3 comments about A Foxfire Christmas: Appalachian Memories and Traditions.

1. This book along with the nine preceding this one, should be required reading for anyone interested in the day to day living of early days in the south.



2. Every Christmas, I read a book in the month of December about Christmas. This was my choice for 2006, and it really is a wonderful little book. The authors provide us with accounts from Appalachia's older folks who recall the Christmasses of their childhoods. It is almost like listening to them speak as we are told of a more innocent time in America, and the simplicity of their Christmas, which focused on the Lord. We learn about their gifts, which aren't much compared to today, their meals which sound delicious, games they played, church, and social gatherings. Recipes are included, as well. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wishes to incorporate more peace and simplicity into their Christmas season. Merry Christmas!



3. Take your thoughts away from the commercialism of Christmas by traveling through time and re imagining how poor folks joyfully celebrated Christmas. We could learn many lessons from them.

5 comments about Polish Customs, Traditions and Folklore.

1. What a wonderful service Sophie Hodorowicz Knab has provided for the Polish community and for those who write about the Polish past! I didn't come across this book until my last few months of working on PUSH NOT THE RIVER, but it was a big help, nonetheless. I only wish it had been around years before when I started my novel. When you read about Marzanna, the Goddess of Death, you'll know who provided some invaluable information.

   POLISH CUSTOMS, TRADITIONS, and FOLKLORE, like Miss Knab's other books, is accessible, authoritative, and intensely interesting!

   James Conroyd Martin




2. This is a book full of interesting things, neatly organized by month. It talks about many, many customs, traditions, and proverbs, but doesn't mention much folklore, and leaves the reader wondering just *why* most of the customs she's talking about came to be. Still, it's highly readable, covers a lot, and there aren't many books on the subject, especially not in English, so this is something I'd highly reccomend to any Polish-American, and to other curious people.



3. According to my knowledge this is the most comprehensive book devoted to Polish customs available for English speaking readers. I recommend it especially for people with Polish ancestors or these who are interested in Polish traditions or anthropology. It may be also used as a reference book or the encyclopedia. But, the book is very interesting to read from cover to cover also. It contains an index and some pictures - I wish it had more!
   Overall, Sophie Hodorowicz did a wonderful job - she arranged the majority of customs according to calendar - entangling the customs with the seasons of the year and the Christian feasts traditions.



4. I am concerned that future generations will not know the joy of these
   Polish customs and traditions and this book exemplifies the promise of keeping the nationality alive along with its rich background of cultural traditions. Great book!



5. Babcia loved it, I havent read it yet..she's still reading it.
   I thought it would be interesting. I'm always right, arent I?!!? lol

4 comments about The Savage Mind (Nature of Human Society).

1. This is the first anthropology book I read. It may be considered difficult to read this book. A scholarly and heavy description however very rewarding in my opinion. Spanning a real wide scope.



2. hmmmm..... I can't see why this book has got such humble and unskilled review till now. This book is the easiest material to understand the tenet of structuralism. Personally I don't like the disposition of structuralism at all and I suspect whether in 50 years, anybody remember that kind of school existed at all except writers of history of philosophy.
   Anyway, this book made structuralism floating on the vogue with its ease to understand and constructed the intellectual fashion of structuralsim which dominated the whether of discourse in human science in the 1960s and 1970s. Yep. now nobody read Levi-Strauss, even anthropolgists don't read his books. But if you want to understand structuralism, post-structuralsim and postmodernism, you'd better begin with this book for it's the easiest and fun to read.



3. Claude Levi - Strauss' The Savage Mind (1962) is a densely - composed book that winds a circuitous path through several important thematic areas of the anthropological minefield. As multiple passages attest, Levi - Strauss was capable of writing and thinking clearly. Quoted passages - many of admirable simplicity - reveal that Levi - Strauss also appreciated straightforward writing, thinking, and scholarship in others.

   Nonetheless, much of the book's content is bogged down in miasmic discussions concerning simplistic points of fact or interpretation that are obvious in many cases ("the principle underlying a classification can never be postulated in advance," or the unsurprising fact that Indian tribes from opposite regions of North America regarded the crow in entirely different lights), thus further obscuring his already ambiguous theses. Levi - Strauss conjures up extended metaphors which he manipulates haphazardly (the most prominent being the comparison of the myth - making process to the 'bricoleur'), and makes outright, seemingly willful mistakes of logic, such as the passage in which he refers to an eagle hunter cleverly hidden within a self - devised trap as "both the hunter and the hunted" merely because the man has situated himself on the inside of the trapping mechanism: within the trap he may be, but hunted by the eagle, or by anything else, he is not. That the hunter remains in firm control over the successful capture of the eagle is a fact Levi - Strauss slyly chooses to look away from.

