Books about Spoiled from Amazon.com

Stigma is an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts, prostitutes, or those ostracized for other reasons must constantly strive to adjust to their precarious social identities. Their image of themselves must daily confront and be affronted by the image which others reflect back to them.

Drawing extensively on autobiographies and case studies, sociologist Erving Goffman analyzes the stigmatized person's feelings about himself and his relationship to "normals" He explores the variety of strategies stigmatized individuals employ to deal with the rejection of others, and the complex sorts of information about themselves they project. In Stigma the interplay of alternatives the stigmatized individual must face every day is brilliantly examined by one of America's leading social analysts.

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Price: $3.69 [Notify me when price goes down.]

On those magnificent days on which your drives split the fairway down the middle and your wedge shots leave you putting for birdie, you think: "I wonder if I could do this for a living." After all, guys in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, guys no one heard of until recently, are making planeloads of money on the various golf tours (and buying private planes to take them from one big-money tournament to the next). A Good Walk Spoiled is a bit of a reality check. John Feinstein chronicles the struggles of the top golfers in the game, as well as those trying to get onto the PGA Tour. These are gifted players who've devoted their lives to the game, and on any given day they could just flat out stink. A Good Walk Spoiled is a completely engaging book from first page to last, a wonderfully observed and masterfully told story of pain and profit in the world's most frustrating sport..
Price: $3.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Oh, those naughty, naughty high school girls! Talk about spoiled! The rambunctious raconteuse of raunch Rebecca takes a vacation from her horny Housewives and Hot Moms to throw a VERY explicit spotlight on the younger generation of female flesh and, oh my! Knees and other body parts are kissed, girls are forced to act like dogs and babies (and Thanksgiving dinner), strap-ons are given a workout, friends meet enemas, nipples squirt milk, and those cute little teenagers do things to each other's per little butt holes that you have to see to believe (did you know why it was called corn holing? Well?)..
Price: $6.44 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Like Kofi Annan, Larry Miller is one of the most irresistible comic personalities working today. Known for years as an actor, writer, comedian, and sexual pioneer, he's gained a new following as a cultural commentator and frequent guest on political shows. Now, in Spoiled Rotten America, he fixes his gaze on what's funny about our daily lives—which includes, roughly speaking, everything. From middle-aged drinking ("When you're in your twenties, you can drink all night and bungee-jump off a bridge the next day. If I drank all night, I'd want to go off that bridge without the cord") to the excesses of our eating habits ("This is why the world hates us: the size of the portions we order. Thank God they've never shown us eating on Al Jazeera—that would be the end of it"), Miller finds the silver lining of absurdity within every black cloud.

Ultimately, though, Spoiled Rotten America is more than just the average yukfest. It's an insightful, and surprisingly heartfelt, plea for us to notice what's best and worst about ourselves. "The American pendulum only swings to extremes," he writes. "The news is on all day, but we know less and less; there's music in every mall, but we don't hear it; everyone has a phone but nothing to say. The chubbiest of us have the strictest diets, because we can't learn to modulate and moderate. It's all or nothing. One bite of a cookie, and suddenly you're on a plane to Vegas with a hooker. To the Cranky Nitpickers of America—a club I'd join in a second if I weren't already its president—it's long been understood that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket.

"What better time for a collection of seventeen comic essays?"

What better time indeed.

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Price: $2.92 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $5.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Lights, camera -- disaster! The coolest show on TV, Spy Guy, is filming an episode in Jigsaw's town. When Jigsaw lands a role as an extra, he gets to go behind the scenes. He even meets Chase Jackson, the show's spoiled star, who plays a junior spy.

But then an important prop disappears -- and everyone accuses Chase of stealing it. Luckily, there's a real detective on the set. It's up to Jigsaw Jones to crack the case before the cameras roll!

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Price: $1.20 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Despite frequent media accounts of such unpleasant matters as mad cow disease and outbreaks of food poisoning at fast-food restaurants, Nicols Fox argues, we know too little about the threat that current methods of food manufacture and distribution pose to health. Citing Center for Disease Control figures that put the food poisoning count alone at more than 81 million cases a year in the United States, she notes that in many countries it is unsafe to eat the skins of uncooked vegetables, eggs, ground meat, and other staples. Part of the problem lies in advances in transportation and storage technology, which allow us to consume foods grown very far away and at all seasons; part lies in the fact that bacteria are evolving to survive efforts to contain them. Fox's book is alarming--but appropriately so..
Price: $4.88 [Notify me when price goes down.]