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Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities
Engaged Ethnography
Kristin E. Yarris and Whitney L. Duncan
University of Arizona Press, 2024

This collection brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called “accompaniment.”

Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand. The volume stands as a collective conversation about possibilities for caring and decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement with im/migrant communities.

This volume is ideal for scholars, students, immigrant activists, instructors, and those interested in social justice work.

Contributors
Carolina Alonso Bejarano
Anna Aziza Grewe
Alaska Burdette
Whitney L. Duncan
Carlos Escalante Villagran
Christina M. Getrich
Tobin Hansen
Lauren Heidbrink
Dan Heiman
Josiah Heyman
Sarah Horton
Nolan Kline
Alana M. W. LeBrón
Lupe López
William D. Lopez
Aida López Huinil
Mirian A. Mijangos García
Nicole L. Novak
Mariela Nuñez-Janes
Ana Ortez-Rivera
Juan Edwin Pacay Mendoza
Salvador Brandon Pacay Mendoza
María Engracia Robles Robles
Delmis Umanzor
Erika Vargas Reyes
Kristin E. Yarris

 

 

 

 

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Adventures in the Stone Age
A New Guinea Diary
Leopold Pospíšil
Karolinum Press, 2021
The first publication of a charming fieldwork memoir by a giant of legal anthropology.
 
When Leopold Pospíšil first arrived in New Guinea in 1954 to investigate the legal systems of the local tribes, he was warned about the Kapauku, who reputedly had no laws. Skeptical of the idea that any society could exist without laws, Pospíšil immediately decided to live among and study the Kapauku. Learning the language and living as a participant-observer among them, Pospíšil discovered that the supposedly primitive society possessed laws, rules, and social structures that were as sophisticated as they were logical. Drawing on his research and experiences among the Kapauku—he would stay with them five times between 1954 and 1979—Pospíšil broke new ground in the field of legal anthropology, holding a professorship at Yale, serving as the anthropology curator of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and publishing three books of scholarship on Kapauku law.

This memoir of Pospíšil’s experience is filled with charming anecdotes and thrilling stories of trials, travels, and war told with humor and humility and accompanied by a wealth of the author’s personal photos from the time.
 
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American Urbanist
How William H. Whyte's Unconventional Wisdom Reshaped Public Life
Richard K. Rein
Island Press, 2022
“A marvelous new biography.” -The New York Times

On an otherwise normal weekday in the 1980s, commuters on busy Route 1 in central New Jersey noticed an alarming sight: a man in a suit and tie dashing across four lanes of traffic, then scurrying through a narrow underpass as cars whizzed by within inches. The man was William “Holly” Whyte, a pioneer of people-centered urban design. Decades before this perilous trek to a meeting in the suburbs, he had urged planners to look beyond their desks and drawings: “You have to get out and walk.”
 
American Urbanist shares the life and wisdom of a man whose advocacy reshaped many of the places we know and love today—from New York’s bustling Bryant Park to preserved forests and farmlands around the country. Holly’s experiences as a WWII intelligence officer and leader of the genre-defining reporters at Fortune Magazine in the 1950s shaped his razor-sharp assessments of how the world actually worked—not how it was assumed to work. His 1956 bestseller, The Organization Man, catapulted the dangers of “groupthink” and conformity into the national consciousness.
 
Over his five decades of research and writing, Holly’s wide-ranging work changed how people thought about careers and companies, cities and suburbs, urban planning, open space preservation, and more. He was part of the rising environmental movement, helped spur change at the planning office of New York City, and narrated two films about urban life, in addition to writing six books. No matter the topic, Holly advocated for the decisionmakers to be people, not just experts.
 
“We need the kind of curiosity that blows the lid off everything,” Holly once said. His life offers encouragement to be thoughtful and bold in asking questions and making space for differing viewpoints. This revealing biography offers a rare glimpse into the mind of an iconoclast whose healthy skepticism of the status quo can help guide our efforts to create the kinds of places we want to live in today.
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Anthropological Lives
An Introduction to the Profession of Anthropology
Virginia R Dominguez
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Anthropological Lives introduces readers to what it is like to be a professional anthropologist.  It focuses on the work anthropologists do, the passions they have, the way that being an anthropologist affects the kind of life they lead. The book draws heavily on the experiences of twenty anthropologists interviewed by Virginia R. Dominguez and Brigittine M. French, as well as on the experiences of the two coauthors. Many different kinds of anthropologists are represented, and the book makes a point of discussing their commonalities as well as their differences. Some of the anthropologists included work in the academy, some work outside the academy, and some work in institutions like museums. Included are cultural anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists, medical anthropologists, biological anthropologists, practicing anthropologists, and anthropological archaeologists. A fascinating look behind the curtain, the stories in Anthropological Lives will inform anyone who has ever wondered what you do with a degree in anthropology.

Anthropologists profiled: Leslie Aiello, Lee Baker, João Biehl, Tom Boellstorff, Jacqueline Comito, Shannon Dawdy, Virginia R. Dominguez, T.J. Ferguson, Brigittine French, Agustín Fuentes, Amy Goldenberg, Mary Gray, Sarah Green, Monica Heller, Douglas Hertzler, Ed Liebow, Mariano Perelman, Jeremy Sabloff, Carolyn Sargent, Marilyn Strathern, Nandini Sundar, Alaka Wali.
 
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An Anthropologist's Arrival
A Memoir
Ruth M. Underhill, Edited by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen E. Nash
University of Arizona Press, 2014
Ruth M. Underhill (1883–1984) was one of the twentieth century’s legendary anthropologists, forged in the same crucible as Franz Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. After decades of trying to escape her Victorian roots, Underhill took on a new adventure at the age of forty-six, when she entered Columbia University as a doctoral student of anthropology. Celebrated now as one of America’s pioneering anthropologists, Underhill reveals her life’s journey in frank, tender, unvarnished revelations that form the basis of An Anthropologist’s Arrival. This memoir, edited by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen E. Nash, is based on unpublished archives, including an unfinished autobiography and interviews conducted prior to her death, held by the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.

In brutally honest words, Underhill describes her uneven passage through life, beginning with a searing portrait of the Victorian restraints on women and her struggle to break free from her Quaker family’s privileged but tightly laced control. Tenderly and with humor she describes her transformation from a struggling “sweet girl” to wife and then divorcée. Professionally she became a welfare worker, a novelist, a frustrated bureaucrat at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a professor at the University of Denver, and finally an anthropologist of distinction.

Her witty memoir reveals the creativity and tenacity that pushed the bounds of ethnography, particularly through her focus on the lives of women, for whom she served as a role model, entering a working retirement that lasted until she was nearly 101 years old.

No quotation serves to express Ruth Underhill’s adventurous view better than a line from her own poetry: “Life is not paid for. Life is lived. Now come.”
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At the Heart of It
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives
Walt Harrington
University of Missouri Press, 1996

Delving into the everyday lives of real, everyday people, Walt Harrington skillfully draws the reader into an intimate relationship with the men and women profiled in this powerful collection of stories--people like V. I. Smith, a homicide detective; Deane Guy, a stock car racer; Jackie Jordan, a social worker in family services; and Sheri D'Amato, a girls' soccer coach.

Originally appearing in the Washington Post Magazine, these stories, which capture a cross section of Americans, stand out in the field of journalism because of the unique way in which Walt Harrington uses unheralded, individual lives to elaborate on the great human issues of the day. In "Mothers and Daughters" three generations of women discuss how society affected the choices they made and who they became. "The Mystery of Goodness" follows a Harvard-educated lawyer who handles death-row cases for very little money because he feels the system is unfair to African Americans. In "To Have and Have Not" a young couple with two small children struggle to make ends meet. Harrington describes in detail the creation of a poem by Rita Dove, then United States Poet Laureate, in "The Shape of Her Dreaming."

Harrington has adeptly combined sociology and journalism into beautiful prose. As "literary journalism," the stories employ scene, dialogue, and physical description within a narrative framework. At the same time, they also adhere to all the traditional journalistic standards of accuracy, fairness, and balance. As a result, At the Heart of It represents a subgenre that is rarely practiced and seldom understood even within the profession of journalism.

All of these stories are snapshots, pieces of everyday life in America that are intended to be a mirror held to the lives of readers. These are not stories about which you can remain neutral; even the most casual readers will be moved by the glimpses Walt Harrington provides us of ourselves.

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Black Fox
A Life of Emilie Demant Hatt, Artist and Ethnographer
Barbara Sjoholm
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
In 1904 a young Danish woman met a Sami wolf hunter on a train in Sweden. This chance encounter transformed the lives of artist Emilie Demant and the hunter, Johan Turi. In 1907–8 Demant went to live with Sami families in their tents and on migrations, later writing a lively account of her experiences. She collaborated with Turi on his book about his people. On her own and later with her husband Gudmund Hatt, she roamed on foot through Sami regions as an ethnographer and folklorist. As an artist, she created many striking paintings with Sami motifs. Her exceptional life and relationships come alive in this first English-language biography.

