The Cost Of Competence: Why Inequality Causes Depression, Eating Disorders, and Illness in Women
Book Description:
Since the advent of the women’s movement, women have made unprecedented gains in almost every field, from politics to the professions. Paradoxically, doctors and mental health professionals have also seen a staggering increase in the numbers of young women suffering from an epidemic of depression, eating disorders, and other physical and psychological problems.
In Dying to Win, authors Brett Silverstein and Deborah Perlick argue that rather than simply labeling individual women as, say, anorexic or depressed, it is time to look harder at the widespread prejudices within our society and child-rearing practices that lead thousands of young women to equate thinness with competence and success, and feminity with failure. They argue that it is wrong to continue to treat depression, anxiety, anorexia and bulimia as separate disorders in young women when they are really part of a single syndrome. Furthermore, their fascinating research into the lives of forty prominent women from Elizabeth I to Eleanor Roosevelt show that these symptoms have been disrupting the lives of bright, ambitious women not for decades, but for centuries. Drawing on all the latest findings, rare historical research, cross-cultural comparisons, and their own study of over 2,000 contemporary women attending high schools and colleges, the authors present powerful new evidence to support the existence of a syndrome they call anxious somatic depression.
Their investigation shows that the first symptoms usually surface in adolescence, most often in young women who aspire to excel academically and professionally. Many of the affected women grew up feeling that their parents valued sons over daughters. They identified intellectually with their successful fathers, not with their traditional homemaker mothers. Disordered eating is one way of rejecting the feminine bodies they perceive as barriers to achievement and recognition. Silverstein and Perlick uncover medical descriptions matching their diagnosis in Hippocratic texts from the fourth century B.C., in anthropological studies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and in case studies of many noted psychologists and psychiatrists, including the “hysteric” patients Freud used to develop his theories on psychoanalysis.
They have also discovered that statistics on disordered eating, depression, and a host of other symptoms soared in eras in which women’s opportunites grew–particularly the 1920s, when record numbers of women entered college and the workforce, the boyish silhouette of the flapper became the feminine ideal, and anorexia became epidemic, and again from the 1970s to the present day. The authors show that identifying this devastating syndrome is a first step toward its prevention and cure. Dying to Win presents an urgent message to parents, educators, policymakers, and the medical community on the crucial importance of providing young women with equal opportunity, and equal respect.
About the Authors:
Brett Silverstein is Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, City College of New York, and the author of Fed Up. Deborah Perlick is Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Cornell University Medical College.
Ibn 'Ashur: Traetise On Maqasid Shariah
Goals, Objectives, Higher Objectives, principles, Intent, Purpose..
Paperback 489 Pages
Published by the International Institute of Islamic Thought IIIT, London, Washington
ISBN: 1-56564-422-0
Ibn Ashur’s famous and pioneering study of the Shariah’s higher objectives and goals. To restore the intimate contact between Muslims and the Qur’an scholars developed the study of the objectives of Islam. The Shariah is marked by a universal wisdom whereby every legal ruling has a function which it performs, an aim which it realises, an intention which it seeks to fulfill and all of this in order to realise benefit to human beings or to ward off harm or corruption.
Muhammad al-Tahir ibn ‘Ashur (1879 -1973~)was an eminent figure in the institution of the Tunisian scholars for most of the twentieth century. He is also highly regarded as a Muslim reformist and his Qur’anic tafsir al-Tahrir wa’l-tanwir, is among the influential tafsirs produced in the modern era.
Since he lived during the colonial period, as well as the early period of Tunisian independence, Ibn ‘Ashur’s intellectual output reflects different forces and stands witness to the dilemma experienced by the ‘ulama’ in a time of unprecedented change.
Influenced by Muhammad ‘Abduh, and responding to modern challenges to Islamic traditions, Ibn ‘Ashur called for substantive reforms in Islamic education. His work on the ultimate purposes of the Shari‘a represents not only an attempt to revive the maqasid theory of Shatibi, but also a significant addition to modern efforts to renew Islamic legal theory. Ibn ‘Ashur, however, seems to have become disappointed with the independent state’s drive for modernisation and radical secularisation.
Islam & The Destiny Of Man: Gai Eaton
Islam and the Destiny of Man
CHARLES LE GAI EATONPAPERBACK 262 pages size: 234 x 156mmPublished: 1994 by The Islamic Texts Society, Cambridge UKISBN: 0 946621 47 0
Islam and the Destiny of Man is a wide-ranging study of the religion of Islam from a unique point of view. The author was brought up as an agnostic and embraced Islam at an early age after writing a book (commissioned by T.S.Eliot) on Eastern religions and their influence upon Western thinkers. The aim of this book is to explain what it means to be a Muslim, a member of a community which embraces a quarter of the world’s population and to describe the forces which have shaped their hearts and minds. Throughout the book the author is concerned not simply with Islam in isolation, but with the very nature of religious faith, its spiritual and intellectual foundations and the light it casts upon the mysteries and paradoxes of the human condition. ‘Considered essential by [those] seeking to understand Islam.’ Sunday Telegraph
Charles Le Gai Eaton was born in Switzerland and educated at Charterhouse and King’s College, Cambridge. He worked for many years as a teacher and journalist in Jamaica and Egypt (where he embraced Islam in 1951) before joining the British Diplomatic Service. He is now consultant to the Islamic Cultural Centre in London .
Understanding Power: The Indespensable Chomsky
Discussions of Noam Chomsky
Edited by Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel.
Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the preeminent public intellectuals of the modern era. Over the past thirty years, broadly diverse audiences have gathered to attend his sold-out lectures. Now, in Understanding Power, Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel have assembled the best of Chomsky’s talks on the past, present, and future of the politics of power.