   Elsewhere, Levi - Strauss makes laughably incorrect suppositions when attempting to correct the broad generalizations of others, stating, for instance, after tacitly acknowledging the existence of such dietary cravings, that "there is no evidence that pregnant women the world over have cravings." Moving from literal to figurative meaning and jumping from objective fact to subjective interpretation without restraint ("Nature is not in itself contradictory. It can become so only in terms of some specific human activity which takes part in it; and the characteristics of the environment take on a different meaning according to the particular historical and technical form assumed in it by this or that type of activity"), the author's sentences intertwine recklessly together until the reader can reasonably conclude that entire passages are dazzlingly free of definite, cohesive content of any kind. Though he has literally hundreds of objective facts at his fingertips, Levi - Strauss' confidence in his ability to build them into a sustained, persuasive presentation seems illusory at best.

   Readers who have thus far found the book almost impossible to absorb will find their judgment richly rewarded when Levi - Strauss discusses the role of domesticated animals in Western civilization - a subject most readers have had some degree of everyday familiarity with - in Chapter Seven, "The Individual As A Species." Beginning with the absurd statement that "birds are given human christian [sic] names in accordance with the species to which they belong more easily than any other zoological classes, because they can be permitted to resemble men for the very reason that they are so different," and continuing "consequently everything objective conspires to make us think of the bird world as a metaphorical human society: is it not after all literally parallel to it on another level?", the author's discussion of what he believes constitutes the underlying processes in naming dogs, cows, and horses in the West is so transparently ludicrous that it exposes everything that has come before as the intellectual hokum that it is.

   The main supporting audience for The Savage Mind has been masochistic American academics who bow reflexively to European theorists, particularly French theorists, as if on command, building author cults small and large in the process, and thus entering suicidally into intellectual perdition. For such academics, the more obtuse a work, the better; most esteemed is a book completely beyond comprehension. The Savage Mind, a work of anti - knowledge, warrants that level of criticism: it completely fails to succinctly outline its ideas, or prove, finally, that its incommunicable "theories" have any appreciable merit whatsoever.




4. Academic scholarship does not generally lend itself to masterpieces. One tends to balance detail and complexity against efficiency, to narrow one's audience while deepening argumentation. Thus the truly great books of a particular discipline are often incomprehensible outside it, while the wonderfully accessible books rarely do more than describe what others have done.

   The Savage Mind is one of a small number of exceptions to this rule. In a book that requires no prior knowledge of anthropology, Lévi-Strauss succeeds in leveling a major challenge to his discipline and simultaneously to every reader. In elegant, graceful prose, he meticulously dissects his objects, formulates his arguments, and stretches the range of theoretical speculation to cover an extraordinary range of material from all over the world-including the modern.

   In the nearly fifty years since this book first appeared, however, much has changed. Structuralism, for which The Savage Mind served as something of a manifesto, has collapsed beneath the weight of its own logical formation and the critical assaults of various respondents-not all of them well-informed. But even that most scathing critic of structuralism, Jacques Derrida, has noted repeatedly that we can never really go back: structuralism is part of our thinking now, and the only way out is through. To put it simply, if you never read this book, you will never gain the right to criticize structuralism as a method for studying culture.

   Another thing that has changed is basic education. Lévi-Strauss takes it for granted that we all know quite a bit about European literature, music, and art; that we know who the painter Clouet was, and the difference between Mannerism and Impressionism. He doesn't assume expertise, but a kind of general cultural education no longer usual. This can make some of his analyses opaque, where they are intended to be illustrative. Just as you can skim these arguments, which are often problematic anyway, you don't actually need to know much about totemic practices to understand; he summarizes what's important, and so long as you don't intend to challenge through data, you need no background.

   Lévi-Strauss's arguments proceed methodically and exceedingly rapidly. Their weight lies in their logic, not their particulars; that is, it really doesn't matter whether his interpretation of any one myth or ritual is correct, but rather whether the means of going about it makes rigorous sense. He is not expert on everything, and he often inserts such phrases as, "Without presuming to decide this issue...." This is not mere qualification: he distinguishes between illustration of method and rigorous analysis of particular material. If you want him to analyze material, go read The Raw and the Cooked; if you want to know how he does it, read The Savage Mind.

