APRIL 2000: CLASS NOTES (print version)
BOOKS
Biography and Letters
Patricia Cline Cohen, AB'68, The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York (Knopf, Vintage). Cohen reconstructs the career of Jewett, a literary New York courtesan whose 1836 murder sparked journalistic sensationalism surrounding the event and the trial of Jewett's lover.
Sherrie L. Lyons, PhD'90, Thomas Henry Huxley: The Evolution of a Scientist (Prome- theus Books). In this biography, Lyons explores the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley's commitment to scientific reasoning and argues that while Huxley was skeptical of natural selection and gradualism, his contributions to Darwin's ideas strengthened the theory of evolution.
Katharine Parker Riddle, SM'42, A Nourishing Life (Pentland Press, Inc.). In her autobiography, Riddle recounts her missionary work in India, her support of lesbian issues, her work in nutrition, and the three-year life span of the Nourishing Space, a place for women in Arizona.
Business and Economics
Paul G. Keat, AM'52, PhD'59, and Philip K. Y. Young, Managerial Economics: Economic Tools for Today's Decision Makers, 3rd Edition (Prentice Hall). This textbook includes new sections on mergers and doing business with the government, as well as a chapter showing how the subjects covered apply to specific-industry analysis.
Jean-François Laugel, MBA'84, and Christopher Laszlo, Large Scale Organizational Change: An Executive Guide (Butterworth-Heinemann). Laugel provides the principles by which large-scale companies reinvent themselves on an ongoing basis, allowing them to learn, adapt, and innovate faster than competitors. These action principles are based on firsthand experience with Fortune 500 companies.
Robert F. Reilly and Robert P. Schweihs, MBA'81, editors, Handbook of Advanced Business Valuation (McGraw-Hill). Experts from the fields of accounting, business valuation, economic analysis, and law discuss topics such as fairness opinions, blockage discounts, lack of marketability discounts, and valuations of emerging growth companies.
Tim Wroblewski, MBA'94, Global Digital Business.com: Creating Stealth Global Business Advantages through E-business for the 2020 Digital Economy (Tim R. Wroblewski). This guide to integrating e-business and information technology points executives to strategies for future growth in a global digital economy.
Criticism
Leon Botstein, AB'67, editor, The Compleat Brahms (W. W. Norton & Company). An English-language catalog of Brahms's music, this collection discusses nearly all of his works, addressing musical form, history, structure, and biography.
Murray C. Bradshaw, PhD'69, translator, Breve et facile maniera d'essercitarsi a far passagi (American Institute of Musicology/Haenssler-Verlag). The English translation of Giovanni Luca Conforti's 1593 treatise, examines the importance of embellishment in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and how the musicians of the day mastered this technique.
Marilyn Demarest Button, AM'72, and Toni Reed, editors, The Foreign Woman in British Literature: Exotics, Aliens, and Outsiders (Greenwood Publishing Group). This book explores the attempt by English writers from the early- 19th to the mid-20th century to portray their responses to the "double other:" the foreign woman. Examined authors include Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence.
Education
David H. Albert, AM'76, And the Skylark Sings with Me: Adventures in Homeschooling and Community-Based Education (New Society Publishers/Holt Associates). Albert's guide to homeschooling provides a critique of American education and tells parents how to nurture children's intelligence at home, arguing that parents are the most important part of a child's educational development.
Tom S. Loveless, PhD'92, The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy (Brookings Institution Press). Loveless uses political science, organizational theory, instructional policy, and classroom teaching to analyze efforts to reform school tracking at state and local levels.
William H. Maehl, PhD'57, Lifelong Learning at Its Best: Innovative Practices in Adult Credit Programs (Jossey-Bass). Maehl reviews the growth of accredited programs for adult learners since WWII and the accompanying challenges to higher education. He profiles 34 current programs with innovative practices that adult educators can adapt to their specific needs.
Kenneth K. Wong, AB'77, AM'80, PhD'83, Funding Public Schools: Politics and Policies (University Press of Kansas). Wong examines the fundamental role of politics in funding public schools, arguing that legislative gridlock and funding rules affect resource allocation at federal, state, and local levels, often fragmenting policy and hurting schools with the greatest needs.
Fiction and Poetry
Arsen Pankovich, X'64, I Died In Rio (A. Pankovich Publishers). In this science-fiction novel, Earth nears collision with an enormous celestial body called the Demon. As scientists attempt to destroy or deflect the approaching Demon, the people of Earth try to resolve their differences and work together for survival.
David Ray, AB'52, AM'57, HeartStones: New and Selected Poems (Micawber Fine Editions). The latest collection of Ray's poetry.
