The University of Chicago Magazine February 1996
Tropical tales (see Children's Literature)
Wage-earning heroines (see Gender Studies)
Marjorie Gilfillan, PhB'45, Folk Dance Photos of the World (Other than Europe), Folk Dance Photos of Europe, and Classical and Fertility Dance Photos (Wenzel Press). Each book contains 50 black-and-white photos, taken by the author, of folk-dance performances in the Los Angeles area. Together, they depict dances from 83 countries and are accompanied by text descriptions and costume indexes.
James C. O'Connell, AM'74, PhD'80, editor, The Pioneer Valley Reader (Berkshire House Publishers). This illustrated anthology focuses on the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts and its place in American culture: its frontier days, its spiritual and intellectual ascendancy in the 18th and 19th centuries, and its current status as a home to farmers and athletes, poets and politicos. The 80-plus authors include Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, and John McPhee.
Robin Cowan and Mario J. Rizzo, AM'73, PhD'77, editors, Profits and Morality (University of Chicago Press). While neoclassical economists have traditionally endorsed the pursuit of profits, many moral philosophers have challenged profit making on ethical grounds. Through the lenses of economics, philosophy, and law, these six essays explore the morality of profits from libertarian, utilitarian, and more general consequentialist perspectives.
Susan Z. Diamond, AB'70, Records Management: A Practical Guide (AMACOM). In this third edition, Diamond explains how to establish and maintain a successful corporate-records management program, also discussing in depth the use of electronic document-imaging systems.
Katharine Fultz, AB'82, and Susan C. Ruderman, Understanding Development Research: Techniques and Commentary (ORCA Knowledge Systems). Available in Windows and Macintosh formats, this electronic book explores topics in fund-raising and development research for nonprofit institutions.
Paul G. Keat, AM'52, PhD'59, and Philip K. Y. Young, Managerial Economics (Prentice Hall). The second edition of this text--aimed at upper-level undergraduates and first-year MBA students--contains new sections on international applications of managerial economics.
Ken Melrose, MBA'67, Making the Grass Greener on Your Side (Barrett-Koehler Publishers). Melrose, CEO of the Toro Company, describes a "servant-leader" model in which leaders operate from a principle-centered base by working for and serving the rest of the organization. He shares his successes and struggles in applying the model to Toro.
Barbara Kerley, AB'81, Songs of Papa's Island (Houghton Mifflin). In an afternoon of lyrical stories, Mama "sings" to her daughter of their adventures on a tropical island, telling her what life was like before and after the little girl was born.
Jon Corelis, AB'69, editor and translator, Roman Erotic Elegy: Selections from Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid, and Sulpicia (University of Salzburg Press). This anthology of verse translations is intended to make ancient Roman poetry more accessible to modern students and general readers.
C. Richard Fisher, AB'72, AM'77, PhD'85, editor, Ethik und Aesthetik: Werke und Werte in der Literatur vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Peter Lang Verlag). This Festschrift honoring German-American scholar Wolfgang Wittkowski contains essays in German and English on modern German literature and criticism, focusing on questions of ethics and aesthetics in works from the Enlightenment to post-Holocaust modernism.
Alan C. Golding, AM'75, PhD'80, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press). In analyzing battles among poets, anthologists, poetry-magazine editors, and academic schools of thought, Golding presents a history of American poetry anthologies, compares aesthetic and institutional models of canon formation, and discusses the influence of the New Critics.
Donald Lateiner, AB'65, Sardonic Smile: Nonverbal Behavior in Homeric Epic (University of Michigan Press). Noting differences from modern gestures and attending to variation related to gender, age, and status, Lateiner examines the Homeric poems' frequent use of gesture, posture, and vocalics to convey situation and meaning, especially in the Odyssey.
Darby Lewes, PhD'91, Dream Revisionaries: Gender and Genre in Women's Utopian Fiction, 1870-1920 (University of Alabama Press). Lewes examines the literary, social, and historical catalysts for the surge of utopian writing by women on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. She considers women's place in canonical texts and demonstrates how women's utopian responses paved the way for later texts and helped create political and social manifestos.
