Seeing Ourselves

The most important thing to know about "Seeing Ourselves" by John J. Macionis and Nijole V. Benokraitis is that it is NOT a sociology textbook. Instead, it is a collection of essays that talk about a variety of topics. This doesn't help you "learn sociology" directly. Instead, it lets you read about a variety of situations, absorb them, and expand your knowledge about how things work in different parts of life.

Some are classics that everyone should have read at least once by now. you get Karl Marx and his "Manifesto of the Communist party". Then you get "McJobs: McDonaldization and the Workplace," "The Amish: A Small Society," "India's Sacred Cow," and "Are Asian Americans Becoming 'White'?" The essays cover a wide range of topics and help you think more about how different groups integrate into our global world.

These aren't questions with easy answers. From "The English-Only Debate" to "Female Genital Mutilation" there are people who will argue strongly on both sides. The idea here is to look into these issues and examine how they help us learn more about ourselves and the world we live in.

I found the essays to range a broad area of topics, and the book layout makes them easy to read. There are questions and notes at the end of each one. The questions are often very simplistic, but I imagine the book was meant to be an introduction for some students to very complex topics they'd never thought about before, so that is perhaps to be expected.

Well recommended.

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