adjusting the book's tone as the housing market weakened."

Speaking of Newsweek, like many others I suppose, I learned of this book through the excerpt in that weekly. I've been a long-time (20+ years) subscriber. It's a delight to see how many colleagues McGinn credits by name and how many he counts as friends. It's a workplace that seems very family-like and collegial. In the wake of a significant buyout of many of Newsweek's longtime writers, it leaves me a bit melancholy. This is the downside of the web revolution and rapidly plummeting print circulations: the busting up and atrophying of great talent pools like Newsweek is a most unfortunate thing for readers like me...and it seems for people like Daniel McGinn, a generous journalist who understands how a place like Newsweek molded him.

I really enjoyed this book. It is extremely easy to read, has adequate footnotes for those who want to further explore any of the topics which the author covers, and in my opinion it incredibly accurately captures the fascination/interest/obsession (and yes, even lust) of many of us have for all aspects of activity regarding our homes (and those of our neighbors and even strangers). Whatever the reason (idle curiosity, planning a move, determination of the value of your own home, interest in renovations), if you often peruse the weekly real estate section of your local paper, visit open houses just for the heck of it, often mentally decide how you would renovate or redecorate a home that you are visiting, can't resist checking out the neighborhoods where you vacation with the thought that it might be nice to have your own getaway abode there, or have graduated from watching THIS OLD HOUSE on PBS to being able to recite from memory the most watched shows on HGTV, this book is definitely for you.

Dan McGInn is a national correspondent for Newsweek. He has spent several years covering many aspects of the real estate boom that eventually assumed bubble type characteristics and is now undergoing the inevitable hangover of a correction, which will hopefully not morph into a crash. The tone and style of the book is illustrated by his examination of the traditional competition and envy (not confined to real estate), which he describes in his opening chapter about the Toll Brothers' subdivision in Potomac Maryland, aptly titled "Mine's Bigger than Yours". Other randomly selected chapters include commentary on such topics as "Fix-up Fever", the seemingly favorite neighborhood pasttime in some communities of remodeling cum expansion, and the whole mystique of often little used vacation homes that are usually very uneconomic investments despite their frequent justification on that basis. Included in that discussion is a very interesting overview of the operation of the timeshare industry for the uninformed such as myself, as well as the recently introduced luxury vacation option known as destination clubs (as epitomized by Exclusive Resorts, the largest).

McGinn has a keen eye and an engaging style; as the title of my review states, I not only found a lot of educational material (admittedly much anecdotal, but a lot of hard facts as well), but I also really had fun reading this book (as it appeared that he did writing it). So if you are a chronic addict with HOUSE LUST that cannot be cured, you will probably relate to much of the material in this book. But even for the more casual hobbyist (who can change the dial and for whom HOUSE HUNTERS is not "appointment television"), the new terminology alone to which you are introduced is worth the time and price of the book. One example - in Las Vegas a new home is as much a status symbol as a new car, and what is in other parts of the country simply considered an existing home being sold is for many individuals in that area a "used home" which carries as much of a second hand stigma as a used car. Other interesting topics include the monogamous vs. polygamist vacationers (as well as "staycationers"), renovation hell, home location "splitters", the risqué practice of "house humping' (I had no clue), as well as lots of insider lingo and shorthand.

He also touches on the topic of how technological innovations are changing both our lifestyles and our homes, and has a fascinating compilation of statistics regarding the growth in size of our residences over the past few decades. Finally, to complete his research he takes the local exam to obtain his real estate license and provides some insights into the profession of realtor as well.

My goal in writing this review has been to provide an intriguing overview of how successful McGinn has been in capturing in an extremely entertaining manner the quest surrounding what for many Americans is a (and perhaps the) central element of their pursuit of the American Dream, a home of their own (and then- the renovations and subsequent additions, and later a vacation home, etc., etc.) I hope that you enjoy it as much as I did.

