Books by Alumni
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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.
Art
and Architecture
Donald Hoffman, X'53; Frank Lloyd
Wright's House on Kentuck Knob (University
of Pittsburgh Press). This
monograph offers a guide to the house Wright conceived at age
86. Located in southwestern Pennsylvania, it is seven miles from
his renowned "Fallingwater" house.
Leonard
B. Meyer, PhD'54; The Spheres
of Music: A Gathering of Essays (University
of Chicago Press). Linking music theory, history, culture, aesthetics,
and psychology, Meyer examines the connections at the center of
the creation, comprehension, and history of music.
Richard
A. Schwart, AM'74; Woody,
From Antz to Zelig: A Reference Guide to Woody Allen's Creative
Work, 1964-1998 (Greenwood Publishing Group). This encyclopedic
study alphabetically presents Allen's movies, plays, fiction,
television shows, and stand-up comedy routines, including his
experiments with narrative form, and the dominant themes of his
work.
Biography
and Letters
Robert D. Denham, AM'64, PhD'72, editor;
Northrop Frye's Late Notebooks, 1985-1990, Collected Works
of Northrop Frye Series, Vols. 5 and 6 (University of Toronto
Press). These two volumes, spanning seven of Frye's handwritten
notebooks and five collections of his typed notebooks, highlight
aspects of the Canadian educator and literary critic's personality
uncaptured in his previously published works.
Business
and Economics
Christopher
Gardner, SB'79, MBA'80;
The Valuation of Information Technology:
A Guide for Strategy Development, Valuation, and Financial Planning
(John Wiley & Sons). Gardner presents a quantitative framework
for analyzing the value of an IT system. His method is designed
not only to help determine the contribution of a system to shareholder
value but also to guide the activities involved in its construction
to create value.
David
E. Gumpert, AB'68; Better Than Money: Build Your
Fortune Using Stock Options and Other Equity Incentives-in Up
and Down Markets (Lauson Publishing). Partly inspired by Gumpert's
experiences developing the stock-option program for the Internet
direct-marketing agency he co-founded in 1995, this book helps
employees negotiate the best stock-options packages.
Harlan
M. Smith, AB'36, AM'38, PhD'49; Understanding Economics
(M. E. Sharpe). This collection of 40 essays offers students and
others an alternative understanding of the economy by explaining
many critical textbook shortcomings.
Criticism
Rowland
A. Sherrill, AM'71, PhD'75; Road-Book
America: Contemporary Culture and the New Picaresque (University
of Illinois Press). Showing how the picaresque tradition
of novels like Defoe's Moll Flanders opens to include American
picaresque narratives such as John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley
and E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, Sherrill sketches the socially
marginal, nomadic characters through literary history, showing
how the "new American picaresque" changes the original works'
satirical aims to illustrate the immensity of America.
Education
James
H. Block, AB'67, AM'68, PhD'70; Thomas R. Guskey, PhD'79; and
Susan T. Everson,
Comprehensive School Reform: A Program Perspective (Kendall-Hunt).
This revised volume of School Improvement Programs: A Handbook
for Educational Leaders continues to dissect and evaluate school
programs from the U.S. and the world, providing ideas to aid comprehensive
school reform.
Philo
A. Hutcheson, PhD'91; A Professional Professoriate:
Unionization, Bureaucratization, and the AAUP (Vanderbilt
University Press). Combining information from federal and American
Association of University Professors (AAUP) records and surveys
with historical and sociological research, Hutcheson analyzes
the conflict between the professional and bureaucratic pressures
in post-WWII higher-learning institutions and discusses the AAUP's
evolution and growth.
Fiction
and Poetry
Gaye
Follmer, PhB'45, AB'56;
Out Takes in the Galaxies (Saphire Books). Follmer's collection
includes short stories about diverse characters. The stories have
a common theme of courageous response to adversity.
John
Gery, AM'76; American Ghost: Selected Poems,
bilingual English-Serbian edition translated by Biljana D. Obradovic
(Cross-Cultural Communications and Raska skola); and translator
with Vahé Bladouni, For the House of Torkom (Cross-Cultural Communications).
The first book includes four new poems, a short essay, and poems
from three previous collections of Gery's poetry. In the second
book, Gery translates the Hmayyag Shems's prose poems on subjects
such as a portrait of Christ as an exiled Holocaust survivor.
Robert
W. Kirschten AM'75, PhD'77; Nighthawks and Irises:
Poems about Paintings and Old Family Movies: A Book of Poems
(Mellen Poetry Press). The first collection, whose title is inspired
by works by Hopper and Van Gogh, attempts to appreciate the structure
and value of each subject-painting while recording the poet's
emotional response to the works. The second collection, with poems
situated in the Chicago area, reels through familial memories.
Morris
Philipson, AB'49, AM'52; The Wallpaper Fox and Somebody
Else's Life (University of Chicago Press). The reprints commemorate
Philipson's retirement as director of the U of C Press after 33
years. In the first novel, Philipson examines the relationships
between the members of an upper-crust family. The second novel
tells of a university professor who arranges for the forgery of
a disappeared art relic while crafting a new identity for himself.
Judith
Taylor, AM'63; Curios (Sarabande Books). Written
in extended lines, this collection of poetry explores the connections
between identity, imagination, art, and love.
Marian
Kleinsasser Towne, AM'58; Jacob Hutter's Friends:
Twelve Narrative Voices from Switzerland to South Dakota over
Four Centuries (Marian K. Towne). This work of historical
fiction tells the stories of the Hutterites from the 16th-century
Swiss Brethren Anabaptist movement to the 20th-century Prairieleut
of Dakota, including the female point-of-view.
