Published when Truman Capote was only twenty-three years old, Other Voices, Other Rooms is a literary touchstone of the mid-twentieth century. In this semiautobiographical coming-of-age novel, thirteen-year-old Joel Knox, after losing his mother, is sent from New Orleans to live with the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at Skully’s Landing, the decaying mansion in rural Alabama, his father is nowhere to be found. Instead, Joel meets his morose stepmother, Amy, eccentric cousin Randolph, and a defiant little girl named Idabel, who soon offers Joel the love and approval he seeks.

This book is designed to be used in a number of ways, depending on the purposes and teaching style of the instructor. It may be used as a primary text or as supplemental reading, or as a source book for cases and disputes
that illuminate fundamental issues in education. We believe that this book can also be used effectively in staff development and in-service programs, providing experienced teachers with useful tools with which to examine
and reflect on their practice. Any or all of the four other texts in this series can be used in conjunction with this book. They all have similar formats and styles.

In the first volume of this work, Dosse (director, Paris Center for Critical Studies) chronicles with superb documentation the development of the structuralist movement as it was propelled by such forces as Claude Levi-Strauss (in anthropology), Jacque Lacan (in psychoanalysis), Michel Foucault (in literature and history), and many other French social scientists and humanists. Structuralism emerged as a reaction against the French university system's rigidity and refusal to accept, as philologist Leo Spitzer observed, Anglo-Saxon New Criticism and other didactic methodologies.

The core of the book centres around the idea of cognitive dissonance, where the brain has to reconcile two contrasting viewpoints. For example the self belief that "I am rational and intelligent" with the action "I am slowly killing myself by smoking". The dissonance could be resolved by concluding that actually I am neither rational nor especially intelligent, but of course no one wants to conclude that! So instead I look for levers to reduce the gap in the other direction. Smoking helps me to relax, and stress is a big killer, smoking helps me to keep my weight down and obesity is a big health problem. And so on......
This book is a fascinating insight into human nature and will help you understand both other people and more importantly yourself a lot better.