   To put this differently, to pick on trivia here is to miss the point. Perhaps you do name your pets differently than he does. Perhaps the Murngin creation-myth has a step he forgets to mention. Perhaps the interpretation of Clouet doesn't really quite make sense if you know much about Clouet. So what? These are illustrations, not proofs. The same happens with the famous essay "The Structural Study of Myth": Lévi-Strauss proposes a reading of Oedipus which, though wildly suggestive and interesting, really doesn't make a lot of sense for Oedipus, and leads to a stunningly silly conclusion. No matter: the point is to demonstrate how the method works. Again, if you want to see him analyze something, you don't read his pure theory books; you read The Raw and the Cooked, or Totemism, or (especially) The Elementary Structures of Kinship. So long as you can work out how the method functions, Lévi-Strauss thinks you should go test it yourself, on material you know. Then, if it doesn't work, you can come back and criticize.

   As we read The Savage Mind, we are constantly forced to slow down. Lévi-Strauss has a tendency to condense an enormous argument into a paragraph, then move on; unlike his best American and English counterparts, who make their analyses as explicit as possible, Lévi-Strauss takes the classically French approach of hitting the highlights in the topic and concluding sentences of a paragraph, then putting all the illustrative detail of logic and material into the middle. This is a matter of style, a choice and not a vice. So if you really want to understand the book, you actually have to work through his examples very slowly and carefully. Otherwise one has a tendency to lose the thread and simply become bewildered.

   Unfortunately, this translation is, as Clifford Geertz and everyone else has noticed, execrable. Some sentences are not even acceptable English grammar, to say nothing of their failures to render Lévi-Strauss's beautiful, dense French. Mercifully, the various translators involved all recognized their failures and refused to sign their names. Some day, a really good translation will come along, I suppose, but in the meantime at least this one is hyper-literalist-far better than simply wandering off course. If you read French perfectly, read La pensée sauvage; it's genius!

   The Savage Mind is an endlessly fascinating, stimulating, brilliant book, a true masterpiece of the human sciences. It happens that Lévi-Strauss is quite often wrong, but the fact remains that this is a landmark of scholarship and a book everyone seriously interested in culture needs to read. Durkheim, Weber, Freud, and Marx are all wrong too. So are Eliade, Geertz, and Turner, for that matter. Does this mean we shouldn't read them? To think we can simply jump to the most recent people and skip what came before is to submit to ignorance and laziness. Lévi-Strauss is perhaps the last of the great French intellectuals, and his work will stand for a long time as a challenge and a landmark; you must take up his challenge, read him, and thoroughly master his thought. Only then can you move on.

   Read now, and see a (slightly misguided) genius at work.

5 comments about The Origin of Species.

1. It took 277 years for the Church to accept that the universe did not revolve around the Earth, from the publication of Copernicus' 'On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres' in 1543 to the Vatican's total repeal of the condemnation of the Copernican doctrine in the period 1820 to 1835. If that's anything to go by as far as the speed with which the Church accepts new truths about the universe, none of us will be around to see the day Darwin is vindicated as one of humanity's guiding lights, as opposed to the Son of Satan. Seldom in history has such a noble person been subjected to such vilification. It reminds one of the ridicule once heaped on supporters of the Copernican theory, and their disbelieving mockery - how could the Earth possibly revolve without the people flying off? Today we all can only laugh at their ignorance, but only some of us can laugh at the ignorance of those 'Flat-Earthers' who still disregard Darwin's theory. Like many have already pointed out, much of the material that fuels the evolution debate is not to be found in this book. There are no claims or even insinuations in the book of descent from apes. Rather, it was disciples like Huxley who really helped focus the debate on man's primate anscestry, and Darwin was far more direct in his beliefs in his later books such as 'The Descent of Man' and 'The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals', both of which are worth reading as they bolster his theory in countless ways, always combining a penetrating natural observation with intelligent analysis. In fact, I must admit to enjoying them even more than this book, although of course as Darwin's classic, it's a must read for anyone interested in man's evolution, and no open-minded person could possibly remain unconvinced after going through Darwin's evidence and arguments against spontaneous creation. (Creationists still believe that God came down to Earth in 19th century industrial revolution England to create the darker moths which started appearing as the trees gradually darkened from pollution, kindly making sure they did not stick out like sore thumbs on the blackened trees anymore...)



2. Darwin's _Origin of Species_ is a phenomenal work and was truly brilliant and insightful at the time. It's a classic of science and it's one of those books that everyone should read.
   
   That said, this particular Kindle edition of the book is disappointing. Primarily, the text is fully-justified rather than normal left-aligned (right-ragged). (This means that spacing between words varies so that the last characters of each line end up being aligned along the righthand margin, and the first characters are still aligned along the left margin.) It's a well-known principle of typography that justified text is harder to read than ragged text -- the spacing between words is variable, so your eyes have to work harder to move over the text. I don't see why this edition would have made that choice.
   
