Page last updated:
A catch-all category to hold some of the general social scientific reading that I've done. Where would you put A Mouthful of Rocks?
| What I've been read in the past - Sociology |
| Date | Author | Title |
|---|
[Finished 15 June 2010] An interesting book, although there is a lengthy chapter on the best Chinese restaurant in the world which is indirectly acknowledged as an attempt to pad out the size of the book and is almost completely dispensable. Lee also has a tendency towards some of the organizational flaws which are all too common in contemporary narrative non-fiction, but even so, she does some great detective work in ferreting out the origins of not only the titular fortune cooke, but also chop suey (a staple of the Chinese restaurants of my childhood which is now almost completely extinct) and General Tso’s chicken, among other things.
[Finished 9 November 2009] I had decided that I needed to know a bit more about the Zapatista movement than my casual acquaintance with the facts provided (and that the wikipedia article covered), so based on a citation of this book by wikipedia, I decided to dig a bit deeper.
As might be expected in a book edited by Tom Hayden, there is a strong leftist slant in the information provided, something which left me a little dissatisfied as I found a fair amount of the writing felt more like hagiography than analysis (although there were a few token dissenting pieces, I would expect there to be a greater depth of serious critique of the Zapatista project in existence. Then again, given the intellectual bankruptcy of American conservatism, perhaps not). Most appealing were the direct interactions with Subcommandante Marcos whose intelligence, wit and charisma show in his writings and his interviews with others. I also found a wealth of background on the history and sociology of Mexico in general and Chiapas in particular.
My primary complaint about the book is that the choice of organization fails to provide a comprehensive narrative and Hayden’s introductions tended to be redundant rather than illuminating.
[Finished 5 November 2009] A long long book on Gary Gilmore, the first person executed after the Supreme Court ban on the death penalty was lifted in the 1970s. I have vague memories of the execution in the news (I was eight at the time, so more concerned with legos and dinosaurs than with someone being executed in a distant state), but the book does a lot to illuminate events using the non-fiction novel format to detail Gilmore’s life as well as the lives of those around him.
Mailer manages to weave the materials he had (he came onto the project after Gilmore’s death and relied on interviews with Gilmore gathered by others as well as is own interviews with principals of the events) into a compelling interview which has left Gilmore a weighty presence in my consciousness even after finishing the book.
[Finished 24 September 2009] My wife saw this book sitting on my desk while I was reading and asked whether I had been inspired by an exhibit of photographs of Chicano history we had seen a week earlier. I told her no, I needed to learn how to organize farm workers for a short story that I was writing.
And given that I had this rather prosaic goal in mind, this book did a great job of explaining what made the UFW movement so successful. Ganz was one of the early outside volunteers with the movement who later moved into an organizational position with the UFW. He provides a clear-eyed accounting of what happened, and is never afraid to talk about mistakes that were made, nor does he treat Cesar Chavez as an infallible saint (the final chapter that talks about the decline of the UFW is especially noteworthy in this respect; it’s very common for progressives to want to overlook the faults of their leaders, especially charismatic and successful leaders like Chavez. Ganz has no such illusions and while he is able to point to the successful moves of Chavez with the rest of them, he has no problem discussing Chavez’s failings and the organizational problems of the latter-day UFW).
[Finished 8 September 2009] Much of the core of the story in this book I learned from Koeppel’s interviews on NPR (he was on Fresh Air and, I think, Science Friday), but it’s still interesting to get the details filled in, to see how banana cultivation represents the ultimate monoculture, with all bananas in a given variety being genetically identical.
Koeppel makes a compelling case for the importance of GM techniques in creating a future for the banana and points out that since bananas are sterile and propagate only through cloning that many of the concerns about GM techniques in other plants are inapplicable when it comes to the banana. Given that in Africa the banana is a central part of the diet (in some areas 70% of the caloric intake comes from bananas), preserving a future for the banana makes for a critical concern on the continent.
