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  You Bet Your Life: The Burdens of Gambling

  We are a nation of gamblers: pari-mutuel wagering at horse tracks; blackjack in Las Vegas; the NCAA basketball office pool; even day trading on the internet. Gambling is both our national pastime and our predominant cultural metaphor—play the field; beat the odds; take a chance on love. Yet gambling poses serious risks to individuals and to society as a whole.

  Neil Isaacs—sports historian, licensed clinical social worker, English professor, and a gambler himself for more than fifty years—seeks to shatter the myths interfering with our understanding of gambling addiction, its causes, and its treatment. He begins by systematically debunking several ...Read More

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  Appalachia's Children: The Challenge of Mental Health

  This thoughtful, compassionate book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Southern Appalachian child—his mental disorders and his adaptive strengths. Drawing upon his extensive fieldwork as a clinical child psychiatrist in Eastern Kentucky, Dr. Looff suggests means by which these children can be helped to bridge the gap between their subculture and the mainstream of American life today.

  The children described in this book, the author points out, are in a real sense not “all children.” Since no child grows up in a vacuum, the children of Eastern Kentucky cannot be understood apart from the historical, geographic, and ...Read More

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  Social Deviancy and Adolescent Personality

  In this study, 224 ninth graders from two similar Kentucky towns were obtained by means of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. They were divided into various groups and analyzed in relation to a number of background factors and their resulting personality patterns. The emergence of various group patterns in this study demonstrates that the complexity of human personality necessitates complex analytic procedures.

  John C. Ball is associate professor of sociology in the University of Kentucky. During the 1962-1963 academic year, he served as researcher in sociology at the Addiction Research Center, National Institute of Mental Health.