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Critical Discourse Studies in Context and Cognition edited by Christopher Hart (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture Series: John Benjamins Publishing Company) Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), under the general editors of Ruth Wodak and Greg Myers and associate editor Johann Unger, University of Lancaster, is an exciting research enterprise in which scholars are concerned with the discursive reproduction of power and inequality. However, researchers in CDS are increasingly recognizing the need to investigate the cognitive dimensions of discourse and context if they want to fully account for any connection between language, legitimization and social action. Critical Discourse Studies in Context and Cognition, edited by Christopher Hart, Northumbria University, presents a collection of papers in CDS concerned with various ideological discourses. Analyses are firmly rooted in linguistics and cognition constitutes a major focus of attention. The chapters, which are written by prominent researchers in CDS, come from a broad range of theoretical perspectives spanning pragmatics, cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics. More

The Uniqueness of Western Civilization by Ricardo Duchesne (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 28: Brill Academic) This extensively researched book argues that the development of a libertarian culture was an indispensable component of the rise of the West. The roots of the West's superior intellectual and artistic creativity should be traced back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers. Among the many fascinating topics discussed are: the ascendancy of multicultural historians and the degradation of European history; China's ecological endowments and imperial windfalls; military revolutions in Europe 1300-1800; the science and chivalry of Henry the Navigator; Judaism and its contribution to Western rationalism; the cultural richness of Max Weber versus the intellectual poverty of Pomeranz, Wong, Goldstone, Goody, and A.G. Frank; change without progress in the East; Hegel's Phenomenology of the [Western] Spirit; Nietzsche and the education of the Homeric Greeks; Kojeve's master-slave dialectic and the Western state of nature; Christian virtues and German aristocratic expansionism. More

Comprehensive Behavior Management: Individualized, Classroom, and Schoolwide Approaches, 2nd edition by Ronald C. Martella, J. Ron Nelson, Nancy E. Marchand-Martella and Mark O'Reilly (Sage Publications) One of the most critical issues facing teachers and related-services personnel today is behavior management. Behavior management consistently ranks as the most concerning issue in surveys completed by school personnel. Unfortunately, most do not feel well equipped to deal with the multitude of behavior problems they see every day in the schools. The authors say they wrote Comprehensive Behavior Management with these individuals in mind. It is critical for teachers and related personnel to receive high-quality training in behavior management; a solid textbook written by experts in the field that incorporates evidence-based best practices is an important foundational aspect of this training. More 

Windows to the Mind: Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Blending  by Sandra Handl and Hans-Jorg Schmid (Cognitive Linguistic Research; De Gruyter Mouton) Focusing on a wide range of linguistic structures, the articles in this volume explore the explanatory potential of two of the most influential cognitive-linguistic theories, conceptual metaphor and metonymy theory and conceptual blending theory. Whether enthusiastic or critical in their stance, the contributors seek to enhance our understanding of how conventional as well as creative ways of thinking influence our language and vice versa. More

 Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World by James Geary (Harper) "It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!" This is one of Shakespeare's most famous lines and one of the most well-known metaphors in literature. But metaphor is much more than a mere literary device employed by love-struck poets when they refer to their girlfriends as interstellar masses of incandescent gas. It is also intensely yet inconspicuously present in everything from ordinary conversation and commercial messaging to news reports and political speeches. Metaphor is at work in all fields of human endeavor, including economics, business, science, and psychology.

In I Is an Other, James Geary takes readers from Aristotle's investigation of metaphor right up to the latest neuroscientific insights into how metaphor works in the brain. Along the way, he demonstrates how metaphor affects financial decision making, how metaphor lurks behind effective advertisements, how metaphor inspires learning and discovery, and how metaphor can be used as a tool to achieve emotional insight and psychological change. Geary also explores how a life without metaphor, as experienced by some people with autism spectrum disorders, significantly changes the way a person interacts with the world. As Geary demonstrates, metaphor has leaped off the page and landed with a mighty splash right in the middle of our stream of consciousness. More  

Theory of Constraints Handbook by James Cox III and John Schleier (McGraw-Hill Professional) The definitive guide to the theory of constraints In this authoritative volume, the world's top Theory of Constraints (TOC) experts reveal how to implement the ground-breaking management and improvement methodology developed by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt. Theory of Constraints Handbook offers an in-depth examination of this revolutionary concept of bringing about global organization performance improvement by focusing on a few leverage points of the system. Clear explanations supplemented by examples and case studies define how the theory works, why it works, what issues are resolved, and what benefits accrue, and demonstrate how TOC can be applied to different industries and situations.

Theory of Constraints Handbook covers:

• Critical Chain Project Management for realizing major improvements in delivering projects on time, to specification, and within budget
• Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR), Buffer Management, and distribution for maximizing throughput and minimizing flow time
• Performance measures for applying Throughput Accounting to improve organizational performance
• Strategy, marketing, and sales techniques designed to increase sales closing rates and Throughput
• Thinking Processes for simple and complex environments
• TOC methods to ensure that services actions support escalating demand for services while retaining financial viability
• Integrating the TOC Thinking Processes, the Strategy and Tactic Tree, TOC measurements, the Five Focusing Steps of TOC, and Six Sigma as a system of tools for sustainable improvement More

Language Documentation: Practice and Values edited by Lenore A. Grenoble and N. Louanna Furbee (John Benjamins Publishing Company) Language documentation, also often called documentary linguistics, is a relatively new subfield in linguistics which has emerged in part as a response to the pressing need for collecting, describing, and archiving material on the increasing number of endangered languages.
Language Documentation details the most recent developments in this rapidly developing field with papers written by linguists primarily based in academic institutions in North America, although many conduct their fieldwork elsewhere. More 

We Are Our Language: An Ethnography of Language Revitalization in a Northern Athabascan Community (First Peoples, New Directions in Indigenous Studies) by Barbra A. Meek (University of Arizona Press) For many communities around the world, the revitalization or at least the preservation of an indigenous language is a pressing concern. Understanding the issue involves far more than compiling simple usage statistics or documenting the grammar of a tongue it requires examining the social practices and philosophies that affect indigenous language survival.
In presenting the case of Kaska, an endangered language in an Athapascan community in the Yukon, Barbra Meek, associate professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Michigan, asserts that language revitalization requires more than just linguistic rehabilitation; it demands a social transformation. The process must mend rips and tears in the social fabric of the language community that result from an enduring colonial history focused on termination. These disjunctures include government policies conflicting with community goals, widely varying teaching methods and generational viewpoints, and even clashing ideologies within the language community.
We Are Our Language provides the detailed investigation of language revitalization based on more than two years of active participation in local language renewal efforts. Each chapter focuses on a different dimension, such as spelling and expertise, conversation and social status, family practices, and bureaucratic involvement in local language choices. Each situation illustrates the balance between the desire for linguistic continuity and the reality of disruption. More

