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This work provides a review of Wirth's life based on available biographical sources including unpublished materials. It focuses on Wirth's social, political, and professional evolution, and depicts his personal development through his scholarship, his social activism, and his commitment to reform. The biography concludes with an assessment of Wirth's intellectual impact on urban sociology and reviews of recent critiques of his works.
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Lila Corwin Berman asks why, over the course of the twentieth century, American Jews became increasingly fascinated, even obsessed, with explaining themselves to their non-Jewish neighbors. What she discovers is that language itself became a crucial tool for Jewish group survival and integration into American life. Berman investigates a wide range of sources—radio and television broadcasts, bestselling books, sociological studies, debates about Jewish marriage and intermarriage, Jewish missionary work, and more—to reveal how rabbis, intellectuals, and others created a seemingly endless array of explanations about why Jews were indispensable to American life. Even as the content of these explanations developed and shifted over time, the very project of self-explanation would become a core element of Jewishness in the twentieth century.
First published in 1925, The City is a trailblazing text in urban history, urban sociology, and urban studies. Its innovative combination of ethnographic observation and social science theory epitomized the Chicago school of sociology. Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, and their collaborators were among the first to document the interplay between urban individuals and larger social structures and institutions, seeking patterns within the city’s riot of people, events, and influences. As sociologist Robert J. Sampson notes in his new foreword, though much has changed since The City was first published, we can still benefit from its charge to explain where and why individuals and social groups live as they do.
The Geography of Genocide offers a unique analysis of over sixty genocides in world history, explaining why genocides only occur in territorial interiors and never originate from cosmopolitan urban centers. This study explores why genocides tend to result from emasculating political defeats experienced by perpetrator groups and examines whether such extreme political violence is the product of a masculine identity crisis. Author Allan D. Cooper notes that genocides are most often organized and implemented by individuals who have experienced traumatic childhood events involving the abandonment or abuse by their father. Although genocides target religious groups, nations, races or ethnic groups, these identity structures are rarely at the heart of the war crimes that ensue. Cooper integrates research derived from the study of serial killing and rape to show certain commonalities with the phenomenon of genocide. The Geography of Genocide presents various strategies for responding to genocide and introduces Cooper's groundbreaking alternatives for ultimately inhibiting the occurrence of genocide.
This book offers a coherant theoretical introduction to urban sociology. Based on the urban theory of Louis Wirth, it systematically examines Wirth's principal ideas in the contexts of pre-industrial cities, industrial cities and bureaucracies. Morris discusses conditions for the emergence of cities and for industrialization. He relates organisational and ecological accounts of the city and considers the contributions of each. Bureaucracy appears as a peculiarly urban form of organisation: its ecological and social characteristics are examined in an original manner and with considerable insight so as to illustrate and modify the propositions derived from Wirth's theory. The book concludes with a comprehensive evaluation of Wirth and his critics. This book was first published in 1968.