Matthew T. Schneider, AM'82, Original Ambivalence: Autobiography and Violence in Thomas De Quincey (Peter Lang Publishing). Schneider analyzes the paradoxical interactions of myth and violence in the introspective reveries and the social and political journalism of De Quincey, a 19th-century writer who contributed to the emergence of modernism.
R. Rawdon Wilson, AB'56, AM'58, Shakespearean Narrative (Associated University Presses). Wilson investigates how stories are told in Shakespeare's plays and poems and, using Shakespeare as a touchstone, the uses of recent narrative theory.
Jay Scribner and Donald H. Layton, PhD'72, editors, The Study of Educational Politics (Falmer Press). The 25th-year commemorative yearbook of the Politics of Education Association provides a guide for students, scholars, and researchers of the politics of education and of educational-policy studies. A text and reference volume, it synthesizes political and policy developments at local, state, national, and international levels. Each chapter ends with a detailed bibliography.
Hugh Aaron, AB'51, It's All Chaos (Stones Point Press). Aaron's 23 stories address change, loss, courage, trust, friendship, and love in middle-class America. Several are set in Hyde Park and at the University in the 1950s.
John Gery, AM'76, The Enemies of Leisure (Story Line Press). In this poetry collection, Gery embarks on a philosophical quest for the meaning of happiness--and soon discovers that he cannot speak of happiness without discussing ghosts, waffles, lost loves, and good taste.
Philip Smith, AB'89, editor, 100 Best-Loved Poems (Dover Publications). This anthology contains some of the most popular poems in the English language, dating from the Middle Ages to the 20th century and written by such poets as Shelley, Dickinson, Milton, and Sandburg.
Laura Hapke, AM'69, Daughters of the Great Depression: Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s (University of Georgia Press). Drawing on social documents regarding the "don't steal a job from a man" furor of the 1930s, Hapke sets over 50 period novels in context. In analyzing works by novelists from John Steinbeck to Langston Hughes, she provides a revisionary study of how fiction's wage-earning heroines joined their real-life counterparts to negotiate a misogynistic labor climate.
Ritch C. Savin-Williams, AM'73, AM'75, PhD'77, and Kenneth M. Cohen, The Lives of Lesbians, Gays, and Bisexuals: Children to Adults (Harcourt Brace). The authors use research, interviews, and case histories to increase understanding of the issues--such as coming out, dating, families, and the law--facing sexual minorities. Included are lists of resources, organizations, and services, as well as policy recommendations.
Nachman Ben-Yehuda, AM'76, PhD'77, The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel (University of Wisconsin Press). Legend has it that in 73 A.D., 960 Jewish rebels under siege in the desert fortress of Masada committed suicide rather than surrender to a Roman legion. The book looks at how this story was transformed in the 20th century into a powerful ideological symbol of heroism, serving the interests of Zionists, soldiers, the State of Israel, and the tourist industry.
David H. Bennett, AM'58, PhD'63, The Party of Fear: From Nativism to the Militia Movement (Vintage Books). This revised second edition of a study of right-wing movements in American history contains a new chapter on the recent reemergence of the New Right in the form of the Christian Coalition and similar groups, the continuing ferment in the Aryan Nation and white-supremicist groups, and the development of a new party of fear, the militia movement.
Brendan Dooley, PhD'86, Italy in the Baroque: Selected Readings (Garland Publishing). These translated texts by 17th-century Italian writers concern history, aesthetics, religion, political thought, and science. Dooley presents baroque culture as an evolving structure in which contributions to each of these fields played an integral part in Italian life and in the rest of early modern Europe.
Richard Ned Lebow, AB'63, and Thomas Risse-Kappen, editors, International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War (Columbia University Press). This book examines why existing theories of international relations failed to consider that the cold war could end peacefully and what can be learned from such a failure.
Philippe Manigart, AM'79, Future Roles, Missions, and Structures of Armed Forces in the New World Order: The Public View (Nova Science Publishers). Using papers presented at a 1993 NATO-sponsored international conference, Manigart assesses the effect of a new geopolitical environment on the public perception of modern military organizations.
