C WRIGHT MILLS AN AMERICAN UTOPIAN

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Summary: Insightful & Absorbing Biography of Great American Academic
Review: I happened upon this wonderful biography and overview of sociologist C. Wright Mills written by the eminent sociologist Irving L. Horowitz several years ago while browsing through the stacks in a Cambridge book store, and spent the next weekend glued to my easy chair reading this quite interesting, sympathetic, yet still very objective biography of a very controversial academic. Mills was a towering, even legendary figure in American academic sociology at mid-century, and just about everything he did was provocative, trend setting, and often downright outrageous.

This iconoclastic motorcycle-riding monster of a man (he was well over six feet and quite imposing physically) refused to be typecast, constrained, or politically correct even in the depths of the straight-laced '50s. There is an amusing story about him most graduate students have heard various versions of regarding Columbia University's vain attempts to get him into line. Mills love to teach sans tie or suit coat in an open white collared shirt and slacks. Evidently someone complained he was not meeting professional dress standards, and the Dean told him he must henceforth always wear a coat and tie in classroom. Sure enough the next day Mills showed up to teach class attired in a suit with tie dutifully tied around his neck, but with no shirt on!

Mills' prolific published work was also very controversial, from "White Collar", a well documented description of the nature of the emerging affluent American middle class, to "The Power Elite", a hard-hitting critique of the nature of wealth, status and power in the United States, to "The Sociological Imagination", an articulate and approachable appeal to a return to classic sociological perspectives and avoiding the twin horns of what he termed to be a foolish and pointless excessive focus on either "high theory" or "research methods" rather than on important and cogent sociological analysis.

Horowitz threads through Mills extraordinary life and times, and paints a not altogether glowing personality behind the bravado, brilliance, and boldness. Mills sometimes was thoughtless, tactless, and cruel to those around him, and could be close to egomaniacal about getting what he felt was his share of the credit. Yet no one can deny the sheer laser power of his piercing intellect, or his willingness to take on the establishment and tell things the way he saw them, often to the great detriment of his academic career. This is a worthwhile, carefully researched, and absolutely entertaining biography and overview of a man and his work. Enjoy.