Books: The Big Bad Americans

THE POWER ELITE (423 pp.) — C. Wright Mills—Oxford ($6).

As any undergraduate knows, a sociologist is a man who is daily astonished by the commonplace. Usually, this professional sense of wonder finds its outlet in recording masses of data and using them to suggest trends, shifts in manners and mores, and the like. Occasionally one comes along who, like Tho stein Veblen (The Theory of the Leisure Class), gives society a therapeutic, though not necessarily accurate, boot in the pants. But a few of them suffer from a rare though virulent occupational disease. They become hectoring critics...