I began my MSW research class with a great deal of interest in the subject, but this textbook dampened my interest quite rapidly. I do not feel that it is very well organized, and it is very tedious to pull out the main points. It's very wordy with alot of needless jargon. The definitions and vocabulary lack "common sense" and useful applicability. Visually speaking, it is a difficult read due to the way the text is organized and formatted. The concepts themselves are not difficult and can even be fun to learn, but without prior knowledge of some of these concepts, this book would have really turned me off.

I like the book for being able to have practice test and the puzzle after every chapter

This is a great text. Easy to understand, easy to read and laid out nicely. I would recommend this for instructors and students.

This book is really long winded and boring. It rambles a lot and is quite incoherent, though I would give it some credit for trying to sound personable. The chapter on inferential statistics, especially isn't very clear which makes it even more frustrating because stats is already quite a dry topic.

I'm taking a research methods course right now and, unfortunately, this is the book that was assigned. The chapters are too long and the authors make things more complex by trying to include too many examples and unnecessary filler material. Research methods is boring anyway, but Rubin and Babbie make learning about it more boring and confusing by not getting straight to the point. I have a "quiz" next week and you don't know how tedious it is read through these chapters. I had to learn how to speed read in order to save time and find the important information.Thank goodness the book is at least organized.

FLIGHT, by Sherman Alexie was a violent, yet always humorous book. In this action-packed adventure-fiction novel, the main character, Zits, passes through the body of several people involved with Native Americans during the Native American genocide era.
In the beginning of FLIGHT, Zits meets a 17-year-old boy named Justice, who teaches him to enjoy killing. Later, Zits visits a bank in downtown Seattle, where he shoots several people with a paint-ball-gun and a pistol. Zits is then transferred to the body of a white FBI agent in the 1970's. Next he becomes a Native American boy during the battle at Little Bighorn. Afterwards, Zits inhabits the body of a Native American tracker in the 19th century. Finally, he becomes a pilot of a small plane in the 21st century...
As I said before, FLIGHT is a very funny book; however, some of the humor may not be appropriate for children 12 and under. It has a great ending (which I'm not going to spoil). One annoying thing is that when Zits transfers to a new body, there are a lot of boring details that follow. Another bothersome thing is the main character's nickname throughout the course of the story.
FLIGHT left me satisfied. It was a great summer read. I suggest this book to anyone looking for a fun book to enjoy.

This book is a personal favorite of mine. Sherman Alexie never ceases to surprise, entertain, or inform me. This story is a fictional work that brings much needed attention to several issues including but not limited to race, class, child abuse, the astonishing rate of alcoholism in native Americans, the struggle many foster children face on a daily basis, the ability of people to be indifferent, as well as their incredible capacity to care. This book took me through every range of emotion, and yes, big sap that I am, I did cry at the end.

Alexie tackles some tough topics. This book is in no way easy, but it is a great and ultimately very satisfying book.

"Flight": a surprisingly sophisticated book that can be read in an afternoon. Alexie uses his classic prose that takes the reader into a world that is real and haunting. Less than 200 pages in length, yet complex- tackles the issues of hate, love, revenge, destiny, power. Narrated by a teenager who is half-Indian, half-Irish, he goes on a journey through time where he inhabits the bodies of an Indian child, an Indian tracker, an FBI agent, and a pilot in order to learn a crucial lesson- but is the lesson learned, and learned in time?

I had no idea where this book was going when I first started it, and I was kept fascinated all the way through. A beautiful story, really wonderful. Read "Flight" and come away enriched.

good book.
makes you thing about why people think about death and religion.
this copy had an uneven cut long edge so make turning pages a bit irritating.

If you need to do statistics for a thesis, dissertation, course, etc. but aren't quite sure where to start or what to do, this is the book you have been looking for. I don't know how I would've completed my dissertation without this book. EXTREMELY helpful and easy to understand without being "dumbed down." If you've found your way to this page, you owe it to yourself to buy this book.

