|
|
|
Gang Leader for a Day: A Rogue Sociologist Takes to the Streets
First introduced in Freakonomics, here is the full story of Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociology grad student who infiltrated one of Chicago's most notorious gangs The story of the young sociologist who studied a Chicago crack-dealing gang from the inside captured the world's attention when it was first described in Freakonomics. Gang Leader for a Day is the fascinating full story of how Sudhir Venkatesh managed to gain entrŽe into the gang, what he learned, and how his method revolutionized the academic establishment. When Venkatesh walked into an abandoned building in one of Chicago's most notorious housing projects, he was looking for people to take a multiple-choice survey on urban poverty. A first-year grad student hoping to impress his professors with his boldness, he never imagined that as a result of the assignment he would befriend a gang leader named JT and spend the better part of a decade inside the projects under JT's protection, documenting what he saw there. Over the next seven years, Venkatesh got to know the neighborhood dealers, crackheads, squatters, prostitutes, pimps, activists, cops, organizers, and officials. From his privileged position of unprecedented access, he observed JT and the rest of the gang as they operated their crack-selling business, conducted PR within their community, and rose up or fell within the ranks of the gang's complex organizational structure. In Hollywood-speak, Gang Leader for a Day is The Wire meets Harvard University. It's a brazen, page turning, and fundamentally honest view into the morally ambiguous, highly intricate, often corrupt struggle to survive in what is tantamount to an urban war zone. It is also the story of a complicated friendship between Sudhir and JT-two young and ambitious men a universe apart..
Price: $14.85
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Down These Mean Streets
Thirty years ago Piri Thomas made literary history with this lacerating, lyrical memoir of his coming of age on the streets of Spanish Harlem. Here was the testament of a born outsider: a Puerto Rican in English-speaking America; a dark-skinned morenito in a family that refused to acknowledge its African blood. Here was an unsparing document of Thomas's plunge into the deadly consolations of drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery--a descent that ended when the twenty-two-year-old Piri was sent to prison for shooting a cop. As he recounts the journey that took him from adolescence in El Barrio to a lock-up in Sing Sing to the freedom that comes of self-acceptance, faith, and inner confidence, Piri Thomas gives us a book that is as exultant as it is harrowing and whose every page bears the irrepressible rhythm of its author's voice. Thirty years after its first appearance, this classic of manhood, marginalization, survival, and transcendence is available in an anniversary edition with a new Introduction by the author..
Price: $7.23
[Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Manson in His Own Words
|
|
Morrie: In His Own Words
"Learn how to live and you'll know how to die; learn how to die, and you'll know how to live."In these remarkable pages are the profound, life-affirming words of Morrie Schwartz as he faced his own imminent death. In 1994, at the age of seventy-seven, Schwartz learned he had ALS, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Undaunted, the former professor embraced his illness, choosing to live passionately and calmly until the end. He also embarked on his greatest teaching adventure: sharing his evolving knowledge of living while dying. With warmth, wisdom, and humor, Morrie reveals how to: -- live fully in the moment -- tap into the powers of the mind to transcend physical limitations -- grieve for your losses -- reach out to family and friends -- develop an inner space for meditation and spiritual connection. It's never too late to become the kind of person you'd like to be. Morrie shows the way in his magnificent legacy of love, forgiveness, transcendence, and redemption, a guide to living fully to the end of your days. Morrie's willingness to talk about his illness made him an inspiration. In 1995 Nightline ran three interviews in which Ted Koppel spoke to Morrie about life, death and the disease that was afflicting his body. In Morrie: In His Own Words, Morrie combined inspiring lessons with practical advice to help those who have chronic or terminal sickness and to help those close to them maintain healthy emotions and loving relationships. As life-affirming as it is life-releasing, Morrie: In His Own Words will have a profound effect on generations of readers..
