Some Lived Experiences of the 60s Generation of Social Theorists

Excerpt

Alan Sica and Stephen Turner have assembled a lively collection of autobiographies of leaders of the ’60s intellectual generation in sociology who currently form a large component of sociology’s intellectual leadership. They provide an orientation by means of a preface and an introduction and then allow 18 social theorists (all of whom are sociologists) to tell their stories.¹ Also they provide a few “before” and “after” photographs of some of the authors. As Sica points out these theorists “now work in Britain (3), Canada (1), France (2), Germany (2), Italy (1) and the US”; four are women and at least one self identifies as black (pp. 2, 10). The Introduction is especially interesting by virtue of evoking the spirit of the age through citing contemporary magazine accounts. …