University of Minnesota Books

This book is a wonderful history book on Summit Avenue. If you are going to visit Summit Ave or if you have visited, it's a great book to read. The pictures were wonderful. I would highly recommend this book.

Although status is an essential concept in classical sociology and a crucial feature of social structure, it has been much criticized in contemporary social theory and to some extent replaced by a Marxist concept of economic class. In this book, Bryan Turner argues that social stratification has three major components: political-legal rights (status as entitlement), cultural distinction (status as life-style) and economic class. The relationships between these elements are historically contingent and determined by social struggles over resources. He examines the historical variations between these dimensions in slavery, feudalism and capitalism, and argues that in contemporary society the decline of economic class and the struggle between status groups over welfare resources have given life to a new form of political life: status bloc politics under the administration of the state. His analysis of status concludes with an examination of the effects of mass consumption on cultural distinction and a consideration of the implications of cultural postmodernism for the traditional struggle between high and low culture. His main thesis is that economic, political and cultural inequalities can only be understood from a conflict-sociology perspective.
--- from book's back cover

Reed is one of the most acute, fearless and useful commentators on American politics and intellectual history. I rarely agree with everything he says (I tend to give more play to identity politics and see more value in culture, esp. popular culture), but no one can make me question my own take on a subject as assiduously as Reed. For my purposes this volume is not quite at the same level as Class Notes or his masterpiece on WEB DuBois, but for those with an interest in urban development/planning it is definitive (though see also the new volume on post-Katrina New Orleans). The chapter on the Malcolm X revival of the early 1990s was enjoyable for someone who lived through it and gives Reed an excuse to provide a nutshell version of his take on post-1963 African American politics and rehash his critique of Jesse Jackson. But it also gives him a chance to show off his old-codger dismissal of hip hop. Oh well--no one is perfect.

A wonderful book full of interesting details about the streams and rivers of Minnesota. Even small streams and tributaries earn some attention in this book. This is a very thorough reference tool whether you spend time on the water or just enjoy the countryside around it.

"In Surfaces, Avum Stroll does something that is rare: he provides novel answers to two age-old philosophical problems - the epistemological problem of how perception is able to generate knowledge, and the metaphysical problem of what it is that we perceive... This is almost certain to be regarded as one of the major books deaking with philosophical issues of perception and can most profitably be campared with Roderick Chisholm's classical work Perceiving." - Richard Foley, University of Notre Dame

Despite its importance in the sciences and the plastic arts, the concept of a surface has been virtually ignored bt philosophers - mentioned in the philosophical literature since the time of Aristotle, but never accorded the full investigation that Avum Stroll provides in this book. Stoll shows that the concept plays an essential role in many philosophical problems (Our knowledge of the external world, abstract ideas, foundationalism); it is also important in it's own right and for its bearing on future research projects in philosophy and in the psychology of perception. Stroll's first line of questioning - how we define and perceive a surface - issues in a powerful chalenge to one of the main assuptions of traditional epistemology. Then he looks into "the geometry of ordinary speech" - the terms we use to organize and structure the world we inhabit ("margin," "border," "limit," "boundary," "edge") - and shows how this informal topological system reesembles and differs from the mathematical science of geometry. In doing so, he opens up a novel philosophical issue to further discussion and research. -- from books back cover

From the Ice Age to the assasination of Olof Palme, Scott digs into every nook and cranny of Sweden's history. The account is blissfully more than political, though that is the backbone of the book. Besides hitting the military conquests, the great kings, etc. The farming life, the culture, the art, literature, and science of Sweden are also major points in this book, perhaps more aptly a history of the Swedish people, rather than just the nation's history.

Of course, Gustav II Adolph and the tragic Karl XII and the Great Northern War are probably the two greatest contributions of the Swedish people to the development of continental Europe, and they are dealt with very well in this book. But, the shoes of an Empire always too large for Sweden, the book reflects more on the progressive and peaceful transitions and compromises that have made Sweden's politics unique in the world, and more recently, almost a miracle. From the alliance of the monarch and the people against the nobility in the policy of land reduction which forever halted feudalism, to the age of freedom in which Sweden experimented with a bourgeoise liberalism, and finally through the gradual peaceful fall of plutocracy into democracy and the welfare state, Sweden has proved itself to be an iconoclast of domestic and foreign policy.

The author(s) *the 1986 revision contains an additional Epilogue* end on a probing discussion of the Welfare state. The great progressive achievement, they find, rests almost solely on the rich culture of Sweden, a conclusion one can hardly disagree with. A great portrait of a brilliant nation!

My mother and father put this collection together, so I'm a bit biased, but this really is a wonderful collection. Although some of the stories are a bit creepy, it was great to grow up hearing these stories before I went to bed. This is the second pressing (the first was Random House, this is UofMinnesota) and the new pressing has a great cover, and feels great in your hand. Anyone who likes fantasy or folklore really cannot miss this one!

I am greatly impressed with the approach taken by Sassower. There are many efforts in academia to teach scientists ethics, but often they are ineffective -- if not down right pro-tech propogandist. Sassower takes an important first step by acknowledging that many scientists do face ethical dilemmas within their work or work environment, but back away from them due to various social pressures. How do we face these pressures as a society? What are steps for both scientists and citizens in attempting to better govern scientific activity and discovery? The points made here are practical, and meaningful. This highly readable text is perfect for the college-level classroom, as well as for the reflective scientist.

Tempest in the Caribbean would amount to a tour de force if it had been written by a lifelong scholar of Caribbean literature. Given that most of Jonathan Goldberg's previous work is on the English Renaissance, it's both a tour de force and a wonder. Placing issues of sexuality at the center of his readings without displacing the centrality of race, gender, and colonialism, Goldberg offers exact and startling articulations that I hope will inspire many further projects.

I had the fortune of having one Roderick P. McDonald as my instructor in this topic, in the very last semester he taught at the University of Illinois before he retired and returned to his first love, Sydney. This textbook is, essentially, an expanded version of his lecture notes. (As an aside, Rod writes pretty much like he speaks---dry British wit and all---so if you read his book you will get a decent idea of what he is like in person.) Test Theory takes McDonald's basic position that test theory is an integrated field, ranging from classical test theory as a computationally feasible special case of the Spearman factor model all the way to item response theory, which is a nonlinear model that adjusts for the nature of binary data. The factor model is the glue that holds everything together. McDonald's perspective that the confirmatory model makes more sense and that once you have learned it, the exploratory model will be simple to understand, almost as an afterthought, is a very nice bonus. Other books on this topic, by contrast, do not give the reader a sense of the unity of the topic.

There are a few downside to the book. First is that it has a lot of typos. You should definitely make sure to get the errata, which used to be available on the publisher's web page. Unfortunately, the book was written in a fairly antiquated typesetting system and not done in LaTeX; it could really stand an update. Second, the book has no exercises. I have some worksheets from my days at Illinois passed from TA to TA until they got to me. I should get them scanned and put on the web. Third, the publisher also indicates that a suite of free programs (Confa, Cofa, Cosan, NOHARM) written by Colin Fraser (one of McDonald's students) is available, but I cannot find them at present. If you want to do EFA, you can get Michael Browne's CEFA, but having free and simple CFA, SEM and MIRT software would be awfully nice....

Update: After having taught psychometrics all on my lonesome with no one else's lesson plan this Spring 2008, I believe this book is an excellent capstone work. It's too much for most readers, which is why my students got Allen & Yen, but my lectures were based heavily on TT:aUT. I told them if they really wanted to know the material, they needed to take a look.