1 comments about W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line.

1. When most think about Dubois, one of the first theoretical formulations that come to mind is the oft-quoted "double-consciousness." In this work, Reed's central task is to situate African American political thought squarely within the material context in which it occurs using W.E.B. Dubois as the focus for this project. Along the way Reed slices and dices Henry Louis Gates and the new black intellectuals, as well as the troublesome concept of "double consciousness" that Reed shows to be overstudied at best. Clearly among the best works of its kind to come to light in some years.

5 comments about Outer Search\Inner Journey: An Orphan and Adoptee's Quest.

1. Most people would like to believe that adoption is a lovely solution to the problem of an unwanted child. Taking a child from one world and immersing him or her into another without regard is as absurd as expecting a horse to live under water. Like Peter F. Dodds I was taken from my homeland, Germany, and plunged into another world. The shock and trauma that he went through is as honest and as real as it gets. What happened to Peter Dodds is what happens when trauma, (in this case the trauma of transcultural adoption), is not taken care of. As I read through this book I felt the chill of recognition at his questions as well as his confusion regarding his own identity. In many ways his struggle mirrored mine. This is a book that anyone involved in inter-country adoption should read.



2. I picked up Outer Search\Inner Journey on a Tuesday night and started reading that evening. I was so captivated by this story that I took the next day off from work to finish reading this incredible book. I am not adopted but enjoy reading autobiographies. This book drew me into the author's life, his experiences-thoughts-feelings--like none other I have read. I felt I was by his side every page of his life. After reading this story, I am surprised adoption agencies placing foreign children don't discuss the destrutiveness caused by the child's loss of language, culture, heritage, history and family, as well as the emotional toll caused when a child is taken from her/his native land. I have friends who beleive it is quite fashionable to adopt children from abroad. This book offers a picture of the complexities and drawbacks of international adoption. Still, the author doesn't blame and his story is one of overcoming immense barriers to find purpose and fullfillment in life. A must read for everyone desiring to read a superbly written book with a powerful plot!



3. I could not put down the book! You will truly become part of the story. I felt I was there right along on the incredible journey to find Peter's birth-mother. I have not read a book in a long time that has stayed with me long after I have finished it- like "Outer Search, Inner Journey." If you are looking for a book that will lift your spirit, and celebrate the joy of overcoming adverse conditions-this is a must read. I hope there is a sequel.



4. This book opened my eyes to a different side of adotpion that I had not considered. As most I looked at adoption as givng a child a home he would not have otherwise been able to experience. This book showed me that there is much more to this process and those adopting need assistance in helping the child understand and to feel loved - in showing it - not saying it.
   I would be very intereted in knowing how this author has lived the last 10 years - has he truly opened his heart and accepted love when given - or is he still searching and still has fear that he will not be fulfilled.
   It was a very touching book for me.



5. As the parent of a child adopted internationally, I found great understanding in this book about such experiences---from the child's perspective.
   
   This book was a wonderful inspiration for me on our own family's search for our child's birth parents. As the narrative makes clear, finding one's birth parents is not the be all and end all for any adopted child. But it IS the beginning of healing from a trauma concerning which most psychologists, physicians and educators still have very little insight.
   
   This book is very well written and provides a great understanding to parents of children adopted abroad.
   
   However, the book should will also assist anyone who works (in any capacity) with children adopted overseas. Highly recommended, along with The Primal Wound and Betty Jean Lifton's Twice Born.

5 comments about Shameless: The Visionary Life of Mary Gove Nichols.

1. All my life, I've thought of 18th and 19th century women as uneducated homemakers, good at making quilts or helping clear the land. Mary Gove Nichols and her second husband Thomas Nichols seem so absolutely current. She was out there, giving lectures to women on their anatomy and physiology, teaching publicly about healthy sexuality and about equality in marriage. For people who just know about spa history from the novel and movie, Road to Wellville, this book will win your respect and even awe.
   And this book is a great read! It will spark up any women's studies, or 19th Century American studies, or history of medicine reading list. You'll pass this one along to your friends for a great summer read as well, especially if you are going to Upstate New York, or to Antioch and Yellow Springs. Her life was filled with adventures. This really does read like a novel.



