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Erving Goffman (1922-82) was an inspirational thinker, and one of the giants of 20th century sociology. Several of his books, notably The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Asylums (1961), Relations in Public (1963), Stigma (1963)and Gender Advertisements (1979) are acknowledged as modern classics. Goffman fundamentally revised how we think of social life. After him, the study of social encounters, behavior in public, the construction and deconstruction of the self, stigma and forms of everyday communication, were never the same again.

Without being obviously attached to any discrete research tradition, Goffman drew from the best thought on social interaction, applied it in his fieldwork, and produced a richly satisfying and extraordinary influential approach to making sense of social life. He was a sociological virtuoso, producing unmatched insights into how life with others is sustained and why forms of interaction break down or cause personal damage.

This unparalleled collection, edited by two acknowledged international experts on Erving Goffman, produces a unique reference resource for researchers and students. It consists of the main critical responses to Goffman's oeuvre, offering readers a distillation of the main themes in Goffman's work and explaining how these themes relate to contemporary social thought. The collection is systematic and constitutes a unique asset in understanding this searching and wide-ranging thinker.

The four volumes are thematically organized into nine sections:

Section 1: Personal Reminiscences

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This Exam Cram study guide focuses on one of the most popular electives in the MCSE Windows 2000 certification track-the MCSE Installing, Configuring, and Administering Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2000 exam (70-227).This book delivers just what readers need to pass.Namely, efficient yet thorough coverage of pertinent exam topics like configuring and troubleshooting ISA Server Services, managing and troubleshooting Policies and Rules, deploying the Client Computer, and analyzing ISA Server usage.Includes our test-takers' best-loved features of strategies, hints, and tips, tear-out cram sheets, and realistic practice questions. ... Read more

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Public Schools That Work addresses the efforts of teachers, administrators and parents to develop alternative educational models capable of overcoming the alienation and intellectual disengagement that have become so common in American schools. Educators working in some of the best alternative elementary and secondary schools across the country recount their attempts to create systems which will educate diverse populations in their customs and heritages, involve parents and community leaders in decisions related to the life of their schools and involve students in their communities by encouraging participation in a variety of civic projects. By being rooted in their local social environment, these schools demonstrate the transformative potential of education to return power and authority to those individuals attempting to reconstruct and humanize the institutions within which they must learn and teach. ... Read more

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Publisher: Oxford At The Clarendon Press.Publication date: 1904Subjects: LANGUAGE. LINGUISTICS. LITERATURELiteratureLiteratureNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be numerous typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

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This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

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The co-authors of The Mormon Murders explore the murder trial of multimillionaire Cullen Davis, who killed two people at the Fort Worth mansion and used his power and wealth to protect himself from murder charges. Reprint.Amazon.com Review
This story is remarkable not for the actual amount of moneythat T. Cullen Davis had, but for the way in which he was allowed tospend it during his murder trial. Not only did he bring into Dallasthe best, the flashiest, and the most vindictive defense attorneymoney could buy, he also was allowed to turn the whole trial into anunbelievable (at least outside of Texas) circus in which even the jurymembers were treated to prime steaks every night, courtesy of thedefendant. Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith deliver this talewith both tact and panache: they discover the sad substance beneaththe surface glitter, they bring to life the many eccentric charactersinvolved, and they have a fine sense of the absurd. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

money does not buy happiness
ALL I CAN SAY IS " WHAT A STORY" .

Vivid and very well written
This is a fascinating and disturbing tale that illustrates just how hard it is to convict somebody who has a lot of money and power.Cullen Davis, warped little rich boy dominated by his incredibly wealthy and megalomanicfather, grows up to inherit most of the fortune and position.What does hedo with it?He chases sex kitten type women, showers them with lavishgifts, and abuses them.

Naifeh and Smith raise the true crime genre tosomething close to literature here.We have the usual litany of sickiesand psychopaths, the usual police incompetence, prosecutors who can'tprosecute, etc.The "final justice" in the title is somewhat ironic sincemultimillionaire Cullen Davis is never found guilty of any of his crimes,the worst of which was the cold-blooded murder of his wife's 12-year-olddaughter; the least of which, perhaps the killing of her kitten.Thejuries in Texas just would not convict him (although they have put a numberof poor people on death row).Instead they admired him for his money,stupidly since he just inherited it.And before the book is over, he blowsmost of it.

