{"product_id":"a-joyfully-serious-man-9780691204406","title":"A Joyfully Serious Man","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Winner of the History of Sociology and Social Thought Book Award, American Sociological Association\"\u003cbr\u003e\"Bortolini's weaving of biography with the interpretation of a lifetime's intellectual labor into a narrative culminates in a picture of Bellah that brings together large‐scale themes with telling detail both familiar and unfamiliar ... [this] terrific book is likely to be the first one to which scholars turn for a rich examination of Bellah's life for a very long time.\"\u003cb\u003e---Susan E. Henking, \u003ci\u003eJournal of the History of Behavioral Sciences\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bortolini has produced what one imagines will prove to be a matchless achievement.\"\u003cb\u003e---Bryan S. Turner, \u003ci\u003eJournal of Classical Sociology\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Matteo Bortolini has written the definitive biography of the American sociologist Robert Neelly Bellah.\"\u003cb\u003e---Chad Alan Goldberg, \u003ci\u003eCivic Sociology\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bortolini weaves the strands together effortlessly.  Personal loss, friendship, love, and grief are neither afterthoughts nor drivers of this narrative of a life.  Rather we come to appreciate how the life and the mind worked together—sometimes in conflict, sometimes in sync.  In a standard intellectual biography, life is often the background for thought.  In this book, there is no distinction between them.\"\u003cb\u003e---Joan Scott, \u003ci\u003eCivic Sociology\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Robert Neely Bellah makes an excellent subject for a biography, and Matteo Bortolini has written a fascinating biography of him that illuminates his life, his work, and his times all at once.\"\u003cb\u003e---Philip Gorski, \u003ci\u003eThe Hedgehog Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bortolini's terrific book is likely to be the first one to which scholars turn for a rich examination of Bellah's life for a very long time.\"\u003cb\u003e---Susan E. Henking, \u003ci\u003eJournal of the History of Behavioral Sciences\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A helpful and enjoyable biography of the American scholar Robert Bellah.\"\u003cb\u003e---Evan Kuehn, \u003ci\u003eReading Religion\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bortolini's account of [Bellah's] life is a major achievement for its author, an invaluable companion to Bellah's writings, and indispensable reading for anyone who wants to understand Bellah, his thought, and his times.\"\u003cb\u003e---Chad Alan Goldberg, \u003ci\u003eSociological Forum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Matteo Bortolini has made a remarkable contribution to postwar intellectual and social history, using as its prism the trajectory of one scholar to show some of the complex and conflicting tendencies of the time. I believe his book is a resource that any future intellectual or social history of the period would find relevant, and perhaps even indispensable.\"\u003cb\u003e---Arvind Rajagopal, \u003ci\u003eCivic Sociology\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"While the book presents a persuasive, if subtle, plea to revive [Bellah’s] hermeneutic insights, another of its many virtues—likely to ruffle far fewer feathers—is that it serves to make vivid what it is about the sociological imagination that makes it so dazzlingly irresistible. For this alone, \u003ci\u003eA Joyfully Serious Man\u003c\/i\u003e deserves a wide readership.\"\u003cb\u003e---Galen Watts, \u003ci\u003eContemporary Sociology\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"As Matteo Bortolini’s beautiful biography shows over and over, the importance of intellectual curiosity is the ultimate lesson of Bellah’s life and work.\"\u003cb\u003e---David Yamane, \u003ci\u003eInternational Sociology Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bortolini, in this outstanding biography, introduces the readers to not only the oeuvre of a distinguished public intellectual, but also to his personhood, which, amidst personal calamity, could still pave a way as a fierce and passionate independent intellectual.\"\u003cb\u003e---Alisha Saikia, \u003ci\u003eReligious Studies Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"To my knowledge, very few, if any, sociologists born in the 20th century have so far been the subject of a more documented biography than Matteo Bortolini’s \u003ci\u003eA Joyfully Serious Man\u003c\/i\u003e, which is additional evidence of Bellah’s importance for new generations of sociologists.\"\u003cb\u003e---Federico Brandmayr, \u003ci\u003eThe American Sociologist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"One of the richest aspects of Bortolini’s book is the way in which it enables us to see Robert Bellah against the backdrop of his times, to see his intellectual projects and his character shaped by the events and institutions he lived through.\"\u003cb\u003e---Laura Ford, \u003ci\u003eThe American Sociologist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Reading Bortolini on how Bellah first formulated, then had to defend, and then finally abandoned civil religion, encouraged me to think more systematically about issues that I find inherent in the public-ness of certain types of ideas generally.\"\u003cb\u003e---Rhys Williams, \u003ci\u003eThe American Sociologist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"On a second outsider puzzle of interest – Bellah as an emblematic case of mid-century American academic – Bortolini is conspicuously successful. Bellah’s life provides an exceedingly well-documented example of a particular generation of social scientists in America: those who were born in the interwar period and educated in the immediate postwar decades; who were wafted by the explosive growth of academia during the period 1945–1970; and who suffered in their academic primes the rapid transformations of America that took place from 1960 to 1980.\"\u003cb\u003e---Andrew Abbott, \u003ci\u003eThe American Sociologist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eA Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah\u003c\/i\u003e will be the envy of social scientists and historians who write in the genre of biography, and it will long set the gold-standard for scholarship of this kind.\"\u003cb\u003e---Charles Camic, \u003ci\u003eThe American Sociologist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I think that you will relish the encounter that is available here with Bob Bellah. We owe a debt of gratitude to Matteo Bortolini for his wonderful portrait of this joyfully serious man.\"\u003cb\u003e---Peter Blum, \u003ci\u003eTradition and Discovery\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bortolini skillfully and compassionately balances the personal, academic, and cultural elements that comprised Bellah’s life, and presents his theories in understandable and accessible terms.\"\u003cb\u003e---Brian Bromberger, \u003ci\u003eGay \u0026amp; Lesbian Review Worldwide\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"Princeton University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49403893186903,"sku":"9780691204406","price":30.4,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780691204406.jpg?v=1730484816","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/a-joyfully-serious-man-9780691204406","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}