[Interview] Charles Derber
Charles Derber is a professor of Sociology at Boston College, a private university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, in the United States. So far, he has written and published 12 books, among them, The Wilding of America (Worth Publishers, 2006); Hidden Power (Berrett-Koehler, 2005); People Before Profit (Picador, 2003) and Corporate Nation (St. Martin's Griffin, 2000). In this interview, Charles Derber talks about the factors which compel him to write. When did you decide you wanted to be a writer? I was trying to get tenure at a major university. That required a book. I also found writing something like a meditation. It calmed me and centered me. I also found it a way to think and communicate about issues that I was passionate about. My first book took five years and I started in the early 1970s. It’s called The Pursuit of Attention and it’s about who talks and who listens in ordinary conversation -- and focuses on how people subtly shift the topic of conversation