Best Customs & Traditions Social Sciences Books
Here you will get Best Customs & Traditions Social Sciences Books For you.This is an up-to-date list of recommended books.
1. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story
Author: by John Berendt
Vintage
English
400 pages
Shots rang out in Savannah’s grandest mansion in the misty,early morning hours of May 2, 1981. Was it murder or self-defense? For nearly a decade, the shooting and its aftermath reverberated throughout this hauntingly beautiful city of moss-hung oaks and shaded squares.
John Berendt’s sharply observed, suspenseful, and witty narrative reads like a thoroughly engrossing novel, and yet it is a work of nonfiction. Berendt skillfully interweaves a hugely entertaining first-person account of life in this isolated remnant of the Old South with the unpredictable twists and turns of a landmark murder case.
It is a spellbinding story peopled by a gallery of remarkable characters: the well-bred society ladies of the Married Woman’s Card Club; the turbulent young redneck gigolo; the hapless recluse who owns a bottle of poison so powerful it could kill every man, woman, and child in Savannah; the aging and profane Southern belle who is the “soul of pampered self-absorption”; the uproariously funny black drag queen; the acerbic and arrogant antiques dealer; the sweet-talking, piano-playing con artist; young blacks dancing the minuet at the black debutante ball; and Minerva, the voodoo priestess who works her magic in the graveyard at midnight.
2. Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants
Author: by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Vintage Books
English
256 pages
From the extravagant use of pepper in the Middle Ages to the Protestant bourgeoisie’s love of coffee to the reason why fashionable Europeans stopped sniffing tobacco and starting smoking it, Schivelbusch looks at how the appetite for pleasure transformed the social structure of the Old World.Illustrations.
3. Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet
Author: by Chelsea Wald
English
304 pages
1982116218
From an award-winning science journalist, a deeply researched, entertaining, and impassioned exploration of sanitation (Nature) and the future of the toiletfor fans of popular science bestsellers by Mary Roach. Most of us do not give much thought to the centerpiece of our bathrooms, but the toilet is an unexpected paradox.
On the one hand, it is a modern miracle: a ubiquitous fixture in a vast sanitation system that has helped add decades to the human life span by reducing disease. On the other hand, the toilet is also a tragic failure: less than half of the world’s population can access a toilet that safely manages body waste, including many right here in the United States.
And it is inefficient, squandering clean water as well as the nutrients, energy, and information contained in the stuff we flush away. While we see radical technological change in almost every other aspect of our lives, we remain stuck in a sanitation status quoin part because the topic of toilets is taboo.
4. The Rituals of Dinner: The Origins, Evolution, Eccentricities, and Meaning of Table Manners
Author: by Margaret Visser
B00X4YMQJ2
June 23, 2015
English
A New York Times Notable Book: A renowned scholar explores the way we eat across cultures and throughout history. From the wild parties of ancient Greece to the strictures of an Upper East Side meal to the ritualistic feasts of cannibals, Margaret Visser takes us on a fascinating journey through the diverse practices, customs, and taboos that define how and why we prepare and consume food the way we do.
With keen insights into small details we take for granted, such as the origins of forks and chopsticks or why tablecloths exist, and examinations of broader issues like the economic implications of dining etiquette, Visser scrutinizes table manners across eras and oceans, offering an intimate new understanding of eating both as a biological necessity and a cultural phenomenon.
Witty and impeccably researched, The Rituals of Dinner is a captivating blend of folklore, sociology, history, and humor. In the words of the New York Times Book Review, Read it, because you’ll never look at a table knife the same way again.
5. Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age
Author: by Bruce Feiler
Penguin Press
English
368 pages
A New York Times bestseller! A pioneering and timely study of how to navigate life’s biggest transitions with meaning, purpose, and skillBruce Feiler, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Secrets of Happy Families and Council of Dads, has long explored the stories that give our lives meaning.
Galvanized by a personal crisis, he spent the last few years crisscrossing the country, collecting hundreds of life stories in all fifty states from Americans who’d been through major life changesfrom losing jobs to losing loved ones; from changing careers to changing relationships; from getting sober to getting healthy to simply looking for a fresh start.