   If you want to read this excellent book, you might consider a different edition.



3. I read this book, here in Brazil.The author, Darwin was an atheist and a racist.Writen at the same time and place, as Francis Galton and Karl Marx, Darwin didn't followed both of these charlatans, to the sewages of history.
   The theory of evolution began first in Greece and was also supported by another english, Wallace; but Charles Darwin, with this book really put evolution in mankind's mind.This book was read by Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill,Mussolini,etc.
   Someone will claims that Darwin knew nothing, about the genes and DNA.Fossils found decades after this book be published, also put new evidences to evolution.Even so, the main claim of this book,evolution, was increased in believe, by time.Begined by this book, darwinism is alive and good today.



4. The Origin of Species: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life
   
   This is an excellent ebook. Darwin was a great scientist!



5. First you must read the voyage of the beagle by Darwin in which this book is base and it will make much more sense for you to read!!!!

3 comments about Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol.

1. From ancient Greece to MADD (Mothers Against Drunken Driving) Gately hits a beat. From Jacob's Creek to San Francisco steam, from Louis Pasteur's 1862 discovery that yeast eats sugar and excretes alcohol to the "green fairy" absinthe and its eventual prohibition, from the drift away from spitoons to tubes at home and the staggering popularity of Cognac in Hong Kong and Kristal in Harlem - a cornucopia of wit and tasty notes - to your health!



2. Years ago, when I was actually studying to become an alcoholism counselor, I read something from long-ago America, during some sort of political election..... One of the politicians was asked what he thought about alcohol and he proceeded to give an oratory as only a politician could: He said something along the lines of "If you are speaking of the gentle liquid that soothes a man's throat and makes of him a poet....etc. then I am all for alcohol! But, if you are speaking of the devil's brew that turns a man into a wife-beater and irresponsible employee....etc. then I am against the use of alcohol!" Has anyone ever read the entire "sermon", and is it included in this book? I have been trying to find it for years.......



3. Gately brings us a lively, humorous chronicle of the culture of booze from ancient Mesopotamia to our own day. The Dorothy Parker ditty on page 378 is alone worth the price of admission.
   
   Subtract a total of one star for the following editorial oversights:
   
   On page 44 we are told Pliny the Younger was a contemporary of Marcus Aurelius.
   
   On page 134 we are told Gabriel Metsu's Old Drinker is holding the pipe in his left hand and the tankard in his right.
   
   On page 145 we are told that the Carolina colonies made progress in the second half of the sixteenth century.
   
   On page 249 we are told that Saint Paul at his redemption was en route for Tarsus.

5 comments about Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology.

1. After my paperback copy of SEM decayed from several readings, I was more than a little disappointed to see that it had gone out of print. I'm glad that its finally back.

   Absolutely, Bateson is a "sloppy thinker," just as Picasso was a "sloppy painter" by the standards of Vermeer and Rembrandt. And really a comparison to artists - not formal theorists - is the metric by which Bateson should be judged.

   Why is it that Bateson attracts such loyalty? Because his writing illustrates a *process* of thinking, rather than a specific indisputable conclusion. Those who expend the time and effort to read Bateson - and in particular SEM - are rewarded with the certainty that the thinking process is as interesting as any possible conclusion. And it is somewhat more than "clever" that in the SEM dialogues, Bateson uses the very structure and form of his writings to illustrate the content he's explaining.

   Indeed it is precisely that uncertainty which vexes "formal" theorists (such as the reviewer below). Bateson - as a systems thinker - was always more interested in process and context than in defining any literal end result. After all, what possible "proof" could be offered that dolphins are second-order thinkers because they can learn about learning?. How on earth could proof be gained that icons and verbalizations are mediated by dreaming?

   I would offer this question to Bateson's critics: if his thinking is so irredeemably sloppy, what then is his lasting appeal? Why does he - among all the philosophers and scientists of the 20th century - continue to have such a loyal following? Name a single cybernetician or epistomologist who is commonly cited in contemporary philosphical thinking.

   Answer: there are none. So the bigger question is not why Bateson is popular, but why systems thinking (of which Bateson was a practitioner) is so absent from American academia. That fact is an indictment of something, but is certainly is not Gregory Bateson.




2. Reading "Steps" helped save me from the unremitting horrors of divorce court; I'd probably be on a death row somewheres if not for this & some peripherally associated material. I am very pleased to see that it's in print again.
   
   From those meticulous metalogues to those essays on the Theory of Logical Types, Bateson can mesmerize, if you're prepared for it. Especially enlightening is the lecture on the Treaty of Versailles & cybernetics; for Bateson, the two most important events of his lifetime: if you're going to deceive someone (the Fourteen Points), you'd better get an honest man (Woodrow Wilson) to do it.
   
