Social Sciences Books

It had some writing in it, but overall a good deal for the price. Thanks

87 years after the Declaration of Independence, the Emancipation Proclamation was enacted and after the the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution Enslaved Americans gained thier freedom.

Before the civil war Abolitionist were the Advocates of change in America the struggle to gain ones freedom from the experiences of slavery in the south is told from the true experiences of Fredrick Douglass. From Slavery to the Struggle for freedom to escape is the story told here, but also the story of survival to activism in the Abolitionist movement to change America.

During the nearly 100 years after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787 Black America finally found Freedom, But between Slavery and Freedom was the struggle of the freedom fighters of the Revolutionary Abolitinist Movement to bring slavery in America to an end. This is the story of the virtues of a victim of Slavery turned into a revolutionary success story, This is the story of Fredrick Douglass.

As a political junkie, I watch several news and commentary television shows. On the day that Barack Obama was declared the nominee of the Democratic Party for the presidency of the United States, black journalist Eugene Robinson was speaking. He said that we should all stop for a minute and appreciate the significance of this event. In the early 1960's black people had a very difficult time voting and in the southern United States, whites who killed blacks were generally acquitted if brought to trial. Now, there is the very real chance that a black person will be the next president.
One of the greatest assets Obama has is his incredible gift for speech and communication. He is extremely articulate and is capable of delivering his words in a manner that resonates. I was privileged to attend one of his rallies and was even able to ask him a question.
When blacks were slaves, they were property, nothing more. If their owner was dissatisfied, they could whip or even kill their slaves with impunity. Therefore, to truly appreciate and understand how far things have come in the United States, it is necessary to read some of the descriptions of how slaves were treated.
This is one of the best accounts of the horrors of slavery ever written. Douglass was one of the first articulate blacks to appeal to whites. He was even the vice presidential candidate of the Equal Rights Party in 1872. The presidential candidate was Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States.
Douglass describes the brutal and indiscriminant treatment that a slave was forced to endure. When a slave showed any sign of independence, the goal of the white supremacists was to break them by any means necessary. Mothers and fathers were separated from their children, food was withheld and physical mistreatment were all weapons in the arsenal of the slave-breaker.
In this moment of the triumph of racial equality, it is an excellent look back to read the writings of Douglass. It gives you a perspective on how truly historic the nomination of Barack Obama is and will continue to be.

The Narrative is another book, like Hiroshima, that ever person should read. The in-depth look into Douglass' life shows how slaves were treated during the 19th Century. It explains why the struggle for freedom that led to the American Civil War and why it was such a brutal confrontation.

"I expose slavery in this country, because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death." Frederic Douglass

Frederic Douglass tells us the REAL story about slavery in early America. From the first page to the last, I was totally transfixed. There are so many things to admire about this great American. On top of being brilliant and brave and benevolent and broad-minded, etc... what I truly admire about this amazing soul was the fact that he is able to tell us his story sans bitterness. For let me tell you, if the majority of us had to endure one iota of what this man went through... Let's just say that those saccharine sweet saga's like "Gone with the Wind" left a few pertinent things out!

This is one hell of a powerful story! The brutalities of slavery will disgust you, but to see this beautiful soul rise above it all is something special. He is the most important figure in nineteenth-century black American literature and a man that merits more attention than he gets. This is a magnificient achievement, an important work of art.

Very highly recommended!

I though that the service was great and I got the book in time. I like the fact that I can get the books for less in sites such as this so thanks for what you do.

The new addition by Brinkerhoff et. al., though it provides the basics for teaching introduction to Sociology and by far one of the best texts available, is more efficient, but sacrifices much needed information. The recent edition deletes a chapter and attempts to incorparate issues of poverty and inequality in the other chapters, but this really needs to be its own chapter, so I would recommend that they reintroduce it in future editions. Furthermore, their population and urban discussion is good, but its environmental discussion is weak. They really need to add a stronger environmental piece. Furthermore, I really thought that their section on religion was much better in the previous edition. Students had a much easier time grasping concepts. The authors redid this section and now the distinct sects and subsects are unclear. Finally, I would recommend that if you use this book that you find supplemental material on social stratification, social inequality and social differentiation because the book does a poor job discussing the differences. I also would recommend supplemental materials to discuss the race and ethnicity chapter because its discussion on ideological racism and its history is weak.

