Prof's Choice

• Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy inAmerica (Doubleday, 1969) Based on the Frenchman's 1830s travels, this remains one of the most penetrating ethnographies of America, especially volume two on the consequences of "equality" for American intellectual life, sentiments, and mores.

• Jules Henry, Culture Against Man (Random House, 1965) This devastating critique of late 1950s American culture explores how the economy, schools, and family foster a "drivenness" in American life that ultimately dehumanizes and discards the "obsolete"in homes for the aged.

• Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in AmericanLife (University of California Press, 1985) This book examines the contradictory tensions in American individualism between personal freedom and community in an increasingly bureaucratized, anonymous society.

• Hervé Varemie, Americans Together:Structured Diversity in a Midwestern Town (Teachers College Press, 1977) Following in de Tocqueville's footsteps, another Frenchman observes American culture in a Wisconsin town.

• Michael Moffat '66, Coming of Age inNew Jersey: College and American Culture (Rutgers University Press, 1989) Alluding in his tide to Margaret Mead's study of adolescence in Samoa, anthropologist Moffat, who attended Dartmouth for a year, probes the mysteries of individualism, friendship, sex, racism, and almost incidentally studying in student life at Rutgers.