Gerald
R. Wheeler, PhD'74; Tracers (Black Bear Publications).
From Little Big Horn to Saigon, Wheeler's book of poems illustrates
war and the aftermath experienced by the veterans and their families.
Gender
Studies
Daniel
Bornstein, AM'77, PhD'85, editor and translator, Life
and Death in a Venetian Convent: The Chronicle and Necrology of
Corpus Domini, 1395-1436 (University of Chicago Press). Bornstein
translates Sister Bartolomea Riccoboni's accounts of worship and
work inside the convent, and gives in-depth portraits of nearly
50 women who joined the community of nuns.
Sally
L. Kitch, AM'68, Higher Ground: From Utopianism
to Realism in American Feminist Thought and Theory (University
of Chicago Press). The author challenges feminist ideas of social
change based on utopianism by explaining the failures of utopian
societies. Rather, she argues for a "higher ground," a contrasting
approach she calls realism, to help feminist theory respond to
changing circumstances and respect ideological exchanges.
History
- Current Events
Peter
Lewis Allen, AM'79, PhD'94, The Wages of Sin: Sex
and Disease, Past and Present (University of Chicago Press).
By tracing the idea that sickness is a result of sin-whether syphilis
in the 1490s or AIDS today-Allen chronicles how ancient views
on sex and sin continue to shape contemporary religious life,
medical practices, and individual habits.
Nancy
Foner, AM'68, PhD'71, From Ellis Island to JFK:
New York's Two Great Waves of Immigration (Yale University
Press). Studying the immigration patterns of Jews and Italians
at the turn of the 20th century and today's Asian, Latin-American,
and Caribbean influx into New York City, Foner compares the two
waves, dispelling myths on education, neighborhoods, and race,
and presents realities of both immigrations.
Penny
Schine Gold, AB'69, and Benjamin C. Sax, AB'73, AM'73, PhD'78,
editors, Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture
(Rodopi). Written in honor of Karl Weintraub, AB'49, AM'52, PhD'57,
the U of C's Thomas E. Donnelly distinguished service professor,
these essays on the theory and practice of cultural history include
such topics as cultural formation and the creation of national
identity, and how concepts of the self are culturally and historically
constituted. The collection includes works by 10 U of C-associated
contributors.
Paul
E. Gootenberg, AB'78, PhD'85, editor, Cocaine: Global
Histories (Routledge UK). This book examines the drug's early
history with a global perspective from 1880 to 1950 and its transformation
from miracle drug to global pariah.
John
M. Janzen, AM'64, PhD'67, and Reinhild
Kauenhoven Janzen, AM'67, Do I Still Have a Life?
Voices from the Aftermath of War in Rwanda and Burundi (University
of Kansas Monographs in Anthropology). While working for a nongovernmental
organization in Central Africa from late 1994 to early 1995, the
authors collected firsthand accounts from those in the crossfire
of war and genocide from regions of Rwanda, the Eastern Congo,
and Burundi.
Linguistics
Robert
A. Chametzky, PhD'87, Phrase Structure: From GB
to Minimalism (Blackwell Publishers). This book introduces
the fundamental theoretical issues of phrase structure in the
Principles & Parameters approach to syntax, providing analyses
of basic phrase structure concepts, including relation of argument
structure to syntactic structure.
Paul
V. Mankowski, AB'76, Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical
Hebrew (Eisenbrauns). Mankowski studies Hebrew borrowings
from the Akkadian lexicon, paying special attention to the Hebrew
imitation of Assyrian and Babylonian allophones and its consequences
for the phonology of the donor dialects.
Mathematics
Michael
Christ, SM'78, PhD'82; Carlos E. Kenig, SM'75, PhD'78; and Cora
Sadosky, PhD'65,
editors, Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations:
Essays in Honor of Alberto Calderón (University of Chicago
Press). Synthesizing several fields of mathematics, this book
presents the proceedings of a 1996 festchrift for the late Alberto
Calderón, PhD'50, who helped define the "Chicago school" of analysis,
who died in 1998.
Political
Science and Law
Paul
W. Kahn, AB'73, Law and Love: The Trials of King
Lear (Yale University Press). In a political-psychological
interpretation of the tragedy, Kahn explores the demands that
politics makes on the soul and suggests that neither law nor love
can exist with or without the other.
Alan
M. Levine, AB'84, editor, Early Modern Skepticism
and the Origins of Toleration (Lexington Books). Twelve original
essays by leading political theorists study the origins of liberalism,
focusing on toleration as a product of modern religious skepticism.
Including two chapters by Levine and essays by five U of C alumni,
the collection not only filters questions through historical perspectives,
but also applies significance to contemporary political debates.
Ted
Rueter, AM'84, The 267 Stupidest Things Republicans
Ever Said/The 267 Stupidest Things Democrats Ever Said (Three
Rivers Press). This election-year read presents a collection of
rants, malapropisms, and doublespeak from confirmed politicians
and Washington wannabes.
Psychiatry
- Psychology
Myrna
S. Orenstein, AM'81,
Smart But Stuck: What Every Therapist Needs to Know About Learning
Disabilities and Imprisoned Intelligence (Haworth Press).
Through candid interviews with individuals with learning disabilities,
Orenstein presents new facts, suggestions, and inspirational stories
for disabled individuals and their families and friends.
Recreation
Eric
Schiller, AB'76, AM'84, PhD'91, 639 Essential Endgames
and 100 Awesome Chess Moves; and, with Eduard Efimovich Gufeld,
Secrets of the King's Indian (Cardoza Publishers). The first
book, a guide to simple and complex chess endgames, examines games
of today's leading players and aspiring masters. The second book
highlights the best chess games from every year of the 20th century,
and the third provides detailed discussions of middlegame and
endgame positions.
