This biography of Max Gluckman (1911-1975) is part of a series of pocket introductions to major figures in Euro-American Anthropology. From what I can gather, having now read a couple of them, its editor, Aleksandar Bošković, does not ask authors for much more than a clear, concise life and thought narrative of its hero, which Hugh Macmillan certainly delivers.

Robert Gordon’s brilliant biography (2018), which casts a rather meticulous shadow over this book, should not go unacknowledged, not only because Macmillan relies on it but also because of how they differ. The title of Gordon’s biography, “The Enigma of Max Gluckman,” foregrounds a mysterious figure, whose self-fashioning struggled to overcome obstacles that might have done lesser men in. Macmillan also recognizes his hero’s personal and political ambiguities, but what nevertheless develops is somewhat less puzzling. Here is a sketch of the remarkable life that emerges in the book’s six chapters.

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A Maverick Boasian is a biography of a distinctive and exasperating figure in early American cultural anthropology. Alexander Goldenweiser (1880–1940) was a lesser-known member of the first cohort of Franz Boas’s graduate students at Columbia University. A Russian émigré who did fieldwork among eastern Iroquois, he was the most theoretically oriented of his eminent peer group. He was affectionately referred to as Shoora or, alternatively, as Goldie, by kith and kin—and by his biographer Sergei Kan, who claims that Goldenweiser was Papa Franz’s favorite student, but also his most disappointing one.

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