This book is so helpful using SPSS. She does some things different than my instructor wants, due to being in a different continent, but other than that, I don't do my homework without this book open and in front of me!

Very good reference for those who are not at all familiar with SPSS. It is truly a survival manual; I was finally able to finish my thesis research. Highly recommended.

This is the best SPSS manual I've had. It's comprehensive and easy to follow. I really enjoy it.

If this is as good as the previous edition that I used, and I've no reason to believe it isn't and every expectation that it is, this is a must have reference book for newcomers to data analysis using SPSS.

It walks you through the process and has sound recommendations on what to do with what sort of data.

Advanced users may not need this, but everyone starting out should have this handy.

The book has good general information about the affects of different drugs on the brain and body, and attempts to address some of the social controversies surrounding various drugs. I wish it had more information on the history of drug legislation in the US and the sociocultural context of those decisions.

I use this text in my undergraduate course 'Drugs and HumanBehavior' at USC. The students like it. The pictures are great. Everything's explained in clear language. The references are up to date, chapters are well organized, and the reviews are comprehensive.

Order reduces options. Classical education inclines the mind to idealism.
Through the ages we have grown heavy with hierarchical matter, isolated by divisive, absolute, classified ideologies in the name of order maintained as truth by authority. Now "Everything is Miscellaneous" glories in a new vision of hope, transparency, understanding, freedom, and peace--a newly enlightened collective consciousness. Weinberger's work is fascinating and exuberant with optimism that we can emerge out of the chaos of messy, unfettered knowledge to global understanding. Western civilization (essentialism) from Plato to Aristotle to Dewey to Jimmy Wales is up for review and the prognosis is good. Read the book; play with tools; enter the conversations; navigate the cosmos, indeed, let knowledge at long last lead to understanding.

It always frustrated me that I could never get a group to really achieve consensus on the best way to organize a website. Arguments about how to label pages, what to include and not include, etc. dominated discussions. You always ended up with a compromise that people outside of the room end up questioning.

Until you realize, there IS no one right way to organize a web site.

David Weinberger's book, Everything is Miscellaneous, dramatically details why I was having such a difficult time and the good news -- that increasingly in the digital world, we can stop worrying about how to organize the information and concentrate on providing information that contributes to meaningful understanding.

We're not constrained by front page real estate, column space/sizes, peer-review editorial boards and other feedback filtering mechanisms that came to dominate what he calls the 2nd order of organization. People access knowledge in the digital world through a variety of means and it becomes less important who you are and more important what the perceived value of what you contribute is.

Of course most businesses currently operate under the model he describes of providing the engineered customer experience. They have spent tons of resources building a brand based precisely on who they are and why you should listen to them. They could probably care less about adding to meaning, they just want sales or readers or whatever.

I highly recommend the book to anyone who has ever been frustrated by an attempt to classify or organize -- whether it's organizing a closet, file drawers, deciding where to put a file on a shared drive at work, grading 3rd grade papers, planning a web site or whatever.

Similarly anyone who has ever looked for something and couldn't find it, especially if you consider yourself organized -- you will love how this book opens up your perspective on finding, organizing and searching in the new digital world.

Of course, if you're under the age of like 19, you've grown up with this and the book won't have as much meaning potentially.

In the physical world, we have to abide by the laws of physics - atoms can only be in one place at a point in time. Hence, store layouts, filing structures, or even the mess on your desk comes to down optimization, context, and often, personal bias. However, in the digital world, as David Weinberger points out, we have no such limitations. If we can get rid of the idea that there is a best way to organize our digital world, we'll end up with a world of meta-data and systems that can dynamically construct faceted trees to exactly meet your immediate needs.

"Everything is Miscellaneous" is a great argument against Aristotelian trees and the notion of 'perfect order'. Let's face it, we're all different, we all have our context, and our information systems should exploit these facts. Migrating towards meta-data is the first step.

