Volume 10, Number 10 · May 23, 1968
The Way We Live Now
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
III-at-Ease in Compton
by Richard M. Elman
Pantheon, 207 pp., $5.95
The Levittowners
by Herbert J. Gans
Pantheon, 474 pp., $7.95
The Way It Spozed to Be
by James Herndon
Simon & Schuster, 188 pp., $4.50
These must be bad days for historians with literary interests. They, alone among social scientists, cannot hope to participate in the situations and events that engage their attention. The most serious writing about social processes today seems to be by persons who took part in them at least as journalists. Academic writing in the social sciences tends, by comparison, to seem more lifeless than ever. The kind of sociology that carries conviction today is really anthropological; to have any impact the sociologist must function as an ethnographer to the group or institution he is studying.
Review, 4947 words
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