Social Sciences Books

This is the "authorized" and "sound bite," version of a few of the highlights of American history, dumbed-down so much so that even those with short attention spans would get it. It follows Robert Whul's rule of "When the fact becomes legend, go with the legend." That is what has been done here: We have all of the favorite unchallenged legends of American history strung together as literary sound bites.

Although it is sure to be a best seller, since it is a regurgitation of the standard line, it is exactly what any respectable Historian dreads: selective isolated facts strewn across time without a context and with little rhyme or reason. Under the false banner of patriotism, this book is not a "Time for Freedom" but a "time to cash in on one's celebrity as "Second Lady."

As an alternative, to this red, white and blue, hors d'oeurve, I recommend any good Junior High History textbook, at least there you also get good pictures, charts and graphs.

Absolutely dreadful and shameful; one star.

I am a senior citizen and use Lynne Cheney's A Time for Freedom as a way to look up historical dates, events and leaders all the time. Cheney has taken the most important information and condensed it in an understandable way for all readers. An excellent handbook and guide to history, a must for all home libraries.

Save you money! This isn't really suitable for anyone who cares what their children read. Much, much better can be found elsewhere.

Lynne does an excellent job affixing the white ruling class idelogy for your guppy children to soak up and defend. Too bad she doesn't plan to share the bounty stolen by her supremist perspective. There are much better ways to fill your children with wonder and optimism than to indocrinate them with one-sided vitrol wrapped in warmly illustrated fantasy art. People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (P.S.)Theres a reason it sells for 96% off every day- propaganda is never expensive, you get what you pay for... unless your a robber barron's wife!

E.D.Hill has interviewed a great many people for this work and has compiled them into a series of interesting anecdotes

Great source of info on processed foods. It should be a class requirement in grade school health class. People might eat better if they knew what they were really eating.

I thought this would be enjoyable reading, but the tone of the book thoughout was so about not offending anyone. I mean, 50% of our food--whole and processed--is genetically modified, created by a chemical company responsible for Roundup, Agent Orange, postcancer drugs, etc., and that's OK with Steve? All that gets is a little footnote at the bottom of the page? And I wanted to know if stearic acid and sodium stearylate or however you spell it is animal-byproduct-derived, but there was no mention of anything about that--just vague mentionings throughout about "emulsifiers" and whatnot. This book serves no purpose. Hated it.

This is the sort of book I would normally enjoy. Filled with arcane details and delightful trivia, the odysseys of the huge number of products that come together to make Twinkies should be a fun read. But it wasn't.

Part of the problem is that he is not a good writer. There are many of those "Well, that's not the right word there" moments, where he has chosen a word or syntax that made me stop and note the writing (in a negative way) rather than the tale. One example. On page 48 he describes Marmite, a goop I'm quite familiar with. He describes it as "tasting like a salty, bitter, awful form of molasses." The texture is not at all like molasses. Nor the flavor. The color sort of is; it is, after all, brown, but the word "awful" really makes this already weak and unhelpful description sound as if written by a 10 year old. One example among many I could choose.

Then there are the endlessly unfunny asides. If we were casually chatting on an airplane, I might find his little jokes amusing. (Though I doubt it.) But the snide and unwitty remarks of the "this is also used in the manufacture of anti-freeze" variety make this a loser. Am I supposed to be afraid? Worried? Amused? Or just what?

He repeatedly uses terms without defining them (e.g., crumb) but with other terms repeats the definition. A glossary might have been nice.

Ultimately, there is nothing much here. Endless tales of huge tanks and vats and train cars and spinning things and precipitating liquids and complex processes (many of which he is not allowed to see) all blur together. Do I really need to read how each one is made? All these less than 2% chemicals that are swirled together in a process he never sees? Maybe someone cares, but I did not. I bought this book having never heard of it, based on these delightful reviews, but I was not delighted.

Anyone who's ever eaten a Twinkie remembers the experience, even if it's been years. The textured, firm, sweet dough combined with the intense vanilla creme (not cream, mind you) filling is distinctive and, especially when you're a kid, delicious, yet obviously somehow sinful and wrong and unnatural at the same time.

Twinkie, Deconstructed is a perfect "sick day in bed" book: a sort of "science lite" non-fiction tome that's fascinating, informative, and non-polemical while still making a political point. I finished it in a little over a day while in the hospital.