The Sociology of Childhood, 3rd edition by William A. Corsaro (Sociology for a New Century Series: Pine Forge Press) The Sociology of Childhood has been acclaimed as the best book available on the sociology of children. Author William A. Corsaro is the Robert H. Shaffer Class of 1967 Endowed Professor of Sociology at Indiana University, Bloomington where he won the Presidents Award for Distinguished Teaching in 1988.
The Sociology of Childhood presents a focus on children's relationships with peers and adults, including coverage of children's peer cultures from preschool through preadolescence. This third edition, like the first two editions, is about children and childhood from a sociological perspective. An interpretive perspective on the sociology of childhood is contrasted with more traditional socialization or outcome approaches. A special chapter reviews and evaluates different methodologies for studying children and childhood and discusses the special ethical consideration. The volume brings together Corsaros ideas and experiences gained from research and teaching in this area during the past 30 years. More

Catholic Social Thought: A Documentary Heritage by David J. O'Brien and Thomas A. Shannon (Orbis Books)  This classic compendium of church teaching offers the most complete access to more than 100 years of official statements of the Catholic Church on social issues.
With documents ranging from Pope Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum (1891) to Pope Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate (2009), this is the single most comprehensive collection available of the primary documents of Catholic social thought. Along with the complete texts of every essential papal encyclical, this volume also includes the important documents of the American bishops on peace, the economy, and racism. Every document is preceded by an introductory essay and helpful notes, making it an exceptional reference and teaching tool.
This updated and expanded edition of a classic reference work remains an indispensible tool for scholars and students, religious and lay people, and everyone concerned with the official statements of the Catholic Church on social issues and world peace. More

War and Sex: A Brief History of Men's Urge for Battle by John Van Houten Dippel (Prometheus Books) War or sex it's never been a simple either-or choice. In fact, making war and making love have a long, tangled, intimate history.
Why young men voluntarily go off to war has long defied understanding. Eagerly risking one's life seems contrary to the innate instinct for self-preservation. Are young males notorious risk takers courting death out of some irresistible altruistic impulse to sacrifice their lives for a larger cause or, conversely, do they expect something in return? More 

Escape the Improvement Trap: Five Ingredients Missing in Most Improvement Recipes by Michael Bremer and Brian McKibben (Productivity Press, CRC Press) Despite performance improvement initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Supply-Chain Management, only a handful of companies actually break out of the pack to transform their enterprises. This problem is not unique to today's improvement methodologies; the same issues existed when organizations first adopted TQM, re-engineering, and other popular improvement methodologies. Providing methods and metrics for effecting true change, Escape the Improvement Trap highlights how to avoid common improvement traps that inhibit many organizations from rising above the rest. More 

Becoming Eloquent: Advances in the emergence of language, human cognition, and modern cultures by Dr Francesco d'Errico and Jean-Marie Hombert (John Benjamins Publishing Company) Few topics of scientific enquiry have attracted more attention in the last decade than the origin and evolution of language. Few have offered an equivalent intellectual challenge for interdisciplinary collaborations between linguistics, cognitive science, prehistoric archaeology, palaeoanthropology, genetics, neurophysiology, computer science and robotics. The contributions presented in this volume reflect the multiplicity of interests and research strategy used to tackle this complex issue, summarize new relevant data and emerging theories, provide an updated view of this interdisciplinary venture, and, when possible, seek a future in this broad field of study. More

Tools of Engagement: Presenting and Training in a World of Social Media by Tom Bunzel (Pfeiffer) Times are rapidly changing in the presentation field in the early twenty-first century. Travel constraints, budget concerns, and the advent of new technology have mandated that many individuals who might have in the past addressed their audiences directly and personally need to do so electronically, across large distances.
In addition, the instantaneous nature of the Internet has made it possible for individuals and businesses to connect with each other in new and amazing ways, forging online communities and networks that commingle personal and professional issues.
The software and technology that enables this process is continually changing and is quite complex. While Fortune 500 corporations may still avail themselves of proprietary broadband networks that support sophisticated and expensive videoconferencing, more and more organizations are using reasonably priced software over the Internet to reach out to customers, clients, colleagues, students, constituencies, and other audiences. More 

Manifesto of the Critical Theory of Society and Religion by Rudolf Siebert (Studies in Critical Social Sciences: Brill Academic) A wonderful summa of an intensely lived social and religious life. Siebert provides seminal insights derived from the Social theory of the Frankfort school and grounded in neo-Kantian German idealism. This is fused with the new political theology grounded in a vision of human rights and universal justice as the legal and ethical measure human sciences and institutions. The work, though daunting at first sight, actually makes a wonderful primer for students seeking a unified vision of social order that is not antagonistic to the effect of transcendent in human relations.  The Manifesto develops further the Critical Theory of Religion intrinsic to the Critical Theory of Society of the Frankfurt School into a new paradigm of the Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy and Theology of Religion. Its central theme is the theodicy problem. The Manifesto approaches this theme in the framework of comparative religion and critical political theology in a narrative and discursive fashion. In search of a solution to the theodicy problem, the Manifesto explores trends in civil society toward Alternative Future I (the Totally Administered Society), Alternative Future II (the Militarized Society,), and Alternative Future III (the Reconciled Society) in the horizon of the longing for the Wholly Other as perfect justice and unconditional love. Likewise trends in alternative futures of religion are characterizes as I: Religious Fundamentalism, II: Modern and Postmodern Secularism, and III: The Open Dialectic between the religious and secular, toward a possible reconciliation. Toward that goal it relies on both the critical theory of society as developed by Max Horkheimer, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, and on the new political theology of Johannes B. Metz, Helmut Peukert, and Edmund Arens. Students and professors who are interested in psychology and social psychology, sociology and anthropology, philosophy and theology and comparative religion in public and private, secular and religious universities and colleges. More

Human Behavior in the Social Environment: A Multidimensional Perspective 4th edition by Jose B. Ashford. Craig Winston LeCroy (Brooks / Cole) In our first edition, we tried to do something very different. We attempted to bridge the chasm between issues of application and theory by bringing together our diverse expertise—a focus on human behavior theory and a focus on social work practice. Given our different skill sets (Jose teaches human behavior and Craig teaches social work practice), we hoped to write a textbook that would link the development of assessment skills with the examination of curriculum content relevant to Human Behavior and the Social Environment (HBSE) education policy standards. With this end in view, we are pleased that our efforts in writing our first edition helped stimulate a new generation of textbooks that now include issues of assessment in the coverage of HBSE foundation knowledge. More

Communicology: The New Science of Embodied Discourse edited by Deborah Eicher-Catt and Isaac E. Catt (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press) In the social sciences, communication is often ignored or treated as a means to more substantive ends. Moreover, much work within discourse study proceeds on deeply held, culturally embedded ontological and epistemological assumptions about communication. Uncritical approaches to communication and discourse prevail. Communicology provides an alternative to readers curious about the fundamental nature of human communication rather than viewing this phenomenon as the mere vehicle for referents or thoughts. More