In recounting Demant Hatt's fascinating life, Barbara Sjoholm investigates the boundaries and influences between ethnographers and sources, the nature of authorship and visual representation, and the state of anthropology, racial biology, and politics in Scandinavia during the first half of the twentieth century.
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Burned Alive
Bruno, Galileo and the Inquisition
Alberto A. Martinez
Reaktion Books, 2018
In 1600, the Catholic Inquisition condemned the philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno for heresy, and he was then burned alive in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. Historians, scientists, and philosophical scholars have traditionally held that Bruno’s theological beliefs led to his execution, denying any link between his study of the nature of the universe and his trial. But in Burned Alive, Alberto A. Martínez draws on new evidence to claim that Bruno’s cosmological beliefs—that the stars are suns surrounded by planetary worlds like our own, and that the Earth moves because it has a soul—were indeed the primary factor in his condemnation.

Linking Bruno’s trial to later confrontations between the Inquisition and Galileo in 1616 and 1633, Martínez shows how some of the same Inquisitors who judged Bruno challenged Galileo. In particular, one clergyman who authored the most critical reports used by the Inquisition to condemn Galileo in 1633 immediately thereafter wrote an unpublished manuscript in which he denounced Galileo and other followers of Copernicus for their beliefs about the universe: that many worlds exist and that the Earth moves because it has a soul. Challenging the accepted history of astronomy to reveal Bruno as a true innovator whose contributions to the science predate those of Galileo, this book shows that is was cosmology, not theology, that led Bruno to his death.
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Byron Cummings
Dean of Southwest Archaeology
Todd W. Bostwick
University of Arizona Press, 2006
Byron Cummings, known to students and colleagues as “The Dean,” had a profound influence on the archaeology of Arizona and Utah during its early development. An explorer, archaeologist, anthropologist, teacher, museum director, university administrator, and state parks commissioner, Cummings was involved in many important discoveries in the American Southwest over the first half of the twentieth century and was a pioneer in the education of generations of archaeologists and anthropologists.

This book presents the first comprehensive examination of Cummings’ life, offering readers a greater understanding of his trailblazing work. Todd Bostwick elucidates Cummings’ many intellectual and cultural contributions, investigates the controversies in which he was embroiled, and describes his battles to wrest control of Arizona archaeology from eastern institutions that had long dominated Southwest archaeology.

Cummings saw the Southwest as an American wilderness where the story of cultural development revealed by the archaeologist and anthropologist was as important as it was in Europe. Bostwick’s meticulous account of his life reflects his great reverence for the region and pays tribute to a man whose dedication, mentoring, and friendship have forever sealed his place as The Dean.
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Carl Jung
Paul Bishop
Reaktion Books, 2014
Swiss-born Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961) was one of the pioneers of psychology, largely responsible for the introduction of now-familiar psychological terms such as “introvert,” “extrovert,” and “collective unconscious.” But in spite of this, Jung has often remained on the fringes of academic discourse. Seeking to understand Jung in view of not only his life, but also in light of his extensive reading and prolific writing, this new biography reclaims Jung as a major European thinker whose true significance has not been fully appreciated.
 
Paul Bishop follows Jung from his early childhood to his years at the University of Basel and his close relationship—and eventual break—with Sigmund Freud. Exploring Jung’s ideas, Bishop takes up the psychiatrist’s suggestion that “the tragedies of Goethe’s Faust and Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra . . . mark the first glimmerings of a breakthrough of total experience in our Western hemisphere,” engaging with Jung’s scholarship to offer one of the fullest appreciations yet of his distinctive approach to culture. Bishop also considers the role that the Red Book, written between 1914 and 1930 but not published until 2009, played in the progression of Jung’s thought, allowing Bishop to provide a new assessment of this divisive personality. Jung’s attempt to synthesize the different parts of human life, Bishop argues, marks the man as one of the most important theorists of the twentieth century.
 
Providing a compelling examination of the life of this highly influential figure, the concise and accessible Carl Jung will find a place on the shelves of students, scholars, and both clinical and amateur psychologists alike.
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The Day of Shelly's Death
The Poetry and Ethnography of Grief
Renato Rosaldo
Duke University Press, 2014
This deeply moving collection of poetry by Renato Rosaldo focuses on the shock of his wife Michelle (Shelly) Rosaldo's sudden death on October 11, 1981. Just the day before, Shelly and her family had arrived in the northern Philippine village of Mungayang, where she and her husband Renato, both accomplished anthropologists, planned to conduct fieldwork. On October 11, Shelly died after losing her footing and falling some sixty feet from a cliff into a swollen river. Renato Rosaldo explored the relationship between bereavement and rage in his canonical essay, "Grief and a Headhunter's Rage," which first appeared in 1984 and is reprinted here. In the poems at the heart of this book, he returns to the trauma of Shelly's death through the medium of free verse, maintaining a tight focus on the events of October 11, 1981. He explores not only his own experience of Shelly's death but also the imagined perspectives of many others whose lives intersected with that tragic event and its immediate aftermath, from Shelly herself to the cliff from which she fell, from the two young boys who lost their mother to the strangers who carried and cared for them, from a tricycle taxi driver, to a soldier, to priests and nuns. Photographs taken years earlier, when Renato and Shelly were conducting research across the river valley from Mungayang, add a stark beauty. In a new essay, "Notes on Poetry and Ethnography," Rosaldo explains how and why he came to write the harrowing yet beautiful poems in The Day of Shelly's Death. More than anything else though, the essay is a manifesto in support of what he calls antropoesía, verse with an ethnographic sensibility. The essay clarifies how this book of rare humanity and insight challenges the limits of ethnography as it is usually practiced.
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Economists Lives
Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics, Volume 39
E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget, eds.
Duke University Press
This collection of essays, a supplement to History of Political Economy, brings together prominent scholars from economics, sociology, literature, and history to examine the role of biography and autobiography in the history of economics. The first of its kind, this volume looks at the relevance of first-person accounts to narrative histories of economics. The essays consider both the potential and the limits of life writing, which has traditionally been used sparingly by historians of economics, and examine types of biographies, the relationship between autobiography and identity, and the writing of biography.

Contributors to this collection question whether biography is essential to understanding the history of economic ideas and consider how autobiographical materials should be read and interpreted by historians. Articles consider the treatment of autobiographical materials such as conversations and testimonies, the construction of heroes and villains, the relationship between scientific biography and literary biography, and concerns related to living subjects. Several essays address the role of biography and autobiography in the study of economists such as F. A. Hayek, Harry Johnson, Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Oskar Morgenstern, and François Quesnay, concluding with several accounts of the interconnection of the historians’ projects with their own autobiographies.

All 2007 subscribers to History of Political Economy will receive a copy of “Economists’ Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics” as part of their subscription.

Contributors
Roger E. Backhouse
Bruce Caldwell
Loïc Charles
William Coleman
Robert W. Dimand
Paul John Eakin
Ross B. Emmett
Evelyn L. Forget
Craufurd D. Goodwin
Peter Groenewegen
Malachi Haim Hacohen
Jan-Otmar Hesse
Patricia Laurence
Frederic S. Lee
Robert Leonard
Tiago Mata
D. E. Moggridge
Jeremy D. Popkin
Mike Reay
Christine Théré
E. Roy Weintraub

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Edward P. Dozier
The Paradox of the American Indian Anthropologist
Marilyn Norcini
University of Arizona Press, 2007
Edward P. Dozier was the first American Indian to establish a career as an academic anthropologist. In doing so, he faced a double paradox—academic and cultural. The notion of objectivity that governed academic anthropology at the time dictated that researchers be impartial outsiders. Scientific knowledge was considered unbiased, impersonal, and public. In contrast, Dozier’s Pueblo Indian culture regarded knowledge as privileged, personal, and gendered. Ceremonial knowledge was protected by secrecy and was never intended to be made public, either within or outside of the community. As an indigenous ethnologist and linguist, Dozier negotiated a careful balance between the conflicting values of a social scientist and a Pueblo Indian. Based on archival research, ethnographic fieldwork at Santa Clara Pueblo, and extensive interviews, this intellectual biography traces Dozier’s education from a Bureau of Indian Affairs day school through the University of New Mexico on federal reimbursable loans and graduate school on the GI Bill. Dozier was the first graduate of the new post–World War II doctoral program in anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles in 1952. Beginning with his multicultural and linguistic heritage, the book interprets pivotal moments in his career, including the impact of Pueblo kinship on his indigenous research at Tewa Village (Hano); his rising academic standing and Indian advocacy at Northwestern University; his achievement of full academic status after he conducted non-indigenous fieldwork with the Kalinga in the Philippines; and his leadership in establishing American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona. Norcini interprets Dozier’s career within the contexts of the history of American anthropology and Pueblo Indian culture. In the final analysis, Dozier is positioned as a transitional figure who helped transform the historical paradox of an American Indian anthropologist into the contemporary paradigm of indigenous scholarship in the academy.
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Fascination with the Persecutor
George L. Mosse and the Catastrophe of Modern Man
Emilio Gentile and and Stanley G. Payne, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi
University of Wisconsin Press, 2021
In 1933, George L. Mosse fled Berlin and settled in the United States, where he went on to become a renowned historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Through rigorous and innovative scholarship, Mosse uncovered the forces that spurred antisemitism, racism, nationalism, and populism. His transformative work was propelled by a desire to know his own persecutors and has been vital to generations of scholars seeking to understand the cultural and intellectual origins and mechanisms of Nazism.
 
