BOOKS
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Comparative Literature department at Queens College . In his brief
life, Zweig did so many and such varied things that even a partial list
of them reads like one of Whitman's catalogues. Repeatedly he was
drawn to adventure - a central theme of his life and his writing. This
book is among his last and best adventures, for few books could have
been so challenging to write, and few could have been so well–
written . It is a gifted book, and an important book, and a very gen–
erous book. I've often thought that, in one of the several resemblances
which unite Zweig and Whitman, "This is no book, / Who touches
this, touches a man."
ALAN HELMS
THE PUZZLE OF C. WRIGHT MILLS
C.
WRIGHT MILLS: AN AMERICAN UTOPIAN.
By
Irving Louis Horo–
witz.
The Free Press. $24.95.
C . W right Mills was a lightning rod for some of the most
powerful currents which surged through American social science
and political ideology in the 1950s and 1960s. Irving Louis Horo–
witz-Professor of Sociology and Political Science at Rutgers Uni–
versity and the editor of
Society,
ajournal devoted to bridging the gap
between social scientists and a wider, educated public - has spent
two decades gathering the factual evidence and analytic perspectives
from which Mills's life might be evaluated.
Horowitz has chosen to divide his book into three sections. The
first , "Settings," sketches the various intellectual contexts in which
Mills moved, from his undergraduate education in Texas, on
through his graduate training at the University of Wisconsin, a stint
a t the University of Maryland during World War II, and finally the
seventeen years spent in and around Columbia University until his
death in 1962. While at Columbia, such luminaries as Paul Lazars–
feld, Robert Merton, Daniel Bell, Jacques Barzun, Lionel Trilling,
and Richard Hofstadter became his friends. At the service held in
his memory , the common refrain of his assembled colleagues was "I
used to be his friend, but we became somewhat estranged." Mills's
progressive estrangement from his colleagues grew out of conflicting
conceptions of intellectual responsibility, and it is as a chronicle of
