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The Mogul
Eddie Gottlieb, Philadelphia Sports Legend and Pro Basketball Pioneer
Foreword by Paul Arizin
Thomas H. Keels
Reviewed in the online edition of “The Philadelphia City Paper” on April 22. The review read, “[A] long overdue look at Gottlieb…Westcott does a superb job...present[ing] an unusually well-rounded portrait. While Gottlieb’s varied life could probably encompass several volumes, The Mogul gets enough of the man between two covers.” |
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Multiethnic Moments
The Politics of Urban Education Reform
Susan E. Clarke, Rodney E. Hero, Mara S. Sidney, Luis Fraga and Bari Anhalt Erlichson, foreword by Clarence N. Stone
Reviewed in the April 2008 issue of “Teaching Sociology.” The review read, “The book is well written and clearly organized….The book would be most appropriate for a graduate course in social policy analysis. Faculty teaching change graduate student courses in social change, social stratification, race and ethnicity, or sociology of education may find this book a useful supplemental text….Parts of this book may be quite useful in an undergraduate course.” |
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Dark Days in the Newsroom
McCarthyism Aimed at the Press
Edward Alwood
Reviewed in the Spring 2008 issue of “Nieman Reports,” a publication from the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. The review read, “Writing a blurb for this book would be a snap: ‘Every serious journalist should read this fascinating, superbly researched, thoroughly documented, and invaluable historical account of a frightening, sustained and vicious assault on robust journalism—an assault that has great resonance today,’ is what I’d say…For those not old enough to have lived through this time in our nation’s history, having the chance this book gives to absorb its valuable lessons is a gift worth sampling.” |
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The Racial Logic of Politics
Asuab Americans and Party Competition
Thomas P. Kim
Reviewed in the Spring 2008 issue of “Political Science Quarterly.” The review read, “The book has several notable strengths. Most importantly, Kim’s argument about how parties are incentivized to respond to the racialization of Asian Americans is reasonable and compelling…It offers a bracing and much-needed challenge to the conventional understanding that a racial or ethnic group’s growing numbers and money are likely to translate into meaningful political power.” |
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Cold War in A Hot Zone
The United States Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies
Gerald Horne
The Spring 2008 issue of “Multicultural Review” ran a review of Cold War in A Hot Zone. The review read, “Horne details a comprehensive history of the political and economic struggles of the islands and traces the collapse of British colonialism and the rise of U.S. influence in the Caribbean. Horne’s extraordinary expose, rich with historical data on the political parties, their leaders, and their federations, reads like an encyclopedia on ‘everything you would ever want to know’ about these islands, and should serve as a main text for Caribbean history, politics, and economics of the region from the 1930s to the end of the Cold War.” |
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Welfare Discipline
Discourse, Governance, and Globalization
Sanford F. Schram
Reviewed in the March 2008 issue of “Perspectives on Politics.” The review read, “[This book] should challenge assumptions about redistributive politics in the United States and advance the study of the welfare state. [It is] particularly ideal for teaching undergraduate or Masters-level policy students.” |
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Wheelchair Warrior
Gangs, Disability, and Basketball
Melvin Juette and Ronald J. Berger
Reviewed in the March 1 issue of “Library Journal .” The review read, “Juette offers an informative ethnography on both gang life and wheelchair basketball….His accounts of gang life alone would recommend his book as a worthy assigned text by those who teach courses on the sociology of deviance and gangs. Those who teach sport sociology courses would also find merit in the first-hand accounts of participation in the National Wheelchair Basketball Association, which was founded in 1949. In short, this book has something to offer both academics and lay readers.” |
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The Philadelphia Mummers
A vivid history of the nation's oldest folk parade.