This translation makes Emilio Gentile’s groundbreaking study of Mosse’s life and work available to English language readers. A leading authority on fascism, totalitarianism, and Mosse’s legacy, Gentile draws on a wealth of published and unpublished material, including letters, interviews, lecture plans, and marginalia from Mosse’s personal library. Gentile details how the senior scholar eschewed polemics and employed rigorous academic standards to better understand fascism and the “catastrophe of the modern man”—how masculinity transformed into a destructive ideology. As long as wars are waged over political beliefs in popular culture, Mosse’s theories of totalitarianism will remain as relevant as ever.
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Field Seasons
Reflections on Career Paths and Research in American Archaeology
Anna Marie Prentiss
University of Utah Press, 2012

In Field Seasons, Anna Marie Prentiss chronicles her experiences as an archaeologist, providing an insider’s look at the diverse cultures, personal agendas, and career pathways associated with American archaeology since the late twentieth century. As the narrative moves from her academic training to employment in government and private consulting to her eventual professorship at a state university, several themes emerge.

This book is about career paths. Its discussion of the diverse jobs within the archaeological profession makes it valuable to students seeking guidance about their career options. It also provides insight into the cultures of American archaeology, a discipline with many schools of thought and unique subcultures. The world of archaeological field technicians is quite different from that of government bureaucrats or academics. Prentiss also explores the elements of cultural change within archaeology while she reflects on her personal evolution throughout her thirty years within the discipline.

The book’s unique personal assessment of the state of American archaeology will appeal to a broad swath of students and professionals. Students will find it an entertaining road map to possible careers while professionals will find plenty of scholarly material concerning ethics, archaeological theory, and interpretations of the archaeological record.
 

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Frantz Fanon
James S. Williams
Reaktion Books, 2023
A biography of the revolutionary philosopher and psychiatrist.
 
Doctor, militant, essayist, ambassador, teacher, journalist, pan-Africanist, Frantz Fanon sought to decolonize mid-twentieth-century culture as he embodied a new kind of intellectual. Born in colonial Martinique, he fought for France during World War II but later renounced his citizenship and fought in the Algerian War of Independence. This book emphasizes Fanon’s gift for self-invention and performance as it follows his short but extraordinary life and explores how his pioneering work in psychiatry influenced his revolutionary philosophy.
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Fredrik Barth
An Intellectual Biography
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Pluto Press, 2015
Fredrik Barth, editor of the influential Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, is one of the towering figures of twentieth-century anthropology. In this accessible but penetrating intellectual biography, Thomas Hylland Eriksen explores Barth’s six-decade career, following Barth from his early ecological studies in Pakistan to political studies in Iran, to groundbreaking fieldwork in Norway, New Guinea, Bali, and Bhutan. Along the way, Eriksen raises many of the questions that emerge from Barth’s own work: questions of unity and diversity, of culture and relativism, and of art and science. This will surely be the definitive biography of Barth for many years to come.
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Freud
In His Time and Ours
Élisabeth Roudinesco
Harvard University Press, 2016

Élisabeth Roudinesco offers a bold and modern reinterpretation of the iconic founder of psychoanalysis. Based on new archival sources, this is Freud’s biography for the twenty-first century—a critical appraisal, at once sympathetic and impartial, of a genius greatly admired and yet greatly misunderstood in his own time and in ours.

Roudinesco traces Freud’s life from his upbringing as the eldest of eight siblings in a prosperous Jewish-Austrian household to his final days in London, a refugee of the Nazis’ annexation of his homeland. She recreates the milieu of fin de siècle Vienna in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire—an era of extraordinary artistic innovation, given luster by such luminaries as Gustav Klimt, Stefan Zweig, and Gustav Mahler. In the midst of it all, at the modest residence of Berggasse 19, Freud pursued his clinical investigation of nervous disorders, blazing a path into the unplumbed recesses of human consciousness and desire.

Yet this revolutionary who was overthrowing cherished notions of human rationality and sexuality was, in his politics and personal habits, in many ways conservative, Roudinesco shows. In his chauvinistic attitudes toward women, and in his stubborn refusal to acknowledge the growing threat of Hitler until it was nearly too late, even the analytically-minded Freud had his blind spots. Alert to his intellectual complexity—the numerous tensions in his character and thought that remained unresolved—Roudinesco ultimately views Freud less as a scientific thinker than as the master interpreter of civilization and culture.

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From Joseph Bensman
Essays on Modern Society
Robert Jackall
University of Tennessee Press, 2014
Joseph Bensman (1922-1986), a renowned analyst of modern institutions, professions, and culture, was Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and at City College of New York. From Joseph Bensman: Essays on Modern Society brings together some of his finest work, often done in collaboration with colleagues such as Arthur J. Vidich, Robert Lilienfeld, Bernard Rosenberg, and Israel Gerver.

In the introduction to this volume, editors Robert Jackall and Duffy Graham identify Bensman’s trademark habits of mind: an analytical stance, fundamentally objective and dispassionate; a vigilant awareness of the reach and vitality of bureaucracy; an ability to discern intellectual problems in superficially unremarkable phenomena; attention to empirical detail and suspicion of theoretical abstractions; and appreciation of irony and unintended consequences.

Robert Jackall is Willmott Family Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Williams College. He is the author of Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate Managers
and Street Stories: The World of Police Detectives, among other books. Duffy Graham is the author of The Consciousness of the Litigator.
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Genuine Reality
A Life of William James
Linda Simon
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Intellectual rebel, romantic pragmatist, aristocratic pluralist, William James was both a towering figure of the nineteenth century and a harbinger of the twentieth. Drawing on a wide range of sources, including 1,500 letters between James and his wife, acclaimed biographer Linda Simon creates an intimate portrait of this multifaceted and contradictory man. Exploring James's irrepressible family, his diverse friends, and the cultural and political forces to which he so energetically responded, Simon weaves the many threads of William James's life into a genuine, and vibrant, reality.

"William James . . . has never seemed so vulnerably human as in Linda Simon's biography. . . . [S]he vivifies James in such a way that his life and thought come freshly alive for the modern reader."—David S. Reynolds, New York Times Book Review

"Superb. . . . Genuine Reality is recommended reading for all soul-searchers."—George Gurley, Chicago Tribune

"Ms. Simon . . . has provided an ideal pathway for James's striding. . . . [Y]ou become engaged in his struggles as if they were your own."—Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times

"[A]n excellent narrative biography at once sensitively told and lucidly written."—John Patrick Diggins, Wall Street Journal
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In a Village Far from Home
My Years among the Cora Indians of the Sierra Madre
Catherine Palmer Finerty
University of Arizona Press, 2000

What do most career women do after a successful run on Madison Avenue? Catherine Finerty watched her friends settle into the country-club life. She opted instead for Mexico.

When the 60-year-old widow loaded up her car and headed south, what she found at the end of the road was far from what she expected. Finerty settled into a comfortable house just outside of Guadalajara and, although not a Catholic, she soon immersed herself in Franciscan volunteer work. It wasn't long before she found herself visiting small settlements hidden in the tropical mountains of western Mexico, and it was in Jesús María—so isolated that one could only get there by mule or small plane—that she found her new calling: the village nurse.

With its bugs and heat, no phones or running water, the tiny town was hardly a place to enjoy one's retirement years, but Finerty was quickly charmed by the community of Cora Indians and mestizos. Armed with modest supplies, a couple of textbooks, and common sense, she found herself delivering first aid, advising on public health, and administering injections. And in a place where people still believed in the power of shamans, providing health care sometimes required giving in to the magical belief that a hypodermic needle could cure anything.

Finerty's account of her eight years in Jesús María is both a compelling story of nursing under adverse conditions and a loving portrait of a people and their ways. She shares the joys and sorrows of this isolated world: religious festivals and rites of passage; the tragedy of illness and death in a place where people still rely on one another as much as medicine; a flash flood that causes such havoc that even less-than-pious village men attend Mass daily. And she introduces a cast of characters not unlike those in a novel: Padre Domingo and his airborne medical practice; the local bishop, who frowns on Finerty's slacks; Chela, a mestiza from whom she rents her modest two-room house (complete with scorpions); and the young Cora Indian woman Chuy, from whom she gains insight into her new neighbors.

Blending memoir and travel writing, In a Village Far from Home takes readers deep into the Sierra Madre to reveal its true treasure: the soul of a people.

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In the Arms of Africa
The Life of Colin Turnbull
Roy Richard Grinker
University of Chicago Press, 2001
Colin Turnbull made a name for himself with The Forest People, his acclaimed study of African Pygmies. His second book, however, The Mountain People, ignited a swirl of controversy within anthropology and tainted Turnbull's reputation as a respected anthropologist.

In this scrupulously researched biography, Roy Richard Grinker charts the rise and fall of this colorful and controversial man—from his Scottish family and British education to travels in Africa and his great love affair with Joe Towles. Grinker, noted for his own work on the Pygmies, herein gives readers a fascinating account of Turnbull's life and work.