Anne F. Spackman, AB'95, The Last Paradise (1stbooks.com). This second installment in a science-fiction series is set in the far future and concerns explorers from an alien civilization who come to Earth. Spackman broaches ideas of damnation and redemption, the consequences of immortality and genetic manipulation, and the origins of humanity.
Robert Rawdon Wilson, AB'56, AM'58, Boundaries and Other Fictions (University of Alberta Press). Wilson's collection of short fiction deals with crossing boundaries--actual, fantastic, geographic, cultural, sexual, political, and narrative.
William S. Zaferson, AM'65, The Songs of the Muses For Gods and Men (William S. Zaferson). Zaferson's poems offer principles to help states and families live in health and harmony.
History and current events
Richard B. Allen, AM'72, Slaves, Freedmen, and Indentured Laborers in Colonial Mauritius (Cambridge University Press). Allen reconstructs the social and economic history of Mauritius from 1721 until 1936, emphasizing the changing relationships between the island's sugar industry and different elements of the island's plural society.
Myra Young Armstead, AM'77, PhD'87, "Lord, Please Don't Take Me in August": African Americans in Newport and Saratoga Springs, 1870 to 1930 (University of Illinois Press). By examining the "backstairs" social and political experiences of African-American workers and their families in two resort towns, Armstead expands the black American narrative beyond the rural South and metropolitan North.
Bonnie Blackburn, AM'63, PhD'70, and Leofranc Holford-Strevens, The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-Reckoning (Oxford University Press). This reference work investigates the layers of historical significance, the mathematical patterns, and the literary inspiration associated with the calendar year. The first part is a day-by-day guide to the year, while the second discusses past and present systems for measuring time.
Rivkah B. Harris, PhD'54, Gender and Aging in Mesopotamia: The Gilgamesh Epic and Other Ancient Literature (University of Oklahoma Press). Using primary sources--myths, epics, letters, and legal and economic texts--Harris examines ancient Mesopotamian attitudes toward youth and mature adulthood, aging and the elderly, generational conflict, and gender differences in aging.
Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg, SM'55, PhD'58, Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project (Temple University Press). The book examines the contributions of hundreds of women scientists, engineers, and technicians who worked on the Manhattan Project during WWII.
Paul H. Kratoska, AM'68, PhD'75, The Japanese Occupation of Malaya: A Social and Economic History (University of Hawaii Press), and editor, Food Supplies and the Japanese Occupation in Southeast Asia (St. Martin's Press). In the first book, Kratoska studies the social and economic effects of the occupation era on the people of Malaya. In the second, he presents ten articles that examine Southeast Asia's food shortages from 1941 through 1945.
Sally Gregory Kohlstedt; Michael M. Sokal; and Bruce V. Lewenstein, AB'80, The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Rutgers University Press). The authors trace the evolution of scientists' roles in American society, public attitudes toward science, and the changing dimension of the sponsorship of science and its participants. Topics include the tension inherent in having a scientific "elite" in a democratic society and debates between disciplinary specialization and interdisciplinary research.
Lawrence W. McBride, PhD'78, The Reynolds Letters: An Irish Emigrant Family in Late Victorian Manchester (Cork University Press). This selection of 50 letters sent from Manchester between 1877 and 1904 chronicles the growing wealth and respectability of Irish emigrants in industrial England, disproving the perception that all such emigrants experienced squalor and degradation.
Muriel C. McClendon; Joseph P. Ward, AB'87; and Michael MacDonald, editors, Protestant Identities: Religion, Society, and Self-Fashioning in Post-Reformation England (Stanford University Press). This book investigates the complex ways in which England's gradual transformation from a Roman Catholic to a Protestant nation presented men and women with new ways in which to fashion their identities and to define their relationships with society.
Bronwyn Rebekah McFarland-Icke, AM'91, PhD'97, Nurses in Nazi Germany: Moral Choice in History (Princeton University Press). In detailing the story of nurses participating in Nazi "euthanasia" measures from 1939 to 1945, McFarland-Icke explores how men and women who were trained to care for their patients instead came to assist in their murders.
Walter Nugent, PhD'61, and Martin Ridge, editors, The American West: The Reader (Indiana University Press). This collection of essays deals with the experiences, values, and ideas of the diverse groups of people who settled in different parts of the American West. Analyzing what happened when different cultures intersected in the underdeveloped region, the tales provide a history of how and why the West was settled.
Jule DeJager Ward, AM'87, PhD'96, La Leche League (University of North Carolina Press). Examining the history of the La Leche League, started in the 1950s to help women worldwide learn to breast-feed their children, Ward provides insights into its origins and theological underpinnings, showing how the organization's quasi-religious status was combined with scientific ideology and feminism.
