Hello, Prestige Head

Hello, Prestige Head and welcome to American Prestige.

I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade Derek Davison.

And we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today, Charles Derber, Charles, a professor of sociology at Boston College, and the author of many books,

including Bonfire, American Sociocide, Broken Relations, and The Quest for Democracy.

So, Charles, thank you so much for joining us. I just want to say I really enjoyed this one.

It's nice. I read a lot of sociology because I wrote an intellectual history,

intellectual biography of a sociologist, and it's just nice to think in like these mega macro terms

in a way that historians are very uncomfortable

to our own gentleman doing these days.

But it was a really fun book to read, and thank you for joining us.

Yeah, well, thanks for having me.

And, you know, it's written, because it's dealing with really big political issues, but it's also

rooting them in very personal issues about relationships and the nature of social connections

and social cohesion. I think it's a book that hopefully people will find easily, you know,

accessible and personally very relevant for their, for their thinking of it. It's a light read about how America is

tearing itself. Yeah, I mean, this is basically like the undercurrent of our show, so it's really nice

to have you on. But why don't we just dive into it. Why don't we start, you begin with this metaphor,

the great societal bonfire. And so why don't we talk about, and of course the name of the

book is bonfire, so why don't you talk about that metaphor, what you mean by it, and what do you

see happening in American society right now? So, you know, the original, I'm note in the book

that the British word bonfire, you know, we have a positive association with it,

...