Originally published by St. Martin's Press
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In the Realms of Gold
Pioneering in African History
Roland Oliver
University of Wisconsin Press, 1997
Over the last fifty years, Roland Oliver has been both a witness to the post-colonial history of Africa and a preeminent scholar of the continent’s pre-colonial history. Oliver was a young Cambridge graduate in 1947 when he took a newly created position at the University of London to research, and eventually teach, the pre-colonial history of Africa. Seeking from the outset to establish a unified conception of African history free from European frameworks, Oliver and his colleague John Fage went on to write the influential A Short History of Africa, found the Journal of African History, and co-edit the eight-volume Cambridge History of Africa.
     In the Realms of Gold is Oliver’s account of his life and work. He writes in a deft and lively style about the circumstances of his early life that shaped his education and outlook: his childhood on a river houseboat in Kashmir, the influential teachers and friends met at Stowe and Cambridge, and his service in World War II as a cryptographer in British intelligence, where he met his first wife, Caroline Linehan. His interest in church history while at Cambridge led him to study the historical effects of Christian missionaries in Africa, and thus his career began.
     The core of the book is Oliver’s account of his research travels throughout tropical Africa from the 1940s to the 1980s; his efforts to train and foster African graduate students to teach in African universities; his role in establishing conferences and journals to bring together the work of historians and archaeologists from Europe and Africa; his encounters with political and religious leaders, scholars, soldiers, and storytellers; and the political and economic upheavals of the continent that he witnessed.
[more]

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Isaac Newton and Natural Philosophy
Niccolò Guicciardini
Reaktion Books, 2018
Isaac Newton is one of the greatest scientists in history, yet the spectrum of his interests was much broader than that of most contemporary scientists. In fact, Newton would have defined himself not as a scientist, but as a natural philosopher. He was deeply involved in alchemical, religious, and biblical studies, and in the later part of his life he played a prominent role in British politics, economics, and the promotion of scientific research. Newton’s pivotal work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which sets out his laws of universal gravitation and motion, is regarded as one of the most important works in the history of science.

Niccolò Guicciardini’s enlightening biography offers an accessible introduction both to Newton’s celebrated research in mathematics, optics, mechanics, and astronomy and to how Newton viewed these scientific fields in relation to his quest for the deepest secrets of the universe, matter theory and religion. Guicciardini sets Newton the natural philosopher in the troubled context of the religious and political debates ongoing during Newton’s life, a life spanning the English Civil Wars, the Restoration, the Glorious Revolution, and the Hanoverian succession. Incorporating the latest Newtonian scholarship, this fast-paced biography broadens our perception of both this iconic figure and the great scientific revolution of the early modern period.
[more]

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Journeys to the Edge
In the Footsteps of an Anthropologist
Peter M. Gardner
University of Missouri Press, 2006
In this fascinating and vivid account, Peter M. Gardner takes us along with him on his anthropological field research trips. Usually, the author’s family is there, too, either with him in the field or somewhere nearby. Family adventures are part of it all. Travel into the unknown can be terrifying yet stimulating, and Gardner describes his own adventures, sharing medical and travel emergencies, magical fights, natural dangers, playful friends, and satisfying scientific discoveries. Along the way, we also learn how Gardner adapted to the isolation he sometimes faced and how he coped with the numerous crises that arose during his travels, including his tiny son’s bout with cholera.

Because Gardner’s primary research since 1962 has been with hunter-gatherers, much of his story transpires either in the equatorial jungle of south India or more than one hundred miles beyond the end of the road in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Other ventures transport readers to Japan and back to India, allowing them to savor ancient sights and sounds. Gardner closes the book with a journey of quite another sort, as he takes us into the world of nature, Taoist philosophy, and the experimental treatment of advanced cancer.

Throughout this fast-moving book, Gardner deftly describes the goals and techniques of his research, as well as his growing understanding of the cultures to which he was exposed. Few personal accounts of fieldwork describe enough of the research to give a complete sense of the experience in the way this book does. Anyone with an interest in travel and adventure, including the student of anthropology as well as the general reader, will be totally intrigued by Gardner’s story, one of a daily existence so very different from our own.
[more]

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Like a Brother
Grenville Goodwin’s Apache Years, 1928-1939
Neil Goodwin
University of Arizona Press, 2004
When the anthropologist Grenville Goodwin died in 1940 at the age of 32, he had published several papers and one book, Myths and Tales of the White Mountain Apache, and had already achieved a stature that has only continued to grow. His posthumous landmark monograph, The Social Organization of the Western Apache, was hailed by anthropologist Edward Spicer as "one of the most detailed and best-documented studies of Indian social organization". Yet, although he was highly regarded by colleagues within the profession, Goodwin himself was largely self-taught, with neither formal training nor academic degrees. This volume is the latest in series of books derived from his unpublished papers. It helps broaden our understanding of Goodwin's life and work. It includes selections from his field notes, diaries, and letters, along with those of his wife Jan and other family members. Assembled by Goodwin's son Neil, who never knew his father, these writings are gathered in thematic chapters that extend Neil Goodwin's earlier work, The Apache Diaries, and shed light on Grenville Goodwin's deepening understanding of the Apache people and their culture, and of the wrenching problems which reservation life forced on them. In two of the chapters Neil tells how he retraced his father's search for the Sierra Madre Apache, re-discovering abandoned Apache campsites and conveying even more personally than his father's diaries what was for both father and son the adventure of a lifetime. Other chapters trace Goodwin's interest in children of the Sierra Madre Apaches who were captured in Mexican raids on these camps during the early decades of the twentieth century. The full stories of the lives of three of these children are for the first time pieced together from newly gathered research. Grenville was quiet, self-effacing and rarely revealed his inner life, but one chapter affords a closer look: a portrait of his marriage to Neil's mother, Jan. Her diary entries, juxtaposed with her vivid poetry and her paintings and drawings, illuminate her relationship with Grenville and throw his elusive personality into deeper relief than his own writings do. Here too are letters from Goodwin's Apache friends that paint a powerful and poignant portrait of their daily lives and of their relationship with him. Goodwin's daily diary excerpts relate his own experiences on the San Carlos Apache reservation from 1928 to 1936: what was happening at the store, how the cattle were doing, who was in jail, and thousands of other details that give readers a sharp sense of what the reservation was like in the 1930s. As these writings also show, Goodwin was powerfully drawn to Apache spirituality and became steeped in their sacred knowledge. His simple description of a day in the life of an Apache family captures the expression of this spirituality in the rhythms of everyday life, whether greeting the rising sun, curing an injury, plowing the earth, or simply being good to one's family. More than half a century after his death, Grenville Goodwin continues to be regarded as one of the most enigmatic and romantic figures in American anthropology. Like a Brother gives us a fuller understanding of the man and his work as it broadens our knowledge of Apache history and culture.
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The Lost Black Scholar
Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought
David A. Varel
University of Chicago Press, 2018
Allison Davis (1902–83), a preeminent black scholar and social science pioneer, is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking investigations into inequality, Jim Crow America, and the cultural biases of intelligence testing. Davis, one of America’s first black anthropologists and the first tenured African American professor at a predominantly white university, produced work that had tangible and lasting effects on public policy, including contributions to Brown v. Board of Education, the federal Head Start program, and school testing practices. Yet Davis remains largely absent from the historical record. For someone who generated such an extensive body of work this marginalization is particularly surprising. But it is also revelatory.

In The Lost Black Scholar, David A. Varel tells Davis’s compelling story, showing how a combination of institutional racism, disciplinary eclecticism, and iconoclastic thinking effectively sidelined him as an intellectual. A close look at Davis’s career sheds light not only on the racial politics of the academy but also the costs of being an innovator outside of the mainstream. Equally important, Varel argues that Davis exemplifies how black scholars led the way in advancing American social thought. Even though he was rarely acknowledged for it, Davis refuted scientific racism and laid bare the environmental roots of human difference more deftly than most of his white peers, by pushing social science in bold new directions. Varel shows how Davis effectively helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.
[more]

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The Lost Itinerary of Frank Hamilton Cushing
Curtis M. Hinsley
University of Arizona Press, 1996
In the fall of 1886, Boston philanthropist Mary Tileston Hemenway sponsored an archaeological expedition to the American Southwest. Directed by anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing, the Hemenway Expedition sought to trace the ancestors of the Zuñis with an eye toward establishing a museum for the study of American Indians. In the third year of fieldwork, Hemenway's overseeing board fired Cushing based on doubts concerning his physical health and mental stability, and much of the expedition's work went unpublished. Today, however, it is recognized as a critical base for research into southwestern prehistory. This second installment of a multivolume work on the Hemenway Expedition focuses on a report written by Cushing—at the request of the expedition's board of directors—to serve as vindication for the expedition, the worst personal and professional failure of his life. Reconstructed between 1891 and 1893 by Cushing from field notes, diaries, jottings, and memories, it provides an account of the origins and early months of the expedition. Hidden in several archives for a century, the Itinerary is assembled and presented here for the first time. A vivid account of the first attempt at scientific excavatons in the Southwest, Cushing's Itinerary is both an exciting tale of travel through the region and an intellectual adventure story that sheds important light on the human past at Hohokam sites in Arizona's Salt River Valley, where Cushing sought to prove his hypothesis concerning the ancestral "Lost Ones" of the Zuñis. It initiates the construction of an ethnological approach to archaeology, which drew upon an unprecedented knowledge of a southwestern Pueblo tribe and use of that knowledge in the interpretation of archaeological sites.
[more]

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The Madman in the White House
Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson
Patrick Weil
Harvard University Press, 2023

“The extraordinary untold story of how a disillusioned American diplomat named William C. Bullitt came to Freud’s couch in 1926, and how Freud and his patient collaborated on a psychobiography of President Woodrow Wilson.”—Wall Street Journal

The notorious psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson, rediscovered nearly a century after it was written by Sigmund Freud and US diplomat William C. Bullitt, sheds new light on how the mental health of a controversial American president shaped world events.