Action and Agency in Dialogue: Passion, Incarnation and Ventriloquism by Franois Cooren, with a foreword by and Bruno Latour (Dialogue Studies Series, Volume 6: John Benjamins Publishing Co.) In the end, when you begin to become more familiar with agencies instead of the dummies that are made to speak (formerly known as the human speaking subjects), a totally different speech act theory is emerging. Although Cooren's book has not developed it completely, it is certainly in the offing when, in the last chapter, he compares the agencies able to make us organize ourselves with those able to produce political will or even with those able to make us feel amorous passions. In order to move from the egocentric to the agency-centric view, you just have to replace, in the notion of speech-act, the human actor by what has made this human actor act. No doubt that if we manage not to loose the empirical techniques of inquiry, a much more realistic picture of interactions will be drawn. Cooren's book is an important step in just this direction. More 

Semiotics at the Circus by Paul Bouissac (Semiotics, Communication and Cognition: De Gruyter, Mouton) What do circus performances communicate? They are rich in extreme skills and clever staging. They trigger strong emotions. They make beautiful sense. This book, which is grounded in the personal circus experience of the author, uses semiotics, pragmatics, and cultural studies to explain why we are irresistibly drawn to the circus. It shows how semiotics can be applied to understand and enhance our enjoyment. More

The Animals Reader: The Essential Classic and Contemporary Writings edited by Linda Kalof, and Amy Fitzgerald (Berg) The study of animals - and the relationship between humans and other animals - is now one of the most fiercely debated topics in contemporary science and culture.
Animals have a long history in human society, providing food, labour, sport and companionship as well as becoming objects for exhibit. More contemporary uses extend to animals as therapy and in scientific testing. As natural habitats continue to be destroyed, the rights of animals to co-exist on the planet - and their symbolic power as a connection between humans and the natural world - are ever more hotly contested.
The Animals Reader brings together the key classic and contemporary writings from Philosophy, Ethics, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Environmental Studies, History, Law and Science. As the first book of its kind, The Animals Reader provides a framework for understanding the current state of the multidisciplinary field of animal studies.This anthology will be invaluable for students across the Humanities and Social Sciences as well as for general readers. More

The Power of Positive Deviance: How Unlikely Innovators Solve the World's Toughest Problems by Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, and Monique Sternin (Harvard Business Press) Think of the toughest problems in your organization or community. What if they'd already been solved and you didn't even know it?

In The Power of Positive Deviance, the authors present a counterintuitive new approach to problem-solving. Their advice? Leverage positive deviants--the few individuals in a group who find unique ways to look at, and overcome, seemingly insoluble difficulties. By seeing solutions where others don't, positive deviants spread and sustain needed change.

With vivid, firsthand stories of how positive deviance has alleviated some of the world's toughest problems (malnutrition in Vietnam, staph infections in hospitals), the authors illuminate its core practices, including:

• Mobilizing communities to discover "invisible" solutions in their midst
• Using innovative designs to "act" your way into a new way of thinking instead of thinking your way into a new way of acting
• Confounding the organizational "immune response" seeking to sustain the status quo
• Inspiring and insightful, The Power of Positive Deviance unveils a potent new way to tackle the thorniest challenges in your own company and community. More

Human Behavior in the Social Environment: A Macro, National, and International Perspective by Rudolph Alexander, Jr. (Sage Publications) Taking a macro or broad perspective, Human Behavior in the Social Environment (HBSE) covers human behaviors within the social environment that is, how organizations, institutions, and communities impact individuals and families. Providing students with in-depth coverage of families, groups, and communities, the text encourages students to understand the nature of key macro institutions impact on human behaviors and vice versa. The primary chapters include a section on knowledge and theories followed by the impact on economic and social forces upon these topics. Students develop a knowledge of different macro HBSE theories including community, human conduct, inequality, and group theories. More 

Beyond Writing Culture: Current Intersections of Epistemologies and Practices of Representation edited by Olaf Zenker, Karsten Kumoll (Integration and Conflict Studies: Berghahn Books ) `This is a book that will attract a great deal of attention among anthropologists and social scientists in general. It is a great advance on earlier critiques of Writing Culture (1986) that have emerged at intervals, a large number of them cited by the contributors. Its strength lies particularly in its transdisciplinary perspectives and the clarity of both critique and new representations. The prologue is a tour de force. — Joan Vincent, Professor Emerita, Barnard College/Columbia University

Two decades after the publication of Clifford and Marcus' volume Writing Culture (University of California Press), this collection provides a fresh and diverse reassessment of the debates that this pioneering volume unleashed. At the same time, Beyond Writing Culture moves the debate on by embracing the more fundamental challenge as to how to conceptualize the intricate relationship between epistemology and representational practices rather than maintaining the original narrow focus on textual analysis. It thus offers a thought-provoking tapestry of new ideas relevant for scholars not only concerned with `the ethnographic Other', but with representation in general.

Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography : A School of American Research, Advanced Seminar edited by James Clifford , George E. Marcus (University of California Press) a group of experienced ethnographers, a literary critic, and a historian of anthropology, all known for advanced analytic work on ethnographic writing, place ethnography at the center of a new intersection of social history, interpretive anthropology, travel writing, discourse theory, and textual criticism. The authors analyze classic examples of cultural description, from Goethe and Catlin to Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, and Le Roy Ladurie, showing the persistence of allegorial patterns and rhetorical tropes. They assess recent experimental trends and explore the functions of orality, ethnicity, and power in ethnographic composition. Writing Culture argues that ethnography is in the midst of a political and epistemological crisis: Western writers no longer portray non-Western peoples with unchallenged authority; the process of cultural representation is now inescapably contingent, historical, and contestable. The essays in this volume help us imagine a fully dialectical ethnography acting powerfully in the postmodern world system. They challenge all writers in the humanities and social sciences to rethink the poetics and politics of cultural invention. More

Caching the Carbon: The Politics and Policy of Carbon Capture and Storage edited by James Meadowcroft, Oluf Langhelle (Edward Elgar) Over the past decade, carbon capture and storage (CCS) has come to the fore as a way to manage carbon dioxide emissions contributing to climate change. This book examines its introduction into the political scene, different interpretations of its significance as an emerging technology and the policy challenges facing government and international institutions with respect to its development, deployment and regulation. More

Chomskyan (R)evolutions by Douglas A. Kibbee (John Benjamins Publishing Company) It is not unusual for contemporary linguists to claim that "Modern Linguistics began in 1957" (with the publication of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures). Some of the essays in Chomskyan (R)euolutions examine the sources, the nature and the extent ofthe theoretical changes Chomsky introduced in the 1950s. Other contributions explore the key concepts and disciplinary alliances have evolved considerably over the past sixty years, such as the meanings given "Universal Grammar", the relationship of Chomskyan linguistics to other disciplines (Cognitive Science, Psychology, Evolutionary Biology), and the interactions between mainstream Chomskyan linguistics and other linguistic theories active in the late loth century: Functionalism, Generative Semantics and Relational Grammar. The broad understanding of the recent history of linguistics points the way towards new directions and methods that linguistics can pursue in the future.More

Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage: A methodological analysis of theory and research by Gerard Steen (Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research: John Benjamins Publishing Company) Cognitive linguists have proposed that metaphor is not just a matter of language but of thought, and that metaphorical thought displays a high degree of conventionalization. In order to produce converging evidence for this theory of metaphor, a wide range of data is currently being studied with a large array of methods and techniques. Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage aims to map the field of this development in theory and research from a methodological perspective. It raises the question when exactly evidence for metaphor in language and thought can be said to count as converging. It also goes into the various stages of producing such evidence (conceptualization, operationalization, data collection and analysis, and interpretation). The book offers systematic discussion of eight distinct areas of metaphor research that emerge as a result of approaching metaphor as part of grammar or usage, language or thought, and symbolic structure or cognitive process. More

Human Rights or Religious Rules? by J. A. van der Ven (Empirical Research in Religion and Human Rights: Brill) The relation between religion and human rights is a contested one, as they appear to compete with one another. Religion is often considered to represent a tradition of heteronomy and subordination in premodern times. Human rights emerged from early modern and modern times and stand for principles like human dignity, autonomy, equality. The first question in this book is how to define religion, its meaning, functions and structures, and how to study it. The second question is how to understand religion from its relation with human rights in such a way that justice is done to both religion and human rights. These questions are dealt with using a historical and systematic approach. The third question is what the impact of religion might be On attitudes towards human rights, i.e. human rights culture. For an answer, empirical research is reported among about woo students, Christians, Muslims, and nonreligious, at the end of secondary and the beginning of tertiary education in the Netherlands. More

The Idea of Writing: Play and Complexity edited by Alex de Voogt, Irving Finkel (Brill Academic) The Idea of Writing is an exploration of the versatility of writing systems. From ancient Egyptian, Cuneiform and Meroitic writing to Chinese, Maya and Maldivian script, the authors examine the problems and possibilities of polysemy, representing loanwords and the problems of adapting a writing system to another language. The playful and artistic use of writing, including a contribution on writing dance, further illustrates the intricacies of the systems. This collection of articles aims to highlight the complexity of writing systems rather than to provide a first introduction. The different academic traditions in which these writing systems have been studied use linguistic, socio-historical and philological approaches that give complementary insights into the complex phenomena. More

Terminology in Everyday Life by Marcel Thelen and Frieda Steurs (Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice: John Benjamins Publishing Company) contains a selection of fresh and interesting articles by prominent scholars and practitioners in the field of terminology based on papers presented at an international terminology congress on the impact of terminology on everyday life. The volume brings together theory and practice of terminology and deals with such issues as the growing influence of European English on terminology, terminology on demand, setting up a national terminological infrastructure, the relevance of frames and contextual information for terminology, and standardization through automated term extraction and editing tools. The book wants to demonstrate that terminology is of everyday importance and is of interest to everyone interested in the theory and practice of terminology, from terminologists to computer specialists to lecturers and students. More

Living in Poverty: Developmental Poetics of Cultural Realities by Ana Cecília S Bastos and Elaine P Rabinovich (Advances in Cultural Psychology:Information Age Publishing) covers the results of investigation of social realities and their public representation in Brazilian poor communities, with a particular emphasis on the use of cultural tools to survive and create psychological and social novelty under conditions of severe poverty. A relevant part of it brings together the multi-faceted evidence of a decade of research concentrated in two particular low-income areas in the city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. Other studies conducted in other Brazilian areas and in Cali, Colombia are included.
In contrast to most representations of poverty in the social sciences which create a "calamity story" of the lives of poor people, the coverage in this book is meant to balance the focus on harsh realities with the cultural-psychological resiliency of individuals and families under poverty. More

Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar edited by Klaus-Uwe Panther, Linda Thornburg, Antonio Barcelona (Human Cognitive Processing: John Benjamins Publishing Company) Figurative language has been regarded traditionally as situated outside the realm of grammar. However, with the advent of Cognitive Linguistics, metonymy and metaphor are now recognized as being not only ornamental rhetorical tropes but fundamental figures of thought that shape, to a considerable extent, the conceptual structure of languages.

The present volume goes even beyond this insight to propose that grammar itself is metonymical in nature (Langacker) and that conceptual metonymy and metaphor leave their imprints on lexicogrammatical structure. This thesis is developed and substantiated for a wide array of languages and lexicogrammatical phenomena, such as word class meaning and word formation, case and aspect, proper names and noun phrases, predicate and clause constructions, and other metonymically and metaphorically motivated grammatical meanings and forms. The volume should be of interest to scholars and students in cognitive and functional linguistics, in particular, conceptual metonymy and metaphor theory, cognitive typology, and pragmatics. More

Concepts of the Self  2nd edition by Anthony Elliott (Key Concepts:  Polity Press) The chapters that follow are designed to introduce students to concepts and theories of the self within the social sciences. The book aims to examine critically the ideas, concepts and theories of the self that are used in social analysis while also discussing key areas in which such approaches have produced elucidation of the experience of self-identity, selfhood and personal identity.More

Max Weber by Joachim Radkau (Polity) Max Weber (1864-1920) is recognized throughout the world as the most important classic thinker in the social sciences — there is simply no one else who has been more influential. The affinity between capitalism and Protestantism, the religious origins of the Western world, the force of charisma in religion as well as in politics, the all-embracing process of rationalization and the bureaucratic price of progress, the role of legitimacy and of violence as offsprings of leadership, the 'disenchantment' of the modern world together with the never-ending power of religion, the antagonistic relation between intellectualism and eroticism: all these are key concepts which attest to the enduring fascination of Weber's thinking.
When Joachim Radkau's biography appeared in Germany in 2005 it caused a sensation. Based on an abundance of previously unknown sources and richly embedded in the German history of the time, this is the first fully comprehensive biography of Max Weber ever to appear. Radkau brings out, in a way that no one has ever done before, the intimate interrelations between Weber's thought and his life experience. He presents detailed revelations about the great enigmas of Weber's life: his suffering and erotic experiences, his fears and his desires, his creative power and his methods of work, as well as his religious experience and his relation to nature and to death. By understanding the great drama of his life, we discover a new Max Weber, until now unknown in many respects, and, at the same time, we gain a new appreciation of his work.
This book will become the standard work on the life of Max Weber. It will be indispensable to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and will appeal to a wide readership interested in knowing more about the life of one of the most brilliant thinkers of the twentieth century. More

he Statistical Mind in Modern Society: The Netherlands 1850-1940, 2 volumes by Jacques van Maarseveen (Editor), Paul Klep (Editor), Ida Stamhuis (Aksant Academic Publishers) The contributions in this first volume, produced by experts from various disciplines, cover a great diversity of topics. In addition to the institutionalisation and internationalisation of official governmental statistics, attention is paid to statistics sup-porting policies for modernising society, in areas like agriculture, social legislation, education and justice. The application of statistics in trade and industry (such as banking and insurance, and the railways) is also discussed, as well as the growth of state power to combat social and economic problems such as child labour, the fight against alcoholism and economic crises.

