General Books - Page 6

The School and Society & The Child and the Curriculum

John Dewey

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Subjects -> Nonfiction -> Education -> General AAS

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Why going to school ? 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 14 people found this review helpful.

From a high school student's point of view, reading Dewey couldn't provide something else than hope for educational systems, most of which, despite the efforts of making a school a more living atmosphere, organizations still remain too mechanical in learning procedures and detached from social applications regarding the capabilities they serve.

Originally from Cameroon, I've had the opportunity to explore three educational systems from different cultural influence each. It was an advantage that surely opened my mind to different perspectives by interacting with different cultures in different social contexts, but especially carried me out to realize how the so called "education" - in general, but in high school in particular - shortly addresses fundamental needs as much individually as socialy, since people tend to ignore its essential functions or misunderstand the concepts it involves, precisely because their implications are so general that they shouldn't be analyzed in separated contexts, school and society, as far as they are, with respect, one a component of the other but the other being the expression of the first one in a long term.

By observing both components as a whole, Dewey proposes a model that doesn't necessarily apply to actual issues or give factual solutions, but at least redefines "education" by integrating inherent aspects to human nature in its double acception - as a group as much as an individual -, which reveals the values traditional education still mostly hides.

I delibarately took the initiative of question what high school didn't explained to me, and probably often forget to ask itself. In what ways education serves people in the aim of blooming personally and socially ? which role schools are therefore supposed to play and in which patterns ? The questions are so simple that the answers appear obvious. In fact, they should be when the problematic is carefully put. this is the reason most people can get it wrong and sometimes don't even try to question what is already established. Dewey was an excellent starting point for my research and I recommend it to EVERYONE, not especially those concerned with education because it shouldn't be a matter of a restricted segment of people. Education is everywhere. Sorry for my english :)

Editorial Review:

These two short, influential books represent the earliest authoritative statement of Dewey's revolutionary emphasis on education as an experimental, child-centered process. He declares that we must make schools an embryonic community life and stresses the importance of the curriculum as a means of determining the environment of the child. 4 halftones and 4 charts.

The Book Of Tea

Kakuzo Okakura

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

The Tao of Tea 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

Kakuzo Okakura (1862-1919) was born in a Japan that had seen Commodore Perry but had not yet renounced the Shogunate. By the end of his life he had seen the Great War and Japan's first imperialistic military adventures in Korea and Manchuria that would culminate in the tragedy of the Second World War.

The scion of Japanese aristocracy, Okakura chose to spend the latter half of his life as an expatriate living in Boston, Massachusetts, where he befriended the Brahmins of that city. THE BOOK OF TEA was written in this period, sometime in the nineteen-oh-ohs. Written for an American audience, it eloquently introduced the Boston bluebloods to an idealized vision of Japan, the Japan of cherry blossoms, kakemono, and Chanoyu, the Tea Ceremony.

Reading THE BOOK OF TEA, one realizes that Okakura was not "selling" Japan to the West. THE BOOK OF TEA does not engage in any lacquer-box hucksterism. Rather, THE BOOK OF TEA is his paean to and his lament for a Japan of the virtues that was all-too-rapidly being consumed by Occidentally-intoxicated militarists and industrialists. THE BOOK OF TEA was written to banish the soot-stained chrysanthemums of Okakura's deepest nightmares.

Although this reviewer came to THE BOOK OF TEA expecting a manual on the Tea Ceremony, this book is nowhere so vulgar as that. Yes, a manual on the highly stylized Chanoyu has its place, but it's place is nowhere without this book which penetrates to the heart and soul of the ceremony. This reviewer can honestly say that THE BOOK OF TEA provided him with comprehension, a deeper insight, and a first true appreciation for Japanese art forms, so different than the European.

In its simplicity and its elegance, the Tea Ceremony is a form of Zen practice. Every element, from the atmosphere of the tearoom (called in Japanese "The Abode of Fancy," a world unto itself), the selection of the flowers, the artwork, the bamboo tea implements, the bright, sharp jade green macha tea, and the specially made jangling teapot and ceramic cups, speaks to an aesthetic foreign to the West. Okakura calls it "Teaism," a play on Taoism, and its purpose is to delight the senses, touch the heart, and place the participant fully in the present moment.

