On My Bookshelf
By Charles V. Willie
People seek many things in the books they choose to read: escape, education, exploration. For Professor Charles Willie, a lifelong sociologist, the books on his shelf not only provide a means to experience people and places he’s never known, they also offer him perspective into ways of society both now and in the past. In this edition of On My Bookshelf, Willie discusses how several books have aided his “comparative analysis.”
In the days of my youth, I was told by teachers that books are like magic carpets that can whisk us away to places we cannot go and introduce us to people we do not know. As I put away childhood imaginations, I turned increasingly to books to corroborate, validate, and even triangulate personal experiences and findings from social science research. Books facilitate comparative analysis. My bookshelf is stacked with all kinds of books — some old and some new, some fiction and some true.
An old book I recently reread is Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Rereading this book as an adult, I discovered that Uncle Tom was a slave with great courage, fully developed emotional intelligence, and empathy for all. He refused to whip a black woman slave as directed by Simon Legree (the mean slave master) saying he would die before he would harm any person in his slave community. And die he did, from a mortal blow to his head by Legree. But, if Uncle Tom sacrificed his life for other slaves, why, then, has the appellation “Uncle Tom” become a naughty name to call a black person? These and other questions pertaining to the sociology of knowledge emerge from rereading old books in contemporary times.
A book that has been on my shelf for more than a generation is Situation Ethics (1966) by Joseph Fletcher. In it, Fletcher identifies two kinds of justice: contributive (responsibility of the individual to the group) and distributive (the responsibility of the group to the individual). Clearly, these two dimensions of justice are complementary; one without the other is incomplete. This book has helped me realize that effective school reform must focus on the individual and the group as complementary entities so that both equity and excellence may be achieved simultaneously.
Recognizing the academic trap of reading only books pertaining to one’s own discipline, my wife, Mary Sue, and I helped organize a book club in Thoreau Hills, the neighborhood in which we live in Concord, Mass. In 2007, our book club selected Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation (2004) by Cokie Roberts and Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (2000) by Joseph J. Ellis. I recommend these books to anyone who wants to understand the evolution of the political system in this nation and its unfinished business as a democracy today.
While Roberts' book was interested in women who influenced the Founding Fathers, she acknowledges that these influentials were elite women. Roberts explains how the women of this era haggled the politicians to “remember the women” and not to deny the means of knowledge for people of the female gender, while building a new nation.
Ellis describes the Revolutionary event “which seemed to be so improbable and at the same time so inevitable.” And he tells us why and how an “elusive” personality like Thomas Jefferson “was claimed by Southern secessionists and Northern abolitionists.” The American Sphinx said that Ellis “restores our most enigmatic national icon[s] to human dimensions.” This is precisely what Ellis did as a wonderful storyteller who includes information about the joys, hurts, and regrets of each of the Founding Brothers and the varying social contexts which nurtured each.
Having read many books about the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, I wondered how South Africa transferred political power without a war. This interest led me to the autobiography of Nelson Mandela titled Long Walk to Freedom (1994). I found Anthony Sampson’s biography, Mandela (1999), also, informative and comprehensive. These two books, when linked with Martha Minow’s book, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History and Genocide and Forgiveness (1998), provide impressive information about the choices facing societies which emerge from a period of mass violence, and the benefit of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that was created by Parliament in the Republic of South Africa in 1995. I wondered, after reading these three books, why the United States and other nations similarly situated have not made deliberate effort to learn from nation-states like South Africa.
Two books on my shelf regarding the way of life of black and of white families enabled me to obtain a realistic conception of both kinds of families. Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier in Black Bourgeoisie (1957) described black, middle-class families as living in “a world of make believe,” striving for status and prestige by way of conspicuous consumption and devoting much time to recreational activity, including joining many social clubs. Fortunately, I, also, had on my shelf A.B. Hollingshead’s book, Elmtown’s Youth (1949). He reported that middle-class, white families yearned for a big new family car and other forms of conspicuous consumption, including membership in the country club for “golf and gossip” and other markers of prestige. I concluded that both black, middle-class families and white, middle-class families should be classified as living in “a world of make believe” or neither group should be so classified.
Thus, my bookshelf not only takes me to places I cannot go and introduces me to people I do not know, it also helps me to adjudicate conflicting opinions by way of comparative analysis.
About the Article
A shorter version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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Photo by Martha Stewart
