The ​Silent Language

Claire J. Kramsch - Language ​and Culture
This ​book offers an accessible survey of key language concepts such as social context and cultural authenticity, using insights from fields including linguistics, sociology, and anthropology.

Pierre Bourdieu - Distinction
No ​judgement of taste is innocent. In a word, we are all snobs. Pierre Bourdieu brilliantly illuminates this situation of the middle class in the modern world. France's leading sociologist focusses here on the French bourgeoisie, its tastes and preferences. Distinction is at once a vast ethnography of contemporary France and a dissection of the bourgeois mind. In the course of everyday life people constantly choose between what they find aesthetically pleasing and what they consider tacky, merely trendy, or ugly. Bourdieu bases his study on surveys that took into account the multitude of social factors that play a part in a Frenchperson's choice of clothing, furniture, leisure activities, dinner menus for guests, and many other matters of taste. What emerges from his analysis is that social snobbery is everywhere in the bourgeois world. The different aesthetic choices people make are all distinctions-that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. Taste is not pure. Bourdieu finds a world of social meaning in the decision to order bouillabaisse, in our contemporary cult of thinness, in the "California sports" such as jogging and cross-country skiing.

Jean Baudrillard - Art ​and Artefact
This ​book offers a major reappraisal of Jean Baudrillard's thoughts on the image, radical illusion and media culture. Here for the first time, through a number of highly accessible interviews and recent essays, Baudrillard introduces what he calls the `stunning clarity' of the photographic, and fascinatingly outlines his present thoughts on urban reality, aesthetics, virtual reality and new media technologies, in the light of his practice as a photographer. The book is illustrated with eight colour plates of Baudrillard's photographs and includes a number of provocative and illuminating responses to his recent writings from noted Baudrillard scholars. It also includes a definitive bibliography of critical response to Baudrillar's writings on media culture, art and photography.

Daniel Quinn - Beyond ​Civilization
In ​Beyond Civilization, Daniel Quinn thinks the unthinkable. We all know there's no one right way to build a bicycle, no one right way to design an automobile, no one right way to make a pair of shoes, but we're convinced that there must be only one right way to live -- and the one we have is it, no matter what. Beyond Civilization makes practical sense of the vision of Daniel Quinn's best-selling novel Ishmael. Examining ancient civilizations such as the Maya and the Olmec, as well as modern-day microcosms of alternative living like circus societies, Quinn guides us on a quest for a new model for society, one that is forward-thinking and encourages diversity instead of suppressing it. Beyond Civilization is not about a "New World Order" but a "New Personal World Order" that would allow people to assert control over their own destiny and grant them the freedom to create their own way of life right now -- not in some distant utopian future.

Edward W. Said - Orientalism
In ​this highly acclaimed seminal work, Edward Said surveys the history and nature of Western attitudes towards the East, considering Orientalism as a powerful European ideological creation – a way for writers, philosophers and colonial administrators to deal with the ‘otherness’ of Eastern culture, customs and beliefs. He traces this view through the writings of Homer, Nerval and Flaubert, Disraeli and Kipling, whose imaginative depictions have greatly contributed to the West’s romantic and exotic picture of the Orient. In his new preface, Said examines the effect of continuing Western imperialism after recent events in Palestine, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Henry Jenkins - Textual ​Poachers
"Get ​a life," William Shatner told Star Trek fans. Yet, as Textual Poachers argues, fans already have a "life," a complex subculture which draws its resources from commercial culture while also reworking them to serve alternative interests. Rejecting stereotypes of fans as cultural dupes, social misfits, and mindless consumers, Jenkins represents media fans as active producers and skilled manipulators of program meanings, as nomadic poachers constructing their own culture from borrowed materials, as an alternative social community defined through its cultural preferences and consumption practices. Written from an insider's perspective and providing vivid examples from fan artifacts, Textual Poachers offers an ethnographic account of the media fan community, its interpretive strategies, its social institutions and cultural practices, and its troubled relationship to the mass media and consumer capitalism. Drawing on the work of Michel de Ceteau, Jenkins shows how fans of Star Trek, Blake's 7, The Professionals, Beauty and the Beast, Starsky and Hutch, Alien Nation, Twin Peaks, and other popular programs exploit these cultural materials as the basis for their stories, songs, videos, and social interactions. Addressing both academics and fans, Jenkins builds a powerful case for the richness of fan culture as a popular response to the mass media and as a challenge to the producers' attempts to regulate textual meanings. Textual Poachers guides readers through difficult questions about popular consumption, genre, gender, sexuality, and interpretation, documenting practices and processes which test and challenge basic assumptions of contemporary media theory.

Kathy Reichs - Swamp ​Bones
Although ​a trip to Florida is supposed to be about rest and relaxation, there’s no such thing as a day off for Dr. Temperance Brennan. She has come to visit her friend, a dedicated ornithologist who’s researching the threat that intrusive Burmese pythons pose to indigenous bird species in the Everglades. While sorting through the stomach of an eighteen-foot specimen, they make a disturbing discovery: bones that are unmistakably human. And when Tempe spots the telltale signs of murder by a very different kind of predator, she’s drawn into a case with its roots in the darkest depths of the swamp.

