headline: sociology matters, say sociologists

I just got the following message from a book rep:

Dear Professor Freese,

McGraw-Hill is proud to introduce SOCIOLOGY MATTERS, with POWERWEB, by Richard T. Schaefer.

Available now, this new paperback text is a low-cost, highly focused version of SOCIOLOGY: A BRIEF INTRODUCTION, Fifth Edition. Its design and pedagogy are both straightforward and streamlined, and its newly written chapter introductions highlight a unifying theme--answering the question "How does sociology matter?"

I was reminded of the experience of a friend from the West Coast who interviewed for a job in a small Midwestern city. Everyone she talked to during the course of the interview kept saying about the city as a place to live, "It's a great place to raise kids" (even though she didn't have any kids). She said that "if all anybody can say about a place is that it's a great place to raise kids, you begin to think that it probably isn't even that great of a place to raise kids."

You have to wonder if introductory sociology content has to be presented in a way that explicitly and repeatedly asserts that what it is saying matters, maybe it (gasp) really doesn't matter that much after all. Or, maybe, the rascally students today are just too apathetic to understand what really matters, although I'm always suspicious of that kind of codgerly perspective.