Mills liked to exclaim. He wrote in a vigorous, clear style that rejected the academic caste’s “bloated puffery of Grand Theory,” in sociologist Todd Gitlin’s words. Soon after The Power Elite was published, it began stirring wide debate, catapulting over the ivy-covered walls of academia onto the bestseller list. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, corporate lawyer and presidential adviser Adolf Berle—a member in good standing of the power elite—found “an uncomfortable degree of truth” in Mills’s book but fought off his discomfort by concluding that it was essentially “an angry
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