The contributions in the second volume, produced by experts from various disciplines, cover a great diversity of topics. The application of statistics in the sciences (demography, geography, genetics, economic historiography, agricultural and medical sciences) is discussed in an international context. Special attention is given to the general emergence of thinking in terms of probabilities and the influence of mechanisation in statistics, as well as to the way Dutch scholars and scientists tried to solve statistical measurement problems (in meteorology, demographic forecasting, business-cycle research and unemployment).

In this review the following topics are discussed. First we examine the notion of the 'statistical mind'. Then we look the place of this publication within the historiography of statistics and brief summaries present the various contributions. More 

Tacit Knowledge in Organizational Learning by Peter Busch (IGI Publishing) Understanding the complexity of tactic knowledge has become increasingly important to the enhancement of organizational flow. This book aims to advocate the need for human factor consideration from a (tactic) knowledge capital point of view.  More

Forensic Human Identification: An Introduction edited by Tim Thompson, Sue Black (CRC Press) In philosophy, "identity" is whatever makes an entity definable and recognizable, in terms of possessing a set of qualities or characteristics that distinguish it from entities of a different type. "Identification," therefore, is the act of establishing that identity. In the 17th century, John Locke proposed his tabula rasa (blank slate) philosophy, which concluded that the newborn child is without identity and that it is entirely defined by society and circumstances after birth. While this may have some basis for discussion in the worlds of metaphysics, psychology, and social anthropology it has restricted relevance in the worlds of disaster-victim identification, biometrics, and forensic science. It is, however, true to say that, although many of our parameters of biological identity may be acquired after birth (tattoos, trauma, disease, dental intervention, etc.), many are biologically inherent and established in the period between conception and birth (DNA profile, sex, fingerprints, blood group, etc.). More

Sentencing: A Reference Handbook by Dean Champion, Mildred Vasan (Contemporary World Issues: ABC-CLIO) examines the sentencing process in detail. The initial chapter on history and development defines sentencing and its goals. Sentencing is the application of one or more punishments / sanctions following a criminal conviction. These punishments include fines and / or incarceration, or placement under the super­vision of probation officers. The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 restated a number of sentencing objectives that have guided sentencing judges in their leniency or harshness toward convicted defendants. More

Environmental Justice and the Rights of Unborn and Future Generations: Law, Environmental Harm and the Right to Health by Laura Westra (Earthscan)  The traditional concept of social justice is increasingly being challenged by the notion of a humankind that spans current and future generations. This book, with a foreword by Roger Brownsword, is the first systematic examination of how the rights of the unborn and future generations are handled in common law and under international legal instruments. It provides comprehensive coverage of the arguments over international legal instruments, key legal cases and examples including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, industrial disasters, clean water provision, diet, HIV/AIDS, environmental racism and climate change. Also covered are international agreements and objectives as diverse as the Kyoto Protocol, the Millennium Development Goals and international trade. The result is the most controversial and thorough examination to date of the subject and the enormous ramifications and challenges it poses to every aspect of international and domestic environmental, human rights, trade and public health law and policy. More

Foundations for Social Change: Critical Perspectives on Philanthropy and Popular Movements edited by Daniel R. Faber, Deborah McCarthy (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) This multi-disciplinary collection blends broad overviews and case studies as well as different theoretical perspectives in a critique of the relationship between United States philanthropic foundations and movements for social change. Scholars and practitioners examine how these foundations support and/or thwart popular social movements and address how philanthropic institutions can be more accountable and democratic in a sophisticated, provocative, and accessible manner. More

The Blackwell Dictionary of Modern Social Thought edited by William Outhwaite (Blackwell Publishing) Modern social thought ranges widely from the social sciences to philosophy, political theories and doctrines, cultural ideas and movements, and the influence of the natural sciences. This dictionary provides an authoritative and comprehensive overview of the main themes of social thought, principal schools and movements of thought and those institutions that have been the subject of social analysis or engendered significant doctrines and ideas.Detailed entries cover major currents of thought, philosophical and cultural trends, and the individual social sciences from anthropology to welfare economics. These are supplemented by shorter accounts of specific concepts and phenomena.This second edition updates about 200 entries and includes new entries on the Internet, ethnic cleansing and other topics. Each entry includes suggestions for further reading, and the volume contains a bibliography of all sources cited within the text. More

Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species? by Etzioni Amitai (Rights and Responsibilities: Communitarian Responses: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) investigates the definition, role, and decline of public intellectuals in American society. Drawing from a wide range of commentaries and studies, this edited volume demonstrates the unique importance of public intellectuals and probes the timely question of how their voices can continue to be effective in our ever-changing social, academic and political climates. More

The Social Scientist as Public Intellectual: Critical Reflections in a Changing World by Charles Gattone (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers) addresses the question of the public role of the social scientist by reviewing the work of several key social thinkers, from Max Weber to Pierre Bourdieu. Drawing on the analyses of these scholars, Gattone argues that although political and economic institutions continue to influence the course of academic knowledge, opportunities remain for social scientists to act independently of these constraints, and approach their work as public intellectuals. More

Murdering Myths: The Story Behind the Death Penalty by Judith W. Kay (Polemics: Rowman and Littlefield) (Paperback) goes beyond the hype and statistics to examine Americans' deep-seated beliefs about crime and punishment. She argues that Americans share a counter-productive idea of justice--that punishment corrects bad behavior, suffering pays for wrong deeds, and victims' desire for revenge is natural and inevitable. Drawing on interviews with both victims and inmates, Kay shows how this belief harms perpetrators, victims, and society and calls for a new narrative that recognizes the humanity in all of us. More

Cross-cultural Communication: Perspectives in Theory and Practice by Thomas L. Warren (Baywood) is a collection of essays that examines how practitioners can improve the acceptance of their documentation when communicating to cultures other than their own. The essays begin by examining the cross-cultural issues relating to quality in documentation. From there, the essays look at examples of common documents, analyzing them from several perspectives. Specifically, the author uses communication theories (such as Bernstein's Elaborated and Restricted Code theory and Marwell and Schmidt's Compliance-Gaining theory) to show how documents used by readers who are not native speakers of English can be written and organized to increase their effectiveness. The principal assumption about how practitioners create their documents is that, while large organizations can afford to write, translate, and then localize, small- to medium-size organizations produce many documents that are used directly by people in other cultures-often without translating and localizing. More