When the fate of millions rests on the decisions of a mentally compromised leader, what can one person do? Disillusioned by President Woodrow Wilson’s destructive and irrational handling of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, a US diplomat named William C. Bullitt asked this very question. With the help of his friend Sigmund Freud, Bullitt set out to write a psychological analysis of the president. He gathered material from personal archives and interviewed members of Wilson’s inner circle. In The Madman in the White House, Patrick Weil resurrects this forgotten portrait of a troubled president.

After two years of collaboration, Bullitt and Freud signed off on a manuscript in April 1932. But the book was not published until 1966, nearly thirty years after Freud’s death and only months before Bullitt’s. The published edition was heavily redacted, and by the time it was released, the mystique of psychoanalysis had waned in popular culture and Wilson’s legacy was unassailable. The psychological study was panned by critics, and Freud’s descendants denied his involvement in the project.

For nearly a century, the mysterious, original Bullitt and Freud manuscript remained hidden from the public. Then in 2014, while browsing the archives of Yale University, Weil happened upon the text. Based on his reading of the 1932 manuscript, Weil examines the significance of Bullitt and Freud’s findings and offers a major reassessment of the notorious psychobiography. The result is a powerful warning about the influence a single unbalanced personality can have on the course of history.

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The Martian's Daughter
A Memoir
Marina von Neumann Whitman
University of Michigan Press, 2013

One of the five Hungarian scientific geniuses dubbed "the Martians" by their colleagues, John von Neumann is often hailed as the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century and even as the greatest scientist after Einstein. He was a key figure in the Manhattan Project; the inventor of game theory; the pioneer developer of the modern stored-program electronic computer; and an adviser to the top echelons of the American military establishment. In The Martian's Daughter, Marina von Neumann Whitman reveals intimate details about the famed scientist and explores how the cosmopolitan environment in which she was immersed, the demanding expectations of her parents, and her own struggles to emerge from the shadow of a larger-than-life parent shaped her life and work.

Unfortunately, von Neumann did not live to see his daughter rise to become the first or highest-ranking woman in a variety of arenas. Whitman became a noted academic during the 1960s and '70s, casting her teaching and writing in the framework of globalization before the word had been invented; became the first woman ever to serve on the President's Council of Economic Advisers and participated actively in U.S. efforts to reshape the international monetary and financial system during the early 1970s; pioneered the role of women on the boards of leading multinational corporations; and became the highest-ranking female executive in the American auto industry in the 1980s. In her memoir, Whitman quotes from personal letters from her father and describes her interactions with such figures as Roger Smith of GM and President Nixon. She also details the difficulties she encountered as an early entrant into a world dominated by men and how she overcame the obstacles to, in her words, "have it all."

[more]

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Max Weber
An Intellectual Biography
Fritz Ringer
University of Chicago Press, 2004
Max Weber was one of the most influential and creative intellectual forces of the twentieth century. In his methodology of the social sciences, he both exposed the flaws and solidified the foundations of the German historical tradition. Throughout his life, he saw bureaucracy as a serious obstacle to cultural vitality but as an inescapable part of organizational rationality. And in his most famous essay, on the Protestant ethic, he uncovered the psychological underpinnings of capitalism and modern occupational life.

This searching work offers the first comprehensive introduction to Weber's thought for students and newcomers. Fritz Ringer locates Weber in his historical context, relating his ideas to the controversies and politics of his day. Ringer also considers the importance of Weber to contemporary life, discussing his insights into the limits of scholarly research and the future of Western capitalist societies. Weber, Ringer reminds us, believed in democracy, liberalism, and fundamental human rights; his ethic of responsibility remains as vital to our historical moment as it was to his own.

A concise and incisive look at the man and personality behind the thought, Max Weber is a masterful outing in intellectual biography and social theory.
[more]

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Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States, 1932–1972, Volume 1
Edward Nelson
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Milton Friedman is widely recognized as one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. Yet no previous study has distilled Friedman’s vast body of writings into an authoritative account of his research, his policy views, and his interventions in public debate. With this ambitious new work, Edward Nelson closes the gap: Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States is the defining narrative on the famed economist, the first to grapple comprehensively with Friedman’s research output, economic framework, and legacy.

This two-volume account provides a foundational introduction to Friedman’s role in several major economic debates that took place in the United States between 1932 and 1972. The first volume, which takes the story through 1960, covers the period in which Friedman began and developed his research on monetary policy. It traces Friedman’s thinking from his professional beginnings in the 1930s as a combative young microeconomist, to his wartime years on the staff of the US Treasury, and his emergence in the postwar period as a leading proponent of monetary policy. The second volume covers the years between 1960 and 1972— years that saw the publication of Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States. The book also covers Friedman’s involvement in a number of debates in the 1960s and 1970s, on topics such as unemployment, inflation, consumer protection, and the environment.

As a fellow monetary economist, Nelson writes from a unique vantage point, drawing on both his own expertise in monetary analysis and his deep familiarity with Friedman’s writings. Using extensive documentation, the book weaves together Friedman’s research contributions and his engagement in public debate, providing an unparalleled analysis of Friedman’s views on the economic developments of his day.
[more]

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Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States, 1932–1972, Volume 2
Edward Nelson
University of Chicago Press, 2020
Milton Friedman is widely recognized as one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century. Yet no previous study has distilled Friedman’s vast body of writings into an authoritative account of his research, his policy views, and his interventions in public debate. With this ambitious new work, Edward Nelson closes the gap: Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States is the defining narrative on the famed economist, the first to grapple comprehensively with Friedman’s research output, economic framework, and legacy.

This two-volume account provides a foundational introduction to Friedman’s role in several major economic debates that took place in the United States between 1932 and 1972. The first volume, which takes the story through 1960, covers the period in which Friedman began and developed his research on monetary policy. It traces Friedman’s thinking from his professional beginnings in the 1930s as a combative young microeconomist, to his wartime years on the staff of the US Treasury, and his emergence in the postwar period as a leading proponent of monetary policy. The second volume covers the years between 1960 and 1972— years that saw the publication of Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s Monetary History of the United States. The book also covers Friedman’s involvement in a number of debates in the 1960s and 1970s, on topics such as unemployment, inflation, consumer protection, and the environment.

As a fellow monetary economist, Nelson writes from a unique vantage point, drawing on both his own expertise in monetary analysis and his deep familiarity with Friedman’s writings. Using extensive documentation, the book weaves together Friedman’s research contributions and his engagement in public debate, providing an unparalleled analysis of Friedman’s views on the economic developments of his day.
[more]

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No Place for a Lady
The Life Story of Archaeologist Marjorie F. Lambert
Shelby Tisdale
University of Arizona Press, 2023
In the first half of the twentieth century, the canyons and mesas of the Southwest beckoned and the burgeoning field of archaeology thrived. Among those who heeded the call, Marjorie Ferguson Lambert became one of only a handful of women who left their imprint on the study of southwestern archaeology and anthropology.

In this delightful biography, we gain insight into a time when there were few women establishing full-time careers in anthropology, archaeology, or museums. Shelby Tisdale successfully combines Lambert’s voice from extensive interviews with her own to take us on a thought-provoking journey into how Lambert created a successful and satisfying professional career and personal life in a place she loved (the American Southwest) while doing what she loved.

Through Lambert’s life story we gain new insight into the intricacies and politics involved in the development of archaeology and museums in New Mexico and the greater Southwest. We also learn about the obstacles that young women had to maneuver around in the early years of the development of southwestern archaeology as a profession. Tisdale brings into focus one of the long-neglected voices of women in the intellectual history of anthropology and archaeology and highlights how gender roles played out in the past in determining the career paths of young women. She also highlights what has changed and what has not in the twenty-first century.

Women’s voices have long been absent throughout history, and Marjorie Lambert’s story adds to the growing literature on feminist archaeology.
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On a Trail of Southwest Discovery
The Expedition Diaries of Frederick W. Hodge and Margaret W. Magill, 1886–1888
Curtis M. Hinsley and David R. Wilcox
University of Arizona Press, 2024

The Hemenway Southwestern Archaeological Expedition (1886–1889), directed by Frank Hamilton Cushing, was the first privately funded expedition to the American Southwest. This volume examines the expedition through the diaries of two participants who fell in love on the expedition: the field secretary, Fred Hodge, and the expedition artist, Margaret Magill—who was also Cushing’s sister-in-law. It also presents the first biographical treatment of Hodge, who became a major figure in early twentieth-century anthropology. The book’s first two sections chronicle the field operations of the expedition, while the third describes the long anthropological career of Hodge after the end of the expedition. Through deep research in primary and secondary sources and archival materials, the book details both the daily operations of the expedition and the growing romantic relationship between Hodge and Magill.

For those interested in settlements in early Arizona and Zuni Pueblo, the book provides rare insights into the lives of both men and women, offering an intimate view of an enterprise that is now considered a foundation of Hohokam archaeology—even as it reveals deep love and persistent personal conflicts.

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Once Upon the Permafrost
Knowing Culture and Climate Change in Siberia
Susan Alexandra Crate
University of Arizona Press, 2021
Once Upon the Permafrost is a longitudinal climate ethnography about “knowing” a specific culture and the ecosystem that culture physically and spiritually depends on in the twenty-first-century context of climate change.

