ART AND ARCHITECTURE

BIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS

Robert D. Denham, AM'64, PhD'72, editor, The Correspondence of Northrop Frye and Helen Kemp, 1932-1939. Vols. 1 and 2 of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye (University of Toronto Press). Denham has compiled 266 letters, cards, and telegrams written between Helen Kemp and Northrop Frye during the six periods they were apart from the winter of 1931-32 until the summer of 1939. The collection narrates the couple's early relationship: They fell in love and wished to marry, but lacked the money and the education they both needed to advance their careers.

CRITICISM

FICTION AND POETRY

David Ebershoff, MBA'96; Wayne J. Scott, AB'86, AM'89; and Norman K. Wong, AB'86, contributors, Men on Men 6: Best New Gay Fiction, edited by David Bergman (Plume/Penguin). This anthology of 20 short stories for, by, or about gay men includes three works by these U of C alumni.

Peter N. LaSalle, AM'72, Hockey Sur Glace (Breakaway Books). With this collection--written in English--of short stories about ice hockey, the author explores the sport's role in players' lives and in New England culture.

Naomi E. Lindstrom, AB'71, translation emendor, Birds Without a Nest: A Story of Indian Life and Priestly Oppression in Peru, translated by J. G. H. This new translation of the 1889 Peruvian novel by Clorinda Matto de Turner adds a critical foreword and restores the missing portions of the expurgated and abridged 1904 English translation.

Edith Rosen Skom, AB'48, The Mark Twain Murders (Dell) and The George Eliot Murders (Delacorte). The first book marks Skom's debut as a mystery novelist and features protagonist Beth Austin, a midwestern university professor who suspects plagiarism and instead finds murder. The second book finds Austin on midwinter break in Hawaii, where her choice of holiday reading--George Eliot's Middlemarch--assists her investigation into the unexpected death of an award-winning fashion designer.

James L. Weil, AB'50, As Gods Go (James L. Weil). The central poem in Weil's work concerns a friendship between two painters who lived in the early 19th century.

HISTORY/CURRENT EVENTS

Ralph W. Marrow and Harriet I. Carter, BLS'44, In Pursuit of Crime: The Police of Chicago--Chronicle of a Hundred Years: 1833-1933 (The Flats Publishing Company). This history tells how the Chicago police force, in its first 100 years, dealt with crime and coped with such events as the Great Fire of 1871, the sinking of the Eastland, and the Haymarket riot.

Ronald E. Zupko, AM'62, and Robert A. Laures, Straws in the Wind: Medieval Urban Environmental Law--The Case of Northern Italy (Westview Press). The authors examine medieval legislative efforts to control the environment and conclude they were rational responses to the concerns of that era's urban elites. The book describes early environmentalists and their programs, and shows evidence of grassroots support for resource protection and preservation, including efforts by town officials to provide the best possible quality of urban life.

MATHEMATICS

MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Lawrence Corey; John Mills, SB'61; and Paul A. Volberding, AB'71; editors, Antiviral Chemotherapy 4: New Directions for Clinical Application and Research (Plenum); Mills and Suzanne Crowe, editors, Management of the HIV-Infected Patient (Cambridge University Press). In the first book, which presents the 1994 proceedings of the San Francisco conference of the same name--along with substantial material not presented at the meeting--69 experts from five countries provide a comprehensive overview of viruses and antiviral chemotherapy. In the second book--a guide to managing patients at every stage of HIV and AIDS--authorities on HIV-infection (including Volberding) treat special topics as they pertain to HIV and AIDS, such as psychiatric disturbances, travel to developing countries, and infection control.

POLITICAL SCIENCE AND LAW

Judith A. Baer, AM'71, PhD'74, Women in American Law (Holmes & Meier). The revised and updated second edition of this feminist analysis of women's legal status since the New Deal presents new material on fetal protection, reproductive technologies, and sexual harassment.

Andrew P. Dunne, AM'83, PhD'93, International Theory: To the Brink and Beyond (Greenwood Publishing Group). Adopting a pragmatic philosophy of science, the author argues that for international political science to develop, explanatory theory must be linked to non-theoretical approaches. He goes on to introduce theories useful for analyzing international economic and political systems.

Stathis N. Kalyvas, AM'90, PhD'93, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Cornell University Press). Kalyvas examines five Western European countries where a successful Christian Democratic, or confessional, party emerged, and one where it did not, to investigate how such parties, with their religiously rooted principles and objectives, nevertheless prevailed in secular, democratic Western Europe. He also addresses broader issues such as party-formation theory, the relationship between religion and politics, and the construction of collective political identities.

