HUMPING MY DRUM by J.A.Barnes

PUBLISHER'S DESCRIPTION: After a lifetime of not keeping a diary, John Barnes has reconstructed his past from a good memory and those few documents that do record his life and times. His story starts with his childhood in Reading, his schooldays and undergraduate career. Although six years of war interrupted his academic progress, they gave him experiences in the Fleet Air Arm that may have prepared him for the rigors of his first anthropological fieldwork in Northern Rhodesia.

The life of an academic is seldom smooth and various universities in England and Australia augmented his scholastic duties with ample tests of his diplomatic and political skills. In pages crowded with the names of colleagues, friends, family and rivals, Barnes brings a social scientist's eye to bear on the disciplines of anthropology and sociology themselves.