Sarah of Textual Relations has an excellent, short review of Bauman and May’s Thinking Sociologically:
My favourite part of the book, though, is that it actually follows through on the promise of the title. Like The Sociological Imagination before it, Thinking Sociologically focuses on what it means to approach questions in a sociological way. Rather than bounding the discipline by providing a list of “sociological” topics, Bauman and May spend the introduction exploring the idea that what makes sociology different from the other social sciences is not its subject matter, but rather its way of thinking about the world.
Check it out!
A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book 
Thomas
/ October 18, 2010This was the textbook used in the SOCI 1000 course for which I was a teaching assistant last semester, but it was used alongside one of the traditional ‘subdiscipline-oriented’ books with lots of pretty pictures, and attempts to make sociology cool.
Dan Hirschman
/ October 18, 2010What did the students think of the two books? Did they like Thinking Sociologically?
Amanda M.
/ November 6, 2010Hey, I know I rarely pop by here (sorry!) but I just happened across this entry.
I’m surprised your friend liked that textbook. I used it in undergrad and remember hating it. I might be able to dig it up and refresh my memory if you want anything more specific than that.