The author, anthropologist Susan Alexandra Crate, has spent three decades working with Sakha, the Turkic-speaking horse and cattle agropastoralists of northeastern Siberia, Russia. Crate reveals Sakha’s essential relationship with alaas, the foundational permafrost ecosystem of both their subsistence and cultural identity. Sakha know alaas via an Indigenous knowledge system imbued with spiritual qualities. This counters the scientific definition of alaas as geophysical phenomena of limited range. Climate change now threatens alaas due to thawing permafrost, which, entangled with the rural changes of economic globalization, youth out-migration, and language loss, make prescient the issues of ethnic sovereignty and cultural survival.

Through careful integration of contemporary narratives, on-site observations, and document analysis, Crate argues that local understandings of change and the vernacular knowledge systems they are founded on provide critical information for interdisciplinary collaboration and effective policy prescriptions. Furthermore, she makes her message relevant to a wider audience by clarifying linkages to the global permafrost system found in her comparative research in Mongolia, Arctic Canada, Kiribati, Peru, and Chesapeake Bay, Virginia. This reveals how permafrost provides one of the main structural foundations for Arctic ecosystems, which, in turn, work with the planet’s other ecosystems to maintain planetary balance.

Metaphorically speaking, we all live on permafrost.

 
[more]

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A Passion for Cooperation
Adventures of a Wide-Ranging Scientist
Robert Axelrod
University of Michigan Press, 2023
A Passion for Cooperation is the exciting autobiography of Robert Axelrod, one of the most acclaimed and wide-ranging scientists of the last fifty years. After being recognized by President Kennedy for being a promising young scientist while in high school, Axelrod built a career dedicated to collaborating with business school professors, international relations scholars, political scientists, computer scientists, and even evolutionary biologists and cancer researchers. Fifty years later, he was honored by President Obama with the National Medal of Science for scientific achievement and leadership and his work has been referred to as the gold standard of interdisciplinary research. 

Yet Axelrod’s autobiography is not just an account of his wide-ranging passion for cooperation. It reveals his struggles to overcome failures and experience the joys of gaining new insights into how to achieve cooperation. A Passion for Cooperation recounts Robert Axelrod’s adventures talking with the leader of the organization Hamas, the Prime Minister of Israel, and the Foreign Minister of Syria. Axelrod also shares stories of being hosted in Kazakhstan by senior Soviet retired generals and visiting China with well-connected policy advisors on issues of military aspects of cyber conflict. Through stories of the difficulties and rewards of interdisciplinary collaborations, readers will discover how Axelrod’s academic and practical work have enriched each other and demonstrated that opportunities for cooperation are much greater than generally thought. 
[more]

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Patty’s Journey
From Orphanage To Adoption And Reunion
Donna Scott Norling
University of Minnesota Press, 1998

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The Perils of Normalcy
George L. Mosse and the Remaking of Cultural History
Karel Plessini
University of Wisconsin Press, 2014
A taboo-breaker and a great provocateur, George L. Mosse (1918–99) was one of the great historians of the twentieth century, forging a new historiography of culture that included brilliant insights about the roles of nationalism, fascism, racism, and sexuality. Jewish, gay, and a member of a culturally elite family in Germany, Mosse came of age as the Nazis came to power, before escaping as a teenager to England and America. Mosse was innovative and interdisciplinary as a scholar, and he shattered in his groundbreaking books prevalent assumptions about the nature of National Socialism and the Holocaust. He audaciously drew a link from bourgeois respectability and the ideology of the Enlightenment—the very core of modern Western civilization—to the extermination of the European Jews.
            In this intellectual biography of George Mosse, Karel Plessini draws on all of Mosse's published and unpublished work to illuminate the origins and development of his groundbreaking methods of historical analysis and the close link between his life and work. He redefined the understanding of modern mass society and politics, masterfully revealing the powerful influence of conformity and political liturgies on twentieth-century history. Mosse warned against the dangers inherent in acquiescence, showing how identity creation and ideological fervor can climax in intolerance and mass murder—a message of continuing relevance.
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The Power of the Between
An Anthropological Odyssey
Paul Stoller
University of Chicago Press, 2008
It is the anthropologist’s fate to always be between things: countries, languages, cultures, even realities. But rather than lament this, anthropologist Paul Stoller here celebrates the creative power of the between, showing how it can transform us, changing our conceptions of who we are, what we know, and how we live in the world.

Beginning with his early days with the Peace Corps in Africa and culminating with a recent bout with cancer, The Power of the Between is an evocative account of the circuitous path Stoller’s life has taken, offering a fascinating depiction of how a career is shaped over decades of reading and research. Stoller imparts his accumulated wisdom not through grandiose pronouncements but by drawing on his gift for storytelling. Tales of his apprenticeship to a sorcerer in Niger, his studies with Claude Lévi-Strauss in Paris, and his friendships with West African street vendors in New York City accompany philosophical reflections on love, memory, power, courage, health, and illness.

Graced with Stoller’s trademark humor and narrative elegance, The Power of the Between is both the story of a distinguished career and a profound meditation on coming to terms with the impermanence of all things.
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Race and Excellence
My Dialogue with Chester Pierce
Ezra E.H. Griffith
University of Iowa Press, 1998

Chester Pierce was born in 1927; by 1952 he was a graduate of the Harvard Medical School. He went on to become president of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology and president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy of Sciences and had an annual research seminar named after him by the National Medical Association.

Founding chair of the Black Psychiatrists of America, Pierce has profoundly affected American psychiatry and the thinking of African American psychiatrists during the last two decades. While recognized for his substantive scholarship on coping with extreme environments such as the South Pole, he is probably best known for his theories regarding how blacks cope with racism in the United States.

In Race and Excellence, Ezra Griffith, also an African American professor of psychiatry, engages Pierce in a dialogue with the goal of clarifying the inter-connection between the personal and the professional in the lives of both black scholars. The text melds the story of Pierce's life and his achievements, with particular attention to his theories about the predictable nature of racist behavior and the responses of oppressed groups. Having earned his doctorate a generation after Pierce, Griffith approaches his conversation with Pierce as a face-to-face meeting between mentor and student. Retelling Pierce's life story ultimately becomes for Griffith an exercise in conceptualizing his own experience. As he writes, “I never just wanted to tell Chet's story; I wanted to work his story out, to measure it, to try it on, to figure out which parts are good for me and other blacks so earnestly seeking heroes.”

[more]

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Recollecting Freud
Isidor Sadger; Edited and introduced by Alan Dundes; Translated by Johanna Micaela Jacobsen and Alan Dundes
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
This eyewitness account by one of Sigmund Freud's earliest students has been rediscovered for twenty-first-century readers. Isidor Sadger's recollections provide a unique window into the early days of the psychoanalytic movement and also illuminate Freud's own struggles: his delight in wit, his attitudes toward Judaism, and his strong opinions concerning lay, nonmedical psychoanalysts.
            As a student, Sadger attended Freud's lectures from 1895 through 1904. Although Sadger was not part of Freud's inner circle, he was a participant observer of Freud's early years as teacher, therapist, and clinician. In 1930, Sadger published the biography Sigmund Freud: Persönliche Erinnerungen, but with the rise of Nazism and World War II, the book was almost lost to the world of psychoanalytic history. Recollecting Freud is a long-lost personal account that provides invaluable insights into Freud and his social, cultural, and intellectual context.
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Remembering Ezra Vogel
Martin K. Whyte and Mary C. Brinton
Harvard University Press, 2022

Ezra F. Vogel (July 11, 1930–December 20, 2020) was one of America’s foremost experts on Asia, mastering the Japanese and Chinese languages and contributing important scholarly works on both countries, and on their relationships with each other and with the world. Starting from modest roots in an immigrant family in a small town in Ohio, he came to Harvard in 1953 to train as a sociologist. He then shifted his focus to Asia, spending almost the entirety of his life at Harvard.

Vogel had a dramatic impact around the world, not only through his scholarship and the students he trained, but also through his friendship and mentoring of journalists, diplomats, business executives, and foreign leaders as well as through his public policy advice and devotion to institution building, at Harvard as well as nationally and internationally. Active until the end, his sudden death provoked outpourings of gratitude and grief from countless people whose lives he had affected. The present volume, containing fond reminiscences from 155 diverse individuals, conveys what was so extraordinary about the character and life of Ezra Vogel.

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Reversing the Gaze
What If the Other Were You?
Geneviève Makaping
Rutgers University Press, 2023
Tired of being scrutinized, criticized, and fetishized for her black skin, Cameroon-born scholar Geneviève Makaping turns the tables on Italy’s white majority, regarding them through the same unsparing gaze to which minorities have traditionally been subjected. As she candidly recounts her experiences—first across Africa and then as a migrant Black woman in Italy—Makaping describes acts of racist aggression that are wearying and degrading to encounter on a daily basis. She also offers her perspective on how various forms of inequality based on race, color, gender, and class feed off each other. Reversing the Gaze invites readers to confront the question of racism through the retelling of everyday occurrences that we might have experienced as victims, perpetrators, or witnesses. 
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Ruth Benedict
Stranger in This Land
By Margaret M. Caffrey
University of Texas Press, 1989

Poet, anthropologist, feminist—Ruth Fulton Benedict was all of these and much more. Born into the last years of the Victorian era, she came of age during the Progressive years and participated in inaugurating the modern era of American life. Ruth Benedict: Stranger in This Land provides an intellectual and cultural history of the first half of the twentieth century through the life of an important and remarkable woman.