The concept is brilliant. Prompted by a question from one of his kids, Ettlinger, a long-time science and consumer products writer, tells a story of traveling around the world to find out where each of the dozens of ingredients in a Hostess Twinkie comes from--in the order in which they're listed on the package. In doing so, he visits a lot more factories than farms, and encounters many more industrial centrifuges than ploughs.

Some reviewers think that Ettlinger got co-opted into the "Twinkie-Industrial Complex" (as he calls it) during the writing of the book. They think that he is too accepting, too uncritical, and indeed too friendly to the various large corporate interests who show him (or, in many cases, refuse to show him) around their facilities and processes. But I think he's smarter and more subversive than that.

Here's something from page 195:

"In an undisclosed location, perhaps in an industrial park near Chicago, maybe in rural, central Pennsylvania, possibly in riparian Delaware, in a plant full of tanks, railroad sidings, and a maze of pipes and catwalks, big, stainless steel vats are filled with fresh, hot, luscious, liquefied sorbitan monostearate."

Or check out this label-text Kremlinology from page 255:

"...while it seems that not one natural color is use in Twinkies, sometime the label has said 'color added,' which would make me suspect that annato, the butter and cheese colorant that is popular with [Hostess's] competitors, is indeed in the mix. But their punctuation indicates otherwise. 'Color added' is followed by '(yellow 5 red 40)' which would seem to indicate grammatically that they are the only colors involved."

One of the most obvious stylistic effects throughout the book is that whenever Ettlinger first mentions a trademarked product, he adds the registered trademark symbol: Yoo-hoo(R) Chocolate Drink, PAM(R) cooking spray, Clabber Girl(R), Davis(R), and Calumet(R) baking soda, and so on. Normally you'd only see things written that way in a press release or corporate brochure.

You might think he was simply pressured by company lawyers, but when I read the book every trademark symbol seemed to me like a wink from the author, an unavoidable reminder that while he's breezing along in his personal, gee-whiz style, he hasn't forgotten that the process of Twinkie-making is huge and industrial, one that has only a little to do with baking and nourishment, and a lot with multinational chemical firms and drill rigs and mines and massive tract farms.

Twinkie, Deconstructed is no Silent Spring, or even Super Size Me. It's neither a manifesto nor a satire. It's not horrified at what Twinkies are made of--because ingredients originating from petroleum or minerals rather than food plants or animals is part of the Twinkie legend. What's surprising is only how far some of those ingredients have to travel, and how extensively they have to be mangled, reprocessed, ground, dissolved, flung, and dried before they get used in even minute quantities to bake those little cakes.

Ettlinger's book is, I think, more effective because he doesn't politicize it overtly. He simply tells us, repeatedly and relentlessly, about conveyor belts, pipes, pressure vessels, railroad cars, noxious chemical reactions, huge stainless steel tanks, monstrous earth-moving equipment, and what obviously must be enormous quantities of energy used in all those processes. He talks just as blithely about factories that refuse to tell him where their ingredients come from at all as he does friendly chemical engineers who show him around less secretive facilities. You can draw your own conclusions.

I did find myself wishing, at the end, that he had calculated how much energy a single Twinkie consumes in its manufacture--how much oil or coal or gas, or how many kilowatt-hours of electricity, it takes to bring all those ingredients together. And I was surprised that, after nearly 300 pages of background, Ettlinger never actually describes step-by-step how a Twinkie is made at the Hostess bakery.

But Twinkie, Deconstructed is a fun read. Whether you feel safe eating a Twinkie afterwards is a message you can safely infer from the book, rather than having to be clubbed over the head with it.