Linguistics
Louis Aarons, PhD'57, English Say Hello (Wordmate). This audiocassette and workbook program helps native Spanish speakers learn basic English.
Medicine and Health
Bryan A. Liang, PhD'89, Health Law and Policy (Butterworth-Heinemann). Liang offers a reference source for health providers, lawyers, and others who want to learn about health-care law without wading through pages of regulations, statutes, and court cases.
Political Science and Law
Stefan H. Krieger, AB'68; Richard K. Neumann Jr.; Kathleen McManus; and Steven D. Jamar, Essential Lawyering Skills: Interviewing, Counseling, Negotiation, and Persuasive Fact Analysis (Aspen Law and Business). This text for law students in clinical and other skills courses introduces the analytic methods used by lawyers in client representation.
Oliver Lepsius, LLM'93, Steuerungsdiskussion, Systemtheorie und Parlamentarismuskritik (Mohr Siebeck). Lepsius argues that contemporary discussion of German administrative law is influenced by the systems theory, and he criticizes the theory's application in legal contexts.
George W. Liebmann, JD'63, Solving Problems without Large Government (Praeger Publishers). Liebmann discusses the potential role of government-assisted entities in providing effective and fair access to services. The proper use of small institutions, he argues, can foster greater economic equity and political power.
Arthur MacEwan, AB'63, Neo-Liberalism or Democracy? Economic Strategy, Markets, and Alternatives for the 21st Century (St. Martin's Press). MacEwan examines current economic thought, asking whether there is an alternative to the ideology of free trade and self-regulating markets and whether poor countries have the choice to pursue prosperity through means other than opening up to global forces.
Rachel M. McCleary, PhD'86, Dictating Democracy: Guatemala and the End of Violent Revolution (University Press of Florida). McCleary analyzes relations between the Guatemalan military and private sectors from 1982 to 1994, arguing that the country was returned to democratic rule in the mid-1990s because of an elite agreement following the coup against President Jorge Serrano Elias.
David Menefee-Libey, AM'82, PhD'89, The Triumph of Campaign-Centered Politics (Seven Bridges Press). Drawing on interviews and archival research, Menefee-Libey contends that campaign-centered politics is now the dominant force in American elections, with serious implications for representative democracy. He includes 1998 election data on campaign finance and other activities.
David R. Segal, AM'63, PhD'67;Charles C. Moskos; and John Allen Williams, editors, The Postmodern Military: Armed Forces after the Cold War (Oxford University Press). Military analysts from 12 countries describe the range of organizational responses by their respective militaries to the end of the Cold War in Europe. Issues include women's roles, treatment of homosexuals, public attitudes toward the military, and relations between the military and the media.
Psychiatry and Psychology
Raymond J. Corsini, PhD'55, Dictionary of Psychology (Brunner/Mazel). Completed over eight years with the help of 100 consulting editors, this dictionary contains an estimated 30,000 headwords and definitions, including ten different appendixes and more than 100 drawings.
Paul C. Rosenblatt, AB'58, Parent Grief: Narratives of Loss and Relationship (Brunner/Mazell). Rosenblatt illuminates the efforts by bereaved parents to understand the death of their child, the continuing relationship of the parents and child, the influence of the child's death on the couple's relationship, and parental accounts of individual and couple grief processes.
Religion and Philosophy
J. Harley Chapman, AM'69, AM'70, PhD'84, and Nancy K. Frankenberry, editors, Interpreting Neville (SUNY Press). This collection of essays assesses philosopher and theologian Robert Neville's work in metaphysics, theology, comparative studies, and cultural criticism. Continuing the dialogue, Neville provides responses to each essay.
Paul Franco, PhD'87, Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom (Yale University Press). Franco traces the development of Hegel's ideas of freedom, both situating them within the thinker's philosophical system and relating them to the larger tradition of modern political philosophy.
Bernard Linsky, AB'71, Russell's Metaphysical Logic (CSLI Publications). Linsky examines the philosophical foundations of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Arthur Russell's book Principia Mathematica.
Barbara Pitkin, AM'87, PhD'94, What Pure Eyes Could See: Calvin's Doctrine of Faith in Its Exegetical Context (Oxford University Press). Through a detailed analysis of selected biblical passages, Pitkin traces the evolution of John Calvin's thought and establishes the exegetical underpinnings to his view of faith.
Andrew Tempelman, AM'66, PhD'72, The Patchwork Gospels: Gospel Origins in the First, Second, and Third Centuries (Aretree Press). Tempelman looks at the origins of the New Testament, arguing that the gospels were primarily written by six writers in the second century, who originated the works rather than citing or quoting established beliefs.