Patrician Anne Masters
The March 2008 issue of “Contemporary Sociology” reviewed The Philadelphia Mummers. The review read, “The Philadelphia Mummers provides an insider’s look into its longstanding ceremonies, tied to larger culture, and how this annual parade provides community where social integration has otherwise been lost….[W]ell-written, carefully documented, and assiduously researched, The Philadelphia Mummers offers insight into a time-honored tradition, how it has been maintained for over a century, and the crucial role that play serves in forging community ties….[I]t’s accessibility, readability, and fascinating tales make it recommended reading for courses in urban sociology, community, sociology of leisure, social change and qualitative methods. If Masters’s rendering of the Parade is as accurate as we believe, to paraphrase another W.C. Fields quote, ‘we’d rather be in Philadelphia’ come next New Year’s Day.” |
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Jobs Aren't Enough
Toward a New Economic Mobility for Low-Income Families
Roberta Rehner Iversen
Reviewed in the March 2008 issue of “Qualitative Social Work.” The review read, “[The chapter] on workforce development stands out as a shining centerpiece to the entire volume and as a key contribution to the literature with compelling applications for social work practice. It is here that Roberta Iversen’s expertise in the area of workforce development, is both evidenced and affirmed…For the growing number of social work scholars involved in research and teaching on workforce development and employment…Jobs Aren’t Enough is required reading.” |
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Wheelchair Warrior
Gangs, Disability, and Basketball
Melvin Juette and Ronald J. Berger
Reviewed in the March 1 issue of “Booklist.” The review read, “Juette’s story follows his evolution from boy to man, from gang member to wheelchair athlete, and it’s a story of determination and inspiration that will touch everyone who reads it.” |
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Disorders of Desire
Sexuality and Gender in Modern American Sexology
Revised and Expanded Edition
Janice M. Irvine
Reviewed in the February 2008 issue of “Archives of Sexual Behavior.” The review read, “[T]his is a very useful book, one that Irvine rightly describes as a product of a particular intellectual and political moment….Accessibly written, well organized and consistently engaging, this text continues to appeal to a wide audience. It is useful for teaching at the undergraduate and graduate levels, it will continue to appeal to general readers looking for an introduction to the field, to students of sexology, and studies of sexuality, and indeed for specialists looking to gain further insight into their own practice.” |
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Medicalized Masculinities
edited by Dana Rosenfeld and Christopher A. Faircloth
Reviewed in the February 2008 issue of “Archives of Sexual Behavior.” The review read, “[A]n excellent collection that will be required reading for scholars interested in gender and health. Its clear and lively writing, the wealth of background information in the introduction, and its contributors’ compelling identification and analysis of key sites for the medicalization of masculinity in American today make it a pivotal addition to the fields of medicalization and gender research. Its accessibility and topicality will also make it an excellent teaching resource.” |
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There Goes the 'Hood
Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up
Lance Freeman
Reviewed in the February 2008 issue of “The Journal of Housing and the Built Environment.” The review read, “There Goes the 'Hood represents a new complementary approach to research on gentrification.…The book is well worth reading for urban geographers and planners, especially because Freeman presents a balanced view that takes both the good and the bad sides of gentrification into account and brings out the indigenous residents’ perception of the process.” |
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Chinese St. Louis
From Enclave to Cultural Community
Huping Ling
Reviewed in February 2008 issue of “The Journal of Asian American Studies.” The review read, “Chinese St. Louis is an important contribution to the rapidly growing field of Chinese American studies….the book is highly informative about the life and social background of both historical and contemporary Chinese immigrants.” |
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Positively No Filipinos Allowed
Building Communities and Discourse
edited by Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr., Edgardo V. Gutierrez and Ricardo V. Gutierrez, foreword by Lisa Lowe
Reviewed in February 2008 issue of “The Journal of Asian American Studies.” The review read, “The book is effectively structured…a fine collection…with an exceptionally good introduction.” |
