JUNE 2000: CLASS NOTES (print version)
BOOKS
Art and Architecture
Edwin S. Munger, SB'43, SM'48, PhD'51, Cultures, Chess, & Art: A Collector's Odyssey across Seven Continents: Volume Three: Pacific Islands & Asia (Mundial Press). In the latest addition to his series, Munger combines anthropology and history with the aesthetics and collection of chess pieces. Through illustrations and descriptions of 89 ethnic chess sets, Munger depicts the cultures found in 22 countries and as many islands in the Pacific, spanning 17 centuries. Wolfgang Schorlau, Down at Theresa's-Chicago Blues: The Photographs of Marc PoKempner (Prestel). This book contains more than 80 black-and-white photographs by Marc J. PoKempner, AB'73, taken at Theresa's and other neighborhood Chicago blues clubs since the late '60s.
Sally M. Promey, PhD'88, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent's Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton University Press). Promey interprets the imagery in Sargent's religiously controversial library panels within the context of the cultural currents running through 19th- and 20th-century America, particularly Boston.
Biography and Letters
June Rachuy Brindel, AB'45, AM'58, and Wilbur Zelinsky, editors, Bernard Brindel: Who Wore at His Heart the Fire's Centre (Heraclitus Press). Contributors to this biography of the late teacher and Chicago Symphony Orchestra conductor and composer Bernard Brindel range from CSO members to lifelong friend Studs Terkel, PhB'32, JD'34, to those who spoke with him for only a few hours.
Nathaniel S. Lachenmeyer, X'91, The Outsider (Broadway Books). In this memoir, Lachenmeyer recounts how schizophrenia transformed his late father from a brilliant sociology professor into a homeless alcoholic.
Business and Economics
Jacques Silber, AM'73, PhD'75, editor, Handbook on Income Inequality Measurement (Kluwer Academic Publishers) and, with Yves Flückiger, The Measurement of Segregation in the Labor Force (Springer-Verlag). The first book surveys the theoretical foundations of income inequality measurement and includes contributions from 50 authors. The second discusses different methods of measuring segregation in the labor force.
Criticism
Mary Louis Charnon-Deutsch, PhD'78, Fictions of the Feminine in the 19th-Century Spanish Press (Penn State University Press). Using a wide array of images from popular magazines of the day, Charnon-Deutsch finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture. She organizes 190 images reproduced in the book into six broad categories, reading women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil, as a privileged link with the natural order, as a font of male inspiration, as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores, as a focalized point of male fear and desire, and as an eroticized expression of Spanish exoticism and political ambitions.
Phyllis R. Klotman and Janet Klotman Cutler, AB'70, editors, Struggles for Representation: African American Documentary Film and Video (Indiana University Press). Contributors explore how more than 300 documentaries by some 250 African-American filmmakers reveal the aesthetic, economic, historical, political, and social forces that shape the lives of black Americans.
Philip C. Kolin, AM'67, Williams: A Streetcar Named Desire (Cambridge University Press). Kolin chronicles the history of Streetcar productions from 1947 to 1998, surveying major national premieres by leading directors and analyzing interpretations by black and gay theater companies and by other art forms, including ballet and television.
William Frank Monroe Sr., PhD'82, Power to Hurt: The Virtues of Alienation (University of Illinois Press). Monroe outlines a new approach, which he calls "virtue criticism." Using this framework, he demonstrates that works of alienation by authors such as T. S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov are filled not only with belligerence but also with the virtues of trust and solidarity with the reader.
Alice Arnott Oppen, MAT'63, Shakespeare: Listening to the Women (Seaview Press). Oppen provides the writings of Renaissance women to verify the voices of several of Shakespeare's female characters, shedding light on what it was like to be a woman in 1600 and on whether Shakespeare represented women as they saw themselves.
Education
Bruce A. Shuman, AB'63, AM'65, Library Security and Safety Handbook: Prevention, Policies, and Procedures (American Library Association Editions). Shuman discusses the major risk factors facing libraries and offers strategies for developing security policies and staff procedures.
Joseph J. Tobin, PhD'83, Good Guys Don't Wear Hats: Children's Talk About the Media (Teachers College Press). Tobin challenges the conventional notion that the media easily fools children, concluding instead that they are capable of critical interpretations of the movies and TV shows they watch.
Fiction and Poetry
Debra Hargus Brown, MBA'89, The Virgin Spring (Harlequin Historicals). Winner of the Romance Writers of America Golden Heart Award, Brown's novel tells of a 13th-century Scottish laird who risks his position and his heart when he falls for an amnesiac Englishwoman who heals his badly burned body.