   "Steps" is to science & reason what Frost's "West Running Brook" is to poetry: an intense meditation, soliloquy & dialogue. It's worth your while.



3. Take all the buzzwords in fashion in psychology and philosophy: classification, genotype, flexibility, somatic, discrete, threshold, characteristics, analytic... mix everything together and you get this book.
   In other words there's not an ounce of meaning in those 700 pages, it's all worthless. No case studies, no examples, long phrases full of self importance written by someone who thinks he's an authority in everything from zen to medecine to evolution theory to archeology. Not only does he prove he doesn't understand anything, you'll laugh yourself silly reading any paragraph of the book at random.

   If you have to read this for an assignment, you'd better change major and give it to your worst enemy for toilet paper. That's how low I think of this. And to think that a tree was felled for this. Ha !




4. Bateson's writings are profoundly layered with meaning that a brief glance will overlook. His prolific influence can be found in sundry fields of study, including psychiatry, communication theory, and marriage and family therapy to name a few.

   This is the type of book (among few) that can be read over and over again while discovering new facets of understanding every time.

   I highly recommend the metalogues.




5. Really, what is the difference between a nip and a bite? They look the same, when you are watching kittens playing, how can you tell if they are biting in earnestness or just fooling around? Well you can't really tell, because a nip is a bite and isn't a bite all at the same time. However, you can tell, of course you can, because a nip has a sign posted on it saying "this is play", a bite on the other hand has a sign saying "this is for real". Moreover tells us Bateson - one of the greatest minds in social thought - whoever cannot tell the difference between a bite and a nip is in big trouble, because the sign stating "this is play" enables us to tell reality from imagination, thus safeguarding our sanity. "Steps in the ecology of the mind" is a profound statement on the mechanisms that make us tick, on the human condition.

5 comments about Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.

1. I come back to this book time and again in my own work and see it as one of the most indispensible books today on issues of aesthetics, class distinctions, group identity, and covert social inequality. Bourdieu takes on the Kantian aesthetics of the "subjective universal," showing that the value judgments about things reflect material and social conditions and in fact index social and class differences. The way we classify things (operas, desserts, leisure activities) is inextricably tied up with the way we classify ourselves as social beings and others as members of other social groups.

   Distinction is a long and difficult book, but from start to finish it is full of fascinating and original insights. Bourdieu's language is loaded with big words and long sentences, but I find that after I get used to the kinds of words and structures he uses, his language actually becomes pretty clear and straight-forward. It's definitely worth the time and brain-power needed to read it.




2. Distinction is the most cited book from Bourdieu, one of France's most prolific scholars. The book tends to assume that its readers are familiar with his key terms, developed mostly in _Outline of a Theory of Practice_ and _Logic of Practice_. Although it is the most cited, beginning readers of Bourdieu should probably start with _Partical Reason_ to get a handle on these concepts before getting involved in this larger tome.

   Word for word, Bourdieu's writing style is not economical, and he is almost as cumbersome as Derrida. He does not approach the overly-complex mode of Deleuze and Guattari. His concepts bear the most resemblance to those of an early Baudrillard or a late Gramsci in terms of their interpretation of the social world, although he will depart into some more Marxist modes of interpretation.

   Bourdieu's _Distinction_ is most valuable for his diagrams, as they provide a clear graphic representation of what he is trying to say. If one wants the read Bourdieu for content and/or argument, she would be better directed to one of his other books named above, as his arguments are more on-point and rpecide.

   In addition, _Distinction_ is careful to limit itself to a data set collected in the late 60s and early 70s. Although the theory seems to be a sound one, Bourdieu makes claims of greater applicability in his books about the Bayle: _Outline_ and _Logic_. For discussions of modern Europe, his newer _Weight of the World_ provides a better, and more recent, analysis of the same social trends as in _Distinction_.




3. This is a fantastic explication of how social class prearranges our tastes and interests. I disagree with the reader who thinks that it is not applicable to American society--to the contrary. It is true that American culture is not so obviously stratified in the exact same ways as French culture (of the 1960s, I would add, when Bourdieu collected his data). Also, in American culture there is less of a tendency to exploit the social markers (dress, etc.) that one might find in Europe, and it's hip nowadays for the middle-class to adopt the style and dress of the street (e.g., hip-hop); nevertheless, I'd say that this is a veneer of street-cred, and that if you were to look at how the middle-class actually lives compares to those where hip-hop originated, you'd find some pretty significant differences.

