Reviews for CUBAN LITERATURE (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities)

The average rating for CUBAN LITERATURE (Garland Reference Library of the Humanities) based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-06 00:00:00 Gretel Rodriguez Gonzalez I’ve been reading quite a bit of sociology lately and so I thought it might be a good idea to read a general textbook to get an overview of the subject itself. This was interesting, though very American, obviously. And that had both benefits and disadvantages. Much of the sociology I’ve been reading has been European – so it was interesting to see a US perspective on the subject. All the same, this is such a general introduction that besides the occasional statistic there wasn’t all that much that I felt I learnt from it. The best chapter is five – where he explains various sociological research methods and the limitations and difficulties of each. The best part of this chapter is the summary at the end, perhaps as good a summary of these methods in a few pages as I’ve found to date. The chapter I found least useful was the chapter on religion. I guess it is important to remember that the US is an extremely religious nation and quite unusual as such for an advanced industrial society. I think this might have coloured a lot of this section and made the conclusions much more rosy than might have been the case if written in another country. I had no idea that quite such a large percentage of people went to church in America every week. All the same, I would have liked to have had more discussion on European countries which are far less religious and yet do not seem to have fallen into despair. There are many things stated here that I believe might well be true, for example, that religious people tend to be happier than non-religious ones, although, to be honest I’ve never checked the data on this and it could be a kind of survey effect. There are also things stated that are clearly false, such as that prayer has been proven to be efficacious in curing illnesses. It always seems a little pointless to me to have people tell me that overall religious people are happier than non-religious people. Where is this overall happy religious person? And what am I to do with this information? Start believing in God? I can assure you that being forced to pretend to believe would make me anything but happy. Besides which, it would be hard to imagine that the African Americans who were told to take out shonky loans by pastors of their local church who proved to be on commission from sub-prime lenders, because Jesus wanted them to be home owners are all that happy now. This book is organised according to themes: religion, the economy, class, gender and so on. While this is as good a way to organise such a book as any, I think I would have gotten more out of a more in depth look at sociologists themselves and their theories. This is done for Weber’s views on capitalism and Protestantism – something the author finds interesting enough to explain to his readers three times. It is also done with Marx and his alienation theory of labour (described at least twice) and there is also some mention of Durkheim on suicide and Morgan on social development – but I think I would have preferred much more of this. It seems somewhat surprising to me that one could write an entire book on sociology and never mention Bourdieu, Foucault or any of the post-structuralists. Oh well, I guess the book is ‘down to earth’.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-09-22 00:00:00 Brian Mcloughlin Read this as a prerequisite for my nursing degree. I had taken Sociology long ago and didn’t do so well in it so I decided to give it another try. The author of this textbook did a very good job putting this together. I really actually enjoyed this class.