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Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism
$20.92
Book
Taking a new approach to the history of Buddhism, this book describes how Buddhist authors reorganized family values in China. Close readings of more than twenty Buddhist texts written in China from the fifth to the thirteenth century demonstrate that Buddhist authors crafted new models for family reproduction based on a mother-son style of filial piety, in contrast to the traditional father-son model.
Building on itself century after century, Buddhist propaganda sought to produce three elemental responses: (1) guilt and a sense of indebtedness to one's mother, (2) suspicion regarding the mother's sexual and sinful nature, and (3) faith that the Buddhist monastic institution could, if correctly patronized, cancel the debts and expiate the sins that it so painstakingly promulgated. Emerging at the end of this arc of Buddhist ideology is something resembling "original sin", or, better, the "sin of birth", in which all mothers are threatened with infernal punishment simply for their role in procreation.
The author draws on modern critical and psychoanalytic perspectives to argue that by reorienting family values, the Buddhists succeeded in bridging the gap between the private world of the Chinese family and the public presence of monastic Buddhism, thereby working Buddhism into Chinese society on several levels: sexual, familial, monetary, and political. Surprisingly, Buddhist family values, despite their intrusive nature and unprecedented focus on the mother, remained committed to supporting the traditional patrilineal family. The book thus demonstrates that the personal and intimate mother-son complex provided engaging desires and fears that were gradually shaped and directed by apropaganda effort seeking reliable support for both professional Buddhists and the patriarchal family.
The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe
$26.59
Book
Exploring autobiographical texts written by European urban craftsmen from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, this wide-ranging book studies memoirs, diaries, family chronicles, travel narratives, and other forms of personal writings from Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and England. In the process, it considers the motivations of the authors, the changing forms and emphases of artisan narratives, and, more generally, the significance of written self-expression in early modern popular culture.
By analyzing reading and writing as practices laden with social meaning, this work aims to illuminate the changing role of the lower classes and other groups considered marginal in the history of literature and literacy. It uncovers an "Icarian" logic by which writing about the self and one's immediate and private world developed as a complex response to widely shared expectations regarding the cultural and political subordination of craftsmen and others relegated to the margins of public life and discourse.
The book also contributes contrary interdisciplinary debate on the nature and evolution of ancient writing. It draws upon those currents within literary studies, such as feminist criticism, which favor a more flexible approach to the study of first-person narrative than that adopted by traditional literary critics and historians of ideas. It also argues for revising the standard history of autobiography, eschewing the teleological presentation of a small handful of classi texts in favor of a more nuanced trajectory in which a wide range of social actors helped hape the emerging patterns of modern self-understanding and expression.
James S. Amelang is Professor of Early Modern History at the Universidad Antononia de Madrid. He is the author, most recently, of A Journal of the Plague Year: The Diary of the Barcelona Tanner Miquel Parets.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned book so please review the online preview to confirm it's up to the standards you desire. Obvious anomolies in printing will occur in reproduction editions.
Exploring the Highest Sierra
$29.54
Book
Exploring the Highest Sierra is a broadly accessible introduction to one of the most magnificent regions of the American West, detailing the geology, natural history, and the early explorations of the highest part of California’s Sierra Nevada range. It is also an indispensable guide for visitors to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, with abundant maps, photographs, and geologic guides that clearly explain the formation of the awesome natural features before them.
The highest Sierra was one of the last parts of the United States to be explored, and it was only during the Civil War that the first scientific party attempted a reconnaissance map of the region. They discovered in the process, that it included the highest mountain then in the United States, Mount Whitney. The book describes the arduous travels of the early explorers, including John C. Fremont and John Muir, and weaves the history of exploration together with modern geologic concepts to show the early naturalists’ contributions to geologic thought. Throughout, all terms that may be unfamiliar to non-specialists are simply and succinctly defined, and the book is richly punctuated with anecdotes, tales, myths, and biographical sketches of colorful characters associated with the region.
The book is illustrated with some 224 early etchings and maps, modern photographs, and diagrams, including 44 maps that incorporate 12 historical charts dating back to the earliest explorations. A series of 15 color maps of the region encompassing the parks, all at the same scale, feature such diverse aspects as the trails pioneered by John Muir, the extent of glacial ice during the Ice Age, and the location of geologic faults and epicenters. Geologic guides for the region’s principal roads and trails define the mileage of all lookouts and points of interest so that the visitor can examine the described features at first hand. The southern half (more than 100 miles) of the John Muir trail lies within the region, and the book includes a geologic guide to this high-altitude wilderness trail.
James G. Moore is Senior Research Geologist Emeritus with the U. S. Geological Survey in Menlo Park, California. His is the coauthor (with Robert D. Ballard) of Photographic Atlas of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge Rift Valley.