Steven A. Riess, AM'69, PhD'74, Sport in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Harlan Davidson). Riess analyzes how the rise of modern American sport was shaped by urbanization and industrialization.
Barnett R. Rubin, AM'76, PhD'82, The Search for Peace in Afghanistan: From Buffer State to Failed State (Yale University Press). Drawing on interviews and unpublished private and government documents, Rubin analyzes the Afghan civil war from the 1978 communist coup to the fall of the last Soviet-installed president in 1992. He argues that the war's origins, conduct, and resolution were all functions of Afghanistan's connections to the changing international community.
V. Kowalenko; M. Lawrence Glasser, AB'53, SM'55; N. Frankel; and T. Taucher, Generalized Euler-Jacobi Inversion Formula and Asymptotics beyond All Orders (Cambridge University Press). This work presents new developments in understanding the subdominant exponential terms of asymptotic series.
Ralph H. Hruban, AB'81; William H. Westra; Timothy H. Phelps; and Christine Isacson, Surgical Pathology Dissection: An Illustrated Guide (Springer-Verlag). A hands-on manual for dissecting surgical pathology specimens, this book includes descriptions and illustrations of the mechanisms involved in handling specimens, as well as a conceptual framework for questions to keep in mind during the dissection.
Edwin Diamond, PhB'47, AM'49, and Robert Silverman, White House to Your House: Media and Politics in Virtual America (MIT Press). Beginning with the 1992 election and concluding with the Republican victory of 1994, the authors analyze media coverage of national politics, arguing that new outlets such as talk shows, radio call-in shows, MTV, and the Internet offer shallow political information and communication and have helped to create a "blow-hard" culture.
Ronald D. Elving, AM'72, Conflict and Compromise: How Congress Makes the Law (Simon & Schuster). Elving, political editor for The Congressional Quarterly and a former congressional staff member, reveals the inner workings of Congress by tracing the path of one of the most complex and protracted law-making efforts ever--passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993.
Daniel R. Ernst, JD'83, Lawyers against Labor: From Individual Rights to Corporate Liberalism (University of Illinois Press). Revising the history of U.S. labor law in the early 20th century, this book goes beyond legal issues to consider cultural, political, and industrial history. Ernst examines the turn-of-the-century American Anti-Boycott Association and shows how pluralism had won itself a place in the legal, academic, political, corporate, and even trade-union worlds long before the New Deal.
Matthew M. Franckiewicz, JD'73, Winning at the NLRB (Bureau of National Affairs). A guide for members of both unions and management, this book offers opinion and advice on dealing with the National Labor Relations Board. Based on the author's 14 years of experience as an NLRB trial attorney, it includes such topics as unfair labor-practice investigations, deferral to arbitration, and computation of back pay.
Vernon W. Ruttan, AM'50, PhD'52, United States Development Assistance Policy: The Domestic Politics of Foreign Economic Aid (Johns Hopkins University Press). Ruttan follows the development of the U.S. Agency for International Development, quasigovernmental agencies, and private voluntary organizations, and also examines U.S. policy toward the World Bank, U.N. agencies, and other international development-assistance organizations. He reviews past reform efforts and recommends ways to restructure the U.S. program.
Frank Tachau, PhB'49, AM'52, PhD'58, editor, Political Parties of the Middle East and North Africa (Greenwood Press). With an introduction by Tachau, this reference work describes the formation, evolution, and impact of parties in 19 surveyed countries and also among Palestinian and Kurdish peoples. An index, internal cross-references, information about party genealogies, chronologies, and bibliographies are included.
Kenneth W. Thompson, AM'48, PhD'51, editor, Problems and Policies of American Presidents and Twenty Years of Papers on the Presidency (University Press of America). The first book contains essays on particular presidents and the issues they faced, while the second brings together some of the best essays that the Miller Center for Public Affairs has published in its series The Virginia Papers on the Presidency.
Edwin L. Wade, AM'56, Constitution 2000: A Federalist Proposal for the Next Century (Let's Talk Sense Publishing). Wade makes the case for a return to Federalist principles, discussing areas of government that need reforms and proposing a constitutional convention and 11 amendments designed to effect those changes.
