" The author, a respected rhetorical critic and eminent stylist, has written a compelling narrative of life in and outside the academy, focusing on how to discover Quality in one’s academic life—a quality that admits the personal and the private into the ‘‘mix’’ of the professional and public self. Not all will have experienced his journey in the same way, but all who have an acute awareness of the rigidity that infects tradition-bound perspectives, and the arrogance of some in maintaining those perspectives in the face of a need to expand our horizons, will profit from his story…Finally, this volume should not only be used as a text in ethnography classes but also as a text for students, faculty, and administrators at all levels. It serves as an example—not as a testament to a life well-lived, but as a testament to the search for that life. Both undergraduate and graduate students will be exposed to an academy of which they are too little aware; and faculty and administrators will be reminded of the need to humanize our institutions…The hopeful message is that being forewarned leads to one choosing the appropriate persona for the occasion, and can turn it into something that, while it challenges the structure that causes the damage, does so in a manner that leaves one’s humanity intact. "
- Raymie E. McKerrow (Ohio University) & Kathleen J. Turner (Davidson College)
" In
Trickster in Tweed: The Search for Quality in Faculty Life,
Tom Frentz wrestles with the alienation, demoralization, isolation, and
anger he experienced over a lifetime as a university professor.
Refusing to give up his quest for a meaningful, high quality life, or
give in to the institutional depression that permeates American
universities in the twenty-first century, Tom turns to personal
narrative and autoethnography to better understand the emotional and
institutional sources of his discontent and to fashion a new story for
himself, one that would allow his own voice to flourish, and make it
possible for him to merge his heart with his head in both teaching and
research. "
- From the Foreword by Arthur P. Bochner, University of South Florida
" This is a powerful, compelling book that is destined to have a
seismic impact. It will be widely read, partly for the critique it
offers of the forces that diminish life and learning within the world
of the academy, partly for its story of a rebellious life lived on the
margins of that world, and partly for the joy, anger, and tragedy of
the personal life it reveals. Beyond these factors, the book is simply
one hell of a good read: I can’t remember when I stayed up so long
beyond bedtime with an academic book simply because I could not put it
down. "
- Michael Osborn, University of Memphis
"
Trickster in Tweed is a tour de force on academic
culture written with a compelling and artful narrative style all its
own. But it is also the story of a latter day Robert Pirsig-inspired
Phaedrus searching not only for Quality but also for voice within an
academy that too often denies or at least depreciates it. The vital
connection between Quality and voice, between denial and depreciation
of one and the demise of the other coupled with his own
self-questioning depression and cancer is perfectly pitched to the
Trickster’s brave discovery that achieving one’s own voice is at once a
lifesaving accomplishment and an important gift of Quality to his
readers and students. "
- H.L. Goodall, Jr., Director, Hugh Downs School of Communication, Arizona State University