Despite my minor critiques, I still would hightly recommend this book.

While often overloaded with details, anecdotes, and apocrypha, Crabgrass Frontier is a passionate, informative investigation into the history of the suburb, both in America and elsewhere. The author clearly researched his stuff thoroughly, though one might wish for a bit LESS detail sometimes (his "evidentiary anecdotes" often get in the way of the narrative flow).

The sheer volume of detail and data make this a great book for the historian or history student (in college).
The passion of the author, and the light writing style, makes this a great book for the historical dabbler as well.

A good read, if at times a bit weighty.

Needed book for a college course, and the campus bookstore did not have it. It came within 10 days of order, standard shipping. could not ask for more.

Even though the book was written a while ago, it's still really good. I think the chapter on credit and housing was fascinating.

It's an acknowledged classic in the field of Urban History, but it's twenty years old and the last quarter of Crabgrass reads like it. Delores Hayden has covered the same ground in her more recent "Building Suburbia". The approach is hisorical, Jackson takes each period of suburbanization in chronological order. In terms of explanation for why America is so surburban, he focuses on government policy and the unique characteristics of the american middle class mind. Also, the fact that land is cheap is important. Readers may want to check out Building Suburbia for a more recent treatment of the same subject.

Jackson writes one of the seminal studies in urban history relating to the suburbs. The end conclusion is that suburbs have not been beneficial to the United States. This tracks things from the start of suburbanization to the downfall of downtowns. Race relations are a big part of the book as is the heralding of the automobile. Jackson writes very well and the book is wonderfully organized. If you are starting out in urban history this is an essential book to start off with. For those interested in post world war 2 American life this is also a must read.

This is one of the best reads I've ever read. The language is simple, and it is very interesting to read of so many different studies which reveal what's going on in our society or about our human behavior. Definitely looking for other compilations like these which enrich your knowledge and give you good reading as well.

McIntyre selected great content for this collection--the articles are interesting, thought-provoking, informative, and exciting. In fact, I'm buying the book AGAIN because I lost it, I have to write a research paper, and I can't think of a better source to use! It's a great starting point for nearly all pertinent social issues, and it's organized very cleverly with review questions at the end of each article. VERY good buy!

Guy Debord's THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is one of the most widely quoted and important works of the past fifty years. Society as spectacle has become one of the most frequently used descriptors for modern consumer society and the media that reinforces its basic principles. For instance, in only the past couple of weeks I have encountered frequent mentions of Debord in Telotte's REPLICATIONS: A ROBOTIC HISTORY OF THE SCIENCE FICTION FILM as well as an essay on a number of recent important SF films by Bukatman (contained in Kuhn's first anthology of essays on SF film, ALIEN ZONE) entitled "Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle." One encounters Debord's central image in literary critics like Fredric Jameson and a host of writers on popular culture such as Greil Marcus (especially in his LIPSTICK TRACES: A SECRET HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY).

Marcus's discussion of the Spectacle is at best vague, but I believe that is part of the source of its power. One sees -- to stay on the level of the SF film -- in movies like ROBOCOP the spectacle in full bloom, as the mass media through advertising pushes onto the public utterly irrational products like the 6000 SUX, a large luxury automobile that explicitly celebrates its horrible gas mileage and somehow makes this a reason for desiring it (in the course of the film a gunman holding hostages makes one of his demands a huge car that gets "really sh*tty gas mileage, like the 6000 SUX"). One can associate a wide range of phenomena with the Spectacle, from the endless hawking of products that are supposed to result in "a better you" to political regimes like the Bush administration that used the explicit, bald-faced lie as its primary tool for governing to our endless preoccupation with pseudo-celebrities like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and the contestants on AMERICAN IDLE (yeah I know that is spelled wrong). It is a flexible and versatile image that gets at our brute suspicion that our world is increasingly obsessed with what is not important but with what is trivial and unimportant. Debord's insight that the system of the spectacle elevates untruths to the level of uncontested beliefs is constantly on view, such as the absurd contention that the American news media -- one of the most conservative and compliant to the needs of the corporations that own it -- is "liberal." And when entities as the very conservative American news media or politicians like the fiscally conservative Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter are defined as "liberal" it shifts the "center" so far to the right as to make the far, far right seem mainstream. And the few voices that point this out -- such as Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who points out that he is, while the most liberal current member of the U. S. Supreme Court, in fact a moderate conservative -- are ignored. The celebrities, the pageant, the epic verbiage, the spectacle obscures history and prevents any other understanding either of history or of what kind of society would actually serve our real needs.