James O. Yerkes, AM'69, PhD'76, editor, John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company). These 15 essays, with an introduction by Updike, consider the religious dimension of his literary vision. The essays explore what Updike terms the "sense of the sacred," as it influences human experience and as a foundation of American religious understanding.
Sciences and Technology
Lou Agosta, AB'73, AM'74, PhD'77, The Essential Guide to Data Warehousing (Prentice Hall). Agosta considers data, information, and knowledge within the context of designing and building a data warehouse system.
Robert V. Binder, AB'74, MBA'79, Testing Object-Oriented Systems: Models, Patterns, and Tools (Addison-Wesley Longman). This comprehensive guide to the design of automated test suites for object-oriented software uses the test design pattern to synthesize applicable research and best practices.
Stephen C. Maxson, SB'60, PhD'66; Donald W. Pfaff; Wade H. Berrettini; and Tong H. Joh, editors, Genetic Influences on Neural and Behavioral Functions (CRC Press). Detailing the relationship between expression of specific genes, nerve-cell biology, and normal and abnormal behavior in animals and humans, this books covers such topics as the genetics of sensory systems, circadian rhythms, sleep, pain, eating, mating, and aggression.
Nancy S. Philippi, AB'56, AM'58, A Case for Wetland Restoration (John Wiley & Sons) and Floodplan Management: Ecological and Economic Perspectives (Academic Press). In both texts, Philippi traces some two decades of progress in wetland restoration, highlighting case studies of successful restorations and key public-policy issues.
Wayne Proell, SB'37, Solid State Heat Engines (Cloud Hill Press). In arguing that, theoretically, the usual Carnot conversion limits to thermal conversion don't apply to solid state heat convertors, Proell contends that many new paths for energy conversion are reasonable.
Peter Stone, SB'93, Layered Learning in Multi-agent Systems: A Winning Approach to Robotic Soccer (MIT Press). Stone looks at multiagent systems--teams of autonomous agents acting in real-time, noisy, collaborative, and adversarial environments--emphasizing the system architecture, layered learning, a new multiagent reinforcement learning algorithm, and a fully functioning multiagent system.
Social Sciences
Joan Ablon, AM'58, PhD'63, Living with Genetic Disorder: The Impact of Neurofibromatosis 1 (Auburn House). Ablon examines the social, educational, and economic impact of living with neurofibromatosis 1. Analyzing factors that affect adaptation to the neurological genetic disorder, she offers suggestions for families, support systems, and health-care providers.
Roger W. Axford, AM'49, PhD'61, Mirror for Marriage (Media Productions and Marketing, Inc). This "how-to" guide for those considering marriage, those in a marriage, or those who have split and are considering reuniting offers recommendations for a fulfilling relationship between husband and wife.
Dale F. Eickelman, AM'68, PhD'71, and Jon W. Anderson, editors, New Media in the Muslim World (Indiana University Press). This collection of essays offers insights into such areas as Egyptian film, Turkish Web sites, and African-American Muslim pamphlets, discussing how Muslims have adapted local and international media to communicate independently of official government and mainstream religion.
Eduardo R. Gomes, PhD'98, and Ana Kirschner, editors, Empresas, Empresários e Sociedade (Sette Letras Publisher). First presented at a workshop organized by the editors, these papers discuss economics and management research by Brazilian social scientists.
Sherry B. Ortner, AM'66, PhD'70, Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaineering (Princeton University Press). Ortner studies the evolving relationship--one of mutual dependence and cultural conflict--between climbers of Mt. Everest and the native Sherpas who help them on their journeys up the slopes.
Ethel Spector Person, AB'56, SB'56, The Sexual Century (Yale University Press). Arguing that sexuality is central to human identity, Person explores the roles played in the sexual revolution by sexologists and psychoanalysts, antibiotics and birth control, the women's liberation movement, and Freud's insight that sex has as much to do with the mind as the body.
Martha Shirk, AM'75; Neil Bennett; and J. Lawrence Aber, Lives on the Line: American Families and the Struggle to Make Ends Meet (Westview Press/Perseus Books). The authors put a human face on the nation's child-poverty statistics by profiling ten families struggling to raise children below the poverty line. Demographics research and policy suggestions from the National Center for Children in Poverty accompany the profiles.
Joseph A. Varacalli, AM'75, Bright Promise, Failed Community: Catholics and the American Public Order (Lexington Books). Influenced by the sociological perspectives of Peter L. Berger, PhD'79, and the late U of C professor Edward A. Shils, Varacalli analyzes the present decomposition of the Catholic Church in the United States and the related reasons why Catholic social teaching has not been favorably received within the American public square.
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of Chicago® Magazine