By the highest standards, Assault on Paradise ranks among the best and most complete modern ethnographic accounts ever written. In a rich narrative style, it chronicles the rapid social and economic change in Arembepe, a once-isolated coastal fishing village in Brazil where the author first conducted anthropological fieldwork more than fifty years ago. With emphasis on the impact of globalization, technology, and mass media, the current edition extends stories of people and events as well as internal and external changes. Readers quickly feel a part of the evolving community of Arembepe and the author’s close friends and informants. As one reviewer put it, “The people and personalities come through in a very human and often amusing way. This isn’t ethnography with the people taken out.” The well-structured, jargon-free coverage makes it ideal for use in introductory anthropology courses.

While many worry about population overload, this book highlights the dramatic fall in fertility rates globally exploring questions such as why are parents having fewer babies? Will this lead to population decline? What will be the impact of a world with fewer children and can social policy reverse fertility decline?

The new tenth edition of Kottak's best selling text for general anthropology continues to offer a holistic introduction to anthropology that approaches the course from a four-field perspective and a book that is good for students and professors. The new, tenth edition is a major revision offering many new and exciting features that build on the strengths of this approach. The text has two new themes --"Bringing It All Together" and "Understanding Ourselves." The "Bringing it All Together" theme, emphasizing anthropology's integrated, comparative and four-field nature, can be found in new "Bringing it All Together" essays that show how anthropology's subfields and dimensions combine to interpret and explain a common topic. The "Understanding Ourselves" theme, helping to explain the relevance of facts and theories to students, can be found in new "Understanding Ourselves" paragraphs that answer the question "So What?" A Brand new and unique atlas and visual guide will be shrink wrapped with every copy of the text for free offering students even more visual material on top of an already outstanding visual arts program in the text. Two new features called Interpreting the World and Atlas and Visual Guide Questions will tie key content in the atlas and visual guide to the text. Two new chapters drawn from an original chapter on cultural and archaeology methods now focus on methods and ethics in all four subfields. This edition will continue to offer revised and updated popular features of previous editions including chapter-opening In the News vignettes (many now from 2002), Interesting Issues boxes, Beyond the Classroom boxes, as well as a wealth of learning tools and support.

A landmark comparative study (U.S. and Brazil) of television's social and cultural effects on human behavior; updated edition has a new introduction bringing the study up to the present.