So I'm at the bookstore, and I noticed this bright orange book on a rack, with a large Twinkie on the cover. Twinkies? I'm fascinated by Twinkies, and have been ever since I put a pair into a jar in 2005, where they sit to this day, stale and hard as rocks but otherwise unspoiled. I looked at the title: Twinkie, Deconstructed: My Journey to Discover How the Ingredients Found in Processed Foods Are Grown, Mined (Yes, Mined), and Manipulated into What America Eats. Oh, I like that. I am highly disturbed by the amount of processing that goes into our food. So I bought it and took it home and read it, even though I knew nothing about the author, because I like surprises in books. And I got one. It seems after reading this that Steve Ettlinger, the man who wrote this and several other food books, is not horrified as I am by the chemicals and machinery that process our food, nor is he disgusted by the source of most of the food additives. Oh, no: he finds it fascinating. It was like reading a canned travelogue by a corporate shill as he goes on an ersatz tour of discovery. The majority of the commentary in the book was along the lines of, "Gee, that machine over there, where they're mixing corn with six different toxic chemicals in order to make it look bright orange, is really, really big!" or "Golly, ain't it a wonder that such a delicious food comes from a petrochemical factory in China! If only we in America could eliminate our labor laws, we could make this wondrous product ourselves!" I took to reading this book in Troy McClure's voice, since it reminded me so much of his Meat Council film on how meat gets from the farm into your stomach. Everything was spun so that it was supposed to depict the miracle of modern industry, the wondrousness of how these massive, shadowy chemical conglomerates manage to make food so easy to make and sell, and so appealing to an unsuspecting public, on such a huge scale. Whenever he visited one of these plants, he was not allowed to see the process that goes into making the actual additive, but he was allowed to gawp at the 80-story buildings and the 1000-ton train cars and the 1,000,000-gallon mixing tanks. Every single company he describes, the first thing he talks about is the scale: how big the buildings and machines are, how much material they take in and how much they pump out every day, every year.

I suppose you could, as some of my fellow reviewers did, see the book as raising questions and provoking thought. But how much of a question needs to be raised here? How much thought do we need to put into these things? The entire thing was disgusting to me. The whole system boils down to this: we eat grains like wheat, soybeans and corn; minerals like salt and soda ash (baking soda), and oil. Lots and lots of oil. I don't know what it is about petrochemicals that make them so handy for the artificial food industry, but the last several chapters of the book (He wrote it in the same order as the list of ingredients on a Twinkie wrapper, which is clever but tends to de-emphasize the most horrid things, which are in there in much smaller proportions that high fructose corn syrup -- though that's really pretty nasty, too.) are all about different ways that oil and natural gas get messed with chemically in order to produce flavorings, dyes, and preservatives. And reading all of this with this author who actually takes the word of the company that all of the toxins are removed after processing and the food is perfectly healthy for human consumption -- it was amazing to watch him swallow that one; it was like watching a boa constrictor eat a Vespa -- gave the whole thing such a surreal aura that it was even more bizarre and uncomfortable to read than it should have been just based on the subject. It amazed me that someone could find out so many terrible things and think so little of it.

Then again, I guess it was like a little slice of America.

So, pretend you are a girl named Suze (short for Susannah) and ever since you have been a little girl, you were a Mediator. (That means that you can talk to ghosts.)
You have lived your whole life (up until 15) knowing this, and you are starting to get sick of ghosts asking you to do favors for them, people thinking that you are crazy, talking to people who aren't there, and getting caught by the police for breaking and entering because "you were trying to stop a ghost murder." And to make it even weirder, your dead dad, who has been dead for quite some time now, pops up at random times to try and scare you. That is Susannah Simon's life. Enter a move to Florida, a new family, (new stepbrothers and a step dad,) and a new room that comes with (what else!) a male ghost named Jessie!!

At her new school, she is becoming more popular then she ever dreamed. But there are still dangers around the corner. Never knowing when she will see another ghost, she tries to get used to the fact that this "gift" is never going away. Read about how Suze does find another enemy ghost, more dangerous than anything before. You will be rooting Suze and her "untraditional" method of battling ghosts on through all the chapters. And you will be shocked at some of the interesting surprises along the way. I loved this book and this series because Suze has such a spunky personality without even trying. Meg Cabot has created something wonderful by writing these books. And I plan to read all of them.

Nora S.
Grade 6
Ms. Kawatachi

I am a book lover, and I'll read almost anything. This Book (series really) is one of my favorites. The writing isn't brillant, but sometimes the storyline counts more. Its about a girl who moves from New York to California. All she wants is to start over, but wait... there's a ghost of a 150 year old cowboy in her bedroom. It's funny, but serouse at the same time, sort of like reading a book by Fred and George Weasly. Well that was how the language was anyway.

A great start to an even better series. This book really opened the door up on this series to me. I'm only working on the third book but I know the rest of the books in the Mediator series are going to be just as great.

Suze has to move with her mom to LA with her moms new husband and 3 boys. Her dad died when she was younger and he still hasn't moved on. she meets that best looking ghost shes ever seen. And even if she won't admit it, shes totally in love with him. And he even saves her life when the ghost heather goes crazy because shes mad she killed herself and now shes taking revenge on the reason she killed herself in the first place.
I highly recommend!

