Finding Out

For more than fifty years Leo Bogart has been a name of distinction in the little-understood field of social research. He has spent a long professional career investigating the public's opinions, preferences, and behavior, working in an improbable medley of places and problems. Some of his remarkable studies were done out of personal curiosity (the American reaction to the Holocaust), others on assignment (the public response to the TV quiz scandals). Together they fall under two themes: the clash of cultures and the effects of mass communications. To Finding Out, Mr. Bogart brings not only analytical skills but a storyteller's art. His memoir is interlarded with excerpts from some of his most interesting reports-for Macy's, Standard Oil, Revlon, McCann-Erickson, the Defense Department; but some readers will be more entertained by his accounts of the rich and famous with whom he shared a conference table-Charles Revson, Paul Lazarsfeld, Elmo Roper, Marion Harper, Leo Lowenthal, Emerson Foote, and many others. He has been over the years a prescient observer of the influence of the mass media on American habits, and a sharp analyzer of the social dynamics of American culture in its myriad manifestations. Finding Out reflects his astute appraisal of the mass society that America has become in the last half-century.