Book Review: Ali Shariati: Expanding the Sociological Canon

Abstract

books that would not have been published under the old regime. Adam Yamey, a retired dentist and son of an LSE Professor, has published, through Lulu, a self-publishing company discussed in the book, several books about London, the history of places in Britain, the social movements of the Indian diaspora, travel in the Balkans, his great-grandfather, who was a Jewish South African politician, and other historical topics with a strong “social” content. His blog and webpage (https://adam-yamey-writes.com) are nicely professional and indistinguishable from the pages digitally competent academics produce. With books and pages like this the gap between the products of academic publishing and self-publishing narrows to almost nothing, especially as traditional publishers seek “content” to market to libraries as parts of subscription digital services and off-load more of the work of promotion and production to authors, and intermediate forms, such as “presses” run by academic libraries with instant free downloading, emerge. Given the turmoil over the costs of open access and the expense of academic publishing, one wonders whether the gap will simply vanish. Some academics have taken the leap already, such as the late Hans Zetterberg, who used Amazon’s CreateSpace. Perhaps this is the technological foundation for the democratization of intellectual life, and the decentering of universities and celebrity intellectuals.