I totally disagree with the reviewers that pontificate against this book. It is not a techno-geek book, or a philosophy book, it is simply a common sense overview that I personally consider to be educated, helpful to the point of essential. At $16, with the Amazon discount, this book is a bargain.

I started with the index, and immediately discovered Meta-Data had 18 lines.

The book opens with examples from Staples ("hacking the physical") to Apple iTunes (end of bundling) and I am immediately charmed by the combination of an end to fraudulent store organization (Giant supermarket moves everything from one week to the next to force searching which increases impulse buying) and an increase in focus on serving the individual rather than serving up a "one size fits all" solution. Separately I am looking at Chinese medicine for a health intelligence book, and this resonates.

Early on one sees the author agreeing with Jean Francois Noubel (the end of the pyramidal organization) and Jim Rough (rise of the circle of citizen wisdom)--I myself enraged the secret intelligence mandarins by announcing in the 1990's that "in the age of decentralized information central intelligence is an oxymoron." The author is one of the gurus of what is becoming known as the axis of Cognitive Science and Collective Intelligence (the Art), and he and another 54 authors are brought together in the first collective work of its kind, Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace which is also free online in full pdf or chapter docs. Disclosure: I published the book--I do not know the author personally, but Jock Gill, a gifted communicator, exposed me to the author's earlier work on Open Spectrum, something that inspired my own informal views on "Open Everything" and unlike most of the other contributors that were identified by Tom Atlee or Mark Tovey (the editor), I personally sought his contribution to the book because of my very high regard for his "take" on all this.

I bought the book as a fan already, but the content easily validates my appreciation The discussion of first order pigeon-holing (the Weberian concept of bureaucracy applies), second order cross referencing (naturally limited and often wrong in early generations--Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal System are toast), versus unlimited tagging, chunking, clustering, socially-informed selection, and other aspects of the power of the collective, are all illuminated by this book.

I am further impressed early on with his stellar discussion of Mortimer Adler and the limitations of alphabetization. I was a penniless graduate student when I discovered the Great Books, and as a young officer, spent my first $700 acquiring a set. The Syntopicon that the author mentions in the book is better understood by the image I introduce above, something I created in 1979, my second of four analytic models (the first was on predicting revolution across all domains).

I have two notes at this point:

1) Truth or what can be known constantly changing, a fixed or slow to adapt "index" process cannot scale or survive.

2) 2008 election is already lost--neither candidate offers us what we deserve: listening instead of stump speeches; appointed cabinet and balanced budget now, as part of the campaign, instead of empty promises; and 24/7 interaction with all 65 political parties, instead of focusing on the one third that is their base and a slice of the middle third.

He emphasizes that knowledge is not top down, and with a tip of the hat to Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale and also facilitator for the nation-wide network of 27 separatist movements, I also post above an image of Epoch B "bottom up" leadership that none of our world leaders understand.

Page 80, discussion of Ranganathan (India) Colon Classification system impresses me. I think to myself, wow, needs to be integrated into Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language, or IEML.

The middle of the book discusses--engagingly, I feel--how the digital world enables infinite variations in relationships and labels that can in turn create infinite variations of just right, just in time, just enough visualizations.

Crowd tagging leads to sub-set clustering which leads to contextual sense-making.

He spend time on Wikipedia. I admire Jimbo Wales and try to attend the Wikimanias, but I have given up on Wikipedia because in the case of the Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) page, I had to give up--while the author would have me engage and patiently lead the recalcitrant along (I have 20 years experience with that in the real world) I have come to a different conclusion: I believe that anyone should be allowed to CREATE, but only master moderators should be allowed to destroy.

