This is a study of a progressive law firm and its three partners. The firm was founded in 1936 and existed until the death of one partner in 1965. The partners were harassed by the FBI primarily for defending labor union members and leaders and the defense of both. The firm's primary client was Harry Bridges, the long term President on the International Longshoreman's and Warehouseman's Union (ILWU). The irony was that the more the FBI persecuted labor unions, the more business the firm had from those harassed by the FBI. During this time the FBI was primarily interested in controlling the Communist Party. While the clients of the firm were sometimes Communists, the law partners were not Communist Party members. In both of these ways the FBI was wasting its time in persecuting this firm. Although the primary data used involved existing records (for example all of the partners had extensive FBI files), we also interviewed colleagues and relatives of the partners.

This book is a biography of University of California-Berkeley sociology professor Troy Duster. Troy Duster received an MA and PhD in sociology from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Duster is a black man who was born in South Chicago. His maternal grandmother is the famous Ida B. Wells. He initially had a research interest in the sociology of law and later in human genetics. He worked with approximately 100 graduate students at Berkeley, all minority students. Each of his research interests had a special slant given that Troy Duster is an African American. Troy Duster has always been firmly committed to the idea that race is a sociological not a biological concept.

Edwin Sutherland is the acknowledged father of American criminology. This is the first full-length analysis of his work and his person. Unlike the European schools of criminology, which sought to locate deviant behavior within the deep structures of the economy, Sutherland eschewed such explanations in favor of proximate and observable causes. He located the sources of crime in the association and interaction of specific groups of people. For Sutherland, crime as a way of life results from an individual's attachment to criminals for whom criminal acts are a measure of success no less than a way of life.

In a series of publications, Sutherland expanded the horizons of the classic "Chicago School" of interactionists, and in the process founded criminology as a separate area of research while locating it firmly within sociology. As the authors show, Sutherland's work was inspired by strong moral concerns and a sense of the needs of society for social order without falling prey to either blaming the victim or pandering to sentiment about the joys of criminal life. In this sense, he is a model of the sociological tradition long deserving of the biography acknowledging his role as a master and pioneer.

Yet Gaylord and Galliher have written more than an intellectual biography. They take seriously the need to fit Sutherland and his "theory of differential association" into a social and historical context. They are also aware and critically straightforward about the limitations of Sutherland's work in criminology, but place both his achievements and their limitations in a fully developed analytical context.

Laud Humphreys (1930-1988) was a pioneering and fearless sociologist, an Episcopal priest, and a civil rights, gay, and antiwar activist. In graduate school during the late 1960s, he conducted extensive fieldwork in public restrooms in a St. Louis city park to discover patterns of impersonal sex among men. He published the results in "Tearoom Trade." Three decades later the book still triggers many debates about the ethics of his research methods. In 1974, he was the first sociologist to come out as gay. "Laud Humphreys: Prophet of Homosexuality and Sociology" examines the groundbreaking work through the life of a complex man and the life of the man through his controversial work. It is an invaluable contribution to sociology and a fascinating record of a courageous life.

In biographical essays dedicated to addicts, Keys (political science, West Texas A&M U.) and Galliher (sociology, U. of Missouri) focus more on the drug expert's career than personal life (1905-) though a few photos are included. Influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology, Lindesmith is best known for his theory of Opiate Addiction (1947) and drug policy reform stand for treating addicts as ill rather than as criminals (The Addict and the Law, 1965). Appends a bibliography of Lindesmith's writings, a summary of his unpublished papers, and statistics on his citations in the Social Sciences Citation Index (1966-94).