We get a terrible sense here that people with riches inpositions of power really can get away with murder.People look up to themregardless of their crimes.It helps us to understand how murderers likeSadaam Hussein and what's his name in Yugoslavia continue in power.It'snot just that people are afraid of them, they look up to them and find waysto excuse their crimes.This is the human tribal mind at work: better ourcorrupt and evil leader than theirs, and better a corrupt and evil leaderthan no leader at all.The women in this one come off as particularlysubject to manipulation by power and money, although that was notnecessarily the authors' intent.They wanted to show just what a sick,sick man Cullen Davis is, and they succeed in that.But incidentally theyrevealed the women around him, especially his gold-digging wives, as sad,sad creatures who would be abused and wallow in it for the sake of beingclose to all that money and power and maybe getting a little of it.Onehas the sense that they couldn't help themselves.

This is a good readthat will rouse your sense of indignation.

The OJ Trial 20 years before...
it actually happened!!!

Don't look at the facts.Facts are **BAD***!!Let's attack the victims and divert attention away from what the case was all about...the murder of a twelve year old girl and a familyaquaintance.

OJ's "Dream Team" (what a joke) must've used thiscase as a template for OJ's defense, because the similarities areeerie.

Highly recommended.

Truthful
This book is really, the most precise account of the murders and trials.Some of the other books on the murder trials of Mr. Davis are very goddy and don't focus on the facts of the case.I really think that Mr. Naifehdid an excellent job with the content and details of this novel.I hope thatpeople will not simply judge a case or story by one book, and know that youmust have a numerous amount of facts and reality before you try to judgesomeone or something.

Scary and true to life
At the time of the Davis murders, I was living in Fort Worth and had asecond-hand acquaintance with some of the people involved.Smith andNaifeh got it exactly right:not merely the facts but the "feel"of the case.Texas is a microcosm of the U.S., with all our best and worstqualities exaggerated.The Davis case exemplified our fascination with sexand sleaze, our love/hate relationship with the wealthy, and a legal systemthat's as much showmanship as The Majesty Of The Law -- and the resultswere an ironic commentary on what we truly value.(Somehow, the fact thatPriscilla Davis was a mother whose 12-year-old daughter was brutallymurdered got lost in the shuffle.)The book is engrossing and truly scary,and I highly recommend it. ... Read more

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Useful book
This book is written in a very practical and essentially non-mathematical style. A rigorous approach to aberration theory requires an algebraically complex treatment. This often obscures a qualitative understanding of optical system behavior, and aberrations. This author has done an excellent job of treating the subject intuitively, with many examples. A very useful book. ... Read more

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Much of the current library literature assumes that professional library service is necessarily neutral-detached from the librarian's philosophical or religious views. By contrast, contributors to this collection assert that librarianship is best practiced as an outworking of spiritual conviction. Accordingly, they discuss principles for integrating Christian faith and librarianship within various contexts, and reflect on professional issues from biblical and theological perspectives. This text will prove beneficial to Christians working in all types of libraries, whether religious or secular.

This compilation of 16 essays is divided into two main parts, the first on theory and the second on practice. The first part includes chapters such as A Rationale for Integrating Christian Faith and Librarianship, The Master We Serve: The Call of the Christian Librarian to the Secular Workplace; and The Impact of the Christian Faith on Library Service. Chapters in the second part include Library Encounters Culture, A Christian Approach to Intellectual Freedom in Libraries and Keeping Sunday Special in the Contemporary Workplace Culture. Contributors include William Fraher Abernathy, Rod Badams, Donald G. Davis, Jr., John Allen Delivuk, Kenneth D. Gill, Graham Hedges, D. Elizabeth Irish, James R. Johnson, Roger W. Phillips, Gregory A. Smith, Stanford Terhune, John B. Trotti, John Mark Tucker and Geoff Warren. ... Read more

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This entry in the Major Problems in American History series examines the history of technology in America, from colonial times to the present. Each of the 14 chapters contains an introduction, secondary readings, documents, headnotes, and suggested readings.

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In the past quarter-century, gender has emerged as a lively area of inquiry for historians and other scholars, and gender analysis has suggested important revisions of the “master narratives” of national histories—the dominant, often celebratory tales of the successes of a nation and its leaders. Although modern Japanese history has not yet been restructured by a foregrounding of gender, historians of Japan have begun to embrace gender as an analytic category.

The sixteen chapters in this volume treat men as well as women, theories of sexuality as well as gender prescriptions, and same-sex as well as heterosexual relations in the period from 1868 to the present. All of them take the position that history is gendered; that is, historians invariably, perhaps unconsciously, construct a gendered notion of past events, people, and ideas. Together, these essays construct a history informed by the idea that gender matters because it was part of the experience of people and because it often has been a central feature in the construction of modern ideologies, discourses, and institutions. Separately, each chapter examines how Japanese have (en)gendered their ideas, institutions, and society.