   However, his basic differentiation between working class/petit bourgeois (small business owners, clerical workers and the like)/grand bourgeois (professionals, executives, and large industrialists) certainly carries over into American society. And most interesting is his claim that the higher up in the food chain one goes, the more one's taste in the "aesthetic" inclines towards Kant's idea of disinterested formalism, while the lower classes tend to want their art to be informed by ethics and morality.

   Bourdieu sees these tendencies as "embodied" and largely unconsciously adopted through our upbringing. One only has to watch a television show like "The O.C." and how they cast Ryan's mother in comparison to the trophy wives of Orange County to see that even in America class and taste and body language are still encoded in our body language, choice of dress, manners, and conversational style. The economic reality of America is that a Wal-Mart worker or transcontinental trucker is NOT middle-class in the same way as a doctor, whether in terms of taste or salary. Anyone who thinks so is either deluding themselves or doesn't want to see the truth.

   Bourdieu does not neglect to mention sex (although he doesn't have as much to say about race), and has sections on women's body image (the richer, the thinner) and how the different classes deal with food (high-fat, high-carb for lower classes, fresh veggies and lean meats for higher classes). In America, our current epidemic of obesity is not only the result of marketing campaigns, but also (perhaps largely) the result of poor quality food (e.g. fast food, prepared food) being made much more affordable than high quality food (fresh produce, fish, organic). If you can't afford to eat well in America, you probably won't.

   Moreover, Bourdieu makes the observation, which holds true in America as much as anywhere else, that formal education (which reinforces "legitimate" taste) can change one's tastes and values, but that one's early social upbringing will lead to a quicker assimilation of "legitimate" culture. As someone who went to bourgeois schools without a bourgeois background, and who has subsequently taught at state universities in poor areas, this truism is so obvious as to hardly need explication. Much of the poor performance of underclass or non-bourgeois students is as much due to lack of early acculturation (by this I mean exposure to "culture" like non-Hollywood films, art museums, etc., but also the habits and customs associated with school learning and higher education) as it is to any basic intelligence.

   Finally, it's true that Bourdieu's style is rather ponderous, repetitive, and academic, and the book is very long indeed. Nevertheless, I can't agree that it compares with the difficulty of Derrida, Jameson, Bhabha, or other high theorists. Bourdieu's sentences are sometimes long and have many subordinate clauses, but their basic subjects and verbs are easily identifiable! The Conclusion and Postscript do raise the level of difficulty, but the Introduction and body of the main text are accessible and basically say everything he has to say (many times). Anyone with a basic undergraduate education (one that has done its job properly) should be able to handle Bourdieu's style in this particular book.




4. I think that if you are interested in this book, then you probably know what you are in for. It's hard going (of course) but worth the effort.



5. I must say, this is a nice translation. The translator has skillfully rendered Bourdieu's difficult text in English, and for that he should be applauded. Nicely done!

5 comments about American Nerd: The Story of My People.

1. Although one of of the more interesting & layered treatments of nerds, the book falls short of its promise. It can't quite decide whether it wants to be a memoir or a cultural genealogy of nerds. In the end, it offers too little of both & left me wanting to read more. Definitely worth reading & a breezy read.



2. In short, I was moderately disappointed in this book. I gave it a 3rd star simply because I sympathize to some extent with the object of the book: the nerd. I was not a nerd in school, but I am definitely a geek. As another reviewer noted, the author did a substandard job in delineating the differences between geeks, nerds, dorks, etc.
   
   Overall, the book was not an enjoyable read. It came off as too academic. I enjoy serious, academic books most of the time, but did not buy this book with that expectation in mind.
   
   What someone needs to write is a real geek memoir, not this ethnographic treatise. Perhaps that someone will be me.



3. I purchased the book following a positive review in Scientific America. Unfortunately I found it to be mainly historical observation and hypothesizing, rather than what I hoped would be a researched analysis.



4. I had a bit of a hard time with this book. While parts of it were completely fascinating and I learned some interesting new information, there were parts of it that were very dull. It didn't help that it read like a stream of consciousness exercise in it's organizational scheme. It skipped back and forth between the history of nerds in America and personal stories from the author's own life, often without much transition between the two types of stories. This kind of writing can be very successful (Stefen Fatsis' excellent book Word Freak comes to mind), but the author doesn't quite make it work here. The book then ends with a personal story, why Nugent gave up being a nerd. This makes one question why he wrote a book about nerds. Is he fascinated with nerds since he used to be one? Does he miss being a nerd? Does he consider himself a nerd once again (which isn't ever addressed in the book)? Why does he call it The Story of My People when he makes it clear that he gave up being a nerd? The ending is quite confusing and really detracts from the rest of the book. Nugent clearly IS a nerd, but he apparently pretended so successfully that he wasn't that he was accepted by the non-nerd community; this make you question the validity of the text, like he might be hiding something from the reader as he hid his nerdiness from his peers as a teen.
   
