{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03796761585706309, 'fraction_numerical': 0.003908431044109436, 'mean_word_length': 4.818181818181818, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Women and Irish Society: A Sociological Reader

was some 'postmodernist' or 'cultural studies' affectation, a device to show how clever and innovative one was. Nothing could be further from the truth. These parallel chapters on facing pages of the book were some of the most revealing and effective pages of sociology I have read since C. Wright Mills. The last lines of the mirror chapter read: 'I was becoming ready not only to unravel the hidden positivism of conventional Marxism, but also to question the paradigmatic crisis of modem science. Too late, however, for Pasagarda law' (p. 249). Not too late, however, for us to absorb the lessons leamed by Sousa Santos in his liminal journey, betwixt-and-between the 'First' and 'Third' worlds. This is a book which could only have been written from an 'Irish' perspective, neither (quite) colonial nor (really) advanced industrial society. Sousa Santos expresses, for example, an explicit preference for suppressed or marginalized knowledges. Against all positivisms and the regulation mania ofmodernism, Sousa Santos boldly proclaims the merits ofaccepting and reassessing chaos. Ina phrase which you would need to explore in its context, Sousa Santos tells us that 'chaos invites us to a prudent knowledge' (p. 26). That is the, at first glance surprising purpose of the book, namely to construct 'the paradigm of a prudent knowledge for a decent life' (p. 22). Surprisingly ordinary, but the ambition of this text is to show how we can generate, in these troubled fin de steele times, in troubled places like Ireland, a new 'common sense' in the full Gramscian understanding of the term. It is not surprising that amongst the handful of people thanked in the preface is Vincent Tucker. Ronaldo Munck University ofLiverpool