Ethan Zuckermann - Rewire
A ​rousing call to action for those who would be citizens of the world—online and off. In an age of connection supercharged by the Internet, we often assume that more people online means a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. In reality, it is easier to ship bottles of water from Fiji to Atlanta than it is to get news from Tokyo to New York. In Rewire media expert Ethan Zuckerman draws on contemporary research in psychology, sociology, and his own work on how humans “flock together” to explain why the technological ability to reach someone does not inevitably lead to increased human connection. For those who seek a wider picture—a picture now critical for global success—Zuckerman highlights the challenges, and the headway already made, by attempts to bridge cultures through translation, cross-cultural inspiration, and the search for new, serendipitous experience. Rich with Zuckerman’s personal experience and wisdom, Rewire offers a map of the social, technical, and policy innovations needed to more tightly connect the world.

Charles Lewis Taylor - David A. Jodice - World ​Handbook of Political and Social Indicators
The ​two volumes of the third edition of the World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators, by Charles L. Taylor and David A. Jodice, represent a prodigious amount of work and critical thought and make a large contribution to our usable knowledge. The amount of work is evident from the amount of data presented. The critical thought is implied in the decisions on the usefulness and limits of indicators, on what to include or reject, and on how to deal with the problems of missing data, error margins, and related matters - decisions vital to the preparation of such a work. To assess the significance of this contribution to the social sciences requires that we try to put the enterprise - and that of the Wissenschatfszentrum-Berlin that has supported them - into a broad intellectual context. The present edition of the World Handbook, like its predecessors, is a child of what has been called the data revolution. Aggregate statistical data have become available in unprecedentedly vast amounts and in improved quality, and their existence has challenged us to use them as tools for the better understanding of political and social affairs, both national and international. This edition is the latest in a series of attempts to respond to that challenge in a systematic manner.

Émile Durkheim - Ethics ​and the sociology of morals
Emile ​Durkheim (1858-1917) was one of the founders of modern sociology. "Ethics and the Sociology of Morals" (La science positive de la morale en Allemagne) laid the foundation for Durkheim's future work. More than a review of current thought, it was a proclamation that ethics needed to be liberated from its philosophical bondage and developed as a distinct branch of sociology. Written when Durkheim was charting the course of his own research, it provides a unique key to the interpretation of his earlier work and presents a number of points of Durkheim's ethical theory which are of considerable interest in light of current ethical theory. This volume makes available in English a crucial essay by a master of social thought.

Hunter S. Thompson - Kingdom ​of fear
Be ​afraid. Hunter S. Thompson – hellraising author of _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_, high priest of hedonism and supreme chronicler of the American nightmare – tells the uncensored story of a life dedicated to excess in this outrageous autobiography. Here, for the first time, the godfather of Gonzo journalism takes on the subject no one else could handle: himself. It’s a tale of fast living, hard drinking, sharp writing and ingesting most illegal substances known to humanity. Of crazed road trips, girls, guns, bikes, brushes with the law and accidentally being accused of trying to kill Jack Nicholson. And it’s an explosive, no-holds-barred assassination of America today.

Eric Berne - Games ​People Play
We ​think we're relating to other people;but actually we're all playing games. Forty years ago, Games People Play revolutionized our understanding of what really goes on during our most basic social interactions. More than five million copies later, Dr. Eric Berne's classic is as astonishing;and revealing;as it was on the day it was first published. This anniversary edition features a new introduction by Dr. James R. Allen, president of the International Transactional Analysis Association, and Kurt Vonnegut's brilliant Life magazine review from 1965. We play games all the time;sexual games, marital games, power games with our bosses, and competitive games with our friends. Detailing status contests like "Martini"; (I know a better way), to lethal couples combat like "If It Weren't For You"; and "Uproar,"; to flirtation favorites like "The Stocking Game"; and "Let's You and Him Fight,"; Dr. Berne exposes the secret ploys and unconscious maneuvers that rule our intimate lives. Explosive when it first appeared, Games People Play is now widely recognized as the most original and influential popular psychology book of our time. It's as powerful and eye-opening as ever

Eric Butterworth - David Weir - The ​sociology of modern Britain
First ​published in 1970, this book has established itself not only as the foundation reader in Fontana's Modern Britain series, but as one of the most widely used introductions to contemporary British society.

Clifford Geertz - Works ​and Lives
The ​illusion that ethnography is a matter of sorting strange and irregular facts into familiar and orderly categories—this is magic, that is technology—has long since been exploded. What it is instead, however, is less clear. That it might be a kind of writing, putting things to paper, has now and then occurred to those engaged in producing it, consuming it, or both. But the examination of it as such has been impeded by several considerations, none of them very reasonable. One of these, especially weighty among the producers, has been simply that it is an unanthropological sort of thing to do. What a proper ethnographer ought properly to be doing is going out to places, coming back with information about how people live there, and making that information available to the professional community in practical form, not lounging about in libraries reflecting on literary questions. Excessive concern, which in practice usually means any concern at all, with how ethnographic texts are constructed seems like an unhealthy self-absorption—time wasting at best, hypochondriacal at worst. The advantage of shifting at least part of our attention from the fascinations of field work, which have held us so long in thrall, to those of writing is not only that this difficulty will become more clearly understood, but also that we shall learn to read with a more percipient eye. A hundred and fifteen years (if we date our profession, as conventionally, from Tylor) of asseverational prose and literary innocence is long enough.

