The life-world is a field of action. But action is not praxis. Acton should get meanings. Today, the life-world is faced with split.People are becoming one-sided. Schutz and Luckmann's research gave us a guide,they analied the sturcture of everydaylife, told us how to balance different aspects of our life. We'll know how to esteblish the meaning in the future. Shuguang,Yin.

Having read Beger's "Invitation to Sociology" I felt sufficiently enthused and bought his "Construction of Reality". Oh boy. Was that an error on my part! Here, Berger is nearly impenetrable from the very beginning and throughout, the text structure is mind boggling (it's never quite clear what the author is talking about, and *why* he addresses what he addresses, and why here and not some other place; a profusion of very slippery expressions (Something or other "is not empirically available" for example; seems like this "empirically available" is one of his favourite expressions, and it *is* sort of glibly striking, but what exactly does it mean? Many occurrences of such stuff... a lot of ponderous latinizing -- "ipso facto", "sui generis", "mutatis mutandis", someone "qua" something, etc. -- annoying and uncalled for; it is highly reminiscent of the logorrheaic prolixity typical of psychoanalytic writing of the same time (60s) or perhaps an imitation of translated philosophical German.

All Berger's writing here (as everywhere else) is purely expository, there is no shade of argument present anywhere; if something is less than self-evident to you, that's your problem, I suppose.

While "The Invitation..." itself (first five chapters, that is) was not bad, "The Construction of Reality..." is just plain gobbledegook, purposely (I suspect) rendered incomprehensible in order to make it look profound. And even when you do -- at the cost of a huge mental effort, highlighting, paraphrazing, and drawing lines and circles on the pages -- uncover some vague semblance of a possible meaning, it invariably turns out either trivial or highly questionable.

What's interesting is that, following Berger's bibliography, I moved on to Weber, and turns out, sociology CAN be written logically, concisely, and clearly. What a pleasing surprise.

This book led me into a life of sociology as it encouraged me to pursue and complete a Ph.D. in this discipline. On my first reading as an undergraduate, this book brought together many disparate ideas I had been thinking for sometime. I recently re-read it and still find it fascinating and important. It's contributions are detailed by other reviewers, I would only add that I consider a great bulk of the post-modernist movement to be summarized, detailed and challenged in a coherent and succinct fashion here.

Ever wonder what makes us what we are as individuals? Ever wonder what makes society what it is as a whole? This book is for you! One of the main ideas here is that society is built by a group of people (a nation, a state, a political party, a family, etc.) by people but becomes a thing that is seen by people as being reified. Therefore, people look at society as if it were like a brick wall, i.e. hard, unmovable, etc.

What gets people to the point of seeing the world as a unchangeable whole, almost like nature itself? The most important answer is that we're being socialized from our first day of existence. This socialization comes from our family, friends, teachers, everyone - even the people we meet and see everyday and never think about! They tell us who we are, where we are, what we are, what we do, who they are, what everything is, etc. Its absolutely amazing to think that our view of the world is what it is mostly because of our society, but that's the idea here. Society is constantly being constructed and reconstructed, enforced and reenforced, by people all the time.

A huge part of the reason for this is institutionalization. This means that a certain type of person does certain acts, in just such a way, in the right time of their lives, with the right education level, etc. This book has so many critical things to say about the world we live in. However, best of all in my opinion, the ideas are timeless.

The topics discussed in this book have been with us since the beginning of civilization and seemingly always will be. This isn't a book about modern times, it is a book about all times.

This book is a wonderful source of information. I am a senior nuring student in my final semester, and we have been using this book for three semesters now. There are areas that are sometimes confusing to read, but on the whole, it gives pretty good assessment criteria, nursing diagnoses and interventions.

I found this book to be a fantastic reference text for individuals involved in the medical field! It was very descriptive and informative on the applications in medical/surgical nursing. I would recommend it for not only Nurses who may be just entering the world of medical surgical nursing, but it should definately be considered as a text in every nursing school program.