The University of Chicago Magazine June 1996
The Vision Thing (see Art and Architecture)
James Elkins, MFA'84, AM'84, PhD'89, The Object Stares Back (Simon & Schuster). Combining science, philosophy, psychology, and art history, Elkins observes the way people look at art and perceive the world. Drawings, paintings, diagrams, and photographs illustrate his points.
David Morgan, PhD'90, editor, Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman (Yale University Press). Five scholars investigate Sallman's career and art, revealing much about the role of imagery in the everyday devotional life of American Protestants since the 1940s.
Peter Selz, AM'49, PhD'54, and Kristine Stiles, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (University of California Press). The authors provide a sourcebook of pivotal texts in contemporary art, plus writings that cover unfamiliar ground.
Philip C. Kolin, AM'67, and Colby H. Kullman, AM'68, editors, Speaking on Stage: Interviews with Contemporary American Playwrights (University of Alabama Press). A collection of 27 interviews with such playwrights as Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, and Wendy Wasserstein, the book also includes an in-depth analysis of the interview as a dramatic genre and four introductions, one for each section, charting major trends in American theater since 1945.
James A. Kujaca, MBA'72, The Trillion-Dollar Promise: An Inside Look at Corporate Pension Money, How It's Managed, and for Whose Benefit (Irwin Professional Publishing). This book explains the workings of the pension-fund industry, including the potential for insider abuse. Remedies to safeguard pension-fund assets are outlined for trustees, corporate executives, lawmakers, and plan participants alike.
Samuel N. Malkind, AB'52, MBA'55, Options Are Easy to Understand (Vantage Press). Malkind introduces options trading to investors who want to enhance the return of their investments with options and to investors who have been daunted by often-complicated written material on options trading.
Virginia Walcott Beauchamp, PhD'55, et al, editors, Women Critics 1660-1820: An Anthology (Indiana University Press). Beauchamp and others in the Folger Collective on Early Women Critics have brought together literary criticism by 41 women writers from England, France, Germany, and the U.S.
John Gery, AM'76, Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry: Ways of Nothingness (University Press of Florida). Gery outlines four distinct poetic approaches to nuclear culture: protest poetry, apocalyptic lyric poetry, psychohistorical poetry, and the poetry of uncertainty. He develops and supports his argument with works by Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, James Merrill, and John Ashbery, among others.
Shirley Kistler Baker, AM'74, AM'74, and Mary E. Jackson, editors, The Future of Resource Sharing (Haworth Press). Part of a series on librarianship, these essays address political, technical, and economic issues facing today's libraries as they take on the challenge of providing access to other libraries and to electronic resources.
Rick Ginsberg, PhD'83, and David N. Plank, AM'79, PhD'93, editors, Commissions, Reports, Reforms, and Educational Policy (Praeger). State and national policymakers, educational-reform scholars, and local educators examine the process and impact of educational-reform reports and national commissions on school policy and practice.
William G. Wraga, MAT'80, and Peter S. Hlebowitsh, editors, Annual Review of Research for School Leaders (Scholastic Leadership, Policy, Research Division). Sponsored by the National Association for Secondary School Principals, this volume reviews timely topics in education, including interdisciplinary curricula and instruction, and technology in the classroom.
Colleen Rae, AM'81, Movies in the Mind: How to Build a Short Story (Sherman Asher Publishing). Rae gives step-by-step directions for crafting a short story via "method writing," a process she developed while a student in Richard Stern's creative-writing program at the U of C.
Mary Krane-Derr, AM'93, Rachel MacNair, and Linda Naranjo-Huebl, editors and contributors, Prolife Feminism Yesterday and Today (Sulzburger and Graham). Offering the views of feminists from Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Fannie Lou Hamer, this anthology documents the feminist stance that abortion is a violent act against fetuses originating in injustice against women.
Franklin Hugh Adler, AM'68, PhD'80, Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism (Cambridge University Press). Adler challenges traditional interpretations of Italian fascism in his examination of the development of industrial associations from 1906 to 1934. Industrialists are shown as liberals who worked to maintain as much of a liberal state as possible within the emerging and potentially revolutionary fascist state.
Thomas Bass, AB'73, Vietnamerica: The War Comes Home (Soho Press). Bass tells the story of 25,000 Amerasians who, beginning in 1988, were airlifted out of Vietnam to the United States. He also describes the plight of several thousand Amerasians who remain in Vietnam--some by choice, others against their will. The book's Web site is at http://www.vietnamerica.com.