“An engrossing account not only of the geology but also of the early exploration and topographic mapping of the range. Moore’s half-century of geologic fieldwork in the Sierra shines through in this masterful treatment, presented in an engaging, nontechnical style. Visitors to Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks will be particularly interested in the detailed road and trail logs, which give marvelous descriptions of the region’s scenery, history, and geology.”
Dallas L. Peck, former director, U.S. Geological Survey
“No other author has captured the full panorama of the Sierra Nevada’s geologic history and exploration. Moore has produced a monumental work. Captivating writing and superb illustrations carry the reader into the highest Sierra along the paths of the pioneer explorers. With its wonderful maps and field guides, the book deserves the highest praise.”
Richard S. Fiske, former director, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution
“As a geologist who has worked extensively on the Sierra Nevada, I can say that Moore’s book stunned me with its masterful treatment of much that I knew about this mountain range, but so much more that I didn’t know. It has no competition and will be a bible to the specialist and visitor to the region alike. With so much material to organize, I am amazed at how well Moore has been able to put it all together in a wonderfully readable fashion.”
Garniss Curtis, University of California, Berkeley
Caring for Patients: A Critique of the Medical Model
$24.24
Book
“The late Allen Barbour, a master clinician-educator . . . has distilled 40 years of experience into a book that is both practical and scholarly. . . . A book to be read cover to cover by health care providers of all types, in training as well as midway through their careers. Were he alive today, Osler would be pleased to write the preface.”—Annals of Internal Medicine
“A legacy of Barbour’s 40-year career in teaching, scholarship, and patient care, Caring for Patients is an excellent read. The writing is crisp and lucid. . . . A gem of a book.”—New England Journal of Medicine
“A book to be read cover to cover by health care providers of all types, in training as well as midway through their careers. Were he alive today, Osler would be pleased to write the preface.”—Annals of Internal Medicine
"Caring For Patients" by Stanford physician Allen Barbour is an important medical book which addresses issues critical to routine medical practice. An uncommon treatise like this could shape the future of one's medical practice as well as the economics of medical care.
Barbour points out that experienced physicians have been trained to diagnose and treat organic disease although most patients seen in any given medical practice have illness caused by personal distress; many patients who come for help are not well accommodated by the biomedical system of diagnosis and treatment. Many diagnoses are deferred indefinitely, and evaluations are commonly extended and futile. A major component of the soaring costs of modern medical care, "high-tech" diagnostic procedures are often ordered when seeking a disease-based explanation for what are really unrecognized functional disorders. In the organ-based specialties, physicians rule out conditions instead of ruling them in, leading to both dilution of responsibility and collusive physician anonymity. The author recalls Eugene Stead's famous comment: "What this patient needs is a Doctor."
Barbour considers several common functional disorders worth listing because they are frequently misrecognized and misrepresented: anxiety, depression, fatigue, weakness, obesity, anorexia, impotence or anhedonia, disturbed sleep, headache, backache, constipation, diarrhea, indigestion, bloating, abdominal pain, musculoskeletal chest pain, and chronic pelvic pain. Although 87% of all emotionally based illnesses manifest as "medical" symptoms, functional symptoms are evaluated for organic disease as though the opposite were true.
Emotional expressions are inherently physical: they have evolved to unify mind and body in a common purpose, and great overlap can be seen between functional and organic expression. In organic disease, biologic determinants predominate; however, long-term psychosocial aspects of human life are the factors which actually determine morbidity and mortality. Indeed, much disease results from attempts to control the forces which initially led to illness. Thus, for example, endocarditis may result from intravenously administered drugs used to feel better by someone who feels profoundly bad. That is the core problem. Barbour quotes Stead's comment: "If one doesn't know what is actually going on, then one doesn't really know how to handle it."
Commonly, each possible organic disease is ruled out before the physician considers functional disorder as the diagnosis. This practice is improper and destructive: both varieties of diagnosis should be considered from the outset. Psychosomatic disorders can be detected only as a result of positive diagnosis and not by default. Personal situations which correlate with increased morbidity and mortality from physical disease include degree of parental deprivation, quality of childhood experience, and quality of social support. The author references a 7000 person study in which middle-aged men with the fewest interpersonal connections had three times the mortality rate of a matching group with the most interpersonal connections.
Feelings are either expressed or suppressed; they cannot be obliterated through containment. If suppressed, they emerge either as physical symptoms or as unfocused emotional expression such as anxiety, depression, or other psychiatric syndromes. Because most emotionally distressed persons are only dimly aware of the source of their distress or are overwhelmed by it, their tension mounts until physical symptoms result or until anxiety or depression increase to a level triggering a psychiatric diagnosis. Indeed, unconscious suppression of emotions and failure to understand their link to symptoms is the rule in medicine: by focusing on symptoms instead of their underlying personal problems, people define themselves as sick and thus seek relief from doctors. Complaints about symptoms trigger the medical model.