Vince Bagli and Norman L. Macht, PhB'47, Sundays at 2:00 with the Baltimore Colts (Tidewater Publishers). In this nostalgic collection, 30 players, coaches, officials, and broadcasters for the Colts talk about their lives in pro football, giving the inside story on the 1958 championship win over the Giants, the Super Bowl loss to the Jets, and other high and low points.
F. Donald Bloss, SB'47, SM'49, PhD'51, Sammy Seahorse Teaches Chess (Pocahontas Press). "Sammy Seahorse" introduces readers to the moves and strategies of chess as he teaches the game to his fellow sea creatures. Three-dimensional views of the board and cartoon drawings accompany the dialogue-filled text.
Jae-Ha Kim, AB'84, Best of Friends: The Unofficial Friends Companion (HarperPerennial). Besides filling readers in on what happened on each episode of the debut season of the hit TV series Friends, Kim offers her observations on the show's 20-something characters and their lives.
Eric Schiller, AB'76, AM'84, PhD'91, How to Play the Torre Attack (Chess Digest), and Deja Vu Chess Library 2. An updated manual on a popular opening strategy in chess and a software collection of over half a million chess games in a custom database for Windows and Win95 operating systems.
Peter J. Ahrensdorf, PhD'89, The Death of Socrates and the Life of Philosophy: An Interpretation of Plato's Phaedo (State University of New York Press). Ahrensdorf argues that the dialogue in the Phaedo is primarily devoted to presenting Socrates's final defense of the philosophic life against the theoretical and political challenge of religion. The author concludes that Socrates's defense of rationalism is singularly undogmatic and that he helps us understand the case both for and against rationalism.
Walter L. Brenneman, Jr., AM'65, and Mary G. Brenneman, AM'66, Crossing the Circle at the Holy Wells of Ireland (University Press of Virginia). The book offers an in-depth interpretation of the symbolism and the mythological and ritual origins of Ireland's holy wells.
Willis Elliott, PhD'54, Flow of Flesh, Reach of Spirit: Thinksheets of a Contrarian Christian (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing). Organized around seven themes, this book is a selection of the more than 2,700 "Thinksheets," or short reflections, that Elliott has written.
Marjorie Gilfillan, PhB'45, The Bible May Agree with Evolution and Science May Agree with the Flood (Wenzel Press). Gilfillan's book takes its title from its main argument and offers evidence for a worldwide flood about 11,500 years ago.
Henry Idema III, PhD'87, Before Our Time: A Theory of the Sixties from a Religious, Social, and Psychoanalytic Perspective (University Press of America). Idema looks at the 1960s by linking narcissism in American culture to secularization. Arguing that this connection is related to the Vietnam War and other national traumas of the era, Idema asserts that effective religion helps the individual balance self-love with object-love and sensuality with affection--but that the events of the '60s and a lack of religious knowledge made those balances difficult to achieve.
J. F. Maclear, PhD'47, editor, Church and State in the Modern Age (Oxford University Press). Including royal edicts, state constitutions, and papal pronouncements, this reference work collects the major documents associated with the evolution of the post-Reformation churches in their relationship to the developing modern state in the West.
Joshua Mitchell, PhD'89, The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (University of Chicago Press). Mitchell's interpretation of Tocqueville as a moral historian argues that his analysis of democracy is founded in an Augustinian idea of human psychology in which the self alternately seeks withdrawal from the world or immersion in it.
Stanley Rosen, AB'49, PhD'55, Plato's Statesman: The Web of Politics (Yale University Press). Rosen contends that the Statesman's main theme is defining the art of politics and the degree to which political experience is subject to technical construction and the rule of sound judgment. Rosen also argues that, far from advocating essentialism and the reification of human nature, Plato elaborates a rhetoric of politics as self-defense against nature.
Michael Warner, PhD'90, Changing Witness: Catholic Bishops and Public Policy, 1917-1994 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing). Tracing the development of the public-policy statements of America's Catholic bishops, Warner explains the shift of tone and emphasis as part of a movement away from a Thomistic natural-law framework to a more "political" theology.
