Monographs & Edited Collections (4,753 posts)

Stuart A. Kirk recently retired as a distinguished professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, where his academic research focused on the interplay of science, social values, and professional politics in the helping professions. He is the coauthor or author of nine books, many chapters, and over one hundred articles published in social welfare, psychology, psychiatry, and other journals. Among his books are Science and Social Work, The Selling of DSM, Making Us Crazy, and Mad Science. In thirteen engaging essays in his new book, Prof. Kirk takes you with him as he plunges into the world of motorcycling. As a midcareer professor, he recounts his discovery of the complexities and pleasures of the moto life—the escape, adventure, and mastery. He also shares intimate moments of coping with the dangers and exhilarations of learning to ride well.

In The Mythology of Work, Peter Fleming examines how neoliberal society uses the ritual of work (and the threat of its denial) to maintain the late capitalist class order. As our society is transformed into a factory that never sleeps, work becomes a universal reference point for everything else, devoid of any moral or political worth. Blending critical theory with recent accounts of job related suicides, office-induced paranoia, fear of relaxation, managerial sadism and cynical corporate social responsibility campaigns, Fleming paints a bleak picture of neoliberal capitalism in which the economic and emotional dysfunctions of a society of wage slaves greatly outweigh its professed benefits.

Despite all the talk in this country about our “wounded warriors,” no other book gives us a more powerful sense of the genuine cost of war to Americans.

The Nation
THE INVENTION OF BROWNSTONE BROOKLYN: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York

As the American public grapples with a growing awareness of the problem of bullying, both within schools and outside of them, and heated debate about where to lay the blame for school shootings becomes a regular feature of political debates, one especially painful question stands out: Why? What’s behind these acts of violence and rage?
In his new book, Beyond Bullying: Breaking the Cycle of Shame, Bullying, and Violence (Oxford University Press), Dr. Jonathan Fast, Associate Professor at Yeshiva University’s Wurzweiler School of Social Work, sheds light on that question and others that hit close to home.

MW is a method that has evolved from my work in cooperation with different groups of personnel. According to those personnel that I have met, it differs from MI by being more comprehensive and general. MI is more specific and originates from a non-confrontational psychotherapeutic method (Roger’s client-centred therapy), which is then applied to unmotivated clients.

Eichar contends that as governmental and union threats to managerial prerogatives withered toward the century’s end, so did corporate social responsibility. Today, with shareholder value as their beacon, large corporations have shred their social contract with their employees, decimated unions, avoided taxes, and engaged in all manner of risky practices and corrupt politics.

After surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide, followed by years of confinement to international refugee camps, as many as 10,000 Southeast Asian refugees arrived in the Bronx during the 1980s and ‘90s. Unsettled chronicles the unfinished odyssey of Bronx Cambodians, closely following one woman and her family for several years as they survive yet resist their literal insertion into concentrated Bronx poverty.

The book tells the story of Toronto’s first immigrant neighbourhood of Irish, Jewish, Italian, African American and Chinese newcomers. Considered a slum by the city, it was bulldozed in the late 1950s to make room for a new city hall and Nathan Phillips Square. Today, few Torontonians know of its existence. Contributors include UT Professor of Social Work David Hulchanski who has written extensively about a polarized Toronto with increasing income disparity.

Mad Science argues that the fundamental claims of modern American psychiatry are based on misconceived, flawed, and distorted science. The authors address multiple paradoxes in American mental health research, including the remaking of coercion into scientific psychiatric treatment, the adoption of an unscientific diagnostic system that controls the distribution of services, and how drug treatments have failed to improve the mental health outcome.

Sampaio provides a sustained and systematic examination of policy and enforcement shifts impacting Latinas/os. Her book concludes with an examination of immigration reform under the Obama administration, contrasting the promise of hope and change with the reality of increased detentions, deportations, and continued marginalization.