What are we participating in and how are we choosing to participate in it?

How do typical ways of thinking about gender blind us to what's going on?

What can men and women do to make a difference?

Johnson writes as a man passionately committed to the belief that oppression is not an inevitable feature of human life, and that each of us makes it matter more than we can ever know. He offers a practical, compassionate, and readable guide to understanding what we're stuck in and how to search for a way out.

The Forest and the Trees is an account of how sociological practice finds its way into almost every aspect of life, from headlines in the morning paper to the experience of growing older to the ravages of social oppression. It is about things small and things large, things simple and things more complex than we can imagine.

The Forest and the Trees flows from the tradition of Peter Berger's Invitation to Sociology and C. Wright Mills' Sociological Imagination. It will engage students and teachers alike with a rare and powerful combination of a scholar's feel for the discipline, and a gifted writer's voice that moves and inspires with the immediacy of lived experience, a clear and accessible articulation of the tools of the trade, and a passionate commitment to the promise of sociology to revolutionize how people think about social life and participate in it.