As a Lyricist poet, Ruth Benedict helped define Modernism. As an anthropologist, she wrote the classic Patterns of Culture and at one point was considered the foremost anthropologist in the United States—the first woman ever to attain such status. She was an intellectual and an artist living in a time when women were not encouraged to be either. In this fascinating study, Margaret Caffrey attempts to place Benedict in the cultural matrix of her time and successfully shows the way in which Benedict was a product of and reacted to the era in which she lived.

Caffrey goes far beyond providing simple biographical material in this well-written interdisciplinary study. Based on exhaustive research, including access for the first time to the papers of Margaret Mead, Benedict's student and friend, Caffrey is able to put Benedict's life clearly in perspective. By identifying the family and educational influences that so sharply influenced Benedict's psychological makeup, the author also closely analyzes the currents of thought that were strong when Victorianism paralleled the Modernism that figured in Benedict's life work. The result is a richly detailed study of a gifted woman.

This important work will be of interest to students of Modernism, poetry, and women's studies, as well as to anthropologists.

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Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey
Sociologists and Soldiers during the Second World War
Joseph W. Ryan
University of Tennessee Press, 2013
Samuel Stouffer, a little-known sociologist from Sac City, Iowa, is likely not a name World War II historians associate with other stalwart men of the war, such as Eisenhower, Patton, or MacArthur. Yet Stouffer, in his role as head of the Army Information and Education Division’s Research Branch, spearheaded an effort to understand the citizen-soldier, his reasons for fighting, and his overall Army experience. Using empirical methods of inquiry to transform general assumptions about leadership and soldiering into a sociological understanding of a draftee Army, Stouffer perhaps did more for the everyday soldier than any general officer could have hoped to accomplish.
    Stouffer and his colleagues surveyed more than a half-million American GIs during World War II, asking questions about everything from promotions and rations to combat motivation and beliefs about the enemy. Soldiers’ answers often demonstrated that their opinions differed greatly from what their senior leaders thought soldier opinions were, or should be. Stouffer and his team of sociologists published monthly reports entitled “What the Soldier Thinks,” and after the war compiled the Research Branch’s exhaustive data into an indispensible study popularly referred to as The American Soldier. General George C. Marshall was one of the first to recognize the value of Stouffer’s work, referring to The American Soldier as “the first quantitative studies of the . . . mental and emotional life of the soldier.” Marshall also recognized the considerable value of The American Soldier beyond the military. Stouffer’s wartime work influenced multiple facets of policy, including demobilization and the GI Bill. Post-war, Stouffer’s techniques in survey research set the state of the art in the civilian world as well.
    Both a biography of Samuel Stouffer and a study of the Research Branch, Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey illuminates the role that sociology played in understanding the American draftee Army of the Second World War. Joseph W. Ryan tracks Stouffer’s career as he guided the Army leadership toward a more accurate knowledge of their citizen soldiers, while simultaneously establishing the parameters of modern survey research. David R. Segal’s introduction places Stouffer among the elite sociologists of his day and discusses his lasting impact on the field. Stouffer and his team changed how Americans think about war and how citizen-soldiers were treated during wartime. Samuel Stouffer and the GI Survey brings a contemporary perspective to these significant contributions.
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Savage Kin
Indigenous Informants and American Anthropologists
Margaret M. Bruchac
University of Arizona Press, 2018
In this provocative new book, Margaret M. Bruchac, an Indigenous anthropologist, turns the word savage on its head. Savage Kin explores the nature of the relationships between Indigenous informants, such as Gladys Tantaquidgeon (Mohegan), Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca), and George Hunt (Tlingit), and early twentieth-century anthropological collectors, such as Frank Speck, Arthur C. Parker, William N. Fenton, and Franz Boas.

This book reconceptualizes the intimate details of encounters with Native interlocutors who by turns inspired, facilitated, and resisted the anthropological enterprise. Like other texts focused on this era, Savage Kin features some of the elite white men credited with salvaging material that might otherwise have been lost. Unlike other texts, this book highlights the intellectual contributions and cultural strategies of unsung Indigenous informants without whom this research could never have taken place.

These bicultural partnerships transgressed social divides and blurred the roles of anthropologist/informant, relative/stranger, and collector/collected. Yet these stories were obscured by collecting practices that separated people from objects, objects from communities, and communities from stories. Bruchac’s decolonizing efforts include “reverse ethnography”—painstakingly tracking seemingly unidentifiable objects, misconstrued social relations, unpublished correspondence, and unattributed field notes—to recover this evidence. Those early encounters generated foundational knowledges that still affect Indigenous communities today.

Savage Kin also contains unexpected narratives of human and other-­than-human encounters—brilliant discoveries, lessons from ancestral spirits, prophetic warnings, powerful gifts, and personal tragedies—that will move Native and non-Native readers alike.
 
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The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology
Ira E. Harrison, Deborah Johnson-Simon, Erica Lorraine Williams
University of Illinois Press, 2018
After the pioneers, the second generation of African American anthropologists trained in the late 1950s and 1960s. Expected to study their own or similar cultures, these scholars often focused on the African diaspora but in some cases they also ranged further afield both geographically and intellectually. Yet their work remains largely unknown to colleagues and students. This volume collects intellectual biographies of fifteen accomplished African American anthropologists of the era. The authors explore the scholars' diverse backgrounds and interests and look at their groundbreaking methodologies, ethnographies, and theories. They also place their subjects within their tumultuous times, when antiracism and anticolonialism transformed the field and the emergence of ideas around racial vindication brought forth new worldviews. Scholars profiled: George Clement Bond, Johnnetta B. Cole, James Lowell Gibbs Jr., Vera Mae Green, John Langston Gwaltney, Ira E. Harrison, Delmos Jones, Diane K. Lewis, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Oliver Osborne, Anselme Remy, William Alfred Shack, Audrey Smedley, Niara Sudarkasa, and Charles Preston Warren II
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Shifting Borders and a Tattered Passport
Intellectual Journeys of a Mormon Academic
Armand L. Mauss
University of Utah Press, 2012

The life of a Mormon intellectual in the secular academic community is likely to include some contradictions between belief, scholarship, and the changing times. In his memoir, Armand L. Mauss recounts his personal and intellectual struggles—inside and outside the LDS world—from his childhood to his days as a graduate student at UC Berkeley in the 1960s through his many years as a professor.

As an important and influential observer and author in the Mormon intellectual world, Mauss has witnessed how, in attempting to suppress independent and unsponsored scholarship during the final decades of the twentieth century, LDS leaders deliberately marginalized important intellectual support and resources that could have helped, in the twenty-first century, to refurbish the public image of the church. As a sociologist, he notes how the LDS Church, as a large, complex organization, strives to adjust its policies and practices in order to maintain an optimal balance between unique, appealing claims on the one hand and public acceptance on the other. He also discusses national and academic controversies over the New Religious Movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Writing in clear language, Mauss shows how he has navigated the boundaries where his faith and academic life intersect, and reveals why a continuing commitment to the LDS Church must be a product of choice more than of natural or supernatural “proof.”
 

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Sigmund Freud
Matt ffytche
Reaktion Books, 2022
Drawing on the latest research, an engaging and nuanced biography of Freud that argues for his continuing relevance.
 
However much his work has been reviled or contested, Sigmund Freud remains one of the most significant thinkers of the last one hundred and fifty years. He founded psychoanalysis, and his vision of human behavior and the unconscious mind provided a compelling paradigm for the understanding of society for much of the twentieth century.
 
In this gripping new account, Matt ffytche draws on the latest research into Freud’s impact and historical context, making the case for his continuing relevance in analyzing the vagaries, resistances, and desires of the human mind. Engaging and accessible, Sigmund Freud appeals to both students and the general reader, as well as anyone fascinated with mental health, dreams, and the hidden depths of human experience.
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Sir Gardner Wilkinson and His Circle
By Jason Thompson
University of Texas Press, 1992

Following in the footsteps of Napoleon's army, Europeans invaded Egypt in the early nineteenth century to gaze in wonder at the massive, inscrutable remains of its ancient civilizations. One of these travelers was a twenty-four-year-old Englishman, John Gardner Wilkinson. His copious observations of ancient and modern Egyptian places, artifacts, and lifeways, recorded in such widely read publications as Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians and Handbook for Travellers in Egypt, made him the leading early Victorian authority on ancient Egypt and paved the way for thc scientific study of Egyptology.

In this first full-scale biography of Wilkinson (1797-1875), Jason Thompson skillfully portrays both the man and his era. He follows Wilkinson during his initial sojourn in Egypt (1821-1833) as Wilkinson immersed himself in a contemporary Egyptian lifestyle and in study of its ancient past. He shows Wilkinson in his circle of friends—among them Edward William Lane, Robert Hay and Frederick Catherwood. And he traces how Wilkinson continued to use his Egyptian material in the decades following his return to England.

With the rise of professional Egyptology in the middle and later nineteenth century, Sir Gardner Wilkinson came to be viewed as an amateur and his popularity diminished. Drawing upon recently opened sources, Thompson returns Wilkinson to his rightful place within centuries of Egyptian scholarship and assesses both the vision and the limitations of his work. The result is a compelling portrait of a Victorian "gentleman-scholar" and his cultural milieu.