This book was awesome. I enjoyed every part of it, and I was interested in the topic about mediators. The only one thing that I do have to criticize about this book is that the main character isn't catholic. I am, so in many ways, I found her beliefs conflicting with my own. It was nothing too extreme, but I wasn't fully comfortable with it.
Although, the fact that the preist was the principal made up for it. The story line is well-written. I found Suze's character perfect in the way that she was realistic and not the type where the author just makes them perfect. If you're looking for something to enjoy, pick this book up. It is finish in a day material.

This was a fantastic book. It had everything a book should have, and is a good read that will leave you wanting more.

thank you for selling this book. it made it to me in great time and is in excellent condition. thanks!

"Interviewing for Solutions" is wonderful. I would encourage anyone interested in Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) to read this book. "Interviewing for Solutions" supplies the reader with a overview of SFBT, as well as demonstrating SFBT in action via examples of interviews with various clients. Regardless of the counseling orientation one takes when assisting clients, the book provides valuable tools for all! In addition to this book, I would highly suggest obtaining a few of the lecture tapes of Berg, de Shazer and etc from the Brief Family Therapy Center.

Although solution focused-brief therapy is considered a paradigm, this book could very well be used in any introductory, microskills class, and it should.

The authors put forth a paradigm that is easy to learn (yet technique is perfected with much experience),and it places focus on the client's "non-problem" life. This is important because what we tend to focus on tends to increase.

The authors present SF in a way that is very empowering to both the therapist and the client. For the therapist who is interested in genuinely helping people, this will work, but you cannot use this approach and have an ego-issue w/regard to being an "expert." Rightly, the client is the expert on his/her own life.

A first-class text, and a keeper!

In the year 2000, this book was my first acquaintance with the solution focused approach to helping people. I had heard from a collegue (who is also a management coach) about solution focused working and, although I thought it sounded promising, I remained a bit skeptical. However, from the very moment I started reading 'Interviewing for solutions' my attention was firmly captured. Two chapters later I was practically sold. The approach is very clearly explained and the many dialogues in the book are really excellent (especially those by Insoo Kim Berg). After reading this book I started reading and learning more and I began using solution focused working in my practise as a coach and consultant. With peasure and success.

Great strengths based approach to working with families and young people from vulnerable communities.

Imperialistic colonization and foreign domination are a stain on the forehead of democracy.
But since when monopolization of ethical thoughts under the pretext of urban development and building a nation fed by foreign interests paved the way to progress and national prosperity?

This book might appear as anti- European propaganda, but it is not.

The severe tone of the book is not to be ignored, and I admit the arguments lack historic foundation, nevertheless, the scars of African sufferings are still bleeding, and there is a powerful lesson to learn from this book.

Here is the best one-volume history of this misunderstood continent, one which highlights Africans' agency and creativity. Now in a third edition, it has more useful features than any competitors. Numerous superb illustrations present images ranging from rare to famous. The maps are even better, allowing readers to locate places, peoples and developments precisely. And the text displays Shillington's mastery of all the latest scholarly work on the continent. His sober, balanced approach is sometimes dry, but the style is always readable. Publisher and author claim that "History of Africa" is both a high school and college text, but plentiful (not excessive) detail makes it a challenge for all but the most advanced secondary students. More direct quotations from oral and written sources would improve the book, but this is a minor problem remedied by using supplementary materials. Lastly, the cost is reasonable, less than half the average for comparable surveys of Western Civ or US history. This volume will satisfy the curiosity of the general public too.

Shillington provides a good survey style textbook on African history from antiquity to the modern period. He covers in great detail and quality of the relationship between Africa and Islam as well as the nature of slavery and apartheid. He covers the slave trade in quite a bit of detail, explaining the value of the African as a marketable commodity. He also explains the origins of apartheid as a colonial parting gift that became entrenched racist national policy for more than fifty years. Shillington's survey is quite appropriate for a high school African history class, an undergraduate African history survey or introduction or even as a first book for a graduate African history course. The topics covered here are obviously from an Africanist point of view although there is a minimum, if any, level of bias on Shillington's part.

Shillington blames Europe for all of Africa's ills but he fails to put forth a good case arguing why we should agree with him. The views presented in "History of Africa" are compatible with the current trend in academia, but these interpretations are controversial nevertheless, and should be treated as such. That is why it is disappointing to see an argument without depth or verification. The format is just as telling: it mimics a textbook. "History of Africa" gives a matter-of-fact overview, complete with his dressings of bias, which are presented as irrefutable truths. No counterargument is ever addressed.