Confessions of a Spy: The Real Story of Aldrich Ames by Pete Earley
[Finished 15 August 2009] It’s infrequently that I decide to read a book and then read it right away. I have nine shelves of unread books at my side right now, and I keep a list of books that I plan to check out from the library which currently has over 100 titles in it (I’d never counted until just now: I’m shocked at how long the list is). All of which means that when I come to a book, I may have no reason how I heard of it or what motivated me to read it (perhaps I should start adding notes into the library book list, at least).
This is the third Pete Earley book on spies which appeared in my library list. How I decided to read this batch of books eludes my recall, but I find myself thinking that perhaps one day I might write a spy novel. One thing that I find intriguing are the common threads in the stories that Earley tells. Is this because of Earley’s own editorial bias (unconscious or not), or because his subjects read the earlier books and imposed others’ motivations on their own stories, or possibly that’s just the way things are. For example, I notice that it seems that many of the men profiled found themselves frustrate by how much both the US and the USSR were uninterested in the intelligence that the future double agents thought was really important. When men like Ames considered intelligence to be little more than a game, there may have been a grain of truth in that.
[Finished 28 July 2009] As a movie buff, when I first heard about this book, about a father who lets his son drop out of school and not work in exchange for watching three movies a week with him was one that I couldn’t pass up.
As a memoir, it has the usual not-quite-story-arc structure of real life, and at times Gilmour’s teenage son’s travails in his love life can get repetitive, and the film commentary which is pretty dense in the early days of the story start to fade away later in the book. But on the other hand, it’s an interesting account of hands-off parenting (eventually) turning out alright, although the route there is circuitous and leads the reader (and Gilmour) to wonder whether it’s all a big mistake.
[Finished 28 July 2008] It’s hard to read this book and not get angry. So many of the contemporary problems in the economy were foreseeable and foreseen. Especially if we dig deeper, we can see that things are even worse than they seem.
[Finished 4 June 2008] Reading this book really changed how I saw those around me. I checked this out of the library the day that I began a three-day business trip and finished it two days later. Understanding a bit of the lives of those toil for low wages in the face of this made me see the invisible services that took place behind the trip quite differently. Realizing that the maids who cleaned my hotel room each day faced a grueling schedule (and with a shift towards paying them by the room, rather than by the hour, they were quite possibly making less than minimum wage).
Perhaps most startling is to think about how hard Ehrenreich had making ends meet with gasoline at $2 a gallon. Now that gasoline is more than double that, small wonder that bicycle and transit use has skyrocketed.
Inside the Company: CIA Diary by Philip Agee
[Finished 15 April 2008] It’s not often that a book mentions in its closing passages exactly what’s wrong with it. As a book written to serve a particular agenda, in this case to expose the CIA’s efforts to undermine democracies in Latin America in the name of fighting communism.
Parts of the book are fascinating, particularly when Agee manages to give a good accounting of his own personal experiences, but large parts of it are a dump of classified information whether code names for CIA operations or listings of CIA operatives. If Agee were a better writer, it could have been a better book, but instead it ends up being little more than an attempt to harm the CIA (and this from a leftist who is fully in agreement with Agee’s beliefs).
[Finished 4 May 2007] It sounds like a great concept: An architecture writer with $100,000 in the house sets out to see what she can buy for that money somewhere in America. And the first chapter, where she goes to “architecture camp” in Vermont sets us up for something promising.
But the promise isn’t fulfilled because for a book like this which is as much travelogue as reporting requires that we have a guide that we enjoy spending the trip with, and Jacobs is that most obnoxious sort of New Yorker: No place is good enough because it just isn’t New York. The other cities in America, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, are just places to get through on the way to another rural area which will be dismissed because it’s just some remote area where there aren’t enough hip people (or too many hip people) for it to be comfortably similar to living in Manhattan.
Worse still, in a book about architecture, there is one essential ingredient which is painfully absent. PICTURES. I’m sorry Ms Jacobs, but your prose is not sufficient to convey the feel of the homes you describe without abundant illustration to accompany them. Instead we’re treated to one(!) illustration per chapter, which often isn’t even the most interesting-sounding building from the chapter.
