Cultural Books - Page 4

Diffusion of Innovations, Fourth Edition

Everett M. Rogers

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Total reviews: 30 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Since the first edition of this landmark book was published in 1962, Everett Rogers's name has become "virtually synonymous with the study of diffusion of innovations," according to Choice. The second and third editions of Diffusion of Innovations became the standard textbook and reference on diffusion studies. Now, in the fourth edition, Rogers presents the culmination of more than thirty years of research that will set a new standard for analysis and inquiry.

The fourth edition is (1) a revision of the theoretical framework and the research evidence supporting this model of diffusion, and (2) a new intellectual venture, in that new concepts and new theoretical viewpoints are introduced. This edition differs from its predecessors in that it takes a much more critical stance in its review and synthesis of 5,000 diffusion publications. During the past thirty years or so, diffusion research has grown to be widely recognized, applied and admired, but it has also been subjected to both constructive and destructive criticism. This criticism is due in large part to the stereotyped and limited ways in which many diffusion scholars have defined the scope and method of their field of study. Rogers analyzes the limitations of previous diffusion studies, showing, for example, that the convergence model, by which participants create and share information to reach a mutual understanding, more accurately describes diffusion in most cases than the linear model.

Rogers provides an entirely new set of case examples, from the Balinese Water Temple to Nintendo videogames, that beautifully illustrate his expansive research, as well as a completely revised bibliography covering all relevant diffusion scholarship in the past decade. Most important, he discusses recent research and current topics, including social marketing, forecasting the rate of adoption, technology transfer, and more. This all-inclusive work will be essential reading for scholars and students in the fields of communications, marketing, geography, economic development, political science, sociology, and other related fields for generations to come.

The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do

Clotaire Rapaille

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Total reviews: 56 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Why are people around the world so very different? What makes us live, buy, even love as we do? The answers are in the codes.

In The Culture Code, internationally revered cultural anthropologist and marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille reveals for the first time the techniques he has used to improve profitability and practices for dozens of Fortune 100 companies. His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world.

Rapaille’s breakthrough notion is that we acquire a silent system of codes as we grow up within our culture. These codes—the Culture Code—are what make us American, or German, or French, and they invisibly shape how we behave in our personal lives, even when we are completely unaware of our motives. What’s more, we can learn to crack the codes that guide our actions and achieve new understanding of why we do the things we do.

Rapaille has used the Culture Code to help Chrysler build the PT Cruiser—the most successful American car launch in recent memory. He has used it to help Procter & Gamble design its advertising campaign for Folger’s coffee – one of the longest lasting and most successful campaigns in the annals of advertising. He has used it to help companies as diverse as GE, AT&T, Boeing, Honda, Kellogg, and L’Oréal improve their bottom line at home and overseas. And now, in The Culture Code, he uses it to reveal why Americans act distinctly like Americans, and what makes us different from the world around us.

In The Culture Code, Dr. Rapaille decodes two dozen of our most fundamental archetypes—ranging from sex to money to health to America itself—to give us “a new set of glasses” with which to view our actions and motivations. Why are we so often disillusioned by love? Why is fat a solution rather than a problem? Why do we reject the notion of perfection? Why is fast food in our lives to stay? The answers are in the Codes.

Understanding the Codes gives us unprecedented freedom over our lives. It lets us do business in dramatically new ways. And it finally explains why people around the world really are different, and reveals the hidden clues to understanding us all.

RACE MATTERS

Cornel West

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Total reviews: 65 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Ivy League Charlatan 1 out of 5 stars.
4 of 12 people found this review helpful.

Cornell West is a charlatan and this book, like all the rest of his work, is little more than a collection of biased opinions unsupported by logic or information. While most blacks have achieved middle class status in the past 30 years, West sees only those who are mired in poverty and crime. And those, he thinks, are pure victims of "racism". It does not occur to West that a person with a criminal record, a bad attitude, and a poor education - is unlikely to succeed regardless of his color. If America were really as racist as West imagines, how does he explain his own amazing success - for surely his success is amazing. How many men get paid the money that Cornell West is paid - and that for "mouthing off" about his favorite hobby-horses? Larry Summers chided West for his total lack of scholarship. This book proves that Summers was absolutely right.