Picture a one-sided thesis about Africa as an exploited land, where the continent is portrayed as unable to progress thanks to outside intervention...but wait, this is not Shillington's "History of Africa"; first you must take away all of the supportive details and footnotes - if they were ever there to begin with - leaving only tiny fragments of the original thesis to be sprinkled throughout an encyclopedic article about Africa...THAT mishmash is Shillingon's "History of Africa. His point of view is presumably borrowed from some of the texts in his diminutive bibliography.

It is worth noting that "History of Africa" contains an impressive collection of images. Accentuating the positive, perhaps one could even say the text should be thought of as the cliff notes to select works. Still, this is dumbed-down education at its finest.

I had the good fortune to be introduced to this book by reading it aloud as a volunteer for Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. Shillington builds a lucid case that the decline of the Egyptian civilization coincided with a shift away from trade and toward imperial domination -- which failed over long distances. Each chapter provides a clear perspective and a compelling read. High praise for a textbook!

this was another gift for my daughter she enjoys readin she liked this one also

Small's book is a must read for prospective and new parents. I was amazed to discover how bizarre some American child-rearing habits are, when viewed with a global perspective. One of the passages that struck me most is where Small examines non-human primate behavior, and she describes a female gorilla in a zoo that kept getting pregnant and having babies only to lose them for lack of knowing what to do. She would hold the baby gorilla to her chest, but facing outwards! The zookeepers brought in a new mother-- a human mother-- to breastfeed her baby in full view of this otherwise isolated gorilla mom, and she learned by observation how to do it right! Amazing. Like many Americans who are newish parents, as a kid I didn't see many babies close-up, certainly not breast-fed ones. I was lucky to have a sister-in-law that gave me this book while I was pregnant. Small's cross-cultural perspective makes a lot of sense wtihout being proscriptive, and she gave me the courage to trust my nurturing instincts despite many relatives and well-meaning friends of my parent's generation who gave me contradictory advice. I see other reviews that claim Small has some bias toward the !Kung society, but it's probably because that is the last example of what early human societies were like (i.e., hunter-gatherer), and is most similar to the evolutionary context in which humans developed. Nothing in biology makes sense, exept in light of evolution (said T. Dobzhansky), and it's true for human behavior as well.

I have found this book to be so interesting and useful that I recommend it to all of my friends. One friend credits it with helping her decide that she does want to have children! Small does not make judgements in her book about parenting choices. She is a scientist who presents information based on biology and anthropology. More than any "parenting" book I've ever seen, she gives details about the biology of breastfeeding. She explains the process, hormone shifts, and even evolutionary theory on the origins of nursing a baby. In my opinion, every new parent should know the biological expectations their new baby has of them. If someone is going to use a crib, bottle feed, let their baby cry themselves to sleep every night, etc. then they should at least know the costs those things will have. Educated decisions beat out "choices" any day.

I've been reading this book for the past few days and I am appalled at how biased it is against any Western practices in child rearing. Any American or European practices are considered lacking at best and abusive at worst. I found this to be highly offensive. I have to say that I am surprised by the many positive reviews for this book! Perhaps those who enjoyed it are strong supporters of attachment parenting.

This book gave an anthropological, evolutionary, perspective on infant care. I thought the most valuable insight this book gave was identifying the Western culture's focus on independence and how common parenting practices subconciously and consciously focus on independence. It gave me some perspective on why I was doing what I was doing.

You can tell she is a proponent of cosleeping, babywearing, and breastfeeding. So she emphasizes the positive health advantages of doing these things and how doing these things are more in line with meeting the biological/evolutionary needs of a baby, but she does continue that not doing these things, or doing these things on various continuums, do become cultural norms in order for parents to get the things done that they need to do. And that other cultures, (besides Western culture) do wean their babies, or allow other people to carry their babies, or have the baby sleep in their own bed, but in the same room. She notes that the Western culture is extreme in not doing these things, which is fine, but because it goes against a babies evolutionary/biological needs the trade off is generally a baby who cries more.

I liked the fact that this wasn't a how to book. I liked it because it described how some primitive cultures care for their baby, and I liked the fact that primitive cultures had behaviors that I felt weren't perfect. I liked it because it allows you to think about various parenting choices and analyze the motivations of your choices and whether or not you are willing to accept the possible consequences.