[Finished 23 December 2006] I picked this up as research on my current novel, although as the author pointed out to me in an e-mail after I’d ordered it, it tells me more about how contemporary Czechs view things than providing the kind of historical background that I needed. But even so, given the conservative nature of Czech tastes (for example, the Czech diet remains largely unchanged even after the transition from Hapsburg dependency to republic to communism to the current state of affairs). Even just for some pointers on some of the names and locations of some chief landmarks, it has been invaluable. The compilation of pop culture is also, for its own sake, a significant work.
[Finished 23 August 2006] Every so often a book comes along that can radically change the way that you lead your life. For me this is one of those books. I first heard of Michael Pollan when he was interviewed on NPR’s Science Friday (if you don’t read the book, at least listen to the interview).
My wife and I generally make an effort to eat healthy foods, and whenever possible organics, but I hadn’t considered the implications of some of what’s happening in the industrial food chain in America. The realization that local food is probably more important than organic food, for example (the food that Americans eat travels an average of 1500 miles to get to their table). Or the thought that a huge percentage of what we eat has its origins as corn grown in Iowa (not just the obvious things like corn syrup, but most of the other ingredients that don’t sound like food on the label of your processed food come from corn). Add in that most of our meat is corn-fed now, whether or not that animal is designed to eat it and we have some serious recipes for disaster. The various e. coli outbreaks in the meat supply chain are a direct consequence of feeding beef cows corn (these sorts of infections are not an issue for grass-fed cows). This leads us to such abuses of the food chain like irradiated meat and the widespread use of antibiotics in animal feed which leads primarily to the development of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria.
So what changes have been made? The big one is a stronger drive towards eating local foods. It’s a hard habit to break, especially when you walk into the supermarket in August and see stacks of gorgeous-looking Australian-grown oranges (although the high price should be a deterrent). Avoiding high fructose corn syrup means avoiding almost all processed foods which is a frightening prospect (take a look at the labels sometime: It’s in everything: Bread, lunch meat, soup, salad dressing...).
Living in L.A. we have access to a superabundance of farmer’s markets at least, although there seems to only be one Community Supported Agriculture farm that serves our area.
The first two sections of the book are definitely the best part. The hunter-gatherer meal, was less interesting to me, if only because I really don’t see myself willing to get so close to my food chain as to actually hunt my own wild meat (although my wife and I have contemplated the possibility that game meat might be the healthiest possible option, on second thought though, we just don’t eat that much meat to begin with).
Now to find the L.A.-area restaurants that use local foods...
Stations of the Cross: A Latin American Pilgrimage by Dorothee Soelle
[Finished 27 March 2006] It startles me to think how much the concerns of the late 80s and early 90s have melted away. Which is not to say that the underlying problems have disappeared, but rather that they no longer demand our attention in the same way that they did 10-20 years ago.
Reading this book was a reminder of this sort of shift in attention. When I bought this (1992 or 1993, I think), Latin America was a big issue for me. Now, I rarely think about it, unless Hugo Chavez is mentioned in the news (which seems reasonably frequently), it having been pushed out of the forefront of my consciousness by such horrors as the current war in Iraq, or the problems of Africa. This is not to say that the problems are gone away, however, and this book is a good reminder of just what was and is at stake in Latin America.
The book provides a good ground-level view of the issues facing the poor of South and Central America, and while Soelle falls into the bad habit of glamorizing the pre-Columbian native American lifestyle, a fault which conservative critics would likely use as ammunition to attempt to discredit the whole of her work, it’s a compelling read. It’s a pity that it’s fallen out of print, showing that I’m not the only one whose attention has been diverted from Latin America.
[Finished 16 December 2005] I’d heard about this book before I picked it up after the buy 2 get 1 free table at Border’s. The author is also a contributor to NPR and I’d heard him interviewed on ATC or Morning Edition. I remembered thinking that reading the encyclopedia seemed like it would be fun, although I have yet to make the endeavor myself.