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"An Integrated Approach to Family Work for Psychosis" is a manual for using cognitive behavioural approach to working with families of people with severe mental illness. The authors, all experienced clinicians, discuss the various core components of family work, including what constitutes family work, when it might be offered, and how and where it might be applied. As well as these core concerns, the authors also look at reframing challenges and overcoming common personal and external barriers to effective family work. Each chapter can be read individually or as part of the integrated manual. The central argument of the book is that family work must be individualised and it offers a clear approach to engaging and working with families to ensure that this happens, including guidance on how to link components of a service user's plan with their family's strengths and strategies for reducing stress. The book addressed both theory and practice, and concentrates on the experience of mental illness for the service user and their family, providing a focus for intervention.Exploring family work as an integrated psychosocial and educational support strategy, this manual will increase the confidence and competence of new family workers - mental health workers, social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists - and broaden the knowledge of those already working in the area. ... Read more

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For well over a century the Catholic Church has articulated clear positions on many issues of public concern, particularly economics, capital punishment, foreign affairs, sexual morality, and abortion. Yet the fact that some of the Church's positions do not mesh well with the platforms of either of the two major political parties in the U.S. may make it difficult for Americans to look to Catholic doctrine for political guidance. Scholars of religion and politics have long recognized the potential for clergy to play an important role in shaping the voting decisions and political attitudes of their congregations, yet these assumptions of political influence have gone largely untested and undemonstrated."Politics in the Parish" is the first empirical examination of the role Catholic clergy play in shaping the political views of their congregations.Gregory Allen Smith draws from recent scholarship on political communication, and the comprehensive Notre Dame Study on Parish Life, as well as case studies he conducted in nine parishes in the mid-Atlantic region, to investigate the extent to which and the circumstances under which Catholic priests are influential in shaping the politics of their parishioners.Smith is able to verify that clergy do exercise political influence, but he makes clear that such influence is likely to be nuanced, limited in magnitude, and exercised indirectly by shaping parishioner religious attitudes that in turn affect political behavior. He shows that the messages that priests deliver vary widely, even radically, from parish to parish and priest to priest. Consequently, he warns that scholars should exercise caution when making any global assumptions about the political influence that Catholic clergy affect upon their congregations. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Catholic church arguably remains the most powerful religious organization on the planet.
Despite a great loss in its stature over the centuries, the Catholic church arguably remains the most powerful religious organization on the planet. "Politics in the Parish: The Political Influence of Catholic Priests" is a look at the politics of the Catholic church, and how it uses its power in the modern political world. A look at how priests shape the views of their congregations with their sermons, and how Catholics can intertwinetheir faith with their political beliefs, "Politics in the Parish" speaks on the issues that ignite clashes between Catholic church and both the Democrat and Republican sides of politics. "Politics in the Parish" is highly recommended for community library religious and political collections.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch ... Read more

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This second title in the Masters of Motion series puts kids and parents alike in the driver's seat as Indy driver Al Unser, Jr., shows how to rock 'n' roll behind the wheel of the most powerful racing car on the track today. Packed with full-color action photos, the book focuses on the individual skills involved in handling the car. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Very Hepful!!!!!!!!
This book helps you understand goes on in Indy Car racing. I recommed this book alot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Wish I'd had this book when I was a kid!
If you know a kid who's interested in racing, there's no better introduction to big-time motorsports than this book. It takes young readers (probably age 8 and up) inside the world of Champ Car racing, with thorough discussions of the drivers, cars, teams and events. When I was a kid, I had little concept of racing beyond the Indy 500, but a book like this would have added immensely to my understanding of the sport. The book's only shortcoming is that the information is somewhat dated now, but its young readers probably won't mind a bit. ... Read more

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A collection of 17 narrative essays that range from the light and humorous to the sobering and reflective even including a harrowing brush with death. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Myopic and Condescending
I recommend that you pass on this book.I purchased it based on an advertisement and the current Amazon recommendations, but I found the author to be myopic and condescending.In one chapter, he describes some short stature tourists as "munchkins." In another, he discusseshis thought process on turning back to New Zealand during a gale, and decides against it because his crew might flee and he would have difficulty finding new crew.Obviously, the primary concern should be protection of crew and not the convenience of the captain. He seems obsessed with money and the cost of items to the point of being miserly.For example, when a crew member with whom he has been romantically involved takes her leave, he makes a point of explaining how he offered to buy from her a pair of swim fins to give her some road money. He continually discusses his purchase of food from street vendors and its low cost - while commenting on the unsanitary manner in which it is served. Most of the travel discussions are little more than tourist bus rides.Frankly, I found the author's egocentric point of view distracting to the point of being offensive.Pass.

