No comments about Lyulph Stanley: A Study in Educational Politics.

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No comments about Geoffrey Alley, Librarian: His Life and Work.

No comments about In and Out of the University and Adversity: Applications for Living.

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No comments about Guest Appearances & Other Travels: In Time & Space.

1 comments about Joyful Trek: A Texan's Times and Travels.

1. I didn't know until this morning that Amazon sales ranks went as low as 5,100,000th. That is the rank assigned to my father's toothsome memoir, "Joyful Trek." Why a book this readable and informative should sink into those gloomy depths, I don't well understand. My dad, Robert H. Williams, was a West Texas farm boy who grew up to go to Harvard (all right, for only one semester, but that was on a graduate fellowship), to report for newspapers in Boston, Dallas, Denver, and elsewhere, to sail around the world as a radio operator in the Merchant Marine, to see combat in both world wars, and to invent a mailing machine and sell it for enough that he could finally return to Texas and be a rancher. His memoir is full of detailed and zestful stories. Here is a sample, set in 1921, when he was job-hunting in Galveston, Texas:
   
   "Just about sundown, passing for the nth time a sign which said 'SEAMAN'S EMPLOYMENT BUREAU,' I stuck my head in the door. I did not especially want to go to sea, and how could there be a vacancy when hundreds of old seadogs were on the beach.
   
   "A big man about fifty with bulging midsection was talking on the telephone. I presently got his drift: a ship was looking for a radio operator. I had little notion of the duties of a ship's radio operator and not the slightest knowledge of the kind of wireless equipment aboard a ship. I was, however, an expert with a key and had a fair knowledge of radio theory and of CW (continuous wave) equipment, meaning equipment using the then-new three-element vacuum tubes. The man on the telephone must have seen that I was listening with interest, and I mumbled, while he was talking, that I had been radio officer for the First Army Air Service. Instantly he said, 'Hold it! I've got you an operator.'
   
   "I was flabbergasted. I tried to tell him that I had no idea what the job required, but he had already hung up. He was not even slightly concerned about my protest. He almost pushed me into a Cadillac parked at the curb and drove me round the bay to the waiting ship. He said he was port captain. As I kept trying to protest, he explained that the important thing to the ship's owners was to have on board a radio operator so the owners could get insurance. In view of my qualifications, for which he simply took my word, asking not a single question, they could sign me on temporarily without a license. That did not entirely satisfy me, but a job was a job. And the sudden vision of the kind of job it might be began to tantalize me."
   
   I give "Joyful Trek" four stars instead of five lest my closeness to the author and his subjects might influence me. But I am sure that if I had never heard of Robert H. Williams I would find his book absorbing--a vivid account of an energetic and imaginative life that took in most of the twentieth century and a bit of the nineteenth.

1 comments about Work and Academic Politics: A Journeyman's Story.

1. Some autobiographers devise fantasies that unwittingly divulge facts. In this autobiographical Work and Academic Politics, William H. Form devises the fantasy that academic sociology is a mediaeval guild. A guild is a kind of trade association in old Europe that enforced a trade monopoly and opposed nontraditional technologies. The unintentionally divulged fact is that sociology is merely an academic trade association operating like a guild instead of a science.
   
   Form is not the only sociologist to use the metaphor of the guild, although he is the only one to my knowledge to employ it approvingly. In the "Introduction" to their book, Sociology on Trial, Maurice Stein and Arthur Vidich say that sociologists form professional associations organized to perform the classical functions of a guild - regulation of admission, monopolization of employment opportunity, control and expansion of marketing, and the development of occult terminologies - with the result that the task of sociology gets lost. Form's book amounts to a confession of guilt in sociology's trial.
   
   As a nonsociologist let me submit the following brief as an amicus curiae in this trial: I speak as a witness from personal experience. In 1981 I had submitted a paper to the American Sociological Review, the official journal of the American Sociological Association, while Form was editor. The paper set forth a dynamic model estimated statistically over fifty years of sociologically relevant historical data collected by U.S. government, and developed mechanically with an artificial-intelligence discovery system. In simulations the model exhibited damped oscillations converging in a stable equilibrium growth path, which is due to intergenerational negative-feedback cultural lags among the interacting social institutions. It shows empirically that the five basic institutions of our macrosociety interact to promote macrosocial consensus stability, if per capita real gross domestic product grows at four percent or more annually, and if internal migration is unrestricted so the labor force can exploit economic opportunities.
   
   Form rejected the paper with two referee criticisms. The first showed abysmal ignorance of academic philosophy of science. The second stated that the paper did not reflect sociology's traditions and called it an "empiricist venture". I submitted replies, to which Form responded citing his "folkways". In his Work and Academic Politics Form summarizes his own alternative "organizational approach" to institutional analysis, which exhibits no empirical modeling.
   
   I believe that Form's indulging in his Mediaeval guild fantasy while editor of the American Sociological Review has had a debilitating effect on American academic sociology's information pool comparable to that of incest on the gene pool of a small isolated aboriginal tribe. It has produced a sterile monoculture. Sociological thought is inbred and conformist. Academic sociologists need remedial education in mathematics, statistics, computer systems, and most importantly philosophy of science. I believe that this book is too self-serving to be interesting even to historians of sociology. In fact I believe that it is worthless. The sociologist reader would benefit more from an undergraduate course in philosophy of science.
   
   Readers interested in my further comments are invited to read my book titled History of Twentieth-Century Philosophy of Science at my web site philsci, and to read my other reviews on the Amazon web site.
   
   Thomas J. Hickey

1 comments about Crossroads: Journey to Wholeness.

1. I loved this book. Its a tear jerker about what one man went through to help find himself and his sexual identity while having a wife and kids in tow. Wonderful book

No comments about Stepping Inside the Classroom Through Personal Narratives.