Price: $3.69
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
The Happy Hooker: My Own Story
How did you first learn about sex? If you grew up in the 1970s, it may have been from a gleefully lusty tour guide named Xaviera Hollander In the late 1960s -- that era of sexual chaos, when Playboy Clubs and love-ins were competing for national attention -- a beautiful, intelligent young Dutch secretary named Xaviera de Vries moved to New York, grew swiftly tired of her desk job . . . and soon became the most visible and glamorous madam the city had ever seen. As Xaviera Hollander, she published a shockingly candid account of her life behind the brothel door. The Happy Hooker shot straight to the top of the bestseller lists, sold more than fifteen million copies, and made this enterprising young woman an international phenomenon. Thirty years later, these delightfully explicit tales of the '60s and '70s swingers' scene -- including countless jaw-dropping stories of lesbianism, bondage, fetishism, and more -- remain as titillating as ever, charged with the mix of shrewd observation and uninhibited appetite that made Hollander an irresistible storyteller. The Happy Hooker is a classic: the world's greatest book on the world's oldest profession. .
Price: $7.18
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Sketch for a Self-Analysis
Over the past four decades, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu produced one of the most imaginative and subtle bodies of social theory of the postwar era. When he died in 2002, he was considered to be the most influential sociologist in the world and a thinker on a par with Foucault and Lévi-Strauss—a public intellectual as important to his generation as Sartre was to his. Sketch for a Self-Analysis is the ultimate outcome of Bourdieu’s lifelong preoccupation with reflexivity. Vehemently not an autobiography, this unique book is instead an application of Bourdieu’s theories to his own life and intellectual trajectory; along the way it offers compelling and intimate insights into the most important French intellectuals of the time—including Foucault, Sartre, Aron, Althusser, and de Beauvoir—as well as Bourdieu’s own formative experiences at boarding school and his moral outrage at the colonial war in Algeria. .
Price: $16.85
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Otto Neurath
Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath was a seminal Modernist figure. Much attention has been given to his achievements in the fields of graphic design and philosophy (Neurath was a member of the Vienna Circle, founder of the Museum of Society and Economy, inventor of the ISOTYPE pictorial system and champion of the Unity of Science movement), yet his involvement with urbanism and architecture has been all but ignored. From 1931 onwards, Neurath collaborated with the International Congress of Modern Architecture and its chief exponents--Cornelis van Eesteren, Sigfried Giedion, Le Corbusier and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy--to develop an international language of urban planning and design. More experimentally, throughout the 1930s a fascination with visual media led to an attempt to franchise the Museum of Society and Economy by establishing international satellite museums. This volume contains a text by curator and writer Nader Vossoughian, which offers a fresh perspective on one of the most versatile intellectuals of the twentieth century..
Price: $28.00
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
Joseph Campbell: A Fire in the Mind
The fascinating biography that illuminates the man whose work changed modern culture * Gives a complete biographical view of Campbell's life and a personal perspective of who he was through the voices of his friends and colleagues. * Written by two of Campbell's preeminent students with exclusive access to his notes and journals. Joseph Campbell forged an approach to the study of myth and legend that made ancient traditions and beliefs immediate, relevant, and universal. His teachings and literary works, including The Masks of God, have shown that beneath the apparent themes of world mythology lie patterns that reveal the ways in which we all may encounter the great mysteries of existence: birth, growth, soul development, and death. Biographers Stephen and Robin Larsen, students and friends of Campbell for more than 20 years, weave a rich tapestry of stories and insights that catalogue both his personal and public triumphs..
Price: $15.65
[Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
And when did you last see your father?: A Son's Memoir of Love and Loss
Soon to be a major motion picture, directed by Anand Tucker and starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent And when did you last see your father? Was it last weekend or last Christmas? Was it before or after he exhaled his last breath? And was it him really, or was it a version of him, shaped by your own expectations and disappointments? Blake Morrison's subject is universal: the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, charming and infuriating, domineering and terribly vulnerable. In reading about Dr. Arthur Morrison, we come to ask ourselves the same searching questions that Blake Morrison poses: Can we ever see our parents as themselves, or are they forever defined through a child's eyes? What are the secrets of their lives, and why do they spare us that knowledge? And when they die, what do they take with them that cannot be recovered or inherited? .
Price: $6.75
[ Notify me when price goes down.]
|
|
|
|
|