a different kind of sailing book
Most sailing books are the I got here using this sail with the wind from the south, etc. variety.This is quite different.It is a single, male in self imposed exile on a sailboat.Interacting with the local cultures to some degree, but never a part of it, and thus an observer.A sharp, sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes sad observer.Most are stories and observations at his various longer stops along the way.

True to what any of us might experience going solo, with assorted crew, around the world.A couple would have had a different experience, and perhaps fit in better, but would not notice what he does.
Highly recommended.

Not Just a Sailing Book
Gregory Newell Smith's The Solitude of the Open Sea, a collection of narrative essays drawn from Smith's around-the- world sailing adventures, is much more than a sailing book: it is an insightful reflection on cross-cultural misunderstandings and the problems of cultural isolation; an album of portraits of fascinating people (his account of a young English woman, "Florence," was my favorite); and, most of all, the book is a philosophical examination of solitude and how being alone on his journey shaped his experiences.
The title essay, which tells of Smith's 53-day solo passage from Panama to Hawaii, explains how a full appreciation of solitude goes beyond merely being alone, away from other people.On the contrary, it is through solitude that Smith is able to experience communion with nature and all of its power, a sublimity that, for Smith, is inspired by the breadth and majesty of the open sea.The experience of the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic that overwhelms the observer in a way that ordinary perception cannot.
The sense of what Smith calls "wonder and awe" is difficult to apprehend outside of nature, though it is perhaps approached in some Chinese and Western landscape paintings.As Smith writes, "It took the sea's total freedom and the solitude I found there to finally achieve the communion I'd sought for so many years.When I found that communion, . . . it was a communion with Nature, with the universe beheld each day, with the wind, the waves, the sky, and the creatures of the sea. . . . For a brief time I was at peace.There was nothing I truly desired, no other person I needed to make me feel whole.My world was complete."
What Smith experienced on the open sea was nature mysticism, which differs from traditional mysticism in at least two ways.First, nature mystics are extroverted, by which I mean that all their senses, including the kinesthetic, are stimulated.By contrast, other mystics turn inward and deliberately shut down their senses.Second, traditional mystics, rather than merging with nature, experience a fusion with God or the universal soul (atman) of the Hindus.
Both types of mysticism, however, do draw a person into the Eternal Now.Smith writes, "I can think of no more immediate experience than sailing by oneself. . . . we feel bored or lonely when we are no longer living in the present moment.We want a change of circumstances, to be somewhere else or doing something else.We separate ourselves from our immediate reality by positing an alternate.We react rather than respond."The mystics and the sea teach us the same lesson:"The key is acceptance: eventually the sea will get you to admit that one of the few things you can change in life is your attitude.A successful ocean passage is therefore nothing short of the union of the boat and its crew with the natural environment, and exemplifies the difference between reacting and responding."
By the end of the book, however, Smith has learned that he really needs soul fusion and not just nature mysticism."I know I should be savoring each and every moment of this wonderful sailing-around-the-world life, but my willingness to experience wonder and awe has been drained by the absence of a soul mate with whom to share it." This confession appears at odds with his claim that the open sea is a cure for loneliness and boredom, but now, although he has "increased [his] capacity for solitude," he admits that he is lonely.
Smith fears that his profound experiences of the sublime have made him less than fit for ordinary human fellowship.Nature accepts us unconditionally and she is fair and faithful, "treating us with he same care and respect she affords all." But most human beings want more than this-they are after all social animals-and each of us desires a special someone in a unique relationship of love and trust.
Smith is able to admit that his life is not complete, and that he really does need another person to make him whole. He acknowledges that he has been "nursing [a] resentment about having no partner, no soul mate, no special person with whom to share the journey." Furthermore, he has discovered that other lands, such as New Zealand, even though very much like his own Pacific Northwest, could not really be his home."I'll leave those places to their own natives, to those people who, as Terry Tempest Williams writes, naturally comprehend their landscapes and hold them as sanctuary inside their unguarded hearts."
In addition to insightful ruminations on solitude, the author also reflects on the difficulties of cross-cultural understanding.The reader gets the impression that Smith initially assumed that Euro-American "cruisers"-those who sail leisurely from island to island, continent to continent-would be ideal emissaries for international understanding.The actual experience, however, was far from what he expected.
Though he is not as cynical as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein ("One culture misunderstands another; and a petty culture misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way") he still comes to some rather negative conclusions:"There is little meaningful interaction between the cultures, as if both sides recognize the impossibility of either being able to fathom the other.Notions of universal brotherhood are pragmatically reduced to simple acceptance, without any real understanding of each other's lives."
He expresses his frustration at his failure to make further inroads into the native environment, but recognizes that his frustration is equally a measure of his own society's values and their hold on him.Nor does Smith believe that we westerners can hope to "go native;" no matter how much we may try, they will always remain at a distance from the culture we would embrace, forever identified by the locals as the outsider, the "Other."
The Solitude of the Open Sea is a marvelous book, both philosophically astute and a constant pleasure to read.Through a series of carefully chosen snapshots, Gregory Newell Smith has ably recreated the daily realities of extended travel and the insights it provides, ranging from the depths of despair, to the humdrum quotidian rituals, to the dizzying heights of rapture.The book is also a portrait of a caring, deeply introspective man-a nature mystic if you will-searching for peace with himself and with the world.