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Arsenio Rodríguez and the Transnational Flows of Latin Popular Music
David F. Garcia
Reviewed in the journal “Popular Music” Volume 27/1, 2008. The review read, “All in all, this book gives a detailed account of Cuban-derived Latin popular music from the 1940s to the 1970s in the USA and should provide new valuable insights for scholars of Cuban and Latin popular music.” |
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The Sorcery of Color
Identity, Race, and Gender in Brazil
Elisa Larkin Nascimento
Reviewed in the “Journal of Latin American Studies,” Vol. 40, 2008. The review read, “Larkin Nascimento’s informative account of the myriad institutional forms through which Afro-Brazilians mobilized over the course of the 1900s very few of whom called for a return to their African heritage [is persuasive]… Also useful is a chapter on the psychology of Brazilian racism[.]” |
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Choices and Changes
The most comprehensive book about interest groups in recent American politics
Michael M. Franz
Reviewed in the February 2008 issue of “Campaigns and Elections.” The review read, “Academics are the primary audience for this graph-rich book, but dedicated (and patient) journalists and Hill staffers may also pick up some useful data points.” |
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Surviving Mexico's Dirty War
A Political Prisoner's Memoir
Alberto Ulloa Bornemann, edited by Arthur Schmidt and Aurora Camacho de Schmidt
Reviewed in the “Latin American Review of Books.” The review read, “Alberto Ulloa Bornemann’s testimonial account of his disappearance, imprisonment and torture—the first significant memoir of a political prisoner from Mexico’s ‘dirty war’ of the 1970s—is so important, for it should remind us, and Mexicans themselves, not to forget a past that was both so sinister yet so recent….As the Schmidts point out in their introduction, this work is an important contribution to the genre of testimonial literature that has emerged in Latin America in the late 20th century that is distinguished, above all, by the moral force of the accounts related. Temple University Press must be praised for publishing this book: it makes an important contribution to our understanding of Mexico in the 1970s and gives us a unique insight into the activities and ideas prevalent within the guerrilla organizations of the period, and into the character of figures such as Cabañas.” |
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Forgotten Philadelphia
Lost Architecture of the Quaker City
Thomas H. Keels
Reviewed in the February 14 issue of “The Jewish Exponent” The review read, “For architecture, history and Philly buffs, it’s an indispensible volume….[T]he ‘Projected Philadelphia’ chapter [may be] the most compelling…Looking at these beautiful architectural drawings is like walking directly into the province of dreams, and their pure optimism – the sense of their rightness – provides this book with a melancholy-tinged but fitting finale.” |
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The Story Is True
The Art and Meaning of Telling Stories
Bruce Jackson
Reviewed in the February 2008 issue of “Choice.” The review read, “[T]he author explores qualities good stories evidence—context, listeners, revisions, artistic sensibility, shapes, reconstructions, endings, frames, and so on. Jackson’s masterful analyses of these abstractions about narratives tend to fade into the background as Jackson’s own storytelling prowess comes into play…These are entertaining and accessible stories, and this book is a good read. Highly Recommended.” |
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Cold War in a Hot Zone
The United States Confronts Labor and Independence Struggles in the British West Indies
Gerald Horne
Reviewed in the February 2008 issue of the “Foreign Service Journal.” The review read, “Cold War in a Hot Zone is extremely well researched and surprisingly lively…The author’s documentation of the racism on American military bases in the region is solid…he gives us many intriguing details.” |
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The Coolie Speaks
Chinese Indentured Laborers and African Slaves in Cuba
Lisa Yun
Reviewed in the February 5 on line edition of “Library Journal.” The review read, “The individual testimonies…are stunning in their particularity and personality. Some use Chinese historic and poetic allusions in sophisticated ways, some are quite simple, and all are anguishing….[T]he author is to be commended.” |
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Silent Gesture
The Autobiography of Tommie Smith
Tommie Smith and David Steele
