Behavior in Public Places

Rating:
Summary: Behavior in Public Places - Notes on the Social Organization
Review: This book, while containing a lot of information, is not to be considered easy reading. The reader is bombarded with an array of sociological terms thus making reading seem endless. Many idea's could have been expressed in a much simplier manner.

Rating:
Summary: Genius in the analysis of people in places
Review: Very few books in sociology so clearly and profoundly conceptualize the concepts of social occasions as do the works of Erving Goffman. This book is especially important for it provides a framework for tricking out the seen but unnoticed behaviors of everyday life. The book's profoundity is not in what stands out in human intercourse, but rather what does not. The mundane world of social interaction is revealed in what most readers will find to be commonsensically true. In the same way that a physicist can tell us why a baseball flies over the fence (a fairly mundane evernt) in terms of mass, velocity, and drag coefficients, Goffman tells us why the ordinary is able to sustain itself as such.