The summary of the book's message is offered by the author with four concepts:

1) Filter on the way OUT, not in (this is the difference between the read only publishing model, and the read-write Creative Commons model)

2) Put each leaf on as many branches as possible--unlike the physical world, each leaf can have infinite lives

3) Everything is meta data and everything can be a label (he provides a fine discussion of bar codes, RFIDs, and Thinglinks)

4) Give up control. He admires Wikipedia for doing precisely that. When I first started the modern OSINT movement in 1992, I coined the phrase, "Give up control to gain control" meaning that centralized intelligence had to give way to decentralized sharing and sense-making. The spies still don't get it, but public intelligence in the public interest is here to stay. A corollary here is that the best approach is to include all--optimize inclusiveness and diversity; and where there is conflict or disagreement, postpone exclusion or resolution, more data later will make it easier and easier to come back to...

The final section of the book deals with mapping the implicit, mining the clouds of tags, creating an infrastructure of meaning with infinite potential. I have a note: unites the eight tribes of intelligence (governmenbt, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-profits, and civil societies including religions and labor unions).

Other flyleaf notes:

+ Stupid works. Keep it simple and let it evolve on its own.

+ Bit by bit, not all at once. Provide for innovation at the intersections and on the margins

+ Kind of and sort of rule, not the black and white that did rule

+ I learn of Valdis Krebs and his concepts of social cartography

+ I am engaged with the discussion of information sprawl and natural typologies

+ The author concludes that the search for knowledge will constantly struggle between the simple and the complex (sources and methods).

+ Going meta is what is so cool about web ecology and evolution.

The author does NOT say this, but I mark his book down as being in favor of the human web of sense-making beating out the semantic web and machine learning schools.

Page 230, this is a quote that really grabs my attention: "It's not about who is right and who is wrong. It's how different points of view are negotiated, given context, and embodied with passion and interest. Individual thinking out-loud now have weight, and authority and expertise are losing some of their gravity." The rest of this page is equally good.

I am surprised to learn that the author holds a PhD in philosophy, and that he advised Howard Dean. I am not surprised to learn that he has been twice renewed as a fellow at the Berkman Center.

Other books that have engaged me and for which I have reviews:
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition

There are many others, most obvious. Please do see the two images I post above--I firmly believe that the last eight years were a gift from heaven, a necessarily catastrophic gutting of our Nation so that we might properly conclude that both political parties stink with corruption, and it is time we put We the People back into the Republic, 24/7. This book is a solid brick in our foundation for understanding why this is both possible, and necessary.

As someone involved in Web mining research and education, I have read Weinberger's "everything is miscellaneous" with a different perspective than most other reviewers. I consider this book essential reading for researchers in text mining and categorization because Weinberger points toward what could very well be the future of organization. This means that all our existing data mining-based models of text classification, categorization, retrieval, ...etc, may very well be affected by this new (third) order of organization.
What many negative reviewers seem to have missed is that the challenges imposed by such heaps of leaves (instead of a neatly structures tree) should be handled by automated text mining, link analysis, and collaborative filtering techniques, instead of putting the burden solely on the Humans themselves. This is not Man against the (social) machine. Rather it is the machine "along with" the social machine.
Only that we may have to reconsider our current text mining models in the light of the third order of organization, because most of the traditional models are based on the first and second orders of organization (they "learn" simple labels/categories, trees/hierarchies, and so forth).

I had to add the following reply to some of the reviewers who posted negative reviews about Winberger's book:
While I disagree with your negative opinion about the book, I still respect your opinion because people's reviews are naturally "subjective". You and I do not have to have the same opinion about "stuff". This is why no one of us (you or me) has the sole authority to "classify" Weinberger's book as good or bad, because our opinions (and those of the rest of the people on Earth) are indeed "miscellaneous". This is exactly one of Weinbergers' points. That there are sometimes "multiple" classifications, that ought to coexist together, and no one of them should be silenced by one archaic traditional classification system.

I am a 23 yr. old woman reading a book that was written in 1963 for and about women. I thought this book would help me learn more about women's history, but it was a huge eye-opener and a complete inspiration. The chapters in this book still describe me as a young American woman almost 40 yrs. later. Every woman and man should read this book. It has completely opened my eyes.