Reviewed in the journal, “Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies,” Volume XVI-2007. The review read, “What is the worth of this book? I believe it to be one that accurately portrays Tommie Smith’s life and Olympic ordeal….We have waited a long time for this book. The result is worth the delay….Silent Gesture provides, by far, the most powerful punctuation mark in explaining one of the most historic of all Olympic moments.” |
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Savoring the Salt
The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara
edited by Linda Janet Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall
Reviewed in the February 2008 issue of “Filmbill.” The review read, “These carefully selected ruminations by Bambara’s peers stand as a testament to her and the impact of her iconoclastic vision and style…Savoring the Salt provides fond memories of an incandescent spirit.” |
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Jobs Aren't Enough
"Job opportunity" is a myth for 25% of U.S. wage earners
Roberta Rehner Iversen and Annie Laurie Armstrong
The January 2008 issue of “Contemporary Sociology” reviewed Jobs Aren't Enough. The review read, “Iversen and Armstrong give us a unique comprehensive glimpse into the world of low-wage employment in an environment where considerable resources are devoted to improving the lives of the working poor in America. The results in this excellent book are both revealing and depressing….The authors do an excellent job of explaining, for general audiences, how systems of social networks, cultural capital, and embeddedness describe the economic milieu that most of us live in. They also do an excellent job of showing how these families have some of the things (e.g., family supports) but critically lack others (e.g., access to good schools for their children.)…Jobs Aren’t Enough is well worth your time and your money. If nothing else you will develop a greater understanding of just how much work there is to make a working society a prosperous one.” |
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Ordinary Poverty
A Little Food and Cold Storage
William DiFazio
Reviewed in the January 2008 issue of “The American Journal of Sociology.” The review read, “DiFazio offers an outraged exegesis of the exacerbation of poverty amid an economic boom that has increased the wealth of only the richest….[H]is ethnographic contribution [is] strongest in his description of the travails of long-term social service provision in the late 1980s and into the 1990s.” |
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San Francisco's International Hotel
Mobilizing the Filipino American Community in the Anti-Eviction Movement
Estella Habal
Reviewed in the January 2008 issue of “Filipinas Magazine.” The review read, “This book is a compelling account of community resistance that has become a milestone event in the history of Filipinos in America.” |
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Equal Play
Title IX and Social Change
edited by Nancy Hogshead-Makar and Andrew Zimbalist
Reviewed in the “Journal of Issues in Intercollegiate Athletics,” January, 2008. The review read, “A particular strength of this collection is its strategic reliance on primary source materials, government documents, scholarly analyses, and contemporary writings to tell the story of Title IX’s impact on women’s sports and American society overall.” |
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Surviving Mexico's Dirty War
A Political Prisoner's Memoir
Alberto Ulloa Bornemann, edited by Arthur Schmidt and Aurora Camacho de Schmidt
Reviewed in the January 2008 issue of “Bulletin of Latin American Research.” The review read, “Ulloa Bornemann’s accessible memoir is an intensely self-reflective, critical and sometimes even ironic account of the life of an engaged but naïve young man from the upper middle classes, who plunged into a world of armed resistance and ideological factionalism, and struggled his way through the dungeons of an authoritarian state….[T]his book [is] a revealing and horrifying document.” |
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Universities in the Age of Corporate Science
The UC Berkeley-Novartis Controversy
Alan P. Rudy, Dawn Coppin, Jason Konefal, Bradley T. Shaw, Toby Ten Eyck, Craig
Harris and Lawrence Busch
Reviewed in the January 2008 issue of “Agriculture and Human Values.” The review read, “Universities in the Age of Corporate Science would be of interest to students and faculty in a variety of disciplines and degree levels. Agricultural science students and faculty should be most encouraged to read this study, as it contains much information on where these fields have been and in what directions the research is going. This would also be good reading for those in the social sciences studying the conflicts that arise from the interaction of private interests and public good.” |
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There Goes the 'Hood
Lance Freeman