Shambhala Publications has presented THE BOOK OF TEA in a fine paperbound edition, the colors, typeset, and dimensions of which please the mind. Shambhala has also provided color photographs, in truth forms of abstract art, of the tea implements in use, that add a visual dimension to this already fine book.

Editorial Review:

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism --Teaism.

When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales Of Environmental Deception And The Battle Against Pollution

Devra Davis

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Good, Balanced 5 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

This is a good and balanced book, especially considering the vested interests of the author (her life!). Too often, these types of books turn into little more than political rants. This is not the case here. Sure, there are political actions and inactions that are discussed, but no personal attacks.

There is not a tremendous amount of scientific data in this book, but I did not expect it. I was not looking for a tome of information. The author delivers on her personal and professional experiences in what is the best way possible. If only we could get others to follow her lead.

Editorial Review:

In When Smoke Ran Like Water, the world-renowned epidemiologist Devra Davis confronts the public triumphs and private failures of her lifelong battle against environmental pollution. She documents the shocking toll of a public-health disaster-300,000 deaths a year in the U.S. and Europe from the effects of pollution-and asks why we remain silent. For Davis, the issue is personal: Pollution is what killed many in her family and forced some of the others, survivors of the 1948 smog emergency in Donora, Pennsylvania, to live out their lives with impaired health. She describes that episode and also makes startling revelations about how the deaths from the London smog of 1952 were falsely attributed to influenza; how the oil companies and auto manufacturers fought for decades to keep lead in gasoline, while knowing it caused brain damage; and many other battles. When Smoke Ran Like Water makes a devastating case for change.

Cultural Anthropology: The Human Challenge (with CD-ROM and InfoTrac®)

William A. Haviland, Harald E. L. Prins, Dana Walrath, Bunny McBride

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 14 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Comprehensive, readable and written for the student, Haviland/Prins/Walwrath/McBride's market-leading text, CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, is a highly relevant, high-quality teaching tool. The narrative voice of the text has been thoroughly internationalized and the "we:they" Western voice has been replaced with an inclusive one that will resonate with both Western and non-Western students and professors. In addition, gender, ethnicity, and stratification concepts and terminologies have been completely overhauled in accordance with contemporary thinking and the narrative streamlined using more fully developed, balanced, and global examples. In CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, the authors present students with examples of "local responses" to challenging globalization issues, designed to provide students with a "cross-cultural survival guide" for living in the diverse, multicultural world of the 21st century. This edition is a truly exciting and unique examination into the field of cultural anthropology, its insights, its relevance, and the continuing role of cultural survival issues.

Underworld: The Mysterious Origins of Civilization

Graham Hancock

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 39 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From Graham Hancock, bestselling author of Fingerprints of the Gods, comes a mesmerizing book that takes us on a captivating underwater voyage to find the ruins of a lost civilization that’s been hidden for thousands of years beneath the world’s oceans.

While Graham Hancock is no stranger to stirring up heated controversy among scientific experts, his books and television documentaries have intrigued millions of people around the world and influenced many to rethink their views about the origins of human civilization. Now he returns with an explosive new work of archaeological detection. In Underworld, Hancock continues his remarkable quest underwater, where, according to almost a thousand ancient myths from every part of the globe, the ruins of a lost civilization, obliterated in a universal flood, are to be found.

Guided by cutting-edge science and the latest archaeological scholarship, Hancock begins his mission to discover the truth about these myths and examines the mystery at the end of the last Ice Age. As the glaciers melted between 17,000 and 7,000 years ago, sea levels rose and more than 15 million square miles of habitable land were submerged underwater, resulting in a radical change to the Earth’s shape and the conditions in which people could live. Using the latest computer techniques to map the world’s changing coastlines, Hancock finds astonishing correspondences with the ancient flood myths.