   The dust jacket makes the book sound completely fascinating, but I felt it was too short to be a good history of nerds in America (the author really glossed over several points rather than delving in deeply where I felt he should have - a true nerd would have gone into more detail!) and it had too much historical information to be a good memoir. Nugent really needed to make up his mind and go with one or the other format because including both made the book seem, at times, overly whimsical or poorly researched. I definitely got something out of the book and find myself telling other people the information I learned from reading it, especially my fellow nerds, but it just wasn't all it could be.
   
   I guess it didn't help that I don't agree with the author's definition of "nerd" either. What he wrote about in the memoir sections of the book (boffing, playing D&D, etc) were really more "geeky" and less "nerdy" by my definitions for the two terms. Nugent really didn't address the distinction, or even acknowledge the differences, which disappointed me. I believe I am a nerd because I am obsessive about topics that make me an outsider, but I'm geek too because I love Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. Many people are both nerds and geeks, so it's easy to see where mistakes may be made and why lumping the two groups together might make sense. This lumping could even happen unconsciously to some people. Still, as a person who claims to be a nerd (again, he only really says he USED to be a nerd), you'd think he'd be anal enough to know the difference.
   
   Overall, I found the book reasonably interesting, but I feel it had more problems than positive points. If you're seriously nerdy, this book will likely appeal to you. Based on reviews I've read, this is the demographic the author's book is appealing to anyway. However, if you're looking for historical information or even a memoir of a young nerd, this isn't enough of either to satisfy your needs and you would be better off looking elsewhere.



5. I got this from the local library, as I was intrigued by the title and content matter.
   
   I think the author provides a nice broad overview of some aspects of geek culture, but tends to give too shallow a treatment of them. For instance, his chapter on competitive video games. He contrasts Halo 2, a game that can be played online with people miles away just as easily as in a competition setting, with Super Smash Bros. Melee, a game that requires combatants to be in the same room. He says that this aspect makes the Super Smash Bros. Melee matches much more fun to watch, and thus more worthy of being a spectator sport. He fails to address a few issues:
   1) Halo also has local multiplayer. It is not as if the online mode is a complete replacement for actual human interaction.
   2) Part of what makes Halo a more solitary game is that it's harder to keep track of what's going on in the whole game when looking through the gunsights of a single character. When playing Smash Bros., all combatants fight on the same screen, so it's easy for people viewing to see at a glance everything that's happening.
   and most significantly,
   3) Why have video games as spectator sports caught on in other areas of the world, most notably South Korea with Starcraft, when they have failed to do so in America? (Note too that Starcraft refutes his point about online capability seeming to make matches less interesting to watch - people could just as easily play matches of Starcraft online as they could live in a stadium packed with people, but the call is still there for these live exhibitions)
   
   My other main complaint mirrors that of another reviewer - the book jumps from topic to topic with very little warning or transition. There does not seem to be much of a cohesive structure to the book.

5 comments about Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things.

1. Read his other book that touches on the same subject, DEEP SURVIVAL. As good as that one is this is the antithesis. As a writer Mr. Gonzales projcts his widely liberal world view into "facts" and "solutions" on how people and the world can be better.
   Like when he says how much the war in Iraq costs per month, that if we used that money on schools,roads, etc.. "what a wonderful world this could be" (not his quote but my synopsis of his "solution") Like the goverment would directly spend this money on these problems anyway.
   Another great part of the book is when he talks about the intricacies of the universe and the depths of the sea as his "reasoning" for there being no God. Pretty funny stuff.
   All is not lost though. He mentions a book "Dealers Of Lightning". I have since bought and read 1/2 of it and am loving it. Read DOL or DEEP SURVIVAL.



2. I was surprised by how negative some of the reviews of this book are. It seems that people who read Gonzales' previous book, Deep Survival, were disappointed in this one because they expected a very different kind of book. Not having read Deep Survival, I had no particular expectations and I found Everyday Survival thought-provoking and interesting. I don't entirely agree with Gonzales' main thesis - that our modern way of living has made us unable to call on adaptive behavior that came naturally to our prehistoric ancestors, making us at risk in today's world. But, though they were occasionally a tad too drawn out, I found his stories intriguing, his examples powerful, and his overall analysis thought-provoking.



3. Like other reviewers, I have a dog eared, underlined, heavily used copy of Deep Survival. So when I saw that Gonzales had a new book out, I couldn't wait to read it. What disappoints me about this book is not that it is not as good as Deep Survival, but that it starts with some interesting ideas and ends up getting side tracked and derailed.
   