In a series of enlightening and wide-ranging discussions–published here for the first time–Chomsky radically reinterprets the events of the past three decades, covering topics from foreign policy during the Vietnam War to the decline of welfare under the Clinton administration. And as he elucidates the connection between America’s imperialistic foreign policy and social inequalities at home, Chomsky also discerns the necessary steps to take toward social change. With an eye to political activism and the media’s role in popular struggle, as well as U.S. foreign and domestic policy, Understanding Power is definitive Chomsky.
Characterized by Chomsky’s accessible and informative style, Understanding Power is the ideal book for those new to his work as well as for those who have been listening for years.
Peter R. Mitchell and John Schoeffel are public defenders in New York City.
The Language Of God
The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
Francis S. Collins
Review by: D. Rigas
The latest popularity of the evangelical fundamentalist position on one hand and the growing response of the scientific atheist faction on the other, have recently brought forth an increasing number of books written by believing scientists. This one is the contribution of Dr. Collins, the head of the Genome Project that mapped the human DNA.
As with other similar authors, Dr Collins first establishes his unquestionable scientific authority, and then uses his detailed knowledge of his field (genetics) to prove that Darwin was right and the literal 6000-year creationists wrong. Part of his proof is based on the existence of so-called “junk DNA” segments of purposeless chance-generated code located between genes, and on their similar location in the DNA of other animals along the evolution scale. The average reader, like me, has to accept all that on blind faith, just as he accepts the explanation of gravity and other scientific Truths.
The author’s justification for God’s existence, on the other hand, is based on a somewhat less sturdy foundation. It depends almost entirely on what he calls “The Moral Law,” the selfless altruism that he finds existing in the entire human race and to nobody else in the animal world. He discusses how the “Golden Rule” is found in all societies and ages and then concludes that the knowledge of right and wrong is inherent in all humankind. He maintains that it is a God-ordained plan, somehow planned from the very beginning of the universe fourteen billion years ago. Personally, I am not convinced that all humans have the same sense of what is right and wrong, and I am even less convinced that altruism is missing among animals. How else can you explain the dog who gives up his life protecting his master or the animals he shepherds? Or the numerous stories of dolphins saving drowning people, often fighting off sharks to do it?
When a scientist discusses God he is forced to specify who that God is, something not required of the Catholic priest or the Baptist minister whose religions define him. The God of Dr. Collins is the creator of a universe specifically designed to evolve mankind. For according to the “Anthropic Principle,” if any one of half a dozen universal constants did not have the exact value it does the universe would not have lasted long enough or have been capable of supporting human life. But the author also believes that from the instant of its creation God almost never interfered in the progress of stellar and earthly evolution. And how then does he account for the fact that this evolution has been affected by numerous chance events of defining importance, like the meteor impact on earth 65 million years ago which resulted in the death of the dinosaurs and gave mammals and eventually man an opportunity to develop?
According to Dr. Collins “If God is outside of nature, then He is outside of space and time. In that context, God could in the moment of creation of the universe also know every detail of the future….In that context evolution could appear to us to be driven by chance, but from God’s perspective the outcome would be entirely specified.” Does that mean that after God created the universe and saw that a meteor did not chance to impact earth at the proper time to enable human evolution, he immediately destroyed that particular universe and started all over again until chance events cooperated with his intent?
The writings of C. S. Lewis have apparently helped resolve many of Dr. Collins’s theological puzzlements, and he includes numerous quotations from them. Although these are highly emotional and spiritual I find them to be more philosophically than scientifically inspired. I have the same opinion of most of the author’s own arguments in this book.
(The writer is the author of “Christianity without Fairy Tales: When Science and Religion Merge,” and of the forthcoming “The Way of the Butterfly: A Scientific Speculation on God and the Hereafter.”)
Eight Theories Of Religion
Daniel L. Pals
ISBN-10: 0195165705
Book Description
Why do human beings believe in divinities? Why do some seek eternal life, while others seek escape from recurring lives? Why do the beliefs and behaviors we typically call “religious” so deeply affect the human personality and so subtly weave their way through human society? Revised and updated in this second edition, Eight Theories of Religion considers how these fundamental questions have engaged the most important thinkers of the modern era. Accessible, systematic, and succinct, the text examines the classic interpretations of religion advanced by theorists who have left a major imprint on the intellectual culture of the twentieth century.
The second edition features a new chapter on Max Weber, a revised introduction, and a revised, expanded conclusion that traces the paths of further inquiry and interpretation traveled by theorists in the most recent decades. Eight Theories of Religion, Second Edition, begins with Edward Burnett Tylor and James Frazer–two Victorian pioneers in anthropology and the comparative study of religion. It then considers the great “reductionist” approaches of Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, and Karl Marx, all of whom have exercised wide influence up to the present day. The discussion goes on to examine the leading challenges to reductionism as articulated by sociologist Max Weber (new to this edition) and Romanian-American comparativist Mircea Eliade.
Finally, it explores the newer methods and ideas arising from the African field studies of ethnographer E. E. Evans-Pritchard and the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz. Each chapter offers biographical background, theoretical exposition, conceptual analysis, and critical assessment. This common format allows for close comparison and careful evaluation throughout. Ideal for use as a supplementary text in introductory religion courses or as the central text in sociology of religion and courses centered on the explanation and interpretation of religion, Eight Theories of Religion, Second Edition, offers an illuminating treatment of this controversial and fascinating subject.
About the Author
Daniel L. Pals is at University of Miami.
