Recommended by Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology
I first came across that book in the year between high school and college. I pulled it from the library shelf thinking it was going to be a book on mythology and discovered, of course, that it is a philosophical treatise, which I immediately felt a strong affinity to. Of course I didn’t understand most of it when I first read it. I took it with me to college and basically read it over and over again right through college until I felt I understood it, through the process of absorption. It greatly influenced me.