Breaking the $100 barrier

Another semester (my last) brings more expensive textbooks from the HVCC book store, including a not large, 400-page item called "Becoming a Helper" by a couple named Corey. I scanned the first chapter while waiting in the long checkout line, reading this: "The wounded healer can be authentically present for others searching to find themselves," along with much earnest navel-gazing about "examining your motives for becoming a helper". So does paying $100.10 for this book qualify as a "wound"? How come it's never useful reference works that cost you the most, but soft social science (as previously noted)? Yes, I could have gone to Mary Jane Books or nextag.com, as this week's edition of The Hudsonian student newspaper helpfully points out.

Comments

[Johannah Turner]

The book sounds trashy and I'll bet the selection process is a little fishy. There is such a thing as intelligent "soft science" literature. Check out the prices of medical textbooks, sometime. In the 1960s or 1970s I stopped in a used medical textbook store somewhere near Bellevue Hospital (a teaching hospital) and the prices of used books knocked my socks off. $100 and more, back then. Can't imagine what they'd cost now.

[Bob Conner]

It may actually be useful in informing one how potential supervisors may think. Ya gotta talk the language.
HVCC, by the way, is in Troy, where I stumbled today upon this nice mural:
http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/A-big-splash-of-color-for-Troy-625888.php
You like that better than the Albany sculpture of sunbathing woman referenced in my post a couple of weeks ago?

[Matthew]

The worst is when the professors make you buy something they've written to pad their own sales & never use it for a class.

[Brian]

One of my kids wrote of having to shell out $250 for a Spanish text book. You got off light, it seems.

[Bob Conner]

Maybe so. I don't mean to bash HVCC, although it does work against the purpose of having cheap tuition if you also have expensive texts.