2. The mental health care system today fills one with dread. Physicians with ties to the pharmaceutical industry, with some interest in curing you but with an eye on body materials, tissues, blood, and organs that can be harvested and sold at great profit confront us all. Reading this extremely well-written book provides a perspective at a very different moment in the history of medicine. Mary Gove Nichols advocated a wide variety of alternatives to standard medical care which, if one thinks about it, were not all that bad. They were undoubtedly far superior to what orthodox physicians prescribed at the time: blood-letting, mercury, leeches, purgatives, emetics, and the like. Individuals surviving that kind of treatment could truly be proud of their superior health! Mary Gove Nichols, feminist and physician, was one of the very first women to lecture on medicine to whoever would come and listen. She advocated a healthy diet, the water cure, proper exercise, and rest; ideas that have well stood up the test of time.
   The book is very well written; the illustrations are wonderful. It is a true treasure!! And, for a book from an academic publisher, remarkably affordable.



3. This book is that rarest of works--a wonderful read on an important, thought-provoking subject. As a biographer, Jean Silver-Isenstadt shows us how an individual life can reflect and reveal the ideas and ideals of a particular time and place, but she never reduces Mary Gove Nichols to a mere product of her era. Instead, the author deftly intertwines her subject's story with cogent and relvant insights into the history of health care and women's history, with the result that Mary Gove Nichols seems more--and not less--real.



4. Too little is known of the advances of women in antebellum America. Mary Gove Nichols was an important and fascinating part of this scene, and she is brought to life in this interesting and well-researched biography. Nichols' personal quest for independence from a tragic marriage is agonizing, but only when she achieves such freedom does her real story begin. A writer and teacher, her move to New York City in 1845 led to her knowing some of the era's most important literary people---Poe, Bryant, N. P. Willis, Margaret Fuller, Frances Osgood, and others---and to her association with important social and scientific movements of the day---mesmerism, phrenology, Fouierism, Swedenborgianism, and especially water-cure. Criticized as an advocate for free love, Nichols toured the country, lecturing to women on such taboo subjects as female anatomy and masturbation. Her story is remarkable as is Jean Silver-Isenstadt's telling of it.



5. Jean Silver-Isenstadt's book is an exhaustively researched and beautifully-written biography of this prominent nineteenth-century reformer, Mary Gove Nichols, and her husband, Thomas Low Nichols. In addition to the captivating life story of Nichols, Silver-Isenstadt inlcudes rich detail of American cultural history in the narrative, and in many enjoyable detours, she rounds out the picture of Nichols and her historical context by including information about subjects as wide-ranging as other health reformers, water cure therapy, and transcendentalist writers. All of this helps us understand Nichols' central and at times path-breaking role in several intersecting reform movements of her time.
   A fine historical text, this book is a very readable and engaging book for non-academics and academics alike. Great for professional and armchair historians.

No comments about Anonymity: The Secret Life of an American Family.

No comments about Vance Packard & American Social Criticism.

5 comments about Very Special People: The Struggles, Loves and Triumphs of Human Oddities.

1. I found Very Special People when I was browsing through a book store.....I had to stop and pick it up to look at it. Low and behold one of my ancestors was listed in the book!!!!! What we knew about Matthew Buchinger, was that he was my Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great (yes 6 greats) Grandfather, was that he was born without arms, was an excellent draftsman, had a coat of arms, had a daughter named Anne ( who married John Poole), that he was called the 'little man without arms' and that he lived and in Ireland, and died in 1739. Very Special People has a picture of a drawing of Matthew Buchinger on the seventh page from the end of the picture section. It says the he was also legless! (he was called the little man!), married four times and that he had 11 children! I need to learn more about Matthew Buchinger! Where can I find more information? Please e-mail me If you know where or how I could search to locate more.