The organization of the book, which is a sort of autobiography mixed with some philosophy and nuggets of knowledge from the pages of The Encyclopaedia Brittanica is an entertaining and quick read. Plus anytime I felt self-congratulatory because I knew, for example, just why the Brittanica seems to say so much about type designers (Stanley Morrison, who had been publicity director of Monotype during their golden age of the 20s and early 30s was later on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica), I only had to note that this is Jacobs’ fourth published book. I have yet to make it to number one.
[Finished 15 October 2005] A fascinating account of an anthropology professor’s study of college students. Rebekah Nathan (a pseudonym), took a year off of teaching, and entered the university where she taught as a freshman using only her high school transcripts for placement. She moved into the dorms for the year and took classes with the students.
There are some things that I read and my thought was, “duh, of course,” but much that I didn’t. The experience of attending a large state school is quite different than my own undergraduate experience of nearly twenty years ago at a small private college, and this is helps me get some insight into what my own students are going through. (It’s worth noting that my community college students have a different experience than do my Cal State students).
There are some insights here which I doubt that I would have ever found on my own, like the role of ethnic societies on campuses (non-majority students primarily interact with people who are not like them. This gives them a chance to spend time with people like them), and a handful of ideas which directly will impact my teaching, although much less of that than I had hoped.
[Finished 8 July 2004] Very hard to put down, Larson intertwines the story of the 1893 Columbian World’s Fair with the story of Dr H. H. Holmes, one of America’s first serial killers. I had had some familiarity with Holmes’ story already from the book Chicago by Gaslight, so this wasn’t completely new to me, but Larson’s ability to reconstruct the events in what he terms in his notes as “a plausible recreation” made the story that much more compelling.
At times the interweaving of the stories (along with the events leading to the assassination of Chicago mayor Carter H. Harrison) seemed a bit forced--I’m not entirely certain that the World’s Fair and Holmes were so closely intertwined--but it remains a compelling read. I understand the movie rights have been bought. It will be interesting to see how it turns into a film.
My one complaint is that there is a severe paucity of pictures: Certainly the World’s Fair itself merits a few pages of photos, and there is at least one photo of Holmes’ building in Englewood in existence which I’d seen in Chicago by Gaslight.
[Finished 9 May 2004] A thought-provoking case study of the socialization of immigrant students in a northern California high school.
Olsen’s writing begins with a sense that we’re going to get a rather ideologically driven work, but thankfully, reality intervenes and her ideology is not a driving force in the work.
Few if any solutions are offered. Primarily this is a book about raising questions, designed to make teachers and administrators (and presumably also students and parents) think about questions of race, class and culture in American schools. I don’t see this as a book that will give me solutions for dealing with immigrant students in my classroom, but it is a book that will make me aware of the questions relating to their presence in the classroom.
[Finished 9 April 2004] Some of these essays I’d heard versions of previously on NPR (mostly This American Life, but I seem to remember one or two popping up on All Things Considered. They seemed to work a lot better as radio pieces, and after the first essay I kind of lost interest for a lot of the book. The essay on Austrian teachers in New York was interesting, but didn’t go into those aspects of the teachers’ lives that I was most interested in. Oh well.
Strange Deaths: More than 375 Freakish Fatalities by Ian Simmons
[Finished 24 July 2003] A Barnes and Noble publication given to me by my fiancée, this is a News of the Weird-style collection of odd deaths. Some I’d heard about, some were new to me. An entertaining way to spend a plane trip.
[Finished 26 May 2003] A rather dense academic treatise on how non-prosperous, non-white kids do in school and other contexts
[Finished 16 May 2003] More reading about prisons. In this case Wynn looks at what happens inside the Rikers Island penal colony and how it affects those who pass through it.
[Finished 18 February 2003] The genre of true crime can be a fascinating one, if the stories are told well and in this case, a biography of Sam Giancana written by Giancana’s brother and nephew is quite well told indeed. There are some claims in the book that are a bit dubious (e.g., that the outfit was responsible for the assassination of JFK), but even then, it’s well worth reading. And you’ll never call it the Mafia again.
[Finished 20 January 2003] I have no recollection of how I came across this book, but what a strange, bizarre and wonderful book it is.
