Social Sciences Books - Page 7

The Plan: Big Ideas for America

Rahm Emanuel, Bruce Reed

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 20 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

The leading Neo-Con of the Democratic Party 1 out of 5 stars.
17 of 34 people found this review helpful.

It is amusing to have Rahm Emmanual write a book on saving the United States, when his first allegiance is to Israel. He is a proponent of the neo-con plan to reconfigure the Middle East, including attacking Iran (or, as Hillary Clinton, his partner in crime, would say, "Obliterate Iran"). He supports attacks on Syria, Lebanon, the continued occupation of Iraq, the refusal to allow a viable Palestinian state to exist, and the impending attack on Iran: all for the "survival" of Israel.

In the process, America is weakened, open to more extremist attacks, and its men and women are dying or losing limbs.

Rahm is an orthodox Jew, his parents are citizens of Israel: All of which would be fine if they didn't use America as a puppet for Israel's ultimate super power status in the Middle East.

Rahm is a traitor. He will sell -- and is selling out -- our country for Israel.

This book is a joke.

Editorial Review:

The Plan offers a bold vision of what America can be. It shows the way for both parties to move beyond the old political arguments and make progress for the American people. And it offers an innovative agenda for America – with ideas that address the nation's most pressing challenges by doing more for Americans and asking Americans to do more for their country in return. Each of these ideas offers a clean break with the status quo, yet all are positive, practical, and can be put into action right away. Built on the authors' firm beliefs that politicians owe the people real answers, that citizenship is a responsibility, not an entitlement program, and that the Democratic Party succeeds when America succeeds, the highly anticipated Plan delivers, challenges, and inspires.

Free to Be...You and Me

Marlo Thomas, Gloria Steinem

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Subjects -> Children's Books -> Authors & Illustrators, A-Z -> ( R ) -> Rodgers, Mary

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 24 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

My childhood favorite is now my daughters' favorite 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 5 people found this review helpful.

I'm convinced that I grew up to be a feminist, independent thinker, and lawyer - open to people from all backgrounds - because of Free to Be You and Me. The issues and songs and images are just as relevant today. It's fun for me to watch and hear the celebrities I grew up knowing and my young daughters don't know it's dated - bell bottoms do not deter them from the wonderful messages in these stories.

35 years later.... still relevant and powerful 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

I have had the great honor and pleasure of working with Marlo Thomas and Carole Hart on the 35th edition of this classic book. The book has inspired millions and it will continue to do so. This book is as powerful today as it was when it was first published. It is often pegged as a book to empower girls, but it speaks to boys equally - after all, isn't that our goal -- to be treated as people, not labels? I am hoping that the human race can evolve into a kinder, more generous and sensitive people. This book, given at an early age, (or ANY AGE, in fact!) will continue to help in that process.

Editorial Review:

A number of stories, poems, and songs which demonstrate that people can choose to do or be whatever they desire.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

Annette Gordon-Reed

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Most Disappointing and Maddening Book of the Year 1 out of 5 stars.
21 of 34 people found this review helpful.

I bought this book out of an interest in the subject matter and relying on the impressive credentials of its author. I anticipated that this would be an actual history that would bring many primary source materials together to paint a cohesive picture of the "Hemingses of Monticello."

As Gordon-Reed expressly states, Sally Hemings is a cipher, since there is so little epistolary or other primary source material extant to flesh out her presence in the narrative. Gordon-Reed seems to believe that that gives her unlimited license to project whatever thoughts, experiences, and motivations she likes upon someone who is very close to a blank page in history. It is unfair that Sally Hemings is very nearly a blank page--which injustice is not rectified by essentially inventing a persona and events for her life out of the author's imagination and suppositions. The grossest disservice of all is Gordon-Reed's supposition that Sally Hemings was defined entirely by her enslavement, despite considerable evidence to the contrary. Human beings, even enslaved ones, are more than the sum of their circumstances.