This book was in perfect condition when I received it. My only issue with my purchase was when I received it. The only option for shipping when I ordered was standard shipping, not sure why?? Anyway it took about two weeks to get to me. All in all, it was worth the wait.

If you want to hear the truth about the old days, here it is. This was a perfect example of what many people in El Barrio saw and/or did. Its so real that if you read certain passages slowly, and then close your eyes, you could actually see how it went down. This book can help you look deep and realize that we, in this day and age, have it 50 times better than our fathers and grandfathers. Lets thank our stars and our parents. Praise to you "Don" Piri.

Down These Mean Streets is the story of Piri Thomas' journey into adulthood. The book is set in Spanish Harlem in the 1940s. The author's writing style is refreshing and lyrical. He uses some Spanish words here and there(readers might find the glossary in the back of the book helpful), and kicks in a few slang words as well, which makes the dialogs that much more genuine.

Piri struggles through poverty, family troubles, and desperately wanting to belong. He fights with being a dark skinned Puerto Rican during a time when racism was strong, and trying to find his place as neither black nor white. Piri did some not-so-good things in his life, being in a gang, drug addiction, and armed robbery among other things, but throughout it all it is easy to tell that Piri is a good guy at heart.

Overall, this is a captivating story. You might find yourself wondering what you would have done faced with the same situations. I even found myself rooting for Piri at times. This book is still a very accurate depiction of "the hoods" of New York, despite being published for the first time about 40 years ago.

I was sad to have to finish the book, and in the end I felt like I knew Piri. I look forward to re-reading this book over the years. It is truly a classic. Everyone should read it. Anyone can find something in the story that they will be able to relate to.

This book really told me what it was like to live in Harlem in the 40s. The discrimination and racism is real and raw (although Mr Thomas does get a little jaded and think all white people are bad). The way he describes coming off heroin is realistic, colorful, and explosive. This whole book is very alive, as a memoir. It was funny to see the slang they used back then!

I've read this book more than a few times and have taught it to different level readers a few extra times. There was one high school student who came to me after the book was done and told me, "This is the first book I ever finished." Even if it's not the first book you've read, you'll find writing that is fearless, honest, and powerful. You won't forget it, and if you're really lucky, you'll get to share it with someone else.

I gifted my 12 year old niece with this book. I wasn't sure how she was going to respond to a book about cleaning up her mess of a bedroom but the ideas are straight forward, fun and easy to put into practice. She immediately read several of the sections and went about setting her space up into 'zones'. We have done several of the craftier ideas together, spending time doing a fun project, while all the while working towards a more organized space.

Great summaries of different theoretical approaches to working with families including techniques and where the theory originated from.

I am currently taking a Family Therapy course and I mistakenly bought this book. After buying the required text and examining the two, I decided that this one was a "keeper."

The authors are practioners in the field who have accumulated years of wisdom and knowledge about how the family functions. They do an excellent job of presenting the major treatment paradigms, without injecting their own biases into the explanation. I found this book to be immensely readable, and easy to digest and apply. I have been using this book more than the required text for the simple reason that it is very well organized, the theoretical presentations well thought out, and the writing style is warm and engaging.

I definately recommend this book. No way I will resell this one.

This is a clear, concise and informative text that outlines the fundementals of family therapy. The title accurately describes the text. A must for those who are entering into family therapy!

This is one of the best textbooks I have encountered for the beginning family therapist. It offers great theoretical explanation with helpful application to everyday practice. I would recommend it to anyone!

There is nothing I can say that would do any justice as to how great this book is. It was everything you could possibly hope for in an ethnographic text. You learn a lot about a culture very different from ours and it is truly just fascinating!

What do people make of places? Basso's opening sentence is a good example of what the Apache call `letting one's mind have room'. As we read through the chapters of the book Basso continues to add layers to the meaning of this opening question. It allows us to reflect on various uses of the word `make'. We make sense of places by interpreting them. We make places intelligible by foregrounding them. We make use of places; as sign posts or land-marks through the use of descriptive naming. We make places or constitute them as sites or repositories of learning; we invest them as placeholders for morality tales or homilies. We make places vital; we invest them with agency, we enchant them, animate them, in the spirit of golems; we take a piece of earth and through magic or metaphysics we bring it alive, giving it a mission and a life of its own.