Huey L. Perry, PhD'76, editor, Race, Politics, and Governance in the United States (University Press of Florida). To determine the effects of deracialization as a political strategy, Perry brings together studies of several African-American candidacies in recent elections. The book also considers African Americans elected to executive positions and investigates whether deracialized campaigns have led to deracialized governance.

Kenneth W. Thompson, AM'48, PhD'51, Schools of Thought in International Relations (Louisiana State University Press). Addressing the intellectual history of international relations, the author examines the discipline's growth, identifies the questions it has addressed over the years, delineates its main concerns, and offers his perspective on the field's current status.

Joel D. Wolfe, AM'73, PhD'78, Power and Privatization: Choice and Competition in the Remaking of British Democracy (Macmillan and St. Martin's Press). Wolfe argues that since 1945, economic forces of privatization have reconstructed British democracy, making efficiency the sole policy-making criterion. Distinguishing between direct and indirect forms of state control, Wolfe asserts that privatization itself is a form of state power.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

Brian M. Britt, AM'87, PhD'92, Walter Benjamin and the Bible (Continuum Books). Britt proposes that scholarly debate over what makes a text sacred--its internal features, or external social and historical phenomena--has falsely polarized the problem. Approaching the question through Benjamin's philosophy, Britt argues that texts are sacred because of both kinds of forces, and that sacred texts mediate between past meanings and contemporary uses of language.

Paul Eidelberg, AM'57, PhD'66, Judaic Man: Toward a Reconstruction of Western Civilization (The Caslon Company). In the tradition of the Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides' medieval work, The Guide of the Perplexed, Eidelberg closely examines the Torah. He argues that the sacred text is a mathematically encoded and verifiable system of knowledge that transcends the basic dichotomies of the Greco-Christian tradition.

Anne E. Patrick, AM'76, PhD'82, Liberating Conscience: Feminist Explorations in Catholic Moral Theology (Continuum Publishing Group). Arguing that a feminist, egalitarian concept of virtue is replacing patriarchal ideas of moral goodness, the author maintains that this shift is at the heart of present debates about conscience, authority, and dissent in the Catholic Church. The work probes such issues as spirituality, sexual ethics, and social justice.

Barbara B. Powell, AM'87, Windows into the Infinite: A Guide to the Hindu Scriptures (Asian Humanities Press). Written for students both academic and spiritual, the book takes readers through each of the major Hindu scriptures and clarifies the works' principal themes, figures, and terms, as well as their significance.

Michael A. Sells, AM'77, PhD'82, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University of California Press). Sells asserts that modern religious nationalists first mythologized the story of the death of Serbian Prince Lazar in the 1389 battle against the Ottoman Turks, then used this new portrayal of Lazar as a Christ figure and the Bosnian Muslims as "Christ killers" and "race traitors" to motivate genocide against the Bosnian Muslim community.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Richard Feinberg, AM'71, PhD'74, and Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo, Leadership and Change in the Western Pacific: Essays Presented to Sir Raymond Firth on the Occasion of His Ninetieth Birthday. Vol. 66 of Monographs on Social Anthropology (London School of Economics). In response to political independence, Oceanic islanders in many nations have blended their traditional models of leadership with Western ones to create new structures they then validate with indigenous values and symbols. In this volume, a tribute to British anthropologist Sir Raymond Firth and his work on Tikopia, contributors use ethnography and theory to explore these new forms of leadership in Western Pacific communities and nations.

Morty Lefkoe, AB'58, Recreate Your Life: Transforming Yourself and Your World (Decision Maker Institute). The author, who founded the Decision Maker Institute, argues that the Decision Maker process helps eliminate unproductive emotional and behavioral patterns by eliminating the underlying beliefs that cause them. In this book, he explains the process.

James Marshall Unger, AB'69, AM'71, Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan: Reading Between the Lines (Oxford University Press). Unger considers why the Japanese have not reformed their system of writing--a system that is difficult to adapt to new technology because it incorporates three different sets of characters. Specifically, he turns to post­WWII efforts at script reform and explores how and why those efforts were defeated.

For inclusion in "Books by Alumni," please send the book's name, author, publisher, field, and a short synopsis to the Books Editor, University of Chicago Magazine, 1313 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637, or by E-mail: uchicago-magazine@ uchicago.edu.

Within Class News:

April 1997
• 1920s
• 1930s
• 1940s
• 1950s
• 1960s
• 1970s
• 1980s
• 1990s
  Saving grace
  Ann Barzel, PhB'25.

  W is for writer
  John Wessel, AB'76.

  Lots of options
  Donald Wilson, Jr., AB'88.

• DEATHS
• BOOKS BY ALUMNI
• IN THE CLUBS

Go to:

• Feature story, "Just what the doctors ordered"
• Feature story, "Top of his game"
• Special Report, "Reel scholarship"
• Feature story, "Northern exposure"