Trust, Risk, and Uncertainty edited by Sean Watson, Anthony Moran (Palgrave Macmillan) This edited collection focuses on recently emerging debates around the themes of "risk", "trust", "uncertainty", and "ambivalence." Where much of the work on these themes in the social sciences has been theory based and driven, this book combines theoretical sophistication with close to the ground analysis and research in the fields of philosophy, education, social policy, government, health and social care, politics and cultural studies. More

The New Challenges of Humanitarian Law in Armed Conflicts edited by Pablo Antonio Fernandez-Sanchez (International Humanitarian Law: Martinus Nijhoff) represents an analysis of and a reflection on the new challenges of humanitarian law in armed conflicts. It covers the jurisprudential dimension not only of the International Court of Justice, but also all the different legal bodies, including the ad hoc tribunals created by the United Nations. It analyses the purely doctrinal dimension of general aspects such as the solutions to world disorder in this field, the relationship between jus in bello and jus ad bellum, the principles of universal and international jurisdiction, and the notion of justice and peace. More concrete aspects include the situation of foreigners and journalists in armed conflicts, terrorist acts in terms of international humanitarian law and sexual violence as a war crime. More

Gendered Bodies: Feminist Perspectives by Lisa Jean Moore, Judith Lorber, Alexander M. Holsinger (Roxbury Publishing Company) The human body has been an object of fascination from the begin­ning of the human species, judging from the little prehistoric statues we see in museums. In this book, we explore feminist contributions to contemporary social studies of the human body. We present the ways bodies are constructed in Western society, which is ordered by gender. More

Class Questions: Feminist Answers by Joan Acker (Gender Lens Series: AltaMira Press) (Paperback) Class questions is an urgent task at the beginning of the twenty-first cen­tury as global, national, and local inequalities escalate. Yet conventional conceptualizations of class are inadequate to the task because they illumi­nate the economic experiences of white men more clearly than those of white women or people of color. In this book, Joan Acker sounds the call for a return to questions of class while she deftly articulates a carefully reasoned resolution to the conceptualization problem. Acker proposes that we see class and capitalism as fundamentally gendered and racialized and powerfully shaped in work organizations. More

The Blackwell Companion to Social Inequalities by Mary Romero, Eric Margolis (Blackwell Companions to Sociology: Blackwell Publishing) The discipline of sociology that arose in nineteenth-century Europe was in very large part developed as an inquiry into the persistent inequalities the founders perceived as the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism decimated the medieval world. Marx saw the increasing emiseration of the proletariat and the monopolization of wealth and power in a few hands as the inevitable contradiction of capitalism. Weber's dialogue with Marx's ghost separated class from social status, and power. He also investigated the economic inequalities of Catholic and Protestant societies in his most famous work (Weber 1958 [1906]). Durkeim, though less interested in inequality than in the basis for social solidarity, was also concerned that increasing conflict between capital and labor threatened the social order: "the working classes are not really satisfied with the conditions under which they live, but very often accept them only as constrained and forced, since they have not the means to change them" (1964 [1893]). It is curious, then, that a recent "Dictionary of Sociology," promising definitions for everything from "Anomie to Zeitgeist," has no entry for "inequality" and the only entry for equality defines it as "Equality of Opportunity" (Jary and Jary 1991). This is very much in keeping with the American sociological view that was developed in the (in)famous "debate on equality" that took place in the American Sociological Review, beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1960s (Davis 1942, 1953; Davis and Moore 1945; Tumin 1953, 1963; Wrong 1959). In the continuing attempt to refute Marx and demonstrate, as George Homans sanctimoniously quipped, that the proletariat had no intellectual or moral right to demand his money or his life, American sociologists vigorously attempted to reduce the issues of inequality to social stratification; and then they sought to demonstrate the inevitability – in fact, the benefits – of stratification in any advanced technological social system. Every human quality came to be ranked on a scale: income, wealth, intelligence, education level, status, and so on. The individuals' rel­ative position on these different dimensions – and mobility in the great social race – then boiled down to "equality of opportunity," as competitive individuals lined up at the starting blocks. All of this intended to create a science demonstrating that Western democratic capitalist societies had developed into meritocracies, and that the few examples of illegitimate inequality were on their way to being eliminated. More

Resisting Racism And Xenophobia: Global Perspectives on Race, Gender And Human Rights by Faye V. Harrison (AltaMira) (Paperback) excerpt: The concept of globalization is used and abused in a number of different ways, sometimes muddling issues that urgently need to be clarified. Arguing that globalization has a history that goes back centuries, Ted Lewellen under­scores the historical specificity of contemporary globalization. He defines the most current phase or moment of globalization as the increasing flow of trade, finance, culture, ideas, and people brought about by the sophisticated technology of communications and travel and by the worldwide spread of neoliberal capitalism, and it is the local and regional adaptations to and resistance to these flows. More

Criminal Responsibility by Victor Tadros (Oxford Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice: Oxford University Press) considers the proper nature and scope of criminal responsibility in the light of its institutional and political role. Tadros begins by providing a general account of criminal responsibility which is based on the relationship between the action that the defendant has performed and his or her character. He then moves on to reconsider some of the central doctrines of criminal responsibility in the light of that account. More

Defining Crimes: Essays on the Special Part of the Criminal Law edited by R.A. Duff, Stuart Green (Oxford Monographs on Criminal Law and Justice: Oxford University Press) This collection of original essays, by some of the best known contemporary criminal law theorists, tackles a range of issues about the criminal law's 'special part'—the part of the criminal law that defines specific offences. One of its aims is to show the importance, for theory as well as for practice, of focusing on the special part as well as on the general part, which usually receives much more theoretical attention. More

The Suffering of the Immigrant by Abdelmalek Sayad (Polity Press) This work of outstanding originality is a powerful account of the nature of immigration and the condition of the immigrant in our societies today. It represents the synthesis of twenty years' of research on immigration and emigration, two processes that are, by their nature, as inseparable as the two sides of a coin, yet so different in appearance that we are led to believe that one can be understood without reference to the other. By highlighting the intrinsic relationship between these two phenomena, Abdelmalek Sayad - an Algerian sociologist and close associate of Pierre Bourdieu - succeeds in providing a comprehensive and illuminating account of the nature of immigration and the lives of immigrants in the West. More

Immigrants and the American Dream: Remaking the Middle Class by William A. V. Clark (Guilford Press) Text uses statistical data to evaluate who today's immigrants are, where they live, and what levels of success they are achieving in social, economic, and occupational realms. For scholars and students in geography, sociology, planning, and ethnic studies; and policymakers and professionals interested in changing the face of the American middle class. DLC: Immigrants--United States. More