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The Sociology of Howard S. Becker
Theory with a Wide Horizon
Alain Pessin
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Howard S. Becker is a name to conjure with on two continents —in the United States and in France. He has enjoyed renown in France for his work in sociology, which in the United States goes back more than fifty years to pathbreaking studies of deviance, professions, sociology of the arts, and a steady stream of books and articles on method. Becker, who lives part of the year in Paris, is by now part of the French intellectual scene, a street-smart jazz pianist and sociologist who offers an answer to the stifling structuralism of Pierre Bourdieu.

French fame has brought French analysis, including The Sociology of Howard S. Becker, written by Alain Pessin and translated into English by Steven Rendall. The book is an exploration of Becker’s major works as expressions of the freedom of possibility within a world of collaborators. Pessin reads Becker’s work as descriptions and ideas that show how society can embody the possibilities of change, of doing things differently, of taking advantage of opportunities for free action. The book is itself a kind of collaboration—Pessin and Becker in dialogue. The Sociology of Howard S. Becker is a meeting of two cultures via two great sociological minds in conversation.
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Surviving Madness
A Therapist's Own Story
Betty Berzon
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

    Betty Berzon, renowned psychotherapist and author of the bestselling book Permanent Partners, tells her own incredible story here. Berzon’s journey from psychiatric patient on suicide watch—her wrists tethered to the bed rails in a locked hospital ward—to her present role as a groundbreaking therapist and gay pioneer makes for purely compelling reading.
    Berzon is recognized today as a trailblazing co-founder of a number of important lesbian and gay organizations and one of the first therapists to focus on means of developing healthy gay relationships and overcoming homophobia. Her sometimes bumpy road to success never fails to fascinate. Along the way she encounters such luminaries as Anaïs Nin, Eleanor Roosevelt, the Sitwells, Evelyn Hooker, and Paul Monette. Her recollections here provide a collective portrait of her fellow pioneers and a stirring lesson in twentieth-century history.
    It is, however, the intimate story of Berzon’s own private passage toward self-discovery—from mental breakdown and suicide attempts, through hospitalization, eventual triumphant recovery, and her own coming out as an open lesbian at the age of forty—that makes this memoir an urgent, insightful, and deeply emotional testament to human survival.

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Truth's Fool
Derek Freeman and the War over Cultural Anthropology
Peter Hempenstall
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman ignited a ferocious controversy in 1983 when he denounced the research of Margaret Mead, a world-famous public intellectual who had died five years earlier. Freeman's claims caught the attention of popular media, converging with other vigorous cultural debates of the era. Many anthropologists, however, saw Freeman's strident refutation of Mead's best-selling Coming of Age in Samoa as the culmination of a forty-year vendetta. Others defended Freeman's critique, if not always his tone.

Truth's Fool documents an intellectual journey that was much larger and more encompassing than Freeman's criticism of Mead's work. It peels back the prickly layers to reveal the man in all his complexity. Framing this story within anthropology's development in Britain and America, Peter Hempenstall recounts Freeman's mission to turn the discipline from its cultural-determinist leanings toward a view of human culture underpinned by biological and behavioral drivers. Truth's Fool engages the intellectual questions at the center of the Mead–Freeman debate and illuminates the dark spaces of personal, professional, and even national rivalries.
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Two Lucky People
Memoirs
Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman
University of Chicago Press, 1998
In Two Lucky People, Rose and Milton Friedman provide a memorable and lively account of their lives, the people they knew, and the work they shared. Their involvement with world leaders and many of this century's most important public policy issues moves their memoir beyond the merely personal and makes fascinating reading for anyone interested in the history of twentieth-century ideas.

"The Friedmans come across as the last Enlightenment thinkers in a post-modern world. . . . This is a book that restores your faith in reasoned discourse. . . . There really are people who believe in scholarly exchange as a way to discover truth."—David Brooks, New York Times Book Review

"The Friedmans are a feisty couple, who clearly delight in their lives and each other. And shining through their reticence, and their conservatism, is a decency that even liberals will recognize."—Milton and Judith Viorst, Washington Post Book World

"This engaging book recounts the life and contributions of one of America's most influential writers and economists in the second half of the twentieth century. And her husband's no slouch either. . . . An indispensable guide through the evolution of economic thought."—Stephen Moore, National Review

"A thought-provoking book and one rich in history, the personal history of the Friedmans . . . and the cultural and political history of our country."—Steve Huntley, Chicago Sun-Times Books

"[Two Lucky People] is almost like a letter from a couple of old friends—a couple of old friends who had a long, compelling intellectual journey, came to know some of the great world leaders of this century, and had 60 years of happy, supportive marriage."—N. Gregory Mankiw, Fortune

"A rich autobiographical and historical panorama."—William P. Kucewicz, Wall Street Journal

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Weaving a Way Home
A Personal Journey Exploring Place and Story
Leslie Van Gelder
University of Michigan Press, 2008

An inquiry into how we engage with the world, and how solutions to environmental challenges can be found in the heart of our emotional relationships with places

"No one with a working heart will fail to be moved by Van Gelder. With passion and intelligence, she explores the way we story places and places story all life."
---Patrick Curry, Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Kent, and author of Ecological Ethics: An Introduction and Defending Middle-Earth

"With grace and passion Leslie Van Gelder weaves together stories of her own encounters with an amazing variety of places---riverside meadows of Oxford, racially sundered Cyprus, fly-tormented Canadian muskeg, caves stroked by Paleolithic fingertips, derelict Coney Island, grasslands through which lion cubs follow the black tip of their mother’s tail---to show us how Place and Story are the warp and weft of our being as earth-dwellers."
---Tim Robinson, Folding Landscapes, and author of Connemara: Listening to the Wind

"Travel narrative, memoir, literary criticism, and anthropology fuse in this highly original and moving exploration of place and home."
---John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of Home and Pilgrimage to Vallombrosa

"Van Gelder offers her most deeply personal stories as microcosmic examples of universal human experience, thus creating an empathic bond with her reader that conveys power and understanding simultaneously, and stimulates the reader's imagination toward reflection upon similarly personal stories of place. Van Gelder has modeled the relationship between story and place by telling placeful stories, and so has licensed the reader to do the same. Her writing throughout is rich and metaphoric. She is a gifted storyteller and a competent scholar, a combination to be treasured."
---Joseph W. Meeker, Professor Emeritus, College of Arts/Science, Union Institute and University, and author of The Spheres of Life, The Comedy of Survival, and Minding the Earth

Weaving a Way Home is an inquiry into the complex relationship between people, place, and story. In our memories and connections to a place, we are given one of the few opportunities to have deep relationships with place---relationships that cannot be described in words. Place can embody powerful emotions for us, and Leslie Van Gelder argues that we ourselves are places---geographical points possessing unique perspectives---that can feel displaced, replaced, or immovable. While the places of the external world can be accessed through maps and a good GPS system, our emotional landscapes are best reached through the sharing of stories.

In the tradition of writers Lewis Hyde, Barry Lopez, Peter Matthiessen, Joseph Meeker, Steven Mithen, Paul Shepard, Gary Snyder, and Terry Tempest Williams, Van Gelder uses both creative nonfiction narrative and evolutionary biological theory to explore complex terrain. Following Van Gelder's own travels, the book moves from the caves of the Dordogne lit only by the small beam of a flashlight, to an acacia thicket in Mozambique, to a black fly–infested bay inappropriately named Baie de Ha Ha in the inlands of Quebec, to the green line wrapped in barbed wire separating northern and southern Cyprus, to Abu Simbel's empty stone eyes in the Egyptian desert, and finally to the high road above Pelorus Sound on the rocky coasts of New Zealand. The author takes the reader to each place to create a storied landscape and explore new intellectual terrain. Van Gelder shows us that our collections of experiences, unique to us, can only be shared through the articulation of narrative.Weaving a Way Home will appeal to those deeply interested in knowing how we forge relationships with places and how that shapes who we are.

Jacket photographs: Garden gate: © iStockphoto.com/Richard Goerg. Iron fence: Christ Church Meadow in Oxford, Leslie Van Gelder.

Author photograph: Kevin Sharpe

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The Wing of Madness
The Life and Work of R.D. Laing
Daniel Burston
Harvard University Press, 1996

Daniel Burston chronicles Laing's meteoric rise to fame as one of the first media psychogurus of the century, and his spiraling decline in the late seventies and eighties. Here are the successes: Laing's emergence as a unique voice on the psychiatric scene with his first book, The Divided Self, in 1960; his forthright and articulate challenges to conventional wisdom on the origins, meaning, and treatment of mental disturbances; his pioneering work on the families of schizophrenics, Sanity, Madness and the Family (coauthored with A. Esterson). Here as well are Laing's more dubious moments, personal and professional, including the bizarre experiment with psychotic patients at Kingsley Hall. Burston traces many of Laing's controversial ideas and therapeutic innovations to a difficult childhood and adolescence in Glasgow and troubling experiences as an army doctor; he also offers a measured assessment of these ideas and techniques.

The R. D. Laing who emerges from these pages is a singular combination of skeptic and visionary, an original thinker whose profound contradictions have eclipsed the true merit of his work. In telling his story, Burston gives us an unforgettable portrait of an anguished human being and, in analyzing his work, recovers Laing's achievement for posterity.

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