Wisdom sits in places. The Apache are a good example of virtue ethics. This is a theory of ethics, usually based on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which argues against an ethical universalism and in favor of a particularism. It foregoes the quest for nomothetic foundations and looks instead to the development of certain skills or character traits. Aristotle created a catalogue of areas of behavior or traits with a continuum of possible dispositions. The virtuous behavior was the means between the two extremes of each continuum. Thus the virtue of bravery was somewhere in the range between cowardice and foolhardiness or irrational voluntarism in the face of impossible odds or a meaningless risk.
Aristotle's concept of phronesis finds an interesting parallel in the Apache moral imagination. Phronesis is a meta-virtue; it is the ability to choose the right action for each particular event; the ability to find the virtuous means between vicious poles. It is the essential skill for particularism which is the theory that the right action, the correct moral choice is particular to each unique event. It is opposed to the universalist proposition that there are sets of moral propositions or codes that we can apply in a covering law model. Universalism holds that when two of our moral codes clash we resolve the dilemma by applying a meta-rule, most commonly a deontological (Kantian) or utilitarian proposition.
The Apache's sense of wisdom is a good example of a pragmatic ethics informed by a set of virtues that are learned and continually developed throughout their life's journey. In the first chapter we note how each speaker brings the homily (the moral lesson associated with a place name) forward, making it their own, fleshing it out. One imagines that each speaker and hearer of place names is expected to silently immerse themselves in each homily; making it real by seeing it happen. The act of giving vision to the oral narrative is a process of developing layers upon layers of particular exemplars of the lesson. It is thus internalized and carried forward for the next use. As one gains wisdom one becomes more proficient at seeing when and where to apply these lessons.
This is similar to the thought of the American pragmatist and logician, C. S. Peirce, who proposed a fallibilism about knowledge, truth, and scientific results. He felt that we were always discovering more and that a full statement of any putative universal law was always deferred. Peirce's original pragmatism differed from what James and Dewey later made of it. For Peirce we expanded our sense of a truth through a process of discovering layers upon layers of particular applications and gradually gaining more of an understanding of the wider truth. But his sense of fallibilism posited rich moral concepts such as justice or duty as essentially contested concepts.

We have maps in our heads. There are other interesting parallels with the ancient Greeks besides virtue ethics. There is a significant body of study regarding Plato's thought on the spoken and written word. Plato argued that reality resides in absolute and eternal forms. Thus the impressions available to our senses are imitations that is but a shadow of these eternal truths; they confuse us and should not be trusted. Worse still are the imitations of imitations; thus his polemics against poetry, art, and the written word. It would be interesting to combine this with the study of texts in the 20th century to look at the Apache's preference for maps in the head. Barthes, Derrida and others all expanded our notion of what can serve as texts and it might be interesting to look at Apache use of places through some of those lenses.
In addition there are interesting parallels with the sophists. Although Plato and Socrates succeeded in creating our contemporary disdain for sophism, recent work in the study of Isocrates and others brings a new appreciation of certain tenets of sophism. The sophists exhibited some similarities to the Apache notions of epistemology. They both saw the elders and ancestors as the source of wisdom and warrants for knowledge to be used for current problems. They both argued that the knowledge of the past resided less in universal laws than in practices of the ancestors; actual responses to past dilemmas that are best accessed through interpretation rather than a rote use of the covering law model or a slavish rehearsal of rigid and dogmatic rituals.
They both thought that knowledge (as justified true belief) was discovered and ultimately ratified and warranted by the voice of the majority; the interpretation that found the most general favor. The sophists proposed that vigorous debate in an open forum of citizens is the most epistemologically sound form of inquiry. Their best speakers would take both sides on various propositions of what the ancestors would have done in the current crisis. The goal was to make the best possible argument for all options and let the citizenry decide.
Both the ancient Greeks and the Apache continued to observe religious rituals but it would also be interesting to compare characteristics of their religious cosmology, the role of the gods, and their associations with natural entities and nature in general.

This book was mediocre at best. Although Keith Basso did provide some insight into why the Apache people cherish their land, I felt that Basso kept on saying the exact same thing in every sentence. I had the point of the entire book by the time I was ten pages into it, and it kept on going, therefore making me lose my concentration on what I was reading.

Anthropologists, language students, and Native American culture afficionados will find this book, and any by Keith Basso, written links into a cultural past which struggles to exist today. As the Western Apache tribes become more modern, the information found in this and other Keith Basso writings, become necessities in the preservation of traditional Apache culture; with the exception of the knowledge of a few hundred very traditional Apaches still living in Arizona.