Gordon-Reed herself discusses the dangers of speculation about and projecting modern values upon historical subjects--and then disingenuously proceeds to do just that. Concerning both the Hemingses and Jeffersons et al, this book is full of outrageously broad generalizations, wild speculation, and leaps of imagination made and taken from the historical and moral perspective of a modern academic. One would expect more rigorous intellectual discipline from any author who purports to interpret history.

No one who picks up this book is likely to need convincing of the horrors of slavery--or even of 18th-century white male European patriarchy--but Gordon-Reed spends the better part of 700 pages bending others' scholarship to serve an agenda which admits of no historical context for, or alternative understandings of, actual facts. Gordon-Reed is welcome to an agenda, but it isn't history.

Since I am one of those who cannot stop reading a book--any book--before the end, I have spent the better part of the last 24 hours seething over "The Hemingses of Monticello" and what I consider to be false marketing of this work. Evidently I will have to track down and read the materials cited in the bibliography to get real information on the subject.

Editorial Review:

Historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed presents this epic work that tells the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family, and their close blood ties to Thomas Jefferson.

Nourishing Traditions

Sally Fallon, Pat Connolly

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 318 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

More than just a cook book... 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

More than just a cook book but a way of life and so much more!

Back to basics and common sense 4 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

LOVED, loved, loved this book. Great Anatomy and Physiology review of how the body works and why to eat natural foods. Loads of common sense and the recipies are easy and yummy!

more than satisfied 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Thank you for the super service. The book came timely and in good shape.

More than a cookbook 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

More than a cookbook--more like an encyclopedia. Provides great recipes, plus additional information, such as sources of products. Detailed explanation of nutritional aspects makes the book educational. Comprehensive indices make finding things easy.

must have!! 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This cookbook is a must have. I learned so much about how foods are supposed to be prepared, that I had never even heard of before. This is phenomenal resource for learning about the body and how it actually uses natural fats and how they are good for you. This is a must read. I take it with me everywhere and read a little at a time. It seems there is more to learn on every page.

Editorial Review:

The book that says "your body needs old-fashioned animal fats," is a successful challenge to politically correct nutrition and a reason to recall the culinary customs of our ancestors -- includes recipes.

Rules of the Game

Neil Strauss

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 45 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

If you want to play the Game, you've got to know the Rules.

In his international bestseller The Game, Neil Strauss delved into the secret world of pick-up artists--men who have created a science out of the art of seduction. Not only did he reveal the techniques that they had developed, but he became a master of The Game, and the world's No. 1 PUA, as Style.

Now, in his first follow-up to The Game, comes an extraordinary package: A lavishly produced, two-volume pocket-size set that every pickup artist--accomplished or aspiring--will need to have. The first book, The Stylelife Challenge, is the manual Strauss thought he'd never write: the ultimate guide to landing the woman of your dreams. Bound in white leatherette, it offers an in-depth 30-day program, Strauss challenges readers to confront their insecurities and overcome them through a process of rigorous self-examination, briefings and field missions.

In the second book, Strauss takes readers into the dark side of The Game. Bound in black leatherette, The Style Diaries offers a series of tales of seduction and sexual (mis)adventure. From accidentally getting married during a drunken night in Reykjavik, to luring a famous musician's granddaughter into a threesome; from conducting a keenly felt and tender relationship over email, to the stress and frustration of the torturous and highly unorthodox "30 Day Sex Experiment," The Style Diaries takes you further into the seduction underworld than ever before, and delves where The Game never dared to tread: into the even more complicated rules of relationships.

Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul

John Eldredge

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Subjects -> Religion & Spirituality -> Christianity -> Christian Living -> Faith

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 613 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Finally! 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Finally a book that's about guys being real men!!!
I absolutely recommend this to all Christian boys looking toward manhood, and for the men looking to discover the depths of their soul.