He then spent a year coding these stories, identifying patterns and takeaways that can help all of us survive and thrive in times of change. What Feiler discovered was a world in which transitions are becoming more plentiful and mastering the skills to manage them is more urgent for all of us.
The idea that we’ll have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness is hopelessly outdated. We all feel unnerved by this upheaval. We’re concerned that our lives are not what we expected, that we’ve veered off course, living life out of order.
6. Drinking with the Saints: The Sinner's Guide to a Holy Happy Hour
Author: by Michael P. Foley
English
487 pages
1621573265
Raise Your Spirits and Toast the Saints Recipe for a liturgically correct cocktail: mix Bartender’s Guide and Lives of the Saints, shake well, garnish with good cheer. Drinking with the Saintsis a concoction that both sinner and saint will savor.
Michael Foley offers the faithful drinker witty and imaginative instruction on the appropriate libations for the seasons, feasts, and saints’ days of the Church year. A guide to wine, beer, and spirits, including 38 original cocktails Lively sketches of scores of saints, from the popular to the obscure Tips on giving the perfect toast and on mixing the perfect drink Even includes drinks for Lent!
7. Plants of the Gods: Their Sacred, Healing, and Hallucinogenic Powers
Author: by Richard Evans Schultes
Healing Arts Press
English
208 pages
World-renowned anthropologist and ethnopharmacologist Christian Ratsch provides the latest scientific updates to this classic work on psychoactive flora by two eminent researchers. Numerous new and rare color photographs complement the completely revised and updated text. Explores the uses of hallucinogenic plants in shamanic rituals throughout the world.
Cross-referenced by plant, illness, preparation, season of collection, and chemical constituents. Three scientific titans join forces to completely revise the classic text on the ritual uses of psychoactive plants. They provide a fascinating testimony of these “plants of the gods,” tracing their uses throughout the world and their significance in shaping culture and history.
In the traditions of every culture, plants have been highly valued for their nourishing, healing, and transformative properties. The most powerful of those plants, which are known to transport the human mind into other dimensions of consciousness, have always been regarded as sacred.
8. The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community
Author: by Malidoma Patrice Some
TarcherPerigee
English
352 pages
Through The Healing Wisdom of Africa, readers can come to understand that the life of indigenous and traditional people is a paradigm for an intimate relationship with the natural world that both surrounds us and is within us. The book is the most complete study of the role ritual plays in the lives of African people-and the role it can play for seekers in the West.
9. A Witches' Bible: The Complete Witches' Handbook
Author: by Stewart Farrar
English
349 pages
0919345921
The Complete Witches’ Handbook. Everything you need to know is here! The Sabbats; Casting & Banishing the Magic Circle; The Complete Book of Shadows; The Great Rite; Initiation Rites; Consecration Rites; Spells; Witches’ Tools; Witchcraft & Sex; Running a Coven; Clairvoyance;Astral Projection.
This collection includes two books in one volume, Eight Sabbats for Witches and The Witches’ Way, and is the most comprehensive and revealing work on the principles, rituals and beliefs of modern witchcraft.Over 200,000 sold!
10. The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging
Author: by Charles Vogl
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
English
216 pages
Create a Culture of Belonging! Strong cultures help people support one another, share their passions, and achieve big goals. And such cultures of belonging aren’t just happy accidents – they can be purposefully cultivated, whether they’re in a company, a faith institution or among friends and enthusiasts.
Drawing on 3,000 years of history and his personal experience, Charles Vogl lays out seven time-tested principles for growing enduring, effective and connected communities. He provides hands-on tools for creatively adapting these principles to any groupformal or informal, mission driven or social, physical or virtual.
This book is a guide for leaders seeking to build a vibrant, living culture that will enrich lives. Winner of the Nautilus Silver Book Award in the Business and Leadership Category.
11. Dress Codes: How the Laws of Fashion Made History
Author: by Richard Thompson Ford
English
464 pages
1501180061
A sharp and entertaining (The Wall Street Journal) exploration of fashion through the ages that asks what our clothing reveals about ourselves and our society. Dress codes are as old as clothing itself. For centuries, clothing has been a wearable status symbol; fashion, a weapon in struggles for social change; and dress codes, a way to maintain political control.