Understanding Social Problems by Linda A. Mooney, David Knox, Caroline Schacht (Wadsworth Publishing) This is a comprehensive mid-level paperback text that takes a theoretically balanced, student-centered approach to social problems. The text progresses from a micro- to macro-level of analysis, focusing first on such problems as illness and health care, drugs and alcohol, and family problems and then broadening to the larger issues of poverty and inequality, population growth, environmental problems, and conflict around the world. The social problem in each chapter is framed in a global as well as U.S. context. In every chapter, the three major theoretical perspectives are applied to the social problem under discussion, and the consequences of the problem, as well as alternative solutions, are explored. Pedagogical features such as The Human Side and Self and Society enable students to grasp how social problems affect the lives of individuals and apply their understanding of social problems to their own lives. More

Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader by Elizabeth Hackett, Sally Haslanger (Oxford University Press) "What is sexist oppression?" "What should be done about it?" Organized around these questions, Theorizing Feminisms: A Reader provides an overview of theoretical feminist writing about the quest for gender justice. Incorporating both classic and cutting-edge material, the reader takes into account the full diversity of women, highlighting the effects of race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, and religion on women's experience. More

Media and Minorities: The Politics of Race in News and Entertainment by Stephanie Greco Larson (Spectrum Series: Rowman & Littlefield) looks at the media's racial tendencies with an eye to identifying the system supportive messages conveyed and offering challenges to them. The book covers all major media--including television, film, newspapers, radio, magazines, and the Internet--and systematically analyzes their representation of the four largest minority groups in the U.S. African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asian Americans. Entertainment media are compared and contrasted with news media, and special attention is devoted to coverage of social movements for racial justice and politicians of color. More

Listening to the Silences: Women And War edited by Helen Durham, Tracey Gurd (International Humanitarian Law: Brill Academic) Challenging the perception that women are exclusively the victims, the caregivers or the passive supporters of men in times of armed conflict, Listening to the Silences: Women and War exposes the reader to a diversity of women’s voices. These voices, both personal and academic, demonstrate that women are increasingly taking on less ‘traditional’ roles during war, and that these roles are multifaceted, complicated and sometimes contradictory. More

Accountability of Peace Support Operations by Marten Zwanenburg (International Humanitarian Law: Springer) Quis custodiet ipsos custodies? In other words, who guards the guardians? At a time when the mandate of many peace support operations includes halting violations of international humanitarian law by third parties, there is still a lack of clarity concerning accountability of peace support operations themselves. This book addresses that accountability, focusing on peace support operations under the command and control of the United Nations and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It is concerned with the accountability of international organizations as well as troops contributing and member states, but not of individuals. More

Handbook Of Archaeological Methods edited by Herbert D. G. Maschner, Christopher Chippindale (Altamira Press) comprises 37 articles by leading archaeologists on the key methods used by archaeologists in the field, in analysis, in theory building, and in managing cultural resources. The book is destined to become the key reference work for archaeologists and their advanced students on contemporary archaeological methods. More

Archaeology In Practice: A Student Guide To Archaeological Analyses by Jane Balme, Alistair Paterson (Blackwell Publishing Professional) (Paperback) This volume is intended for archaeology students who are learning how to analyze archaeological materials. For many years, we have been involved in teaching university courses in field and laboratory techniques in archaeology. Over a cup of coffee during one of these courses, we were bemoaning the fact that, although there are many books on field methods (especially excavation techniques), much less is available on archaeological analysis techniques beyond the introductory first-year archaeology level. What we wanted was a series of essays that showed students how different kinds of archaeological materials are used to answer research questions. In our experience, students are more likely to understand this link when they learn from archaeologists who are talking about their own research problems and how they solved them. It brings a sense of immediacy to the work that makes it much more fun for them to read. Thus, to remedy the problem of the lack of such materials for students to read, we decided to assemble a collection of essays by experts on archaeological analysis. More

Free Will, Consciousness and Self: Anthropological Perspectives on Psychology by Preben Bertelsen (Studies in the Understanding of the Human Condition: Berghahn Books) What is it to be human? How do we relate to the world, to each other and to our selves—in everyday life and when faced with life's big questions?
In this book, the author develops a general theoretical model that may offer a better understanding of underlying principles of human behavior. The author shows that general psychology can make a significant contribution to a general anthropology and the human condition. More

Fads and Fallacies in the Social Sciences by Steven Goldberg (Humanity Books) Steven Goldberg has devoted his career to exposing fallacious reasoning, misrepresented fact, and ideological agendas in the social sciences. His scholarly critiques offer alternative, and sometimes controversial, explanations that are notable for their logical integrity and loyalty to empirical reality. Best known for his work in the physiological roots of sex differences, he has also written on a myriad of other subjects, which, as he bluntly states, "are as fallaciously reasoned in professional journals as in the cocktail party conversations that naively repeat the errors first propounded in those journals."

In this new collection of essays he is as lively, interesting, and provocative as ever. In addition to lambasting the fallacies infusing the received wisdom on many issues, he also directly addresses the factors and motivations that  contemporary surrender of the social sciences to the forces of antiscientific ideologies, which subordinate logic and evidence to wish fulfillment and political goals.

Among the subjects addressed are the validity of intelligence tests, group differences, the death penalty, sex differences in aggression and cognition, the family, abortion, and the nature of modern society. Also included are a couple of polemics, observations on the O. J. Simpson trial, and a moving encomium to his hero, Jackie Robinson.

Goldberg's work has been praised by reviewers as "persuasive and accurate" (Margaret Mead), "coolly, tightly, even brilliantly reasoned" (Morton Kaplan), and "the most significant...on the subject in decades" (Murray Rothbard). Readers who appreciate razor-sharp rigor and logical elegance will be richly rewarded by these essays on many of the most hotly contested issues of the social sciences.

The purpose of science—be it physical, natural, or social—is to find out how the world works. Its justification is its ability to satisfy curiosity, just as the justification of music is its ability to enable us to expe­rience beauty. When we learn how stars are born and die we greatly increase our understanding of the world—satisfy our curiosity—even though so doing does not enable us to create or destroy stars.

To be sure, one hopes also that science will do more than satisfy our curiosity and will make the world a better place in additional ways. And, to be sure, science—or at least technology based on science—can on occasion make the world a worse, indeed a horrible, place.

But it is the faith of science that truth is always better than untruth. Like all faith, this faith is rooted in an assumption that cannot be demonstrated to be true and is occasionally attached to events whose concordance with the assumption is dubious. (lt is not yet clear that the discovery of the laws permitting atomic power have made the world a better place, though that discovery unquestionably increased our understanding of the world—satis­fied our curiosity—more than did any other.)

What is without doubt true, however, is that by any measure we are, in general, better off trusting truth than denying it. Denial of truth festers, setting our innate curiosity against our wishes and forcing us to endure the painful conflict between what we sense to be true and what we wish were true.

That we experience the wish speaks well of us and makes more likely our putting the truth we find to good use. But when wish is given priority over truth—when political ideology begins to determine what we shall con­sider true—science is wounded, and the world is likely to become a worse place.

In the physical sciences of the last five centuries this has not been much of a problem. The natural sciences occasionally encounter a Lysenko, but, by and large, they proceed apace to increase truth.