Clifford Geertz - The ​Interpretation of Cultures
In ​The Interpretation of Cultures, the most original anthropologist of his generation moved far beyond the traditional confines of his discipline to develop an important new concept of culture. This groundbreaking book, winner of the 1974 Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association, helped define for an entire generation of anthropologists what their field is ultimately about.

Clifford Geertz - Local ​Knowledge
In ​essays covering everything from art and common sense to charisma and constructions of the self, the eminent cultural anthropologist and author of The Interpretation of Cultures deepens our understanding of human societies through the intimacies of "local knowledge." A companion volume to The Interpretation of Cultures, this book continues Geertz’s exploration of the meaning of culture and the importance of shared cultural symbolism. With a new introduction by the author.

Clifford Geertz - After ​the Fact
"Suppose," ​Clifford Geertz suggests, "having entangled yourself every now and again over four decades or so in the goings-on in two provincial towns, one a Southeast Asian bend in the road, one a North African outpost and passage point, you wished to say something about how those goings-on had changed." A narrative presents itself, a tour of indices and trends, perhaps a memoir? None, however, will suffice, because in forty years more has changed than those two towns--the anthropologist, for instance, anthropology itself, even the intellectual and moral world in which the discipline exists. And so, in looking back on four decades of anthropology in the field, Geertz has created a work that is characteristically unclassifiable, a personal history that is also a retrospective reflection on developments in the human sciences amid political, social, and cultural changes in the world. An elegant summation of one of the most remarkable careers in anthropology, it is at the same time an eloquent statement of the purposes and possibilities of anthropology's interpretive powers. To view his two towns in time, Pare in Indonesia and Sefrou in Morocco, Geertz adopts various perspectives on anthropological research and analysis during the post-colonial period, the Cold War, and the emergence of the new states of Asia and Africa. Throughout, he clarifies his own position on a broad series of issues at once empirical, methodological, theoretical, and personal. The result is a truly original book, one that displays a particular way of practicing the human sciences and thus a particular--and particularly efficacious--view of what these sciences are, have been, and should become.

Ildikó Horváth - Interpreter ​Behaviour
Interpreter ​Behaviour offers a comprehensive overview of the most frequent research topics in Interpreting Studies. At the same time it explains the basic notions behind these and offers an insight into such fields as communication studies, psycholinguistics, cognitive science and sports psychology. Therefore, it is a truly interdisciplinary study. It also attempts to shed new light on interpreting as a profession and interpreters as professionals by taking an interpreter-centered view and focusing on the interpreter as a human being and not purely a ‘black box’ or a ‘non person’. It highlights the complexity of the linguistic and cognitive skills and competences required from interpreters whose task consists of facilitating communication between persons not speaking the same language and not belonging to the same culture. The book may be of interest to interpreter trainers and trainees, interpreter and translator training programme administrators, professional interpreters, applied linguists, PhD students and scholars of Translation/Interpreting Studies, psychologists and vocational training professionals. Ildikó Horváth holds an MA in English and French language and literature. Her PhD in Applied Linguistics (2007) dealt with the role of autonomous learning in interpreter training. She is a senior lecturer at the Interpreter and Translator Training Department of ELTE University, Budapest, and is an active freelance conference interpreter.

Dougal Dixon - Man ​After Man
What ​is our future? Will the human race exist in a 1,000 years time? In 10,000 years? In a 100,000 years time? If so, what will we look like and how will we behave? How will we have developed or adapted, and why? What will be the effect of that change on other animals? At present, Man as a species is outside evolution - supported by an advanced technology that shapes nature to fit the short-term requirements of Homo sapiens. But can old age, illness and the pressure of evolution be held at bay for ever by medicine and science? Dougal Dixon, the bestselling author of After Man, and a science writer specializing in evolution and palaeontology tackles these key questions and presents a vision of the next 5 million years based on the known principles of evolution and ecology, and the possibilities present within genetic engineering. Man After Man is an illustrated anthropology of the future. It shows how the human race might evolve naturally or be adapted to face life under the sea or in space. And how the descendants of Homo sapiens might meet the harsh challenge of a new ice age or the adverse conditions imposed by the greenhouse effect, ozone depletion or magnetic reversal. Dougal Dixon presents a credible account of human evolution in future centuries. Although exotic and thought-provoking, the illustrations are biologically accurate and strictly within the bounds of the genetically and scientifically possible.

Chris Anderson - Free
http://www.wired.com/images/multimedia/free/FREE_Audiobook_unabridged.zip The ​New York Times bestselling author heralds the future of business in Free. In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company's survival. The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor--effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don't apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage. Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you're trying to sell. In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.