Good Book!
In the nineteen-nineties, approaching the age of forty, Gregory Newell Smith gave up his career as a Seattle corporate lawyer, sold most everything he owned, bought an ocean-going sailboat, and set out to see the world.After logging more than 45,000 blue water miles, and circling the globe aboard his Fast Passage 39, Atlantean, Smith returned to the Northwest to write a book about his travels.It's a dream many of us have had, and few have followed through on.

"I wanted to write about what it was really like to be out there," Smith said when I spoke to him recently about his newly published book The Solitude of the Open Sea."Extended travel is a life changing event, but it didn't make sense to tell readers everything I did in the three and half years I was underway."Smith's solution was to craft a collection of seventeen stories from his journeys, each of them drawing upon a particular experience in order to address the themes of his book, which he describes as "broadening our horizons beyond the known and commonplace, freeing ourselves from cultural self-centeredness, and achieving self-discovery through perseverance, hardship, and solitude."

Smith begins with the title essay, an account of his fifty-three day solo passage from Panama to Hawaii.Though Smith rarely traveled alone-he used pick-up crew for nearly all of his ocean passages, and the Hawaii passage actually takes place near the end of his journey-it's a good place for the reader to start, because Smith's perspective throughout the book is very much that of the lone traveler confronting a "world of strange customs . . . and people who don't look like us or speak our language."Almost all of Smith's stories address his experiences ashore (only three of them are set exclusively at sea), and they do not appear in chronological order, which may frustrate those readers looking for the typical "went there and did this" account.For this reason, I would say The Solitude of the Open Sea is more a collection of travel narratives than sailing stories, though I imagine it will be the armchair sailors who will be initially drawn to the title.

Smith is a careful observer, and his descriptions of the traveling life ring true.There are highs and lows, ranging from the idyllic joys of exploring the "jeweled anchorages" of Tonga's Vava'u Group, to the depressing realities of Madagascar's descent into poverty and environmental devastation.But Smith rarely gives way to the easy cynicism of some travel writers who call our attention to the fact that the South Seas are hardly the paradise many of us would like to believe.He points out that exploring the world by sailboat gives the cruiser a unique advantage-the boat is home, a refuge for those times when life on foreign shores becomes too much to face on a daily basis.

It's Smith's voice that impressed me from the outset and kept me reading.I never forgot that the author was a real person, willing to admit when he was terrified (climbing the mast to replace a broken halyard in the midst of a five-day gale) or lonely (overcome by nostalgic memories during night watch on the Indian Ocean). I appreciate that kind of honesty in a writer, but I was most surprised by Smith's lyrical prose, such as when he refers to Joseph Campbell's "rapture of life" upon hearing a lone bagpiper's sunset skirl on New Zealand's Great Barrier Island.Clearly this man cares about what's happening around him, and is unafraid to listen to his soul.

One of the back cover reviews says, "This book will make the reader want to get out there and do it."I agree, but at age seventy, and with a "busted gut" (a hernia, in the parlance of the tars that inhabit the mess deck in Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander series), my most ambitious sailing days are probably behind me.At least with books like The Solitude of the Open Sea, readers like me can be there in our imaginations, as Smith puts it, "spending this precious gift we call life finding out how much the world has to offer, over the horizon and not so very far away."
... Read more