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The Sociologically Examined Life: Pieces of the Conversation. 2d ed. Michael Schwalbe. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company. 2001. 232 pages. $20.00.
Imagine one of your sociology majors at his or her graduation party and consider the moment when Uncle Fred saunters over with "So, I hear you majored in sociology...what's that all about?" Not a simple question and one, I suspect, not many graduates could answer with aplomb. Yet, students who understand Schwalbe's concept of sociological mindfulness, persuasively introduced in this skillfully written volume, will probably handle Uncle Fred quite well.
This second edition of The Sociologically Examined Life maintains its position in a cluster of introductory primers such as Lemert's Social Things: An Introduction to the Sociological Life, Johnson's The Forest and the Trees, and Berger's classic, Invitation to Sociology. It is a call to sociology that inspires students to pay attention to the social world in a way that is both meaningful personally and important collectively.
The theme of the book is sociological mindfulness-paying attention, not taking for granted, seeing from a different and sometimes uncomfortable perspective. The significance of mindfulness is gracefully threaded through chapters that examine a well-crafted set of topics: social construction of reality, socialization, interaction, causality, power, inequality, patterns of social life, presentation of self in media and images, and the study of social life. While the concept of mindfulness itself is inexact, the explanations are lucid and straightforward. "When we are sociologically mindful we try to see how the past delivers us into the present moment, and what the present moment tells us about the past" (p. 37). "Being sociologically mindful is a way to see how what we become as people depends on the nature of our ties to others" (p. 64).
Schwalbe selects examples appropriate for student readers, provides clarity without...