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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: $14.40
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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: $7.52
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Turning Stones: My Days and Nights with Children at Risk: A Caseworker's Story
Why does an infant die of malnutrition? Why does an eight-year-old hold a knife to his brother's throat? Or a mother push her cherished daughter twenty-three floors to her death? Marc Parent, a city caseworker, searched the streets--and his heart--for the answers, and shares them in this powerful, vivid, beautifully written book. WITH A NEW AFTERWORD BY THE AUTHOR.
Price: $8.44
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Manson in His Own Words
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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: $3.00
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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.
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Price: $17.12
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Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society (Heritage of Sociology Series)
Emile Durkheim is best known in this country as a great sociologist and methodologist Yet it was Durkheim's reflections on morality and society that spoke most deeply of his vital concerns. In his informative introduction to this work, Robert N. Bellah describes Durkheim as moralist, philosopher, theologian, and prophet, as well as sociologist, and the selections in this volume are representative of these aspects of Durkheim's many-faceted scholarship. The first two selections of the volume set the context for the development of Durkheim's sociology of morality. Section I, "The French Tradition of Social Thought," gives Durkheim's picture of how his sociology is to be situated relative to the general French tradition. Section II, "Sociology and Social Action," shows Durkheim grappling with moral and political issues in his society and indicates the immediate social context of his thinking. The remaining selections indicate some of the major substantive areas of Durkheim's sociology of morality. Section III, taken from The Division of Labor in Society, demonstrates his basically evolutionary approach to the development of moral norms in society. Section IV, "The Learning of Morality," gives examples of Durkheim's work on socialization. Section V, "Social Creativity," deals with the important question of how new moral norms arise in society. .
Price: $15.30
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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: $28.99
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Sociological Theory
With one of the foremost authorities on sociological theory as lead author, this best-selling text gives readers a comprehensive overview of the major classical theorists and contemporary schools of sociological thought. Spanning the history of sociological theory from its inception to the latest theoretical developments, it integrates key theories with biographical sketches of theorists, placing readings in context and helping students understand the original works of classical authors as well as compare and contrast the newest substantive theories. The thoroughly updated sixth edition reflects current debates in sociology and includes new sections on Actor-Network theory, neo-Marxian theories of space, and more! .
Price: $50.00
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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: $4.20
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