Years ago when I began to accumulate information for a topic I was researching, I began from the perspective of my own experiences within the topic I studied. I worked outward, and then back again, to understand my topic, and to comprehend each of my perspectives within it. Because I was able to place myself within my topic rather then distancing myself from it, my understanding of 'things' was clearer, more accurate. I became a better sociologist. For me, to be able to view portions of another person's life from the inside out, is an incredible way to learn more about my own life and evaluations. Each person in this book has used personal experience as the basis from which to frame his individual sociological perspectives. Because they have personalized their work, their accounts are real, and recognizable as having come from 'real' persons, about 'real' experiences. There are no objectively-distanced disembodied third person entitites in these accounts. These writers are actual people whose stories will make you laugh, cry, think, and want to know more. If you regard your own perspecitve as truly relevant to your own understanding of all to which you apply your sociological insights, you will allow yourself to experience Private Sociology.

EARLY GIANTS.

Johann Gutenberg.

William Caxton.

Aldus Manutius.

Claude Garamond.

William Caslon.

John Baskerville.

Giambattista Bodoni.

MODERN PIONEERS.

Frederic W. Goudy.

Morris Fuller Benton.

Rudolf Koch.

Oswald Cooper.

William Addison Dwiggins.

Eric Gill.

Stanley Morison.

Jan Van Krimpen.

Robert Hunter Middleton.

Beatrice Warde.

Jan Tschichold.

Designers and Their Typefaces.

Although American medicine has had truly impressive clinical achievements, America's health care system fails to provide equal access to reasonable care or to use its resources effectively at a high human cost. Yet health care reform faces major obstacles. One is a lack of easy-to-find reliable information about key dynamic forces that influence outcomes and performance of various types of health care systems. This book fills that need and provides a guide to the extensive academic and practice journal literature and to the health reports from the U.S. Accounting Office and the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research. This book is for those who want to go beyond glib soundbites and understand the complexities that make health care reform a difficult issue. The volume is arranged in five chapters: current challenges to the health care system; health insurance; health care providers; chronic illness and AIDS: future challenges for the American health care system; and health policy and thoughts on reform. The first and last chapters contain articles that provide broad overviews of the health care system and reform of American health care. Chapters 2-4 acquaint the reader with the literature dealing with the nuts and bolts of how the system works. This book provides a guide to the sources of background information necessary to understand the need for reform, to sources on the complexities and issues that must be dealt with for effective reform, and to discussions of reform itself. This is also a guide to major databases and prominent authorities.