By Janice M. Irvine

Marginal People in Deviant Places revisits early- to mid-twentieth-century ethnographic studies, arguing that their focus on marginal subcultures—ranging from American hobos, to men who have sex with other men in St. Louis bathrooms, to hippies, to taxi dancers in Chicago, to elderly Jews in Venice, California—helped produce new ways of thinking about social difference more broadly in the United States. Irvine demonstrates how the social scientists who told the stories of these marginalized groups represented an early challenge to then-dominant narratives of scientific racism, prefiguring the academic fields of gender, ethnic, sexuality, and queer studies in key ways. In recounting the social histories of certain American outsiders, Irvine identifies an American paradox by which social differences are both despised and desired, and she describes the rise of an outsider capitalism that integrates difference into American society by marketing it.

Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2022. 349p.

By S. Giora Shoham.

This is a ground breaking work by world renowned philosopher, psychologist and criminologist Shlomo Shoham that establishes the basic principles of his integrative theory of personality and deviance, combining the fields of psychology, religion, anthropology, sociology and criminology to provide unique insights into not only the dynamics of deviant behavior, but of the human psyche as well. His tools of analysis are a deep understanding of world religions applied through a lens of his own neo-psychoanalytical framework. Every page contains a new, uncanny insight into the vicissitudes of human behavior and the deviance of which humans are most capable. The book may be fifteen years old, but it is as relevant today as it was when it was written.

NY. Harrow and Heston Publishers. . 2016. 224 pages.