Philip Yancey, AM'90, The Jesus I Never Knew (Zondervan Publishing). Christian journalist Yancey revisits the New Testament, relating gospel events to today's world and asking whether contemporary Christians are taking Jesus seriously enough.
Lawrence S. Lerner, AB'53, SM'55, PhD'62, Physics for Scientists and Engineers (Jones and Bartlett Publishers). This introductory physics text contains more than 2,500 quantitative problems and 500 queries that require the student to prove understanding of concepts.
John A. Weil, SM'50, PhD'55; James R. Bolton; and John E. Wertz, PhD'48, Electron Paramagnetic Resonance: Elementary Theory and Practical Application (Wiley Interscience). Meant for people entering the EPR field, this is an introduction to a type of spectroscopy used primarily by chemists, physicists, and, increasingly, biomedical and geomineralogical researchers.
Stephen Wilson, PhD'72, World Wide Web Design Guide (Hayden Books). Wilson explains how to create Web sites with visual appeal and effective information structures, providing hands-on details regarding HTML; Netscape; image, video, and sound resources; and imagemaps and forms. More information is available on a related Web site at http://www.mcp.com/hayden/internet/webdesign/ index.html.
Ellen B. Bogolub, AB'70, Helping Families through Divorce (Springer Publishing). A guide for mental-health professionals assisting families who have experienced divorce, this book presents an overview of current trends, controversies, and demographics about divorce, and a three-stage divorce model. Bogolub combines clinical depth with attention to gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class as influences on the divorce experience.
Richard Handler, AM'76, PhD'79; as told to by David M. Schneider, U of C distinguished service professor emeritus of anthropology; Schneider on Schneider: The Conversion of the Jews and Other Anthropological Stories (Duke University Press). In question-and-answer format, this work--published not long before Schneider's death this past fall--tells of his days as an anthropology student and as a writer and teacher whose work on kinship and culture theory revolutionized the discipline. Schneider's reflections address pressing ethical and epistemological issues for today's scholars.
Geoffrey J. Huck, PhD'84, and John A. Goldsmith, Ideology and Linguistic Theory: Noam Chomsky and the Deep Structure Debates (Routledge). Examining the 1960s debates among linguists about the nature of meaning and its relation to syntax, the authors conclude that nonscientific factors played an important role in the outcome.
Pradeep Jeganathan, AM'90, U of C doctoral student, and Qadri Ismail, editors, Unmaking the Nation: The Politics of Identity and History in Modern Sri Lanka (Social Scientists' Association). This essay collection questions the "failure of post-colonial nation building," demanding that the nation, its practices, and its projects be redescribed as made/unmade through multiple fields of power.
Richard Ned Lebow, AB'63, The Art of Bargaining (Johns Hopkins University Press). Using examples from everyday life, business, and international relations, Lebow analyzes the nature and strategies of bargaining, and ways of overcoming emotional and cultural obstacles to communication and agreement.
Michel Paul Richard, AB'51, AM'55, editor, Sorokin and Civilization: A Centennial Assessment (Transaction Publishers). The life and work of Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin is assessed by 18 social scientists, some of whom have conducted empirical tests of Sorokin's theories and predictions.
Eric Schiller, AB'76, AM'84, PhD'91, U of C doctoral students Elisa Steinberg and Barbara Need, editors; Autolexical Syntax: Ideas and Methods (Mouton). The editors present seminal papers in the theory of autolexical syntax, developed by U of C linguistics professor Jerrold Sadock and his students. The formal theory holds that language is best represented by a number of interacting autonomous modules of grammar, as opposed to the assembly-line approach adopted by most other frameworks.
M. Belinda Tucker, AB'71, and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, editors, The Decline of Marriage among African Americans: Causes, Consequences, and Policy Implications (The Russell Sage Foundation). The editors present original research that links the recent decline in marriage among African Americans to a drop in the pool of marriageable males. Contributors examine the effects on marriage of chronic economic instability, higher death rates from disease, poor health care, violent crime, and higher incarceration rates of males. An analysis of current social policy aimed at these problems is included.
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