2. I stumbled across this title secondhand somewhere, and what a find it is! It covers, with lots of photos, the lives of many famous and lesser-known people. Because it does such a good job of satisfying ordinary human curiosity, I would not recommend it to the very young and/or impressionable, as it could be haunting -- a small caveat, as most young folks who are able to read the engaging and straightforward text will probably be mature enough for the subject matter. There is also an interesting introduction, covering the language and background of the field of "special people" ("Odd Man Out," "The Comprachicos," "Motives for Wonder," "Ugly Words," etc.). The chapter headings include: "Chained for Life," [conjoined twins]; "Armless and Legless Wonders"; "The Hairy People"; "The Little People" [including Tom Thumb & Lavinia Warren]; "There Were Giants in the Earth"; "Fat and Skinny"; "An Odd Lot" [including Zip the Pinhead]; and "Very, Very Special People" [including the Elephant Man]. Truly a fascinating book about real people.



3. For all its faults, "Very Special People" is still a very readable, personable book. Cloyingly sentimental, it still has its charming moments.
   
   Each section gives background on how being very tall, very short, very hairy, or otherwise possessed of an unusual body happens and what it tends to mean to the owner of said body. Drimmer then gives profiles of famous folks who shared that unusual trait.
   
   A good book for youngsters, but able to appeal to adults as well.



4. First reading this book in the '70s, this was my introduction to Joseph Merrick; the "Elephant Man". Giants and dwarfs, siamese twins and bearded women, some of the most unique group of individuals you'll ever read about. And what may be surprising to many, is the normal lives most of them led. Romance, marriage and children are the evidence for most. Wonderful biographies reveal the very human side of these "Very Special People". My favorites were those surrounding America's first great showman, P.T. Barnum. Especially Tom Thumb. A fascinating read.



5. I bought my paperback in 1976 or thereabouts, and have re-read it several times over the years. I teach middle school science and believe several of the chapters would make appropriate reading for youngsters especially since they address the issue of being different and still finding happiness and success.
   
   I was a kid myself when I first read this. And it's still good reading even though I'm now in my 40s.

1 comments about Pierre Bourdieu (Key Sociologists).

1. While not always terribly kind to Pierre Bourdieu (okay, the truth is that this book erupts into scathing critique at some points!), this is a very readable overview of Bourdieu's main ideas and books. Jenkins sees tremendous value in the questions Bourdieu poses and in how he always theorizes from a point of view informed by field research, and in still trying to get a grasp of this French theorist's work, I found this book equally valuable to my own purposes.

4 comments about Blackberry Winter: My Earlier Years.

1. This autobiography is especially interesting for its insight into the professional life of a woman scholar in the 1920's and 1930's in a then new field of inquiry, although Mead did not encounter the extreme levels of resistance that make heroes and role models. Greek societies at her first college seem to have been far more repressive and damaging than were her graduate programs or employers. The professional rivalries are interesting. The book is especially strong in its depiction of Mead's parents, whose contrasting traits we can easily see influencing the daughter's ideas and character. Mead seems to be a keen observer of them, frank about their strengths and weaknesses, as dispassionate as she was in describing people in New Guinea. Mead is far less interested in or detailed about her three husbands. In fact, the autobiography seems oddly reticent, considering that its author was open minded, professionally interested in the sexual habits of other peoples, and unintimidated. She was able to ask Pacific Islanders what positions they preferred for intercourse, but unable in the autobiography to give a sense of the life of her marriages. We learn in detail what she packed for a trip, but only discover in passing that a divorce occurred. This book rewards readers more with cultural history than with a sense of the author's emotional life.