Betty Friedan's 1962 classic on feminism, based on her own interviews as well as research by others, like: Sigmund Freud (who she generally disagrees with), Margaret Mead, Dr. Alfred Kinsey, and Henry Maslow, provides insight into the status of American women of that era. Those who chose housewifery over higher education are especially maligned, less so are those who became educated and then obtained an MRS. According to Friedan, most women of that time felt unfulfilled living the life of a hausfrau. Each chapter covers a different aspect of the "feminine mystique" aka "mystique," phrases used interchangeably and occurring about 200 times in the book. "The problem that has no name" seems to be that American women were kept from growing to their full capacities due to the expectations of others. The author provides alternately what seems like reasonable, reliable information on women, for example, the attitude of many men (and probably some women) that they needn't bother becoming educated because they will become wives and mothers anyway, as well as contentions and conclusions (sometimes based on others' research) that are excessively inflammatory or just plain wrong. Among them, the comparison of housewife wannabes with concentration camp victims, (p 423) `...the women...who grow up wanting to be "just a housewife," are in as much danger as the millions who walked to their own death in the concentration camps...' and that mothers are at least partially to blame for schizophrenia, (p 414) `As for the causes, the authorities felt that they "must examine the personality of the mother, who is the medium through which the primitive infant transforms himself into a socialized human being."' This sort of heavy-handedness is a major turnoff of the book. Ms. Friedan, founder of the National Organization for Women, fit the role of educated unsatisfied housewife that she wrote of so extensively (and had some pretty unconventional political views). In the epilogue she tells about her divorce (in 1969) after which she felt "less lonely than any time in her life."

As a college-educated mom, I too cringe every time I write "housewife" on the line marked "Occupation," but thankfully, gone are the days when women chose not to bother with college because being a wife and mother was so important. Hopefully, women who choose to have children and can afford to do so will make the choice that is best for their children (tougher than any paying job I've ever had). The Feminine Mystique was a landmark book in the 1960s, and contains information that is both timeless and timely, spot on and off the mark. I found some of the historical information and research particularly interesting, but her personal interviews with women generally awful. Those who loved this book will likely also enjoy: The Awakening by Kate Chopin, Loving Frank by Nancy Horan, The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, Servants of the Map by Andrea Barrett, and Runaway by Alice Munro.

Betty Friedan is known for her work in feminism, this book is well written. All modern women should read this book for a point of reference. Good read, a good reference book to own.

I have long avoided reading this book, since I knew that Ms Friedan had a low opinion of housewives, and being one myself, I didn't think reading this book would do me any good. However, I finally took the plunge, and found it even worse than I had imagined.

Ms Friedan's loathing for the housewife is so venemous that it took me quite aback. Housewives, she reckoned, are mentally arrested, infantile women, afraid to engage in the 'real world' of work (it goes without saying that the workplace is more 'real' than the home, at any rate in Ms Friedan's estimation).

Her theory was that any woman who spent her life as a housewife was wasting her time, only in paid work could a woman really find fulfillment. And not just any paid work either. She doesn't have a kind word to say for the men who work at jobs which are not exciting, fulfilling, and challenging either. The housewife is no more making a significant contribution to society, she tells us, than is the man imagines he has built a car because he tightens the bolts on the assembly line. It doesn't seem to occur to Ms Friedan that we can't all be brain surgeons, college professors, and high court judges. Someone's got to tighten the bolts.

Ms Friedan believed that the rash of divorces in America at the time she was writing the book (early 60s) were caused by men being sick of supporting their useless wives. However, since nowadays most wives work, and since the rate of divorce has not noticeably decreased, I can't help feeling that perhaps the zombie-like housewife is not ENTIRELY to blame for this situation. She thought housewives were to blame for child-battering and homosexuality as well. Neither of those things have noticeably decreased since women gave up being housewives.

