Book recommendation for the literate

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The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman.

It's given me a lot of insight into how the social performances are played out, and how NT's view the world, with or without their knowledge. A warning: The book is highly intellectualized (perfect for many Aspies), requiring a mastery of English vocabulary (or Google ), and sentences are very complex, often running for 3-5 lines.

http://www.amazon.com/Presentation-Self ... 0385094027

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Presen ... ryday_Life

Many thanks - I just ordered one. Looks like a really interesting book.

Great thanks!

Goffman's Presentation of Self is an excellent book. Having published a book about Goffman and translated or edited Goffman's translations in Italian I would like to recommend also Relations in public. Encounters, Interaction Ritual, Strategic Interation and Asylums. Frame Analysis is also very good but hard reading. Stigma is also good and pertinent to many of our problems (as also Asylums). Goffman has nothing to do with academic production of useless babble. He was more akin to Harold Pinter and Jane Austin than to Merton or Parsons.

The Outsider, Colin Wilson.

I've read mixed reviews of this work, but I found it very interesting reading, particularly since I could identify with much of what was written. It is definitely on the dry, intellectual side of things. I've read it a few times. Thinking back now, I think a lot of the conclusions he comes to seems to fit the criteria for ASD. Basically it's about the outsiders of society, how they perceive things and express themselves differently than the majority, the pain and loneliness they feel from the isolation, the gifts they have, and how their differences act as a force of change. He uses several examples from history, using artists, writers, dancers, and philosophers as examples, many of whom have been described as being Aspie-ish (whatever value you put on such speculation). It's been a while since I've read it, so I may be a little off in my description, but that's how I remember it.