Reviewed in the December 2007 issue of “The Berkeley Planning Journal.” The review read, “There Goes the ‘Hood focuses on the experience of gentrification and in that regard it is an important work in the ongoing struggles over neighborhood change. By being honest about race, by focusing strongly on human beings and their stories, and by setting a strong goal of nuanced storytelling, Freeman has consciously opened more doors for future research than he has closed. For anyone interested in the subject, and especially those interested in contributing their voice to the growing literature, it is a worthwhile and important read.” |
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Masters of the Sabar
Patricia Tang
Reviewed in the December 2007 issue of “African Studies Review.” The review read, “Tang’s ethnography is lucid and engaging… [Her] study is particularly significant for examining the performance of sabar beyond its indigenous social and aesthetic frames…. Masters of the Sabar represents a significant contribution in this direction.” |
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Musicians from a Different Shore
Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music
Mari Yoshihara
Reviewed in the Winter 2007 issue of “Multicultural Review.” The review read “This enlightening and informative book studies music in a social and subjective context. The art of music is here regarded as expression and communication. This multicultural study is highly recommended for students and general readers.” |
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One Last Read
Collected Works of the World's Slowest Sportswriter
Ray Didinger
The “Philadelphia Daily News” listed Ray Didinger’s One Last Read as “one of the best books of the year,” in his roundup of holiday sports books. The review read, “One of the best books of the year, for the second year in a row, was authored by Ray Didinger. It's an anthology of his columns and it's called "One Last Read." There are wonderful portraits of Dick Vermeil, Tug McGraw, Thurman Munson. And there are some strong opinion pieces about Pete Rose, Woody Hayes and Leonard Tose. Worth reading again for the elegance of the prose, for the diligent reporting that went into them, for the looooong hours that it took to write them.” |
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She's Got a Gun
Nancy Floyd
Reviewed in the December 15 issue of “Booklist.” The review read, “Floyd presents a definitive picture of how American culture has portrayed women and guns, from the days of Wild West dime novels to those of pulp-fictional and Hollywood Westerns to the present….A great resource on an underappreciated sector of American culture that is knockout entertaining, to boot; the book hits the bull’s-eye for history buffs and firearms enthusiasts alike.” |
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Frankie Manning
Ambassador of Lindy Hop
Frankie Manning and Cynthia R. Millman
“The Seattle Times” included Frankie Manning as one of their recommendations for the year’s best books in their December 2 issue. The review read, “On the crowded dance floor of Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, a nimble young New Yorker named Frankie Manning found his calling. Manning became a swing dancer who helped refine and popularize the Lindy Hop — that remarkable, airborne style of terpsichorean Americana — and go on to teach it to eager dancers his grandkids' age. In this good-humored, oral history-style autobiography, Manning covers a jumpin' and jivin' career that won't quit. (The 93-year old dancer recently showed off his classy moves at Seattle's Century Ballroom.) Making "guest appearances" here are many great dancers and musicians from the Swing Era and beyond. And among the many delightful photos is a publicity glossy of star hoofer Bill "Bojangles" Robinson inscribed, ‘To Frankie, The Greatest Lindy Hopper of Them All.’” |
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Savoring the Salt
The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara
edited by Linda Janet Holmes and Cheryl A. Wall
Reviewed in the December 2007 issue of “Library Journal.” The review read, “This volume is a tribute to the legacy of Bambara, an appreciation of her work, and a celebration of her life and contribution to contemporary American literature and social consciousness. Editors Holmes, Bambara’s former student and a successful writer, and Wall, a writer and Rutgers University English professor, assembled the voices of distinguished art and literary personalities like Amiri Baraka, Abena Busia, Sonia Sanchez, Eleanor Taylor, Audre Lorde, Rudolph Byrd, actor Ruby Dee, and many more. They all write insightfully and affectionately, as they celebrate a truly genuine writer and social activist who made no apologies for being black and female. Recommended for public and academic libraries” |
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