In general, pain is usually and incorrectly thought to be primarily caused by organic disease. Barbour studied 400 consecutive Stanford University Medical Center outpatients and found that in 174 of them, pain was the dominant symptom. However, when these 174 patients were thoroughly evaluated, the pain was found to be due to psychophysiologic reaction in 28%, somatoform disorder in 39%, or organic disease in 33%.
As an example of the diverse origin of pain, the three most common causes of recurrent anterior chest pain are cardiac, esophageal, and psychogenic. Unfortunately, exclusion of a cardiac cause typically discourages further diagnostic or therapeutic steps from being taken. This practice is unsatisfactory from the patient's viewpoint because lack of diagnosis equates with lack of knowledge: if the doctor doesn't know what is going on (i.e., doesn't confidently apply a diagnostic term), why should the patient trust the doctor's opinion of what is not going on? This failure to resolve the problem is expensive, partly because it virtually assures future visits to find an answer. In a large study of patients in a headache clinic, for example, the dominant concern for 77% was explanation of their illness, not pain relief. Barbour elsewhere describes chronic backache as "an illness in search of a disease." In this regard, Barbour points out that CAT scans showed herniated nucleus pulposus in 10% of asymptomatic volunteers aged <40 years; 27% of asymptomatic volunteers aged 40 years, had a herniation. Chapter 13 includes interesting, scholarly, well-referenced discussions of fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, pelvic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic abdominal pain, and various types of headache.
Because the biologic focus is currently so strong, depression has come to be viewed as a disease instead of a response to problems of the human condition. According to Barbour, the biology of depression is the resultnot the causeof feeling depressed. Genetic factors in major depression act not by initiating, but by accentuating intensity of the depressive response. Tricyclic antidepressants are not particularly specific: their effects occur at both ends of the anxiety-depression spectrum. Of little use in mild depression, they are often effective for reversing the biologic dysfunction of more advanced depression. In situations where antidepressants are not effective or are refused, physicians must contribute more time, energy, and personal commitment than most are willing to give. Sufficient time does exist, given the large amounts of time typically ultimately spent prescribing for symptoms one at a time instead of exploring central issues. (This phenomenon is easily observed from patient records.)
Barbour points out that in personal illness, outcome is determined by the physician's concept of care, i.e., whether care is limited to "ruling out" a particular condition or whether it expresses a more general concern for clinical judgment, helping, and healing. Unfortunately, efforts to understand the patient as a person are most often relegated to psychiatry, a field which itself seems to have abdicated that goal. This problem is compounded by patients who do not consider personal growth to be their responsibility.
Ultimately, how illness is explained to a patient is a pivotal issue determining subsequent events. In psychosomatic illness, it is always helpful to explain that the illness is a common response to distress and that the illness fortunately does not result from disease. Naming the illness is critical; an illness without a named diagnosis will not attract an adequate response from the patient. A useful explanation that the severity of stress-induced illness is often greater in irritable bowel syndrome than in cancer, that the pain of fibromyalgia typically is worse than in rheumatoid arthritis. Saying only that "nothing was found so it must be stress-related" is the mark of the therapeutically destitute and is doomed to failure because it fails to fully acknowledge that something is wrong. The crowning achievement for any clinician is to make the correct diagnosis and, with the patient, to reach an understanding of the underlying problem.
In selecting and abstracting some of Allen Barbour's words and ideas, I hope that I have done justice to "Caring For Patients." The entire book is highly readable, eruditely written, and meticulously referenced. This uncommon triad of qualities, combined with the author's extensive clinical experience, creates a work of great merit such as comes along once in a decade or longer. Although Dr. Barbour died just before its publication, his book carries the contemporary banner for ideas developed by George Engel, Richard Magraw, Michael Balint, and Walter Alvarez in their important, earlier books about the nature of a physician's work. Review by Vincent J. Felitti, M.D.
A Sense for the Other: The Timeliness and Relevance of Anthropology
$15.82
Book
If the end of exoticism is one of the characteristics of our time, and if classical anthropology based its study of alterity on this exotic distance from the other, is anthropology still possible, and if so, to what end? The author uses these questions as a point of departure for a probing interrogation of ethnological practice, starting with Lévi-Strauss.
For several years, the author has advocated an anthropology of “proximity” in place of the usual anthropology of distance. He has studied such emblematic places of Western modernity as the Parisian Metro, or such emblematic “non-places” as airports or freeways, treating as valid anthropological objects phenomena that others might judge less “pure” or “significant” than systems of filiation or matrimonial alliance. The proper place of the ethnographer, he argues, is sufficiently distanced to comprehend a system as a system, yet participatory enough to live it as an individual. How can one best arrive at such a place?