Editorial Review:

First published in 1993 on the one-year anniversary of the L.A. riots, Race Matters has since become an American classic. Beacon Press is proud to present this hardcover edition with a new introduction by Cornel West. The issues that it addresses are as controversial and urgent as before, and West's insights remain fresh, exciting, and timely. Now more than ever, Race Matters is a book for all Americans—one that will help us build a genuine multiracial democracy.

Why We Want You to Be Rich: Two Men - One Message

Donald J. Trump, Robert T. Kiyosaki

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Total reviews: 216 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Awesome Book Highly Recommend 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

This is an awesome book and I highly recommend it no matter what business you are in or what walk of life you come from...........

Editorial Review:

Donald Trump and Robert Kiyosaki are both concerned. Their concern is that the rich are getting richer but America is getting poorer. Like the polar ice caps, the middle class is disappearing. America is becoming a two-class society.

Soon you will be either rich or poor. Donald and Robert want you to be rich.

The world is facing many challenges and one of them is financial. The entitlement mentality is epidemic, creating people who expect their countries, employers, or families to take care of them. Trump and Kiyosaki, both successful businessmen, are natural teachers who share a passion for education. They have joined forces to address these challenges, because they believe you cannot solve money problems with money. You can only solve money problems with financial education. Trump and Kiyosaki want to teach you to be rich. Why We Want You To Be Rich was written for you.

The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life

Richard Florida

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Total reviews: 62 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Washington Monthly 2002 Annual Political Book Award WinnerThe Rise of the Creative Class gives us a provocative new way to think about why we live as we do today-and where we might be headed. Weaving storytelling with masses of new and updated research, Richard Florida traces the fundamental theme that runs through a host of seemingly unrelated changes in American society: the growing role of creativity in our economy.Just as William Whyte's 1956 classic The Organization Man showed how the organizational ethos of that age permeated every aspect of life, Florida describes a society in which the creative ethos is increasingly dominant. Millions of us are beginning to work and live much as creative types like artists and scientists always have-with the result that our values and tastes, our personal relationships, our choices of where to live, and even our sense and use of time are changing. Leading the shift are the nearly 38 million Americans in many diverse fields who create for a living-the Creative Class.The Rise of the Creative Class chronicles the ongoing sea of change in people's choices and attitudes, and shows not only what's happening but also how it stems from a fundamental economic change. The Creative Class now comprises more than thirty percent of the entire workforce. Their choices have already had a huge economic impact. In the future they will determine how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities will thrive or wither.

The Order of Things

Michel Foucault

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Total reviews: 12 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Obtuse but Sharp 4 out of 5 stars.
11 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Foucault's stuff is hardly pleasure reading, but it rewards in other ways, more subtly. If you don't read Foucault without coming away with a deeper sense of the world around you, how power and knowledge is diffuse and not central, you would be a rare person. This book isn't so much concerned with power as it is the history of ideas, though.

Difficult but worth it 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 11 people found this review helpful.

This book is one of the most important philosophy texts of the 20th century, if for no other reason than as an eye-opener. The text is a difficult read (although nowhere near as opaque as Derrida). The section on how our culture and, hence, our world-view has been "set" by accepted taxonomies is worth the read all by itself. I have come back to these comments again and again. Taxonomies are useful, but we need to understand the constraints on understanding imposed by such

Editorial Review:

"The work numbers among those outward signs of culture the trained eye should find on prominent display in every private library. Have you read it? One's social and intellectual standing depends on the response." -- Michel de Certeau

Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women

Geraldine Brooks

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Total reviews: 142 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

nine parts of desire...ten parts intrigue 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Geraldine Brooks takes us inside her personal trip trough the Islamic world and gives as close to an UNBIASED view of the treatment of Islamic women that i could imagine. she is careful to point out the reasons that are given for wierd practices. She doesn't shy away from her disgust for certain treatments.

For example the propagation of so-called "honor killings" that still take place all over the world, as well as many other ways women are opressed in the mainstream Islamic world.

O by the way the writting style is smooth and easy to read. You can really enjoy this book even though the topic is sad the way it is told is great!

Editorial Review:

With a new afterword

As a prizewinning foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Geraldine Brooks spent six years covering the Middle East through wars, insurrections, and the volcanic upheaval of resurgent fundamentalism. Yet for her, headline events were only the backdrop to a less obvious but more enduring drama: the daily life of Muslim women. Nine Parts of Desire is the story of Brooks' intrepid journey toward an understanding of the women behind the veils, and of the often contradictory political, religious, and cultural forces that shape their lives. Defying our stereotypes about the Muslim world, Brooks' acute analysis of the world's fastest growing religion deftly illustrates how Islam's holiest texts have been misused to justify repression of women, and how male pride and power have warped the original message of a once liberating faith.

Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

Michael Shermer

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Total reviews: 158 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Well thought out book showing how even smart people can believe weird things. 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful.

Well written easy to understand book about the psychology of how people (even smart people) can fall into common logical fallacies and come to wrong conclusions if they aren't careful.

Must read.

Editorial Review:

UFO abductionstelevision psychicscreationismHolocaust denial. Faced with the rapid changes and anxieties of modern life, many people are turning to the alluring comforts of pseudoscience and the occult. In Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer explores the very human reasons we find these otherworldly phenomena, conspiracy theories, and cults so appealing.In this program, Shermer shows how the eternal search for meaning and spiritual fulfillment often results in our thinking being led astray by extraordinary claims and controversial ideas-particularly in the realms of superstition and the supernatural. A compelling portrait of our immense capacity for self-delusion, Why People Believe Weird Things celebrates the scientific spirit and the joy to be found in rationally exploring the world's greatest mysteries, even if many of the questions remain unanswered.

Black Like Me

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Total reviews: 155 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Black Like Me 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Though approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the events in this book, reading BLACK LIKE ME today shows both the inroads America has made towards erasing the blight of racial intolerance, as well as the limits that America has in truly educating itself about all kinds of Hate. Indefensible Hate still exists here, and there is no indication that it will make as great a stride in the next fifty years as it has in the last fifty.

Without question, this book should be required reading for all teenagers (and adults) across the country. To understand another's perspective is the first, primary step in eradicating intolerance. This book (which is a slight bit didactic at points) is the remarkable journey of a man who bothered to really try to understand the life of the black man in the American South as best as he could. Of course he could never truly KNOW, but he certainly took pains to do what he could to understand the experience better than anyone before.

Students (eighth-graders) in my Honors Language Arts class are required to read this book, and I hope they will discover from where we as a nation have traveled. Those who easily bandy about epithets or think unkind thoughts about others (whether because of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, heritage, or ability) might get an honest sense of perspective by taking the trip with John Howard Griffin.

Better yet, after reading this book, ask yourself these questions (and I will ask my students): "If given the opportunity to change my appearance so dramatically as to appear to be from a different race for six weeks, would I do it? What would I fear going into it? Suppose I was told after four weeks that it was impossible to change back; how would it make me feel?"

For a country that falsely prides itself on equality for all, I believe that our conversations about racial equality are sorely lacking in our public dialogue. BLACK LIKE ME would be an excellent place to start a meaningful conversation.

Editorial Review:

He trudged southern streets searching for a place where he could eat or rest, looking vainly for a job other than menial labor, feeling the "hate stare." He was John Griffin, a white man who darkened the color of his skin and crossed the line into a country of hate, fear, and hopelessness--the country of the American Black man.

The TEACHINGS OF DON JUAN A YAQUI WAY OF KNOWLEDGE

Carlos Castaneda

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Total reviews: 99 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Reading Between The Lines 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Don Juan possesses the wisdom of the ancients . Getting away from your babbling inanities and shutting down the internal dialog, you might just ask the question?" What is the Matrix"?

Enter the world of the sorcerer 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

An excellent book about the first steps of Carlos Castaneda to become a man of knowledge. A book that has it all. Funny, enlightening and mysteries.

Entertaining but false 3 out of 5 stars.
0 of 0 people found this review helpful.

Having read several of Castanedas books and been strongly influenced by them as a youth, it was with great sadness that I subsequently found them to be almost completely imaginary. If you care to research Castaneda you will find that most of his experiences of flying through the air, encountering supernatural Mexican wisemen, receiving transcendental illumination etc etc happened while he was sitting in the library at UCLA. Many of the dates in the books are contradictory, much of the alleged herbal knowledge is potentially dangerous and essentially the bottom line is that you would be well advised to take all these books with a very large grain of salt. However that being said, they are fairly well written, quite entertaining and do contain some measure of truth after all. So go figure...

Editorial Review:

Castaneda's first book in the Don Juan series. He meets Don Juan and is introduced to his magical world and philosophy by means of hallucinogenic plants and special exercises. The author's other books include "The Fire Within" and "The Quest for Ixtlan".