Uncomplicate genisoimage, please.

With a mass of verbiage, the man file for this program has me so confused that what I believed was a correct call line seemed to wander all over my machine collecting stuff I had no intention of including. Here is and example of my script:

#/bin/bash
pathspec=<folder name>
genisoimage -o <filename>.iso /home/me

There is something wrong with this because the messages I got back indicate that the package tried to collect stuff that was far too deep for it. The stuff in <folder name> is no deeper than four levels. The image contained what appears to be a save of my entire /home/me account. This is not what I understood from the man file.

Please, what I want to do is duplicate a disk that is now wearing out. Brasero fails to do the job, so I am trying an alternate approach. I used the file system to copy the disk to <folder name>, and now I want to make an on-line, mountable iso image so that I can avoid damaging the original further.

UBUNTU 10.4 and current updates.
genisoimage 9:1.1.10-1ubuntu1