This book answers by outlining an approach to anthropology that focuses on negotiating the social meanings we and others use in making sense of the world, and on the processes of identification that create the difference between same and other. Why trace a line of demarcation between societies thought to warrant and require anthropological observation and others (namely, our own) thought to demand a different type of study? Once anthropology, through its study of rites, takes social meaning as its principal object, the necessity for a “generalized anthropology” that includes the entire planet seems obvious, especially in view of the rapid proliferation of new networks of communication and the integration of individuals into those networks.
Marc Augé is President of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. He is the author of a dozen books, several of which have been translated into English.
Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production
$21.82
Book
This book examines the modernization of the Cuban sugar industry from the end of the Cuban War of Independence throughout the ensuing boom in the sugar industry. An underlying theme of the book is the close connection between the technical and organizational changes in the Cuban sugar industry and the technological changes behind the managerial revolution in industrial countries.
The technical changes in the sugar industry, marked by the diffusion of mass production technologies and the adoption in Cuba of modern central factories, were characteristic of most progressive industries of that time. In general, the application of mass production technologies heralded the transition from proprietorships to modern hierarchical and corporate forms of business organization. This book links the development in the Cuban sugar industry to the global movement in business organization and technology that has been referred to as the rise of managerial capitalism.
The first three decades of the twentieth century have been recognized as critical in Cuba’s history, because the economic foundations – including the rise of sugar latifundismo – were laid for the Cuban revolution. Most of the existing literature has focused on the social impact of the profound socio-economic and institutional changes that came with the massive entrance of capital from North America. The line of investigation in this book is unique in that it examines the economic factors that underlay these socio-economic and institutional changes. What have frequently been seen as the effects of political intervention or imperialism the author identifies as economic outcomes caused by mass production technology.
This is the first book to apply the tools of the “new economic history’ to Cuba, complementing traditional historical methods with rigorous us of economic theory, transaction-cost economics, and quantitative methods to arrive at its conclusions.
This is a reproduction copy made from the 1998 printing of this work. Please review the online pages to see the anamonolies in print quality that will show up in the print-on-demand volumes of this work.
26 LEAD SOLDIERS
$18.31
Book
Exact, definite, and up-to-date is the information contained in this textbook of printing types, typesetting and printing processes. While it was planned primarily for students of journalism, it will be a valuable and convenient reference work, because of its very completeness, for juniors in advertising offices and all others who have to do with the printed world.
The type specimens are complete in a degree never before attempted by any one. More than 200 type faces are illustrated. The unique arrangement of displaying and explaining types at the bottom of each page makes the book highly useful for reference – a feature that will be appreciated by working newspaper and advertising men.
The non-technical explanation of processes and machines used in production of printed matter and the statement of comparative uses of different typesetting machines add to that value of the book.
THE AUTHOR is an outstanding typographical designer. At one time he was proprietor of the Metropolitan Press in San Francisco, a pioneer advisory typographic service for advertising agencies, and recently was advisory typographic designer for Stanford University Press. He was formerly lecturer, Department of Journalism, Stanford University, where he taught the material pedagogically in his classes.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy of the 1937 edition. Since it is a scanned book you might find some anamolies in the quality of the printing so please review the first few pages online before ordering.
The Love of Art
$16.99
Book
Everyone can visit the art treasures held in the great museums of the world ye, in fact, art museums are visited by only a small segment of the population. What are the characteristics of those who display their love of art by strolling through the galleries of museums? What distinguishes them from the majority of people who are effectively excluded, or exclude themselves, from their doors?
This classic study addresses such questions on the basis of a wide-ranging survey of museums and museum visitors in France, Greece, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland. Central to the analysis of Pierre Bourdieu and his associates is the elaboration of the theory of culture as a form of capital. This work shows that art is of great value in society as cultural capital, yet to a great extent the appreciation of art is considered intensely personal, something ineffable.
Bourdieu challenges this idea, asserting that it is merely one aspect of the ideological underpinnings of social inequality; further, that the power of the idea is such that it has come to pervade the beliefs of even culturally deprived groups, so that they accept and become accomplices in their exclusion and subordination. He reveals those mechanisms of society that together produce our conceptions of art, the artist, the public, and the creation of cultural value through semi-autonomous processes and institutions.
The book is in three parts. Part I describes and analyzes the dynamics of museum attendance: how it is related to occupation, educational level, age, income, amount of leisure time, and family background. Part II deals with cultural dissemination in a comparative summation of the attendance trends and presentation of art in different countries and types of museums, to which he appends a critique of museum policies and practices. In the conclusion, he argues against those who are convinced that there are varying abilities to appreciate art but resist attempts to account for the difference, those who prefer that taste remain a mysterious gift.
This is a reproduction edition from a scanned copy for Stanford University Press. Please review the online preview to see the obvious anamolies that will occur in printing this work.
Manual for Stanford Profile Scales of Hypnotic Susceptibility
$15.00
Book
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