1 comments about Edward Said: Criticism and Society.

1. It is a fact one would be better served reading Said rather than this book. Even the author of this book must likely vouch for such. Herein however, Hussein has patiently parsed and related the strands and materials from which Said works. The volume is clear to be sure, but lacks the polished prose and sparkle of its subject. This work does not review the life course of its subject. Rather, it reviews the works of the author, influences and arguments, aesthetic and political. For the most part Abdirahman Hussein writes of his subject with approval that at moments appears to be gushing. It is generally a disappointment that there are not more works of this nature and as a result of such puzzling paucity, this volume proves pleasing. Edward Said's work compels intellectuals to engage themselves politically and ideologically. As a result of a lacking synthesis or presiding theoretical bent in Said's work, some may conclude that it comes less thoughtfully produced. Mr. Hussein does well to clearly demonstrate that Edward Said's critical might and blight stem from the acute care he brings to his site specific interpretation of texts and situations. As curious and losing as it sounds, Hussein shows Said at work cultivating reason and taste while showing the world too often subdued and framed by something other than reason.

No comments about Authors of Their Own Lives: Intellectual Autobiographies by Twenty American Sociologists.

No comments about Caught in the Middle: Contradictions in the Lives of Sociologists from Working-Class Backgrounds.

No comments about The Guggenheims: An America Epic.

1 comments about When the Fighting Is All over: The Memoir of a Marine Corps General's Daughter.

1. Although the subtitle of this touching, beautifully written volume indicates otherwise, the book is in fact a biography of the author's parents' troubled marriage. Writing with grace and generous doses of humor, Lyle (The Foraging Gourmet) describes her early years with her mother as a wonderful time when women in the community banded together to take care of each other. Family conflict began when her father, Marine Corps Brigadier General John Seymour Letcher ("the youngest officer in the history of the Marine Corps to have a General's command in battle") returned from the South Pacific of WWII an angry, controlling man who proceeded to grind his family into submission. The author explains that her mother had entered into a loveless union with a man who was by turns charming and viciously domineering largely because, as a woman, she was blocked form most other options. During the long marriage she was subject to depression, for which she was occasionally hospitalized. Lyle skillfully describes her own life-long struggle to differentiate herself from her father, in whom she saw many of her own traits magnified and distorted. Describing her journey to come to terms with him, she is as funny as she is frank, and emerges as a compelling figure, every bit as strong and capable as her father but without his apparently self-involved rage.

No comments about George C. Homans: History, Theory, and Method.

No comments about The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation of Max Weber.

No comments about Freedom and Consumerism: A Critique of Zygmunt Bauman's Sociology.

1 comments about Work and Academic Politics: A Journeyman's Story.

1. Some autobiographers devise fantasies that unwittingly divulge facts. In this autobiographical Work and Academic Politics, William H. Form devises the fantasy that academic sociology is a mediaeval guild. A guild is a kind of trade association in old Europe that enforced a trade monopoly and opposed nontraditional technologies. The unintentionally divulged fact is that sociology is merely an academic trade association operating like a guild instead of a science.
   
   Form is not the only sociologist to use the metaphor of the guild, although he is the only one to my knowledge to employ it approvingly. In the "Introduction" to their book, Sociology on Trial, Maurice Stein and Arthur Vidich say that sociologists form professional associations organized to perform the classical functions of a guild - regulation of admission, monopolization of employment opportunity, control and expansion of marketing, and the development of occult terminologies - with the result that the task of sociology gets lost. Form's book amounts to a confession of guilt in sociology's trial.
   
   As a nonsociologist let me submit the following brief as an amicus curiae in this trial: I speak as a witness from personal experience. In 1981 I had submitted a paper to the American Sociological Review, the official journal of the American Sociological Association, while Form was editor. The paper set forth a dynamic model estimated statistically over fifty years of sociologically relevant historical data collected by U.S. government, and developed mechanically with an artificial-intelligence discovery system. In simulations the model exhibited damped oscillations converging in a stable equilibrium growth path, which is due to intergenerational negative-feedback cultural lags among the interacting social institutions. It shows empirically that the five basic institutions of our macrosociety interact to promote macrosocial consensus stability, if per capita real gross domestic product grows at four percent or more annually, and if internal migration is unrestricted so the labor force can exploit economic opportunities.
   
   Form rejected the paper with two referee criticisms. The first showed abysmal ignorance of academic philosophy of science. The second stated that the paper did not reflect sociology's traditions and called it an "empiricist venture". I submitted replies, to which Form responded citing his "folkways". In his Work and Academic Politics Form summarizes his own alternative "organizational approach" to institutional analysis, which exhibits no empirical modeling.
   
   I believe that Form's indulging in his Mediaeval guild fantasy while editor of the American Sociological Review has had a debilitating effect on American academic sociology's information pool comparable to that of incest on the gene pool of a small isolated aboriginal tribe. It has produced a sterile monoculture. Sociological thought is inbred and conformist. Academic sociologists need remedial education in mathematics, statistics, computer systems, and most importantly philosophy of science. I believe that this book is too self-serving to be interesting even to historians of sociology. In fact I believe that it is worthless. The sociologist reader would benefit more from an undergraduate course in philosophy of science.
   
   Readers interested in my further comments are invited to read my book titled History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my web site philsci, and to read my other reviews on the Amazon web site.
   
   Thomas J. Hickey

No comments about The Sociology of Oliver C. Cox: New Perspectives (Research in Race and Ethnic Relations) (Research in Race and Ethnic Relations) (Research in Race and Ethnic Relations).