   The first six chapters are excellent. His link between how we make decisions and our impact on the environment are elegant and provocative. He talks about how we walk about in a "vacation state of mind," oblivious to the effects of our actions. I feel like I see this every day in the way people interact with each other. He then applies this "insulation from reality" to a macro view of the earth's systems and how humanity interacts with them.
   
   After chapter six, the book unravels, jumping rapidly from issue to issue, supporting his statements with increasingly dubious science and venturing into New Age territory. One of the major themes of the later chapters is entropy, which is appropriate as there is a general decline into disorder in the later chapters.
   
   I didn't pick up this book expecting a treatise on environmental responsibility and was not disappointed when Gonzales started down that path. I can, however, see how a "rugged individualist" would be shocked to find ideas about ecological stewardship in a book that looks like it is going to be about wilderness adventures. For those people, you've been warned; maybe you should look for a different book. For everyone else, find this book at your library, read the first six chapters and then return it.



4. Pros: First six chapters are interesting and about the main reasons why folks do silly things with good examples provided.
   
   Cons: Last 10 chapters are an odd mix of material on saving the Earth, physics, entropy, natural history, "look who I met when I went here" and biography of Gonzales and his father. Sources not cited, only selected bibliography provided. Poorly edited: Caption of picture on page 22 of the hardcover is incorrect, "dollars" is spelled "dolars" on page 210.



5. After hanging on every word while reading Deep Survival, I was very disappointed with Everyday Survival. The first 3-4 chapters showed promise with the same excellent story-telling blended with psychology research, evolutionary psychology, and well developed arguments. After that, however, the book devolves and gets lost in ramblings on entropy, environmentalism, and other topics that have little to do with "everyday survival". Instead, just when you think you know where Gonzales is heading, he drifts in another direction. No cohesive theme brings the book together and just getting through the last five chapters became a challenge.

5 comments about Primitive Technology.

1. It has occurred to me that a primitive technology for instant communication has existed for a long time: heliography. All you need it silver or gold metallurgy to make a decent mirror. A very simple way to precisely aim a beam of sunlight from a mirror exists, for the geomentrically unimpaired. With a large mirror, signalling from one mountain peak to another over distances of 50 miles is achievable.
   
   I wonder if any ancient empires practiced this. The crusader kingdoms in Lebanon used fire beacons to indicate they had not yet been overrun by those pesky Arabs and Kurds, but there was no actual telegraphing of text. The earliest telegraph I know of was done in Sweden in the early 19th century, by semaphore assisted with telescopes. Sunny day and batteries not required, as long as there was daylight and a clear view.
   
   One thing about this book... I went out right away, cut off a yucca spine, and started making string out of it. Yep, it really works (but is very labor intensive). Stone chipping was not so successful because you really need the right kind of stone. I've GOT TO TRY IT when I find a good stone!



2. The book is an overview of a wide range of skills and lacks details on how on how to do them.



3. Long ago our knowlegdge was passed down from the elder generations. This book fills the void our society of alienation has created with detailed accounts of "how-to" knowledge. Tempered with instruction, the reader will find scientific analysis of all facets of "primitive" survival methodologies. By far, these are the best encyclopedic volumes of information that would otherwise be lost to us all. If you share any penchant for living with the earth, buy this book...immediately! You should also check out the society of primitve technology online. This group publishes bi-annual journals on primitive skills. I gave this a four because some of the instructions can be vague and for all intents and purposes should be used in conjunction with hands on interaction with a skilled mentor. Enjoy this awe-inspiring collection of knowledge!



4. If you are curious about what primitive technology is about this book will give you a good introduction. Lots of cool drawings and pics but don't expect step by step, hand held instructions for the multitude of topics covered in this compilation. If you don't know much about this stuff then some vocabulary may be new to you such as atlatls, celt, haft, biface, pecking and the list goes on. It was new for me but I found that my interests grew deeper and soon found myself buying books on flintknapping (did I have money for that...?) which I knew next to nothing about not too long ago. Inspirational in so many regards with some reasonable instruction from pics and words combined but I think these articles were intended for those with some background in the subject. Many short articles with great tidbits for the outdoorsman. A taste of this and a flavor of that by leading authorities whose expertise is compiled into one book. I recommend it highly not only for the curious but the outdoorsman, survivalist and tinkerer! I love that little knife in the middle foreground on the cover!



5. The info and presentation of this book are good, but these wonderful folks can't hold a candle to Tom Brown, Jr. He is the best and presents the "whole" of nature and Mother Earth. If you are interested in the deeper meanings of nature try Tom Brown, Jr.