Bondeson debunks the myth that live burials were ever really a serious issue, and while he’s not really able to get to why the fear should be so great (other than recurrence of the motif in fiction), he does provide some interesting history of the steps that were taken to avoid live burial.
[Finished 16 July 2002] Writing this two years after the fact, sadly, I just can’t remember this book. At all. I don’t remember buying it, I don’t remember reading it. I don’t remember owning it.
[Finished 10 July 2002] This is one of those books which was furtively passed around in my childhood, but as an upright youth, I never partook back then. I did now as a warped adult instead.
I knew a little about the Manson family from assorted news accounts (the usual three paragraph summary whenever Manson’s parole comes up), but this book does a pretty good job at attempting to reconstruct the actions and motives of the Manson family. There’s a limit to which one can explain such horrific acts, but this is about as good as you can hope for.
[Finished 28 June 2002] The title of this book plays with the meaning of reflection: This is not merely a reflection on what prisons are about, but also a look at how prisons reflect society. And while the funhouse mirror might not reflect ourselves as we think we look, it still reveals something about who we are. Prisons in the U.S. in particular reflect just how messed up we are as a society, how willing to throw away the lives of people without any real concern for what will become of them when they, inevitibly, are released back into society. But as long as our society is built around vengeance rather than justice, I suppose it shall always be that way.
[Finished 26 June 2002] It’s kind of funny when we have a president who claims Jesus as his favorite philosopher but doesn’t seem to understand any of Jesus’ teachings. There’s nothing exclusively Christian in non-violence, but there’s nothing authentically Christian in violence.
A combination of philosophy and history, this book looks at why non-violence works and considers a number of case studies (including a number of cases where the non-violent protestors ultimately failed in their aims, which gives this a much more authoritative vantage point than approaches to non-violence which point to India and say look, it worked there without addressing the whys of other non-violent causes.
And perhaps the most striking thing comes from the early chapters where we learn that no one can be governed without their consent, and therein is where the true power of non-violence lies: In being willing to say no.
Return Flight: Community Development Through Reneighboring Our Cities by Robert Lupton
[Finished 21 June 2002] A stunning tract: Lupton proposes that the solution to the ills of the inner city is to have the middle class move in, reversing the trend of white flight. There’s a lot to be said for this: If no one in the neighborhood has a job it’s difficult to get the concept that having a job is a normal thing to do. This is one of the big causes of the failure of public housing in the late twentieth century (in Chicago, this is partly the consequence of changes in rent policies which eliminated any sort of economic diversity in the projects).
Lupton has, in fact, put his money (or more accurately, his family) where his mouth is, and has actually moved into the inner city with his family and the stories here come from his own experiences.
The big failure that I can see here, however, is that Lupton doesn’t really address questions of gentrification. In many cities, there is a movement of the middle class back into the city center, but rather than helping raise up the poor who live in that area, they are instead being pushed out.
[Finished 15 August 2001] An accounting of the origins of the names of streets in Chicago along with occasional bits of history (although this latter is a bit thin and disappointing).
[Finished 13 May 2001] An enthralling account of the dark side of Chicago at the turn of the last century. It was fascinating to read about the assorted vice criminals, murderers and corrupt politicians of the era (not to mention connecting some of the addresses mentioned to what’s there today).
[Finished 12 May 2001] Baumeister is fast becoming one of my favorite non-fiction writers. His journal articles are especially fascinating. In this book, Baumeister turns to the question of evil. He makes a conscious point of avoiding literary depictions of evil and instead tries to apply social scientific tools to the question. What he found is that people tend to prefer not being evil in general and attempts to identify some of the root causes (one that stands out is that “evil” behavior is not generally rooted in a lack of self-esteem, but in fact the opposite: It’s generally a consequence of a surfeit of esteem.
I attempted once to replicate one of his studies in which he found that submissives outnumbered dominators in the alternative newspaper classifieds. In the issue of the Reader that I looked at, the opposite was quite the case.
[Finished 14 April 2001] Heavy number crunching looking at the patterns of religiosity and political belief among Mexican immigrants in the American southwest. Much of what the mainstream media seems to find surprising (they’re not all Catholics and they’re not all democrats) is quite clearly outlined here.
