Based on the highly successful A History of Western Society, Understanding Western Society: A Brief History captures students’ interest in the everyday life of the past and ties social history to the broad sweep of politics and culture. Abridged by 30%, the narrative is paired with innovative pedagogy, designed to help students focus on significant developments as they read and review. An innovative, three-step end-of-Chapter study guide helps students master key facts and move toward synthesis.

PRE-ORDER YOUR FREE EXAM COPY TODAY! AVAILABLE JULY 2011.

Long the leading text in urban sociology, The Urban World continues to provide a comprehensive, balanced, up-to-date, cross-cultural look at cities and suburbs around the world. Offering a 21st century view of the changing urban scene, the text covers evolving urban patterns and the changing nature of urban life. Combining expert scholarship with a readable style that students appreciate, J. John Palen is one of America’s leading urban sociologists, who travels the world and adds new insights gleaned firsthand to each succeeding edition of his text.

New to the 9th Edition:

• 2010 U.S. Census Bureau data.
• The political effect of U.S. reapportionment and redistricting based on the 2010 census.
• The impact of the Great Recession and the virtual collapse of the housing market.
• The hidden growth of suburban poverty.
• The continued growth of Latinos as the largest U.S. minority.
• Latest census findings from the United States and Canada, with a focus on changing metro areas.
• Rebirth of central cities and its causes and consequences.
• The post-recession future of North American cities.
• The dramatic changes taking place in the cities of the world’s two largest nations, India and China.
• The future of urban developments such as smart growth, new urbanism, and the “greening” of cities.
• International urban changes including Dubai’s tallest building and Abu Dhabi’s city of the future.
• New photos and illustrations, including the U.S. foreclosure crisis and the BP oil disaster
• Published in paperback at a “Be Kind to Your Students” lower price.

The text seeks to continue its clear writing style with strong student appeal. What also hasn’t changed are enduring features such as strong academic content and instructor friendly organization. It is also accompanied by a comprehensive test item file for qualified instructors. The Urban World is in its ninth edition because it successfully works as a text.

History | Asia | Japan

Textbooks

Nonfiction | Women's Studies

Nonfiction | Social Sciences | Anthropology | Cultural

In this classic best seller, Liza Dalby, the first non-Japanese ever to have trained as a geisha, offers an insider's look at the exclusive world of female companions to the Japanese male elite. A new preface examines how geisha have been profoundly affected by the changes of the past quarter century yet--especially in Kyoto--have managed to take advantage of modern developments to maintain their social position with flair.

History | Asia

History | Modern History | 20th and 21st Century

Parenting & Families | Parenting

The lives and aspirations of young Chinese (those between 14 and 26 years old) have been transformed in the past five decades. By examining youth cultures around three historical points - 1968, 1988, and 2008 - this book argues that present-day youth culture in China has both international and local roots. Paul Clark describes how the Red Guards and sent-down youth of the Cultural Revolution era carved out a space for themselves, asserting their distinctive identities, despite tight political controls. By the late 1980s, Chinese-style rock music, sports, and other recreations began to influence the identities of Chinese youth. In the 21st century, the Internet offered a new, broader space for expressing youthful fandom and frustrations. From the 1960s to the present, global youth culture has been reworked to serve the needs of the young Chinese.

After decades of domination on campus, college sports' supremacy has begun to weaken. "Enough, already!" detractors cry. College is about learning, not chasing a ball around to the whir of TV cameras.
In Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University James Duderstadt agrees, taking the view that the increased commercialization of intercollegiate athletics endangers our universities and their primary goal, academics. Calling it a "corrosive example of entertainment culture" during an interview with ESPN's Bob Ley, Duderstadt suggested that college basketball, for example, "imposes on the university an alien set of values, a culture that really is not conducive to the educational mission of university."
Duderstadt is part of a growing controversy. Recently, as reported in The New York Times, an alliance between university professors and college boards of trustees formed in reaction to the growth of college sports; it's the first organization with enough clout to challenge the culture of big-time university athletics.
This book is certainly part of that challenge, and is sure to influence this debate today and in the years to come.
James J. Duderstadt is President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering, University of Michigan.

History | Asia | China

History | Historical Study

Textbooks | Humanities | History | Asia

This is a sourcebook that tells the momentous history of China since 1919, mainly from the viepoints of participants, including extracts from telegrams, speeches, memoirs, political statements and letters and poems.

THINK Currency. THINK Relevancy. THINK Race and Ethnicity.

 

THINK Race and Ethnicity is informed with the latest research and the most contemporary examples, allowing you to bring current events directly into your classroom with little additional work.