Both the major virtue and a major vice of both THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE and Debord's COMMENTS are the almost complete lack of structure. The former is written as a series of over 200 "Theses" that ramble over a host of matters. These are loosely arranged in chapters but I emphasize the word "loosely." Many comments are immediately clear and easily understood. Some passages are opaque to anyone who is not intimate with the most obscure debates concerning Marxist and Communist history. Some theses are brilliantly written and cut to the heart of our contemporary society; some theses are so dull and irrelevant that they may be guilty of killing brain cells. To say that THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is uneven is an understatement. The upside is that if you don't understand one page, nothing has been said to prevent you from understanding the next; if one page is flat, the next can be thrilling.

COMMENTS ON THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is, compared to the earlier work, very easy to read and understand. There is still some vagueness, but there is little that is impenetrable. It does a somewhat better job of connecting up the various bits and parts. He is more explicit here about precisely what his targets are. There might be a small parallel to a passage in Kierkegaard that he quotes at length in THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE. PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS (actually "Crumbs" -- it is a Biblical reference to the crumbs that fell from the rich man's table; here Kierkegaard imagines himself as the poor subjective thinker who has to content himself with the crumbs from the table of the great objective philosopher Hegel -- so far no translator has been willing to give the book the less impressive but more accurate title) deals with the problem of Christianity "algebraically" (in the Swenson translation), while the much larger sequel CONCLUDING UNSCIENTIFIC POSTSCRIPT "clothes it in its historical dress." So THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is more abstract; the COMMENTS more concrete. He makes several explicit (and scathing) references to Reagan; his allusions in the first book are far more illusive.

Despite Debord's hesitancy to be as clear as he might about his overall argument, his intent is clear: to indict the alliance and collusion between mass media, celebrity culture, market capitalism (and its expression in consumerism -- nicely captures in the title of Lizabeth Cohen's A CONSUMERS' REPUBLIC: THE POLITICS OF MASS CONSUMPTION IN POSTWAR AMERICA), and politics. And by remaining less than utterly specific, he made his work all that much more usable by other thinkers and writers. THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE remains one of the most important books for anyone interested in modern culture and society with which to be familiar, while the COMMENTS is an important tool in aiding that familiarity.

Read it and find out why...

Debord was a key member of the Situationists, that notable group of Parisien flaneurs (well, drunks, to be frank) who thought that by traversing the patchwork of the city on foot they could bring down the imposter structures of capitalist society from within. Sadly (or happily, depending on your socio-political point of view), they failed. But Debord's legacy remains in this fascinating book, broken down into Tractatus style fragments, a deeply philosophical book that examines the unreal nature of modern capitalism, the value of the commodity, something false, phoney, unreal. What happens, of course, is disillusionment with the commodity itself - Christmas presents received two days ago, at the time of writing, across the world are already discarded in cupboards, their value next to worthless as attentions move on.

Debord draws greatly on dialectics, that Hegelian structure of world history, inverted in a materialist fashion by Marx. Reality has given way to the spectacular - pseudo cities and countryside, not involving anything of reality or substance. People are alienated, wrapped up in a seizure of commodifying themselves to the hilt. And are miserable, of course. How to resolve this? Well, you could start by walking through the streets of your neighbourhood, intent on reclaiming the genuine and unravelling the structures of capitalism from...