In principle, the same should be true of the social sciences. While the social sciences encounter numerous practical problems that do not face the physical and natural sciences, the logic of validation in the social sciences is identical to that of the other sciences.

But you wouldn't know this from social science as it is, by and large, practiced today. This book is concerned primarily with issues in sociology, and while there is no doubt some good work being done in each of the social sciences, the general state of attempts to understand human behavior has degenerated to the point that it is far from clear that we are better off for their existence.

There are a number of reasons for this, but primary is the massive infu­sion of political ideology into the social sciences. Nearly all of the essays included here concern issues for which ideological desire has replaced curiosity as the prime mover. I am concerned in this book not with why this has happened, but with demonstration that, at least with reference to the issues discussed, it has.

Likewise, in these essays I attempt to persuade the reader not so much that a particular explanation of the issue is correct as that the explanation accepted as virtual received wisdom in the social sciences does not pass the first test of any explanation.

Any explanation that we wish to take seriously must be both logical and in accord with nature. If it is not logical, if it contains fallacy, we need not go further. An illogical "explanation" is not an explanation.

The reader may well assume that accepted explanations in the social sciences are, at least, logical. It is natural to do so if one is not aware of the extent to which ideological desire has trumped not merely method, but common sense itself.

There is, for example, nothing wrong with wishing that all human groups—and both sexes—start out the same, that the death penalty does not deter, that different scores on tests of academic aptitude do not reflect any innate differences, or any other received conclusions examined in the essays. There is something wrong with accepting fallacious explanations concluding that these things are true.

The fact that the explanations are fallacious does not, of course, demonstrate that the conclusions are necessarily false. But it does preclude the possibility that the explanations give us any reason to believe that the

conclusions are true and does point the way toward our arriving at the cor­rect conclusions, whatever they might be.

With the exception of a few of essays l include simply because l like them and hope the reader will, all of these essays examine issues that are crucial, and of interest and importance to the general intelligent reader as well as the professional social scientist.

If I succeed, the reader who has sensed that a number of commonly accepted explanations are dubious, but who could not put a finger on precisely what was wrong with them, will experience a number of "I knew there was something wrong with that" experiences.

Sociology and Society is a series of four textbooks designed as an introduction to the sociological study of modern society. The books form the core study materials for The Open University course Sociology and Society (DD201), which aims to provide an attractive and up‑to‑date introduction to the key concerns and debates of contemporary sociology. They also take account of the ways in which sociology has been shaped by dialogue with adjacent disciplines and intellectual movements, such as cultural studies and women's studies. More

Social Workers' Desk Reference edited by Albert R. Roberts, Gilbert J. Greene (Oxford University Press) This is by far the best survey of social work standards and practices to cross my desk in years. It is an all-encompassing and well thought-out compendium that the broad range of social work practices, ethics and central theory is at hand. Rumor has it that it is already becoming the essential reference to social work because each of its 146 chapters is assessable and consistently well-written, all by acknowledged scholars in the field.. Social Workers' Desk Reference is a definitely  an outstanding and sourcebook for social work practitioners and academics. More

Alcohol, Tobacco, and Other Drugs: Challenging Myths, Assessing Theories, Individualizing Interventions by Ann Augustine Abbott (NASW Press) reflects the clinical experiences and scholarly research of the original faculty fellows, together with that of numerous other faculty members, social work practitioners, professionals from other fields, and students who struggled together to better understand the complexities of the field of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs. More

Refugee Manipulation: War, Politics, and the Abuse of Human Suffering edited by Stephen John Stedman, Fred Tanner (Brookings Institution Press) This disturbing new book focuses on the conditions of civil war, when armed forces exploit refugee aid and the good faith efforts of international organizations. Warring factions treat aid camps as recruitment pools and camps can become safe havens for significant numbers of "refugee warriors"- those who have participated in genocide and intend to return to conflict. Many refugee organizations hence face a difficult dilemma of differentiating between victim and aggressor. More

Forging Peace: Intervention, Human Rights and the Management of Media Space edited by Mark Thompson, Monroe Edwin Price (Indiana University Press) (PAPERBACK) Early in October 2001, a United States missile strike disabled the Taliban regime's radio station in Kabul . Shortly afterwards, the US commenced psyops from an aerial radio station circling overhead. `Noble people of Afghanistan, the forces of the United States are passing through your area. More

Statehood and the Law of Self-Determination by David Raic (Developments in International Law, Vol. 43: Kluwer Academic Publishers) The striving of communities for statehood is, of course, an old phenome­non. For instance, against the background of nationalism, the Versailles peace settlement led to the rebirth of numerous States in Europe. To that effect, Butler observes, the Versailles Treaties have been described as the "balkan­ization of Europe"! But there were others, apart from the nationalities who were allowed to establish their own State, who favored the peace settlement and considered it right and inevitable.; Whether or not one agrees with this conclusion, the same forces of national feeling have certainly not ceased to operate, nor have they become weaker in the course of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Indeed, to speak with Cobban, "we may approve them, or we may condemn them, but we cannot ignore them". For an international lawyer at least, the challenge is thus to find out whether international law contains rules and principles regulating these forces and their outcomes. More

Creating the American Mind: Intellect and Politics in the Colonial Colleges by J. David Hoeveler (Rowman & Littlefield) Nine colleges of colonial America confronted the major political currents of the sev­enteenth and eighteenth centuries, while serving as the primary intellectual institutions for Puritanism and the transition to Enlightenment thought. The colleges also dealt with the most partisan and divisive cultural movement of the eighteenth century -the Great Awakening. More

In Light of Our Differences: How Diversity in Nature and Culture Makes Us Human by David Harmon (Smithsonian) Most scientists would agree that a sixth mass extinction is on the horizon unless radical changes are made in how Western society treats nature. At the same time, another extinction crisis is unfolding: the loss of many of the world's languages. More and more work in applied biology, anthropology, linguistics, and other related fields is now driven by the assumption that we are approaching a threshold of irreversible loss, that events during the next few decades will decide whether we cross over into a fundamentally changed and significantly diminished world. This leads to a very simple question that has not, until now, been answered satisfactorily: Why should anyone care? Harmon takes a unique approach to answering this essential question by drawing on insights from conservation biology, evolutionary theory, linguistics, geography, psychology, philosophy, and ethics. His interconnected discussion explores the works of Voltaire, A.O. Lovejoy, Darwin, Wittgenstein, William James, Dobzhansky, and many others to explain why everyone must be concerned about the loss of diversity. When more and more elemental differences are erased from the natural world and human societies, the field of possible experience becomes more constricted and our essential humanity becomes jeopardized. The very reason our planet can be said to be alive is because an amazing variety of organisms, streams of human thought and behavior, and geophysical features exist that provide a congenial setting for the interworkings of nature and culture. Harmon's timely, important book elucidates how as we lose diversity, we risk losing ourselves. More