What do people make of places? This is the central question examined by Keith Basso in his ethno-linguistic study of the relationship between language and landscape among the Apaches of Cibecue, on the Fort Apache Reservation in central Arizona. Basso, a professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, has spent over 30 years conducting field work among the Western Apaches. His publications concerning this group include articles on language, patterns of silence in social interaction, witchcraft beliefs, and ceremonial symbolism, among others. The idea for Wisdom Sits in Places stemmed from a study conducted between 1979 and 1984, in which Basso, with the help of a grant from the National Science Foundation and the guidance of the Apaches, conducted a study of Apache places and place-names; how the Apache refer to their land, the stories behind the place-names, and how these place-names are used in daily conversation by Apache men and women. The result is a stunningly informative account of the use of landscape and language in the social interactions of the Western Apaches.
Basso divides his book into four sections: Quoting the Ancestors, Stalking with Stories, Speaking with Names, and Wisdom Sits in Places. Each chapter's focus is to examine how landscape and language serve distinct purposes in Western Apache society. Basso incorporates the oral history of, and discussions with, local Apaches, as well as his formal training as an ethnographer-linguist, to explain the underlying themes of this book.
First, Basso introduces the reader to the idea of place-names and in the Western Apache construction of history. As conceived by the Apaches, the past is a "well-worn `path' or `trail' which was traveled first by the people's founding ancestors and which subsequent generations of Apaches have traveled ever since" (31). The ancestors gave names to places, based on events that occurred there. Regardless of the physical changes in the landscape that occurred over time, the story of what took place, as well as the place-name, was passed down through generations and serves as a connection between the people and their ancestors.
Second, Basso examines how the language and the land are "manipulated by Apaches to promote compliance with standards for acceptable social behavior and the moral values which support them" (41). The historical tales of place-names are without exception morality tales, intended to influence patterns of social action. Their purpose is to serve as warnings, criticisms, and enlightenment for those who are behaving improperly; not in accordance with the Apache way of life. The telling of a historical tale is "intended as a critical and remedial response" to an individual's having committed one or more social offenses. Apaches contend that if the message is taken to heart, a lasting bond will have been created between that individual and the site at which the events in the tale took place. In short, the land, accompanied with its historical tale, "makes the people live right" (61).
Third, through the act of "speaking with names", place-names can be condensed "into compact form their essential moral truths" (101). "Speaking with names" is considered appropriate only under certain circumstances, generally to enable those who engage in it "to acknowledge a regrettable circumstance without explicitly judging it, to exhibit solicitude without openly proclaiming it, and to offer advice without appearing to do so" (91). Evoking images of a particular place and narrative thus replaces a more direct form of advice or criticism, with "a minimum of linguistic means" (103).
Finally, with the guidance of his Apache friend, Dudley Patterson, Basso examines the path of wisdom in Western Apache society. Patterson explains there are two mental conditions, "steadiness of mind", and "resilience of mind", which lead to a third and most desirable condition, smoothness of mind. These three conditions are not innate; therefore, one must work on one's mind in order to gain wisdom. To work on one's mind, "one must observe different places, learn their Apache place-names, and reflect on traditional narratives that underscore the virtues of wisdom" (134). A resilient mind, according to Patterson, does not "give in to panic or fall prey to spasms of anxiety or succumb to spells of crippling worry" (132). A steady mind is "unhampered by feelings of arrogance or pride, anger or vindictiveness, jealously or lust" (133). Steadiness and resilience give way to a sense of "cleared space" or "area free of obstruction", conditions necessary for smoothness of mind. Only those who continue on the trail of wisdom their whole lives come closest to having a smooth mind, and are "able to foresee disaster, fend off misfortune, and avoid explosive conflicts with other persons" (131). Thus, wisdom is intertwined with the idea of survival through the consistent and thoughtful evocation of landscape and language.
Keith Basso and the Western Apaches of Cibecue have provided readers with an insightful and provocative account of the connection between language, land, and a people's cultural history. Wisdom Sits in Places opens the door for future research on place-names by shedding light on a previously overshadowed topic in anthropological studies. Basso's dissection of certain stories and social interactions can be overwhelming and a bit dry, but his purpose is made clear when his examinations are added together with the Apache narratives. What results is a clear picture of what language and landscape mean to the Western Apaches, the functional versatility of place-names, and the importance of being aware of one's sense of place.