Thomas A. Brady, Jr., PhD'68, Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489-1553) and the German Reformation (Humanities Press). Setting aside the assumption of the European nation-state, Brady explores the collision of the Reformation as a religious and social movement with the dispersed, multilayered power structure of the late-medieval Holy Roman Empire. The career of Jacob Sturm, the empire's leading Protestant urban politician, provides the narrative thread.
Irving H. Cutler, AM'48, The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (University of Illinois Press). Cutler traces the development of the Chicago Jewish community from its Old World roots to the present, exploring topics such as their beliefs and societal contributions, and how they lived and adjusted to the New World. Nearly 200 illustrations accompany tales of people, events, cultural and economic factors, neighborhoods, and institutions.
Peter Rowan and June Hammond Rowan, AB'86, editors, Mountain Summers (Gulfside Press). Through letters and diaries, female adventurers give firsthand accounts of their late-19th-century travels in the White Mountains of New England.
Richard D. Schafer, PhD'42, An Introduction to Nonassociative Algebras (Dover Publications). This paperback reprint of the original 1966 Academic Press edition introduces students to finite-dimensional nonassociative algebras and emphasizes alternative, Jordan, and power-associative algebras.
Thomas L. Bohan, SB'60, editor, Forensic Accident Investigation: Motor Vehicles (Michie-Butterworth Publishing Company). Bohan authors a chapter on the use of computer-generated images and introduces the remaining chapters in this textbook for forensic-science and engineering students.
Albert Boime, editor, Violence and Utopia: The Thought of Jerome Boime (University Press of America). Edited by his brother, this posthumous volume draws together the work of Jerome Boime, AM'60. Boime's theories concern the role of violence in the structure of the political order in relation to what is characterized as the civil and fraternal orders. He argues that the ideal of peace involves the traffic of compromises and conciliations that give rise to as much distrust as trust.
John F. Cooney, JD'73, Environmental Crimes Deskbook (Environmental Law Institute). Cooney examines the federal government's efforts to develop a program to prosecute environmental crimes and identifies the major policy issues facing Congress and Department of Justice officials in defining what violations to prosecute. He also discusses practical problems involved in investigating, prosecuting, and defending environmental criminal cases.
Bartholomew H. Sparrow, PhD'91, From the Outside In: World War II and the American State (Princeton University Press). Sparrow argues that the wartime and immediate postwar experiences transformed and redirected New Deal policies and government institutions, then proposes a new model of the state and of state-building. He applies this model, which derives from the resource-dependence perspective, to the historical record of four areas of public policy: social security, labor-management relations, public finance, and military procurement.
Valerie Nash Chang, AM'65, I Just Lost Myself: Psychological Abuse of Women in Marriage (Greenwood Publishing Group). Chang addresses how and why women are abused, how psychological abuse starts and progresses, and the ways that the process differs from physical abuse. Quotes from survivors of psychologically abusive marriages highlight her description of life inside one abusive relationship and her recommendations for treatment.
Herbert Anderson, David Hogue, and Marie McCarthy, PhD'85, Promising Again (Westminster John Knox Press). Created for pastoral counselors and married couples, this religious guide addresses the need to refocus relationships at turning points such as a job change, illness, or the death of a parent or child.
Richard F. Hamilton, AB'50, The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community (Yale University Press). Hamilton examines why social misconstructions--widely shared, long-lasting acceptance of "facts" or interpretations--are created and accepted in many academic communities, warning that scholarly commitment to empirical evidence and research can be superseded by easy acceptance of undocumented argument.
Robert N. McCauley, AM'75, PhD'79, editor, The Churchlands and Their Critics (Blackwell Publishers). Leading figures in philosophy, cognitive science, and the neurosciences explore the work of Patricia S. and Paul M. Churchland, philosophers of science and the mind at the University of California, San Diego. The Churchlands in turn offer detailed responses to each of the nine papers.
Mary Jo Neitz, AM'74, PhD'81, and Marion S. Goldman, AM'70, PhD'77, editors, Sex, Lies, and Sanctity: Deviance and Religion in Contemporary North America (JAI Press). Twelve empirical case studies examine shifting definitions of deviance within religious groups and fluctuating relationships between the groups and their host societies. Leadership, gender relations, and moral boundaries are central themes.