Rey E. de la Cruz, MLA'96, Three Dolls to Polvoron: Plays on Creation, Food, and Whatever (Research on Educational and Environmental Development Foundation). Written in Pilipino, this collection of nine plays displays a variety of styles, including satire, farce, tragedy, historical drama, and theater of the absurd. Penelope Villarica Flores, PhD'84, wrote the introduction.
Anne F. Spackman, AB'95, Fragments of Enor (1stbooks.com). Continuing her Voyage of the Discovery series, Spackman follows the futuristic adventures of a group of humans and their spaceship as they attempt to escape from hostile aliens and find their way through lost lands.
Peter E. Zale, AB'81, Techies Unite: Helen, Sweetheart of the Internet (McGraw-Hill). Zale's alternative comic strip centers on a beautiful and brilliant 24-year-old computer whiz who runs a large company's information-systems department.
Political Science and Law
Charles F. Faber, PhD'61, and Richard B. Faber, The American Presidents Ranked by Performance (McFarland & Company). The authors rank the U.S. presidents, providing analyses of their individual accomplishments while in office as well as additional biographical and political information.
Jay M. Feinman, JD'75, Law 101: Everything You Need to Know About the American Legal System (Oxford University Press). Feinman covers the American legal waterfront, presenting the basics of the litigation process; constitutional; tort; and criminal law; and other areas.
Bruce S. Feldacker, JD'65, Labor Guide to Labor Law (Prentice Hall). This newly revised and expanded guide to labor law in the private sector is written from the labor perspective, emphasizing the issues of greatest importance to unions.
Eric B. Gorham, AB'82, The Theater of Politics: Hannah Arendt, Political Science, and Higher Education (Lexington Books). Gorham questions how political-science departments, and universities in general, can be more responsive to undergraduate students, using Arendt's theories of political discussion to argue that universities can be transformed into political spaces where students are taught civic judgment.
Jeffrey A. Parness, JD'74, Advanced Civil Procedure: Civil Claim Settlement Laws (Carolina Academic Press). A primer for lawyers and a text for upper-level law students, this book explores issues related to the settlement of future and pending civil claims in the United States. Topics include contracts for mandatory and binding arbitration of disputes; the roles of trial judges; the settlement authority of lawyers, parties, and others; the effects of partial settlements on remaining and related civil claims and their trials; and the enforcement of settlement agreements.
James H. Read, AB'80, Power versus Liberty: Madison, Hamilton, Wilson, and Jefferson (University Press of Virginia). Reconstructing passionate debates and delineating the complexity of the issue, Read examines how four of the nation's founders addressed whether every increase in governmental power entails a loss of personal liberty.
Lawrence Rosen, AM'65, PhD'68, JD'74, The Justice of Islam: Comparative Perspectives on Islamic Law and Society (Oxford University Press). Rosen explores the connections between everyday social life and contemporary Muslim ideas of justice and reason, going beyond stereotypes of rigid doctrine punishment to view Islamic law as a kind of common law closely attached to the cultural history of its adherents.
Wendy J. Schiller, AB'86, Partners and Rivals: Representation in U.S. Senate Delegations (Princeton University Press). Schiller seeks to demonstrate that when senators from the same state are viewed as a pair, their combined representational agendas cover a wide range of their constituents' interests and opinions, whether or not they belong to the same party.
Harriet Friedman Woods, X'45, Stepping Up to Power: The Political Journey of American Women (Westview Press). Woods examines the role of women in politics through a broad national scope and through her own experiences working her way up to become lieutenant governor of Missouri and later the president of the National Women's Political Caucus.
Psychiatry and Psychology
Janet Kaplan Belsky, PhD'76, The Psychology of Aging: Theory, Research, and Interventions (Wadsworth). This revised textbook relates the aging experience through first-person narrative accounts. With chapters structured to unfold like a novel, Belsky's book highlights the connections between concepts, research, and applications.
Richard D. Chessick, PhB'49, SB'54, MD'54, Psychoanalytic Clinical Practice (Free Association Books). Chessick sums up insights gleaned from his 45 years of psychoanalytic practice. Through detailed case studies, he aims to help mental-health practitioners improve their own psychotherapeutic skills and better understand the profession's pitfalls.
Ernest L. Hartmann, AB'52, Dreams and Nightmares: The New Theory on the Origin and Meaning of Dreams (Perseus Books Group). Hartmann sets forth his theory holding that dreams are neither meaningless nor simple wish fulfillment but the result of a biological and mental process triggered by pressing internal forces.
Religion and Philosophy
Dane S. Claussen, MBA'86, editor, Standing on the Promises: Promise Keepers and the Revival of Manhood (Pilgrim Press) and The Promise Keepers: Essays on Masculinity and Christianity (McFarland & Company). In these essay collections, scholars in sociology, religion, communications, women's studies, and other fields analyze the Promise Keepers Christian men's movement. The contributors focus on gender and sexuality issues and present positive, negative, and neutral views of the group.
