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Title: Introducing Sociology by Richard Osborne ISBN: 1-84046-067-9 Publisher: Totem Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Society.
Comment: _Introducing Sociology_ by Richard Osborne and heavily-illustrated surrealistic-comic-book-style by Borin Van Loon gives a beginner's outline to the science, study, discipline or whatever you want to call it, of sociology. Sociology attempts to figure out how society, especially how the ever-increasingly complex, modern Western societies are constructed, structured, operate, interact, and what the role of class, race, gender and above all, economics, plays in them. This book goes through all the major theories and thinkers, but is overly-confused by smoke from the crack-pipes of Marxism and radical feminism. A central point is noted toward the end of the book: that of the transformation of the West in the 19th and 20th centuries from an agricultural, Christian and aristocratic base to industrialism, secularism, pleasure-seeking hedonism and sensualism. This is the root of the predicament that Western society is in today, but you won't hear a whole lot about it in the PC New Left and neoconservative academia. The author also dismisses in an offensively condescending manner sociobiology and the evoloutionary Darwinist perspective--that the determining factors of how different cultural groups, races and genders in society act are rooted in heredity rather than in social conditioning. This of course will lead to "racism and the holocaust." _Introducing Sociology_ is a rather quirky yet serious overview of sociology, and the author at the end admits that he cannot come to any decisive conclusion about the study of society in our ever-morphing postmodern world, where individuals live in "hyperreality"; learning more from mass-media and its contrived, false images than from the real world itself. I wish I knew the reasoning behind the cover illustration, a half-human, half-robot woman in a bikini with a human embryo attached to her hip in a huge test-tube, reading a book upside down.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Solid Overview
Comment: It's easy to get lost in the spew of "-isms" and sub-disciplines that pervades the social sciences and humanities these days. This illustrated intro to sociology illustrates fairly clearly how we got there from a few simple questions (E.g., what is the nature of society?) The book provides a broad, historically structured overview that accounts for most of the major thinkers, from Comte and Spencer to Adorno and Baudrillard.
I've read most of the books in this series, and this is one of the best. It is concise, not condescending. And although it offers a wide range of theories and thinkers, it takes pains to distinguish between all of the information presented, even offering some comparisons between different sociological perspectives. This covers methodology, Marxism, Functionalism, Symbolic Interactionism, Chicago School, Frankfurt School, Feminism, Media Studies, Culture, and almost everything else. Of course, you only get a few paragraphs on each, but then that it what this book is designed to do...give a short introduction to each of the sub-areas as well as a general overview. The illustrations are of a fairly good quality, and while they don't really enhance a reader's understanding of the material, they help sustain interest in it.
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Title: Introducing Postmodernism by Richard Appignanesi, Chris Garratt, Ziauddin Sardar, Patrick Curry ISBN: 1840460563 Publisher: Totem Books Pub. Date: 01 March, 2001 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
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Title: Introducing Psychology by Nigel C. Benson ISBN: 1840460598 Publisher: Totem Books Pub. Date: 01 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Introducing Cultural Studies, 2nd Edition by Ziauddin Sardar, Borin Van Loon ISBN: 1840460741 Publisher: Totem Books Pub. Date: 01 June, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Introducing Ethics, 2nd Edition by Dave Robinson, Chris Garratt ISBN: 1840460776 Publisher: Totem Books Pub. Date: 01 May, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Introducing Linguistics by R. L. Trask, Bill Mayblin, B.L. Trask ISBN: 1840461691 Publisher: Totem Books Pub. Date: 01 January, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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