From My Bookshelves

[Dreamwoven]

The deviance symposia were originally a purely British phenomenon, though it drew on U.S. literature in the symbolic interactionist tradition and continues today with more instances. See https://inet.smu.edu.sg/sites/course...is%20Hanif.pdf See also this website: http://critcrim.org.

[Dreamwoven]

Here I want to consider something that Jock Young wrote in his last trilogy volume: The Criminological Imagination (2011). The title is based on a short book by C. Wright Mills The Sociological Imagination (1959), A well-known and challenging piece of writing.

[Dreamwoven]

Besides The Sociological Imagination, which I bought from a student stand when we were in Adelaide for 5 years, I have two other books by Mills on my bookshelves White Collar and The Marxists.

Another interesting book is The Power Elite and Listen, Yankee, on the Cuban Revolution. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/....Listen_Yankee

[Dreamwoven]

Below I have copied the key paragraph in Mills' thought.

"Do not allow public issues as they are officially formulated, or troubles as they are privately felt, to determine the problems that you take up for study. Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else's terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues—and in terms of the problems of history-making. Know that the human meaning of public issues must be revealed by relating them to personal troubles—and to the problems of the individual life. Know that the problems of social science, when adequately formulated, must include both troubles and issues, both biography and history, and the range of their intricate relations. Within that range the life of the individual and the making of societies occur; and within that range the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time." (C. Wright Mills The Sociological Imagination (1959)

[Dreamwoven]

Something else I now remember of those days when I first read [I/]The Sociological Imagination[/I] was his advice to read the notes and apply the Appendix "On Intellectual Craftsmanship". This appendix is full of useful advice to the social science student of everyday life. He advises us "to keep a journal" where we write down our thoughts of each book or article we read. I have done this and always found it invaluable.

[Dreamwoven]

Back to The Criminological Imagination by Jock Young, the entire book is based in C. Wright Mills work. He calls it the Criminological Imagination, because he assumes that Mills´ work in this applies to all disciplines, which of course is right, so the same logic applies.

Young dismisses the false exactitude of so many statistical surveys:

"One wonders - 30,818 gangs? Why not 30,819 or indeed 30,820! And as for 846,428 gang members, the mind boggles at the precision." (Young, 2011 p. 192)

But one of the strong points of his analysis is his thorough reading of the symbolic interactionist literature:

"The decade 1955-1965 was a time of exceptional creativity in American sociology of deviance. The names alone, Becker, Cicourel, Cohen, Cloward, Erikson, Gusfield, Matsa, Scheff, Sykes, to mention just a few, jog the mind and convey the intensity of the period."(Young, 2011, p.201)

[Dreamwoven]

One of my books that reflects my interest in the social problems literature derives from the time when the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societ...ocial_Problems -. was the only place where social problems were discussed in the early days. Its first present was Ernest Burgess, and Herbert Blumer was its third. Founded in 1951, it's journal, Social Problems, was a natural home for my interests. Of course, I never went to any of its conferences, they were all held in the USA.

But in recent years its working group on theory has been inactive, and eventually I decided to leave the society. I have one book from that time by Donileen Loseke "Thinking about Social Problems: an introduction to constructionist perspectives (1999).

[Dreamwoven]

I have three books on the Second World War by Anthony Beevor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Beevor: Stalingrad, Berlin,: the downfall, 1945 and the Spanish Civil War. I am re-reading Stalingrad, and it makes riveting reading. The first casualty of war is the truth. Governments clamp down on this before anything else.

Stalingrad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalingrad_(book)
Berlin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin:_The_Downfall_1945
Spanish Civil War: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Civil_War.

The last of these was very disappointing, but then civil war is not like conventional warfare, it is much more messy, lacking clear borders and equally unclear outcomes. How Beevor managed to write such a thick book is beyond me. In despair, I abandoned trying to read it.

[Dreamwoven]

Anthony Beevor's book on the Downfall of Berlin 1945 makes grim reading. No-one had a clue what was going on: "Berlin's population in early April stood at anything between 3 and 3.5 million people, including around 120,000 infants. When General Reymann raised the problem of feeling these children at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery bunker, Hitler stared at him. 'There are no children of that age left in Berlin", he said. Reymann finally understood that his supreme commander had no contact with human reality." (p.177)

[Dreamwoven]

At that time the Americans were at the Elbe and the Soviets were approaching Berlin from the East.

[Dreamwoven]

I want to take a closer look at the battle for Stalingrad. But this will be published tomorrow.

[Dreamwoven]

The starting point of this is to ask what were the objectives in invading Russia? The country extends far to the east, way beyond Europe, and finally ending on the northern Pacific coast. It is only necessary to look at a map of Russia to understand the implications of trying to occupy it. Even the Ural Mountains have been a popular investment area, sometimes precisely on the grounds of making Russia less vulnerable to invasions from Europe. But this bigger question seems never to have been addressed by either Germany or Russia at the time of Stalingrad. We do not even know what Hitler's view was.

For some further reading on this see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwa...asion_01.shtml

[Dreamwoven]

The starting point of this is to ask what were the objectives in invading Russia? The country extends far to the east, way beyond Europe, and finally ending on the northern Pacific coast. It is only necessary to look at a map of Russia to understand the implications of trying to occupy it. Even the Ural Mountains have been a popular investment area, sometimes precisely on the grounds of making Russia less vulnerable to invasions from Europe. But this bigger question seems never to have been addressed by either Germany or Russia at the time of Stalingrad. We do not even know what Hitler's view was.

For some further reading on this see http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwa...asion_01.shtml

[Dreamwoven]

I have 3 books by Elly Griffiths, this is the first "The house at Sea's end" - the setting for most of her books is the coast of Norfolk, England. This is a Ruth Galloway Mystery, I enjoy her open style of writing and the circumstances of her work. Ruth Galloway is a single mother and a Lecturer in Archeology at the University of North Norfolk This one is about skeletons washed ashore that turn out to be WW2 bodies, German prisoners of war.

[Dreamwoven]

The second Ruth Galloway Mystery is called "The Ghost Fields" (2015) and centres on a WW2 aircraft that crashed in a field, killing the pilot. To say "this book "centres on" is somewhat misleading. It is more accurately described as "forming the background" of the book. Those of child-bearing age will relate to this very well.