 

An engaging visual design developed with extensive student feedback and 20 page chapters makes THINK Race and Ethnicity the textbook your students will actually read. This student-friendly text delivers the core concepts of Race and Ethnicity in a way they can easily understand. A groundbreaking instructor supplements package is also included to help you bring the core concepts for the Race and Ethnic Relations course to life, without burdening your students with learning solutions that are too dense or expensive.

 

Teaching & Learning Experience

• Improve Critical Thinking — Students are encouraged to apply critical thinking skills to contemporary examples, moving from classroom discussion to the community.
• Engage Students — TheThinkSpot provides open-access to chapter-by-chapter quizzes, study cards, flashcards, and a professor-written sociology blog.
• Explore Theory — Three main sociological paradigms are discussed visually through a theory info-graphic in every chapter.
• Understand Diversity — Issues of race, class, and sexuality are addressed in boxed features.
• Support Instructors — A full supplements package supports instructor needs.

  Note: MySearchLab does not come automatically packaged with this text. To purchase MySearchLab, please visit: www.mysearchlab.com or you can purchase a valuepack of the text + MySearchLab (at no additional cost). VP: 0205754686

This compendium of compelling articles and advertisements from women's magazines of the 1940s and 1950s chronicles the debate over women's domestic and public roles during two decades of enormous social change in America.

In January 2002 Rory Stewart walked across Afghanistan-surviving by his wits, his knowledge of Persian dialects and Muslim customs, and the kindness of strangers. By day he passed through mountains covered in nine feet of snow, hamlets burned and emptied by the Taliban, and communities thriving amid the remains of medieval civilizations. By night he slept on villagers' floors, shared their meals, and listened to their stories of the recent and ancient past. Along the way Stewart met heroes and rogues, tribal elders and teenage soldiers, Taliban commanders and foreign-aid workers. He was also adopted by an unexpected companion-a retired fighting mastiff he named Babur in honor of Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor, in whose footsteps the pair was following.

Through these encounters-by turns touching, con-founding, surprising, and funny-Stewart makes tangible the forces of tradition, ideology, and allegiance that shape life in the map's countless places in between.

Biographies & Memoirs | Leaders & Notable People | Military

History | Military | Regiments

History | Asia | Afghanistan

The road back to the Afghan capital after disaster.

The writer of this vital first hand account of the First Afghan War was an officer serving with the 40th Foot. His regiment formed part of Nott's 'Candahar Division' and its role was as part of the so called 'army of retribution' which marched to Cabul to 'conclude' the conflict after the appalling disaster which culminated in the annihilation of a British army under Elphinstone as it retreated from the Afghan capital. The 40th's route took them once again to Ghuznee, the scene of fighting for the 'Army of the Indus' early in the war, but this time the city was left as a smoking ruin. This book graphically describes a time of almost perpetual hard fought running battle as the column ground forward towards its objective; descriptions of attacks on the column, night attacks upon the camp and open set piece engagement fill its pages. Arriving in Cabul shortly after Pollock's forces, the author met the liberated prisoners of the Afghan disaster including the redoubtable Lady Sale. Withdrawal-nothing less than a fighting retreat with the rearguard hard pressed-from Cabul meant the column of which the 40th formed part had to follow the line of the catastrophic march of the destroyed British army and the author's description of the horrors they witnessed as gun carriages literally ground over the bones of former comrades makes harrowing reading. Nevertheless, this is a different account of the war told from a company officer's perspective and is recommended.

Business & Investing | International | Economics

Business & Investing | Popular Economics | Economic Conditions

History | Asia | Southeast Asia; Hong Kong

Nonfiction | Economics | International Economics

Few groups are more secretive than the Asian “godfathers”--the tiny group of obscenely wealthy businessmen who control the economic fates of Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and the Philippines. Mysterious, shrewd, and ruthless, these tycoons represented 8 of the 25 wealthiest people on the planet in the 1990s and they continue to command multi-billion-dollar personal fortunes, controlling everything from banking and real estate to shipping and gambling—yet their names would not be familiar to regular readers of The Wall Street Journal. Who are they and how do they do it? That's the question Joe Studwell, author of the acclaimed book The China Dream, answers in this incisive behind-the-scenes exploration of the outsize figures behind the veil. Studwell has spent fifteen years as a reporter in the region and uses his unprecedented access to paint intimate and revealing portraits of the godfathers—who they really are and how they make, build, and maintain their fortunes. Asian Godfathers: Money and Power in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia  is an explosive book that lifts the curtain on a world of staggering secrecy and hypocrisy and reveals—for the first time—who the leaders of one of the world’s most important and tumultuous markets really are.