Interpreting the National Electrical Code or Consuming Life

Interpreting the National Electrical Code

Author: Truman Surbrook

Extraordinarily comprehensive, this book is completely updated to the 2008 National Electrical Code and continues to offer valuable insight into the Code articles. Explanations are provided for each article in detail, with thorough discussions and practical examples that clearly illustrate how the Code and its most recent changes are applied. Discussions are logically organized into coherent subject groupings, allowing readers to navigate easily through 2008 NEC requirements as well as changes since the last edition. Through this approach, the book also integrates essential information into the 8th Edition that is not directly addressed in the NEC but is extremely useful to electricians.

New interesting textbook: Mushrooming Without Fear or University of Texas Cookbook

Consuming Life

Author: Zygmunt Bauman

With the advent of liquid modernity, the society of producers is transformed into a society of consumers. In this new consumer society, individuals become simultaneously the promoters of commodities and the commodities they promote. They are, at one and the same time, the merchandise and the marketer, the goods and the travelling salespeople. They all inhabit the same social space that is customarily described by the term the market.
The test they need to pass in order to acquire the social prizes they covet requires them to recast themselves as products capable of drawing attention to themselves. This subtle and pervasive transformation of consumers into commodities is the most important feature of the society of consumers. It is the hidden truth, the deepest and most closely guarded secret, of the consumer society in which we now live.
In this new book Zygmunt Bauman examines the impact of consumerist attitudes and patterns of conduct on various apparently unconnected aspects of social life politics and democracy, social divisions and stratification, communities and partnerships, identity building, the production and use of knowledge, and value preferences.
The invasion and colonization of the web of human relations by the worldviews and behavioural patterns inspired and shaped by commodity markets, and the sources of resentment, dissent and occasional resistance to the occupying forces, are the central themes of this brilliant new book by one of the worlds most original and insightful social thinkers.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Or, the most closely guarded secret of the society of consumers     1
Consumerism versus Consumption     25
Society of Consumers     52
Consumerist Culture     82
Collateral Casualties of Consumerism     117
Notes     151
Index     158