I'm not sure if the translation is confusing, or the ideas being presented are confusing, or both. But this philosophical book is a lot of words written without saying much. I'm writing this because I purchased the book after reading the 17 reviewers who rated this book five stars. I was looking forward to an excellent treatise.
But instead I found the ideas confusing and random. It was difficult to
determine exactly was being presented.
I did like the Euclidean/Tractatus numbering system for the propositions.
But the ideas in those propositions weren't clearly written or easily understood by me.
To give you some background on me, I'm no fan of Hegel.
Ernest Becker's works give me a lot of insight, as do Nietzsche's.
I think this book assumes the reader is well-versed in Hegelian thought.
Maybe the reader needs to complete the Phenomenology of Mind before this work is accessible.

I haven't read any of the other translations of this text, however, this one reads quite fluidly.

The scope of the book sets the tone for one's consideration of contemporary events and societal relations. As research for a project on collaboration amongst individuals, the book was helpful in demonstrating that many forces are at work and are behind everything that exists in the world. This relates to collaboration in that each of us in a collaboration brings different histories to the table. The book also helps to illuminate the notion of the impossibility of non-collaboration. Even if the individual is from birth completely independant of others (which of course is quite improbable) their very existance comes into being through the cooperation of at least two separate forces (eg. the parents).

Debord shows us that the (two or more) forces which have led us to this point in history have done so, whether willingly or otherwise, together.

Awesome this book was like brand new, some of the stuff was still in its orginial wrapping. THANKS

Everything is very helpful in my public speaking. Its content is informative. :-)

The book that popped up when I searched this title turned out to be an older edition which di not have all the materials with it. Since I was intending to use it as a text for a course, it did not meet my needs and I had to return it.

I appreciate be able to buy textbooks at a very reduced rate. thanks

The book I received was an older edition(7th instead of 9th) and did not have all the CD's with it. I returned it in disgust and found the 2007 edition with all materials intact for a LOWER price at my college bookstore. To top it all off, Amazon tried to charge me for shipping the book BOTH ways. They featured the wrong book on their site. My advice: if you want the right book, don't trust Amazon's description. Search by the ISBN

This is a great resource for statistics classes. That being said, the text is certainly applicable as a self-help text to the statistics world. The text is easy to read, the concepts spelled out, and the examples very helpful. In the back of the book one will find answers to odd numbered questions, enabling one to constantly check on their success in learning the material. Statistics tables are also contained in the back, as with any statistics book. For those that want to brush up on their basic mathematical skills, the appendices also contain a basic mathematics review. Finally, there is a statistics organizer as the last appendix, which gives definitions for the statistical techniques, decision maps to aid in choosing the correct technique, and the required formulas for each technique. Suggested (but obviously not required) is the Study Guide for Gravetter and Wallnau's 5th Edition book. Although I didn't use this guide very often, it could be a very helpful aid to some, especially those that are learning statistics with minimal instructor feedback (such as an online course).

My first impression was that this book was priceless since it really helped me through the first couple of chapters in the main text. At the beginning it goes into lengthy, step-by-step instructions. I may not have felt as confident in the class if it had not been for this supplement. Once I reached chapter 6 and 7 it was all over!There was not enough information to help me understand what the book was losing me on, I needed to seek private tutoring at this point. Occasionally I still go to the book in the hopes that it can pick me up and get me through the homework but it does not. These later chapters may be too complicated to go into in a study guide but what would a study guide be for if not walking you through the steps? I am glad I bought it, just dissappointed that it quit so early.

This is the very best statistics book that I have purchased (and I have purchased 5 others trying to help me get a grasp on this subject)! I would recommend it to anyone who needs an easy--to-read and easy-to-understand textbook on this difficult subject! I hope it helps you as much as it has helped me!

This book is absolutely excellent. I have looked through other stats books and lost interest immediately, but this book is written in such a way that it actually makes you want to learn the material. Rather than just telling you how to solve the problem, the authors inform you as to why learning it is necessary, and frequently give you real-life, interesting scenarios regarding how specific formulas are used by psychologists.

Statistics, of course, becomes progressively more difficult over time, and you may need to seek outside help once you reach the last few chapters in particular. However, I believe that this book is the best of its kind, and it might be worth purchasing even if it is not your primary source for class, etc.

Having seriously struggled for the last two years with the statistics side of my Psychology studies, this book has really made things so much clearer. An excellent book for anyone struggling to grasp the basic statistical concepts required in behavioral sciences.