2. This book is a must read for a future Anthroplogists.
   It clearly brings together all her theories and it is a
   heartfelt view on a extremly successful and inspiring
   person in this field. I truly enjoyed her book and her
   views on culture and the future of Anthropology. I became a big
   fan of hers and will continue reading the rest of her books.
   If you are only slightly interested in Cultural Anthropolgy
   then I suggest you read her books. They are easy to read and
   very insightful about culture.
   It is worth every penny spend.



3. This book provides Mead's accounts of the people and events that most affected her thought and research. About half the book is devoted to her life before she began her career as an anthropologist. We meet her parents, Edward Mead and Emily Fogg Mead. Edward was an economics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Emily divided her time between managing the household and pursuing her doctoral studies in the social sciences. Edward's mother, Martha Ramsay Mead, a former schoolteacher and principal, also lived with the family and was the primary director of their home schooling. Margaret describes her relationship with each of her parents and with her grandmother and siblings in turn. We learn how the family moved every season from one domicile to another, and how this shaped Margaret's concept of "home". Margaret also discusses how Edward related to his academic work and colleagues (such as when he organized a group to guarantee Scott Nearing's salary for a year after his dismissal). Margaret describes her schooling in detail, from the approach to learning that her grandmother and mother instilled with their home schooling efforts, to the various traditional schools that she attended and the social lessons she learned from them. She also discusses her college years and friends.
   
   The second part of the book describes Mead's adult and professional life. She explains her relationships with all three of her husbands, and how in the case of Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson, they collaborated together in their fieldwork. She also relates how she came to work with Franz Boas, and how he directed her research early in her career. She tells us about how she came to know Ruth Benedict, and how she considered Benedict one of her closest colleagues and friends. The last part of the book, covering Margaret's experiences as a mother and grandmother, is not as detailed, but does provide some personal observations.
   
   For me, the most interesting aspects of this book were Mead's own interpretation of her motivations and accomplishments. She was a firm believer in both the value and necessity of studying cultures very different from her own. On the first page of the text, she tells us "I have spent most of my life studying the lives of other peoples, faraway peoples, so that Americans might better understand themselves." Later she notes, "to clear one's mind of presuppositions is a very hard thing to do and, without years of practice, all but impossible when one is working in one's own culture or in another that is very close to it." In summing up her work, she states, "I went to Samoa-as, later, I went to the other societies on which I have worked-to find out more about human beings, human beings like ourselves in everything except their culture. Through the accidents of history, these cultures had developed so differently from ours that knowledge of them could shed a kind of light upon us, upon our potentialities and our limitations, that was unique." Some anthropologists today have a different approach, believing that since one cannot understand a foreign culture completely, it is better to stick to observing one's own culture. There is still much validity, however, in Mead's point that you can't know what is natural or unnatural, innate or learned behaviors, unless you are aware of the wide range of possibilities exhibited by the myriad cultures of the world.



4. This is a wonderful book to read for those interested in Mead's personality. I was surprised to read how innocent, delicate, loving, stubborn, and calculated this woman was. As she goes back through her life, she realizes how perfectly it all seemed to fit. She also seemed to realize, as she wrote this book, how much she always knew exactly what she wanted to do at each crossroad in her life. Margaret Mead tells us her story, from her perspective and it is a breath of fresh air.
   
   Yes, this book is a must for future anthropologists. She walks us through the many struggles in the field (I found her insights on language learning of great value) and sets the picture for an age where American anthropology was teeming with its most famous characters even today. Mead paints a unique picture of the personalities of Boaz, Benedict and her three husbands.
   
   Mead became something only the slightest fraction of us wannabe anthropologists could ever become. For those wanting fame and respect (come on admit it we all do at least a bit). There are few clues in this book to how Mead managed this. The book is nothing more than a beautiful account of being human. However, with her timing at a particular point in American history, her confidence and perhaps a splash of luck Mead became and remains an icon.

No comments about Maya Explorer: John Lloyd Stevens and the Lost Cities of Central America and Yucatan.

No comments about One Life Richard E Leakey an Autobiography.