Deceptive Cover

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 07 March 2007 06:55:48

This weeks train read has been another of my £1 bargains that I picked up.

Marginalization by John Atherton had a fairly modern cover and interesting title; I thought I knew what I was in for. To my surprise rather than a book for the armchair reader based on lots of analysis of recent happenings I found myself in the middle of a proper academic text, but one which was generally quite readable.

It was wierd though, you would be quite comfortably reading about Manchester or something relatively simple like secularisation and it would shift up a gear, quite dramatically and you would really have to start thinking. I was quite glad I was only going at it in 20 minute chunks. That said it was really good to read a proper inter-disciplinary book like this which took economics, sociology and theology and put them together with elements of social / political history and some contempory examples aswell. Also it introduced me to some things I never knew existed, but now might explore, e.g. feminist economics. (nb in my ickle combined studies degree one maverick lecturer went beyond Keynes and Friedman to tell us Marxist economics existed, but nobody let on about the feminist strand).

For me it also, surprisingly, made me see probably for the first time that the package of subjects I have ended up studying at various levels isn't such a wierd mix; they can usefully tie in together and people do mix them all in together.