James R. Flynn, AB'52, AM'55, PhD'58, How to Defend Humane Ideals: Substitutes for Objectivity (University of Nebraska Press). Flynn argues that both objectivism and postmodernism in ethics are rationally indefensible and counterproductive. He uses philosophical analysis to show the relevance of social science to moral debate, and uses social science to defend humane-egalitarian ideals against racism, Social Darwinism, evolutionary ethics, Nietzsche, and the meritocracy thesis of the Bell Curve.
Albert H. Friedlander, PhB'46, editor, Out of the Whirlwind: The Literature of the Holocaust (UAHC Press). This revised edition has been expanded to include works by second-generation Christian Germans, Harvard professor Daniel J. Goldhagen, artist and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman, and other young contemporary writers.
Michael W. Howard, AB'74, Self-Management and the Crisis of Socialism: The Rose in the Fist of the Present (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers). Howard critiques liberal, communitarian, postmodern, and some Marxist perspectives to develop a model of self-managed market socialism that advocates a basic income for all.
Shail Varma Mayaram, AM'81, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory, and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity (Oxford University Press). Mayaram contributes to debates in the studies of ethnic identities and sub-continental Islam, state formation, nationalism, peasant and religious movements, oral history and memory, and violence. He focuses on the past century's reshaping of the identity of the Meo, a group situated between Hinduism and Islam.
Gerald R. McDermott, AB'74, Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths (Oxford University Press) and Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? Jesus, Revelation, and the Religions (InterVarsity Press). In the first work, McDermott unpacks Edwards's encounters with Islamic, Chinese, Judaic, Greco-Roman, and Native-American thought. In the second, he asks whether Christians can better understand what they call the revelation of God in Christ through the study of other religions.
Social Sciences
Aaron Ben-Ze'ev, PhD'81, The Subtlety of Emotions (MIT Press). The author relies on everyday examples and a number of theoretical approaches and popular sources to explain emotions.
William D. Diemer, AM'52, Davis from the Inside Out: Davis as City (National Housing Register). The first in a three-volume series about the university town of Davis, California, this book details significant locations and events and uses maps and charts to show how the city has grown and changed over the past 80 years.
Johannes Fabian, AM'65, PhD'69, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (University of California Press). Fabian writes to debunk the myth of heroic travel and make a plea for recognizing that states and conditions beyond a researcher's control can be sources of ethnographic knowledge.
Katharine Bjork Guneratne, AM'89, PhD'98, In the Circle of the Dance: Notes of an Outsider in Nepal (Cornell University Press). Guneratne chronicles her yearlong stay in rural Nepal alongside her anthropologist husband, providing both a primer on the realities of fieldwork and insights into South Asian cultures.
Douglas J. Guthrie, AB'92, Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China (Princeton University Press). In his examination of economic reforms in China, Guthrie focuses on the ways state-owned factories are transforming the nation's economy and the role of foreign investment in this process.
Zane L. Miller, PhD'66, and Bruce Tucker, Changing Plans for America's Inner Cities: Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine and 20th-Century Urbanism (Ohio State University Press). Through a case study of a Cincinnati neighborhood, the authors illuminate changing conceptions of culture and community and how those changing views affect city planning and plan implementation.
Vijay Prashad, AM'90, PhD'94, The Karma of Brown Folk (University of Minnesota Press) and Untouchable Freedom: A Social History of a Dalit Community (Oxford University Press). In Karma, Prashad attacks the two pillars of the "model minority" image-that South Asians are both inherently successful and pliant-and analyzes the ways in which U.S. immigration policy and American Orientalism have perpetuated these stereotypes. The second book traces the struggles of the Balmikis of Delhi from the 1860s to the present as they have moved from agricultural labor to urban work.
On the Shelf:
> > In America by Susan Sontag"Almost everything seems located in the past," writes Susan Sontag, AB'51, in the prologue of her fourth novel, In America: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). "Perhaps that's an illusion, but I feel nostalgic for every era before I was born." Sontag brings to life her nostalgia for the 1800s in this fictional account of celebrated Polish actress Maryna Zalezowska--a character based on real-life 19th-century diva Helena Modrzejewska. Beginning in 1876, the novel follows Maryna as she abandons the stage in her native land to establish a utopian commune near Anaheim, California. Trailing behind her to this new land of opportunity are a group of Poles that includes her husband, her son, and a young love-struck writer, Ryszard Kierul, modeled after Nobel laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz, Modrzejewska's lover. When the commune fails, Maryna returns to theater, traveling across the United States as an American railway car performer named Marina Zalenska. Sontag's narrative goes on to reveal the workings of 19th-century American theater and a woman's self-transformation, through heated romantic encounters and an ultimately successful and rewarding career. --E.C.
©2000 The University
of Chicago® Magazine