Filled with thrilling accounts of his own participation in dives off the coast of Japan, as well as in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, and the Arabian Sea, we watch as Hancock discovers underwater ruins exactly where the myths say they should be—sunken kingdoms that archaeologists never thought existed. Fans of Hancock’s previous adventures will find themselves immersed in Underworld, a provocative book that provides both compelling hard evidence for a fascinating, forgotten episode in human history and a completely new explanation for the origins of civilization as we know it.

The Agile Gene: How Nature Turns on Nurture

Matt Ridley

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 40 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Sheds light on various nature versus nurture arguments 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Science writer Matt Ridley is a must read for anyone wanting to understand new discoveries about genes, and how they influence us throughout our lives. "The Agile Gene" is not as illuminating and captivating as the other Matt Ridley books (his best works are "The Origins of Human Virtue" and "The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature"). You'll get a broader and deeper understanding of nature vs. nuture from the other books if you are interested in understanding how genes effect human relations in societies, and civilizations. This book, however, is of particular interest if you want to understand how genes can effect an individual throughout ones life.

For example, the book is dedicated to supporting Ridley's comments like the following: "the influence of genes increases and the influence of shared environment gradually disappears with age. The older you grow, the less your family background predicts your IQ and the better your genes predict it." or "the shared environment plays only a small and non-significant role in the creation of personality differences in adults."

If you are interested in knowing how Ridley can support such statements, and his arguments either way, then this book is for you.

Editorial Review:

Armed with extraordinary new discoveries about our genes, acclaimed science writer Matt Ridley turns his attention to the nature-versus-nurture debate in a thoughtful book about the roots of human behavior.

Ridley recounts the hundred years' war between the partisans of nature and nurture to explain how this paradoxical creature, the human being, can be simultaneously free-willed and motivated by instinct and culture. With the decoding of the human genome, we now know that genes not only predetermine the broad structure of the brain, they also absorb formative experiences, react to social cues, and even run memory. They are consequences as well as causes of the will.

Yanomamo (Case Studies in Cultural Anthropology)

Napoleon A. Chagnon

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

Classic example of exploitation of a native people 1 out of 5 stars.
16 of 30 people found this review helpful.

This (so called) interactive CD is a classic example of 2 unfortunate characteristics of Western anthropology: 1) It sees human beings as specimens to be examined, filmed, held up for cultural di-section, for the interest of westerners with no intention of doing good for these people; 2) It inevitably skews the perception of the culture it depicts. Obviously there are degrees of accuracy with any ethnographic description, but in this case we are left with a very distorted picture. For example, we are not told that the Yanomamo have for decades now been willingly seeking and embracing different methods of conflict resolution - rather than killing each other, resolving issues like who "owns" a woman by negotiation rather than by killing those who disagree with you. Many of these constructive and helpful developments, which the yanomamo have embraced of their own free choice (having had a gut-full of the alternative) were introduced by well-meaning missionaries, and yet it seems the anthropologists want the yanomamo to stay frozen in time and keep killing each other. Meanwhile, Chagnon and others go merrily on their way making big $ out of depictions like this and trying to stop missionaries (and others) from helping these people to help themselves.

For a genuine "insiders" view, see Mark Ritchie's "Spirit of the Rainforest" and discover how the Yanomamo themselves view the arrival of anthropologists with films and notepads, and missionaries with new ideas.

It is naive to think that as an anthropologist you can enter a society to observe it, and the act of observation itself not impact that society. In Ritchie's book, for example, you will see how parts of the footage for this CD were obtained (and how for example they scolded a lady for walking onto the set with clothes on - most Yanomamo were by this time wearing clothes of their own accord ("Who wants to keep getting bitten by bugs?") and yet the anthropologists wanted them to stay naked, at least for the film if not forever.)

I give this CD a good score for interactivity and nice graphics and footage, but I give it a zero in terms of any benefit it has brought to the Yanomamo. (You can read in the updated edition of Ritchie's book what the reaction was of a Yanomamo village leader who actually viewed the CD for himself).

So get the CD if you want to see villagers killing each other, but get Ritchie's book if you want to understand the Yanomamo.

Editorial Review:

Based on the author's extensive fieldwork, this classic ethnography, now in its fifth edition, focuses on the Yanomamo. These truly remarkable South American people are one of the few primitive sovereign tribal societies left on earth. This new edition includes events and changes that have occurred since 1992, including a recent trip by the author to the Brazilian Yanomamo in 1995.

Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology

Gregory Bateson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers.

"This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."—D. W. Harding, New York Review of Books

"[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder."—Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist

Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was the author of Naven and Mind and Nature.

The Naked Ape: A Zoologist's Study of the Human Animal

Desmond Morris

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 51 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

An outdated analysis 2 out of 5 stars.
2 of 4 people found this review helpful.

If you are interested in a 1950-60's view of human evolutionary science, this book may be worthwhile. Otherwise, don't waste your time. Evolutionary science has advanced dramatically in the last 50 years and has discredited many of the views presented in The Naked Ape. Several are even laughable, such as the explanation of homosexuality in the chapter on sex.

Further, while promoted as a zoological study, the presentation is psychological, focusing on behavioral issues and their explanations rather than biological evolution. It is filled with the "he-man hunter" psychobabel that was preached in 1960's university Psych courses.

Simply, this book was a waste of my time and money. The reviews that stated the book was dated, but still relevant, were sadly mistaken.

Editorial Review:

"A startling view of man, stripped of the facade we try so hard to hide behind."  In view of man's awesome creativity and resourcefulness, we may be inclined to regard him as descended from the angels, yet, in his brilliant study, Desmond Morris reminds us that man is relative to the apes--is in fact, the greatest primate of all.  With knowledge gleaned from primate ethnology, zoologist Morris examines sex, child-rearing, exploratory habits, fighting, feeding, and much more to establish our surprising bonds to the animal kingdom and add substance to the discussion that has provoked controversy and debate the world over. Natural History Magazine praised The Naked Ape as "stimulating . . . thought-provoking . . . [Morris] has introduced some novel and challenging ideas and speculations." "He minces no words," said Harper's.  "He lets off nothing in our basic relation to the animal kingdom to which we belong. . . He is always specific, startling, but logical."

The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality

Cheikh Anta Diop

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 97 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Don't hate us because we're Beautiful! 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 14 people found this review helpful.

Without a doubt the most critical and honest review of who the ancient Kemetians(Egyptians)were; Black Africans. This book should be on the shelf in every African-American home, as well as those in the Diaspora. It is the final stage in understanding who were are as a people. As the great Mr. Diop says:

"The oneness of KMT(Egypt)and black culture could not be stated more clearly. Because of this essential identity of genius, culture, and race, today all Negroes can legitimately trace their culture to ancient KMT(Egypt)and build a modern culture on that foundation. By this dynamic contact, the Negro will be convinced that these temples, these forests of columns, these pyramids, these colossi, these bas-reliefs, mathematics, medicine, and all the science, are indeed the work of his ancestors and that he has the right and a duty to claim this heritage."

Diop is no idiot proclaiming this fact just because it sounds good, every arguement that he makes is based upon meticulous research & FACTUAL evidence. Is it any wonder that Dr. John Henry Clarke, the scholar, fought for almost ten years to get his books published in the United States?

The recent King Tut exhibit that was on tour in the United States was a propoganda tour with it's fake euro-arab depiction of King Tut; The blacks that protested it got absolutely NO media coverage. Anyone with just a cursory knowledge of ancient Egypt knows King Tut could never have looked like that, his grandmother was a pure African Woman, Queen Tiye. (look it up and see for yourself)

Zawi Hawass is an idiot who was trained here in the U.S., in its overwhelmingly racist field of egyptology; run by people who find it hard to believe that this was an African civilization, even though the greeks and other ancients admit this fact wholeheartedly themselves in their writings.

It is even more sick that some would like to think that aliens from outer space built the pyramids... It is laughable that an Arab is the curator and spokesman for egypt antiquity when Arabs didn't invade & settle into the Holy land until around 640 AD.

The fact is that Egypt is and was founded by Black Africans and no amount of propoganda can hide this; at least to those of us who know the truth.

Editorial Review:

Now in its 30th printing, this classic presents historical, archaeological, and anthropological evidence to support the theory that ancient Egypt was a black civilization.