Gregory Bruce Smith, AM'77, PhD'87, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Transition to Postmodernity (University of Chicago Press). In analyzing their writings, Smith examines these philosophers' role in the turn to postmodern thought, contending that their influences are founded in a new vision of praxis liberated from theory.
Roger A. Powell, PhD'77, The Fisher: Life History, Ecology, and Behavior (University of Minnesota Press); Powell, S. W. Burkirk, M. Raphael, and A. Harestad, editors, Martens, Sables, and Fishers: Biology and Conservation (Cornell University Press). The first book gives a general introduction to the anatomy, reproduction, and development of the fisher--a large member of the weasel family--explaining population declines and conservation, habitat requirements, food and hunting behavior, and its unique predator-prey relationship with porcupines. In the second volume, specialists from eight countries offer theories and empirical data regarding this commercially and biologically important group.
Siao F. Sun, PhD'58, Physical Chemistry of Macromolecules (Wiley Interscience). Integrating macromolecules in biochemistry and polymer chemistry, Sun provides readers with the basic concepts of biophysical and physical polymer chemistry, introducing important terms and covering basic structure properties and relationships of macromolecules.
Pranab Chatterjee, AM'63, PhD'67, Approaches to the Welfare State (National Association of Social Workers Press). Chatterjee analyzes the welfare state through three distinct orientations: welfare decisions are a function of conflicting values and ideologies; of inherent class, gender, and interest-group cleavages; and of the technological bases of society.
Clementine Creuziger, AM'87, PhD'93, Childhood in Russia: Representation and Reality (University Press of America). Drawing on fieldwork conducted from 1990 through 1992, Creuziger describes childhood in present-day Russia, using personal histories, interviews with parents and teachers, and children's paintings and stories.
Michael R. Darby, AM'68, PhD'70, editor, Reducing Poverty in America: Views and Approaches (Sage Publications). Leading scholars across the political spectrum speak to the problems of poverty, welfare dependence, and the underclass in America and offer contrasting prescriptions and solutions.
Joseph B. Ford; Michel P. Richard, AB'51, AM'55; and Palmer C. Talbutt, editors, Sorokin and Civilization: A Centennial Assessment (Transaction Publishers). A Festschrift to Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, this volume comprises four parts: "A Life Remembered," "Sorokin as Gadfly," "Sorokin's Methodology," and "Applying Sorokin's Theories."
Martin Orans, AB'51, AM'54, PhD'62, Not Even Wrong: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman, and the Samoans (Chandler & Sharp). With 18 months of fieldwork experience in Samoa, Orans corroborates Mead's findings in Coming of Age in Samoa through the in-depth analysis of her field materials, contradicting the criticism of Freeman, Mead's most outspoken detractor.
Jennifer Platt, AM'64, A History of Sociological Research Methods in America, 1920-1960 (Cambridge University Press). Platt discusses topics including the production of methodological writing, the relation between methodological theory and practice, the role of scientism, the impact of research funding, the significance of schools of thought, and the processes of social construction and memory in the folk history of the discipline.
June Solnit Sale, Kit Kollenberg, AB'63, AM'68, and Ellen Melinkoff, The Working Parents Handbook (Simon & Schuster). The authors explore the wide range of problems parents face, from finding child care to maintaining friendships with non-parents to helping a child feel safe in today's world.
Harold F. Schiffman, AM'66, PhD'69, Summary, Linguistic Culture, and Language Policy (Routledge). Schiffman argues that language is a reflection and a vehicle of cultural construction and explores how language policies are implemented, why they evolve, why they work, and how they affect people's lives.
Huston Smith, PhD'45, and Reuben Snake, editors, One Nation under God: Triumph of the Native American Church (Clear Light Publishers) This profile of the Native American Church--its history, structure, meaning to its adherents, and triumph over centuries of adversity--is also the story of the response to a 1990 Supreme Court ruling that freedom of religion did not extend to the use of peyote in Native American religious ceremonies.
Ned Munger, SB'43, SM'48, PhD'51, Cultures, Chess, & Art: A Collector's Odyssey across Seven Continents. Volume I: Sub-Saharan Africa (Mundial Press). The 51 chess sets illustrated and described in this volume were created by African sculptors, carvers, and designers representing numerous ethnic groups in 26 countries. Munger chronicles his African travels and experiences and weaves in the continent's history and politics.
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