I thought this was another touchy-feely book when i saw the title. Just the words "discovering the secret of a man's soul" made me almost want to put this down.
Trust me, once you start it up you'll see it's more "get out there and be alive" or my favorite "be dangerous."

Overall this really has brought me closer to my Lord and Savior. I really have alot to work on!!

Editorial Review:

Helping men rediscover their masculine heart, this guide to understanding Christian manhood and Christian men offers a refreshing break from the chorus of voices urging men to be more responsible, reliable, dutiful… and dead. God designed men to be dangerous, says John Eldredge. Simply look at the dreams and desires written in the heart of every boy: To be a hero, to be a warrior, to live a life of adventure and risk. Sadly, most men abandon those dreams and desires-aided by a Christianity that feels like nothing more than pressure to be a "nice guy." It is no wonder that many men avoid church, and those who go are often passive and bored to death. In this provocative book, now available in trade paper, Eldredge gives women a look inside the true heart of a man and gives men permission to be what God designed them to be-dangerous, passionate, alive, and free.

Hurry Down Sunshine

Michael Greenberg

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 66 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

HURRY DOWN SUNSHINE TELLS THE STORY OF THE extraordinary summer when, at the age of fifteen, Michael Greenberg’s daughter was struck mad. It begins with Sally’s visionary crack-up on the streets of Greenwich Village, and continues, among other places, in the out-of-time world of a Manhattan psychiatric ward during the city’s most sweltering months. “I feel like I’m traveling and traveling with nowhere to go back to,” Sally says in a burst of lucidity while hurtling away toward some place her father could not dream of or imagine. Hurry Down Sunshine is the chronicle of that journey, and its effect on Sally and those closest to her–her brother and grandmother, her mother and stepmother, and, not least of all, the author himself. Among Greenberg’s unforgettable gallery of characters are an unconventional psychiatrist, an Orthodox Jewish patient, a manic Classics professor, a movie producer, and a landlord with literary dreams. Unsentimental, nuanced, and deeply humane, Hurry Down Sunshine holds the reader in a mesmerizing state of suspension between the mundane and the transcendent.

“The psychotic break of his fifteen-year-old daughter is the grit around which Michael Greenberg forms the pearl that is Hurry Down Sunshine. It is a brilliant, taut, entirely original study of a suffering child and a family and marriage under siege. I know of no other book about madness whose claim to scientific knowledge is so modest and whose artistic achievement is so great.” – Janet Malcolm, author of The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes and The Journalist and the Murderer

“One of the most gripping and disturbingly honest books I have ever read.  The courage Michael Greenberg shows in narrating the story of his adolescent daughter’s descent into psychosis is matched by his acute understanding of how alone each of us, sane or manic, is in our processing of reality and our attempts to get others to appreciate what seems important to us. This is a remarkable memoir.” – Phillip Lopate, author of Two Marriages and Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Jared Diamond

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Total reviews: 1075 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

With a new chapter. The phenomenal bestseller—over 1.5 million copies sold—is now a major PBS special.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is a brilliant work answering the question of why the peoples of certain continents succeeded in invading other continents and conquering or displacing their peoples. This edition includes a new chapter on Japan and all-new illustrations drawn from the television series.

Until around 11,000 BC, all peoples were still Stone Age hunter/gatherers. At that point, a great divide occurred in the rates that human societies evolved. In Eurasia, parts of the Americas, and Africa, farming became the prevailing mode of existence when indigenous wild plants and animals were domesticated by prehistoric planters and herders. As Jared Diamond vividly reveals, the very people who gained a head start in producing food would collide with preliterate cultures, shaping the modern world through conquest, displacement, and genocide.

The paths that lead from scattered centers of food to broad bands of settlement had a great deal to do with climate and geography. But how did differences in societies arise? Why weren't native Australians, Americans, or Africans the ones to colonize Europe? Diamond dismantles pernicious racial theories tracing societal differences to biological differences.