[Finished 9 February 2001] Skinner’s controversial work in which he argues for using behavioralist techniques to shape society. But ultimately, it’s much less controversial than the title would imply. Perhaps it’s just that I’m sympathetic to the behavioralist viewpoint (although not necessarily to the extremes that Skinner sometimes espoused, although I’m not sure that Skinner himself believed in those extremes--rather he was just being provocative to get his ideas debated), but much of Skinner’s arguments seemed eminently sensible.
[Finished November 2000] Chicago is a remarkably segregated city, and Rosen, in this book, decided to do a case study of his own neighborhood on the far south side of Chicago to see the processes that led to his neighborhood turning from a predominantly white neighborhood to a predominantly black neighborhood.
[Finished May 2000] An interesting look into the American class system. Definitely something that I should track down and re-read.
[Finished February 2000] I doubt that this would be notable if not for its author. Actually, I’m not sure it’s notable even with its author.
[Finished 9 April 1999] A great collection of essays from an accomplished writer who happens to also run a funeral home.
[Finished 19 January 1999] Rosser does a good job presenting the results of a series of related studies and discussing the implications of their findings, especially in their broader context.
[Finished 1 October 1998] Rather a jumbled mess. Prostitution, at least at the surface, presents a bit of a paradoxical situation for feminist thinkers (more problematic, even, than pornography, I think) and Brock and Thistlethwaite do a poor job of approaching the problem. A further problem is the insistence on linking prostitution with militarism (which may be the case in some contexts but is certainly not universal) and which was apparently done in an effort to enlist the support of people in the peace and justice community in addressing the prostitution problem.
[Finished 17 September 1998] A systematic exploration of where people derive the meanings in their life from a primarily social psychological standpoint. Baumeister tends to be rather dismissive of religion in general and Christianity in particular and occasionally dramatically demonstrates his lack of knowledge in the subject area (“Damn it Jim, I’m a psychologist, not a theologian!”), but still manages to provide a well-written, thoughtful exploration. His defining meaningfulness in terms of its objects rather than its loci is especially interesting to me.
[Finished 12 February 1998] Surprise: The Loved One was not as much of an exaggeration as you might have thought.
I heard Mitford on the radio a couple years ago. It’s all still true. The death industry in America is coldly calculated to separate you from as much of your money as possible.
[Finished 26 January 1998] How a book about real estate development in Chicago can omit all mention of Charlie Swibel I’ll never know. It’s the sort of omission that leads me to look at the rest of the book with a somewhat jaded eye (the curious mention of the then-unknown John Kass also struck me as odd). Nevertheless it’s still an interesting read and if read in conjunction with Ross Miller’s Here’s the Deal about block 39 a pretty good history of what’s involved in Chicago real estate development can be had.
[Finished 13 September 1997] Begun as a radio segment for NPR, this book is very much a sequel of sorts to There are No Children Here (below). Jones and Newman conducted a series of interviews over a six year span with their friends and neighbors in and around the Ida B. Wells housing project on the south side of Chicago. You may recall the name as the place where 5-year old Eric Morse was dropped to his death from a fourteenth-floor window. We’re exposed to the brutality and despair of the neighborhood although there’s some hope as well. Perhaps most striking is the outcome of Jones and Newman. As the book closes, Jones is preparing to begin college. Newman has been held back a year for discipline problems. Both are intelligent and articulate boys, in the same environment.
There are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America by Alex Kotlowitz
[Finished 9 September 1997] The west side has long been familiar to me, whether driving down
Washington or taking the “L”. Still, much of the space between Cicero
and Racine is terra incognita to me. This book is a personal account
of a couple years in the lives of two young boys growing up in the
Henry Horner homes. I’ve seen these buildings many times and have
spent a long time in their shadows. Still, the lives of their
residents have been largely unknown to me (in Chicago, even if your
social relations break racial barriers as do mine, crossing class
barriers is still quite difficult). The neglect of the projects and
the people who live in them is criminal and yet there are still
glimmers of hope. This book is one of those few that everyone should
read.