Howard L. Sacks

George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist.

Details the intellectual development of George Herbert Mead as a thinker of great originality

Children of the Land: Adversity and Success in Rural America.By Glen H. Elder Jr. and Rand D. Conger. University of Chicago Press, 2000. 408 pp. Cloth,

As a now historical case study, Gordy’s book provides much useful information. Gordy devotes substantive chapters to the destruction of political, information, and musical alternatives, as well as to sociability. In each, he discusses geographically (urban-rural) and generationally differentiated responses to the regime. The Culture of Power in Serbia is more descriptively rich than analytically compelling. Generally, it is an uneven work that would have benefited from closer editorial guidance. For example, the chapter on music cultures is considerably more developed and novel than the others and brings a welcome dimension to the study of authoritarian (nationalist) regimes. Yet it is unclear why there is no discussion of other expressive cultural forms such as theater, art, or literature. Stylistically, there are striking redundancies, arbitrary usage of Serbian words, and so on. More unsatisfying, Gordy does not situate his theoretical argument in the broader context of the region’s processes of regime transformation, whether “velvet” or violent. As such, Gordy’s case study may seem too specialized for many readers. Nonetheless, The Culture of Power in Serbia itself presents an alternative political sociological/cultural reading of the Milosevic regime’s tenacity that contributes to the interdisciplinary literature on the the role of the “state against society,” and of civil society against the state. In the end, after thirteen long years, the power of culture in Serbia seems to have prevailed over Milosevic’s culture of power.