He assembles convincing evidence linking germs to domestication of animals, germs that Eurasians then spread in epidemic proportions in their voyages of discovery. In its sweep, Guns, Germs and Steel encompasses the rise of agriculture, technology, writing, government, and religion, providing a unifying theory of human history as intriguing as the histories of dinosaurs and glaciers. 32 illustrations.

America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It

Mark Steyn

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 501 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Every American should read this book 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, by Mark Steyn, is one of the most important books I've read in the last several years. I believe it should be read by all Americans and Europeans.

Steyn looks at demography and discovers some chilling statistics - the birth rate of non-Muslim Europeans is well below replacement rates whereas the birth rates among Muslims, including European Muslims, far surpasses the replacement rate. In other words, the non-Muslim population of every European country, as well as many Asian countries, is aging and shrinking while the Muslim population is young and growing. This, in conjunction with the west's neutering of their own culture and mores, is rapidly leading to the Islamification of Europe. In fact, we see this more and more each day. Just a couple of weeks ago, Great Britain recognized Sharia courts and gave them the full authority of English law in some situations. That is only one of the symptoms. Steyn provides many more.

The United States is the only western country that has a birthrate just at replacement rate and, so far, we have been less apt to abandon our culture. Steyn posits that Europe is already lost, it is only a matter of (short) time. The United States, therefore, will be the last bastion of liberty and western culture.

Steyn's prose is very breezy and readable. He is always a joy to read and his arguments are easily understood. Don't let his writing style fool you into thinking that this is an unserious book, however. This is as serious as it gets.

Editorial Review:

This title is the "New York Times" bestseller - now in paperback. In "America Alone", Mark Steyn uses his trademark wit, clarity of thought and flair for the apocalyptic, Mark Steyn to argue that America is the only hope against Islamic Terrorism. Steyn addresses the singular position in which America finds itself, surrounded by anti-Americanism on all sides. He gives us the brutal facts on these threats and why there is no choice but for America to fight for the cause of freedom - alone.

Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples' Organized Crime System

Roberto Saviano, Virginia Jewiss

Amazon Price: $10.20 List Price: $15.00 Not yet published By: Picador

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 35 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

A Stilted Trip Through Unfamiliar Italy 2 out of 5 stars.
3 of 4 people found this review helpful.

A full-throttle look at Cammora crime from the nitty gritty ground level, "Gomorrah" is a look behind the curtain that suffers from an author with too intimate an approach to his subject. For a Neopolitan perhaps the geography, family and clan names, capos and underbosses, murders, victims and characters are a uniting thread; but, to the average American reader I think this translation of Saviano's originial Italian work lacks some critical elements that would help to make this story more than the timeline of crime it ends up being.

There is no real protagonist to unite the series of seemingly only loosely-related vignettes, unless one counts Saviano himself, but his role is more that of tour guide, standard-bearer and narrator.

Mixed in are some really interesting details about Cammora business, the purpose and organization of the system, and the lifestyle both for the connected and unconnected. But, these are sprinkled in among dizzying references to different criminal systems, families, clans and characters. Further complicating matters, the translation (I can't speak for whether it reflects the original work) is stark and breathless. In spite of the occasional turn of phrase, metaphor or analogy, the writing is spare and unadorned.

All in all, a staccato and stilted trip through what remains -- even after reading -- an unfamiliar vantage point on Italy.

Editorial Review:

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year



A groundbreaking, unprecedented bestseller in Italy, Roberto Saviano's insider account traces the decline of the city of Naples under the rule of the Camorra, an organized crime network more powerful and violent than the Mafia. The Camorra is an elaborate, international system dealing in drugs, high fashion, construction, and toxic waste, and its influence has entirely transformed life in Campania, the province surrounding Naples. 

Since seeing his first murder victim, at thirteen, Roberto Saviano has watched the changes in his home city. For Gomorrah, he disappeared into the Camorra and witnessed at close range its audacious, sophisticated, and far-reaching corruption that has paralyzed his home city and introduced the world to a new breed of organized crime.