Even women who are not housewives are not necessarily safe from Ms Friedan's icy disapproval. She launches an attack on Shirley Jackson and Jean Kerr, both of whom wrote sublimely funny books about raising their children. Ms Friedan seems to be annoyed that even a career woman might think that her children are worth writing about.

But then I'm only a dumb housewife, what would I know?

Let me start off by saying that this book got an additional star from me because I completely agree with the point of this book: That if woman doesn't stand up and provide themselves with an identity and use themselves to their whole potential, they will become incomplete and nothing. This is mainly summed up in the chapter: A New Life Plan for Women. I recommend this book simply on this chapter. It is inspiring, positive, and relevant for women to read, even to this day. However, the rest of this book was hard for me to get through. In reference to the title of my review, I am young and perhaps I can't relate to some of the issues Ms. Friedan has brought up because of the women's movement of the '60's and '70's which has provided me with more opportunity, as a woman, to make life and career choices for myself without pressure or guilt. I am glad that I don't have the restrictions that women had back then and I am so grateful that there were women out there that knew our potential and were not willing to compromise it. But asides from possibly not liking the material because I found it hard to relate to, I did find that Ms.Friedan used alot of subject matter that is at best, subjective (for instance, the chapter Mistaken Choice was absurdly biased-- she makes references that the men in the military that were rejected for service due to mental issues usually came from homes that had doting overly loving mothers, that juvenile deliquency was non-existent in the homes of mothers who worked, that Russian children were more stable and adjusted than American children because their mothers worked or had interests outside the home etc, and that she even goes to imply that over loving a child is more traumatic for the child than raising them in a household where whippings and beatings are frequent possibilties.) There are other scattered observations that she made that I found hard to swallow as well, such as part of the chapter The Sexual Sell which implies that business caters to the homemakers because they do all the buying, and that mothers with careers or serious interests outside the home do not have the time to take to buy from business. I find it hard to believe that big business couldn't capitalize on the working mom. I can't believe that a working mom wouldn't be interested in an appliance that could cut her time to get chores done back then as well as today. That part of the chapter made no sense to me. Basically, I felt that Ms. Friedan used a lot of subjective facts, scare tactics (mother and housewife bashing), and propaganda that was unnecessary, at best, to get to her more inspiring point. I felt that all that "material" detracted from the point of the book, but I am glad I made it all the way through to get to the "New Plan." That's where the "heart of the artichoke" lies. But to those of you who feel that the point of the book is, "women who are unhappy with their lives are this way because they don't have a job" are missing the point. While although it is evident that she found her calling through her career and those around her (upper middle class women with privilege) did the same, her point is for women to challenge themselves and demand more than what is offered. Don't settle for less.

The Fire Next Time is a wonderful collection of 2
spirited essays on Baldwin's evolution from a naive
church boy into a spirited man. His journey leads
him to question his relationship with Christ and
particularly Christianity. He truly believes that
one should not be drawn into a particular religion
out of fear but out of love for humanity.

His beliefs on the acceptance of others and racial
equality are provocative and yet sorely needed in
today's mixed-up world. However, I believe that
Baldwin is almost utopic to the point of being
naive in believing that racism will one day
completely evaporate, though I do believe that
things have gotten better. Still, it's truly sad
that this book and his work has been swept under
the rug but Baldwin always seems to amaze me with
his thought-provoking outlook on life. This book
is a gem of a novel, an easy read and his underlying
message of believing in humanity is sure to be praised
by open-minded readers for years to come.

I had to read this book, as many people told me if your a reader this is one you must not simply read but own. So I got it and started reading. It never really grabbed me, but I made it through. I plan to read it again within at a different time.

The man knew what he was talking about, when he said the U S would burn because of racial discord.

My sense is that Baldwin wrote The Fire Next Time for anyone who had ears to hear, regardless of color or faith or gender. The emotional intelligence with which he speaks is riveting.

Wonderful prose -- use of language.