Content area
Full Text
Required Reading: Sociology's Most Influential Books, edited hy Dan Clawson. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 221 pp. $40.00 cloth. ISBN: 1-55849-152-X. $14.95 paper. ISBN: 1-55849-153-8.
This book came about because Dan Clawson had the clever idea to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Contemporary Sociology (CS) by devoting an entire issue to 10 books judged by the 28-member board of editors to be the most influential books written in the past 25 years. I suspect the board never anticipated that the list of "Required Reading" that eventually appeared would set off enough controversy to warrant the publication of an edited volume to bring closure to the debate. If ever there were a San Andreas fault below the surface of the discipline of sociology, it is the by now well-documented distinction between a book culture and an article culture. As a book writer (who occasionally publishes articles in high-impact journals) in a department dominated by an article culture, I could feel the rumble soon after I posted the list on my office door.
Not only were more than half of the books on the original list not even written by sociologists-specifically Foucault's Discipline and Punishment, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Culture, Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice, Edward Said's Orientalism, Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital, and the...