Merchants dressing like princes and butchers’ wives wearing gem-encrusted crowns were public enemies in medieval societies structured by social hierarchy and defined by spectacle. In Tudor England, silk, velvet, and fur were reserved for the nobility, and ballooning pants called trunk hose could be considered a menace to good order.
The Renaissance-era Florentine patriarch Cosimo de Medici captured the power of fashion and dress codes when he remarked, One can make a gentleman from two yards of red cloth. Dress codes evolved along with the social and political ideals of the day, but they always reflected struggles for power and status.
12. The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture (Sexual Cultures, 34)
Author: by Vincent Woodard
NYU Press (June 27, 2014)
English
320 pages
Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary FoundationUnearths connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture that has largely been ignored until nowScholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized.
Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person’s claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence.
The Delectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L.
13. Revolt Against the Modern World
Author: by Julius Evola
Inner Traditions
English
375 pages
With unflinching gaze and uncompromising intensity Julius Evola analyzes the spiritual and cultural malaise at the heart of Western civilization and all that passes for progress in the modern world. As a gadfly, Evola spares no one and nothing in his survey of what we have lost and where we are headed.
At turns prophetic and provocative, Revolt against the Modern World outlines a profound metaphysics of history and demonstrates how and why we have lost contact with the transcendent dimension of being. The revolt advocated by Evola does not resemble the familiar protests of either liberals or conservatives.
His criticisms are not limited to exposing the mindless nature of consumerism, the march of progress, the rise of technocracy, or the dominance of unalloyed individualism, although these and other subjects come under his scrutiny. Rather, he attempts to trace in space and time the remote causes and processes that have exercised corrosive influence on what he considers to be the higher values, ideals, beliefs, and codes of conduct-the world of Tradition-that are at the foundation of Western civilization and described in the myths and sacred literature of the IndoEuropeans.
14. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century
Author: by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
English
227 pages
0520203542
Wolfgang Schivelbusch tells the story of the development of artificial light in the nineteenth century. Not simply a history of a technology, Disenchanted Night revelas the ways that the technology of artificial illumination helped forge modern consciousness. In his strikingly illustrated and lively narrative, Schivelbusch discusses a range of subject including the political symbolism of streetlamps, the rise of nightlife and the shopwindow, and the importance of the salon in bourgeois culture.
15. Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving
Author: by Celeste Headlee
Harmony (June 1, 2021)
English
288 pages
A welcome antidote to our toxic hustle culture of burnout. Arianna Huffington This book is so important and could truly save lives. Elizabeth Gilbert A clarion call to work smarter [and] accomplish more by doing less. Adam Grant We work feverishly to make ourselves happy.
So why are we so miserable? Despite our constant search for new ways to optimize our bodies and minds for peak performance, human beings are working more instead of less, living harder not smarter, and becoming more lonely and anxious.
We strive for the absolute best in every aspect of our lives, ignoring what we do well naturally and reaching for a bar that keeps rising higher and higher. Why do we measure our time in terms of efficiency instead of meaning?
Why can’t we just take a break? In Do Nothing, award-winning journalist Celeste Headlee illuminates a new path ahead, seeking to institute a global shift in our thinking so we can stop sabotaging our well-being, put work aside, and start living instead of doing.
16. French Kids Eat Everything: How Our Family Moved to France, Cured Picky Eating, Banned Snacking, and Discovered 10 Simple Rules for Raising Happy, Healthy Eaters
Author: by Karen Le Billon
William Morrow Paperbacks
English
320 pages
French Kids Eat Everything is a wonderfully wry account of how Karen Le Billon was able to alter her children’s deep-rooted, decidedly unhealthy North American eating habits while they were all living in France. At once a memoir, a cookbook, a how-to handbook, and a delightful exploration of how the French manage to feed children without endless battles and struggles with pickiness, French Kids Eat Everything features recipes, practical tips, and ten easy-to-follow rules for raising happy and healthy young eatersa sort of French Women Don’t Get Fat meetsFood Rules.
