Alumni Works

“Alumni Works” includes notices about alumni books, CDs, performances, and exhibitions. For inclusion, please send the information about your work (title; publisher, distribution, or venue; and synopsis) to Alumni Works Editor, University of Chicago Magazine, 5801 S. Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, or via e-mail: uchicago-magazine@uchicago.edu.

BOOKS

Art and Archaeology
Janine Barchas, AM’90, PhD’95, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (Cambridge University Press). Recovering the diverse and unusual graphic design of books from the first half of the 18th century, Barchas shows how the novel’s material embodiment once equalled its narrative content in visual inventiveness.

Hattula Moholy-Nagy, AM’58, The Artifacts of Tikal: Utilitarian Artifacts and Unworked Material (University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications). Moholy-Nagy catalogues and contextualizes objects and materials recovered from Tikal, the pre-colonial economic, cultural, and religious center of the Guatemalan lowlands.

Ellen K. Moore, MAT’68, Navajo Beadwork: Architectures of Light (University of Arizona Press). More than simple decoration, Navajo beadwork, Moore argues, is generated by a structure of traditional beliefs and from observation of natural light phenomena such as fires, rainbows, and sunsets.

Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin, AB’68, AM’77, PhD’82, editors, Monuments and Memory, Made and Unmade (University of Chicago Press). Comparing the demolition of Afghani religious monuments with America’s need to commemorate the World Trade Center destruction, these essays consider of the significance of memorials throughout world history. Nelson is a professor of art history at Chicago and Olin teaches at the School of the Art Institute.

C. Roger Nance, Stephen L. Whittington, AB’77, and Barbara Borg, Archaeology and Ethnohistory of Iximche (University of Florida Press). Working with recovered ceramics and skeletal remains, as well as written records from just after the Spanish conquest in the 1520s, the authors reconstruct the history of Iximche, the Cakchiquel Mayan capital that became the first Spanish colonial capital in Guatemala.

Biography & Letters
Ted Solotaroff, AM’56, First Loves (Seven Stories Press). Solotaroff’s memoir recounts the beginning and end of his marriage, and the fortunes and flaws that brought about both.

Business & Economics
Donald P. Delves, MBA’80, Stock Options & the New Rules of Corporate Accountability (McGraw-Hill). An expert on the ethics of executive compensation, Delves examines the fairest way to pay executives and the changing role of stock options in a troubled economy.

William W. Keating Jr., MBA’82, Leveraged to the Hilt? (Directed Dollars Publishing). This guide to debt management features a CD-ROM containing programs designed to organize information and aid decision-making.

Joel Stern, MBA’64, and Irwin Ross, Against the Grain: How to Succeed in Business by Peddling Heresy (John Wiley & Sons). Stern, the managing partner of Stern Stewart & Co. and an authority on financial economics and corporate valuation, explains the origins of his concept of Economic Value Added.

Criticism
Marie Borroff, PhB’43, AM’46, Traditions and Renewals: Chaucer, the Gawain-Poet, and Beyond (Yale University Press). A professor emerita of English at Yale, Borroff offers fresh readings of the tropes, themes, metrics, and historical contexts of Chaucer and his nameless contemporary the Gawain-poet.

Joseph Epstein, AB’59, Envy (Oxford University Press). From a philosophical history of envy to a reading of Shakespeare’s Othello, Epstein examines the deadly sin that “clouds thought, replaces generosity, precludes any hope of serenity, and ends in shriveling the heart. Of the seven deadly sins, only envy is no fun at all.”

Joel T. Rosenthal, AB’54, AM’58, PhD’63, Telling Tales: Sources and Narration in Late Medieval England (Pennsylvania State University Press). Examining primary sources from 14th- and 15th-century England, Rosenthal constructs a portrait of daily life in the late Middle Ages.

Arvid Sponberg, AM’67, A. R. Gurney: A Casebook (Routledge). With this collection of interviews and essays from playwrights, actors, directors, and critics, Sponberg provides a comprehensive guide to the achievements of American playwright A. R. Gurney, whose works include The Dining Room, Love Letters, and The Cocktail Hour.

Education
Damtew Teferra and Philip G. Altbach, AB’62, AM’63, PhD’66, editors, African Higher Education: An International Reference Handbook (Indiana University Press). In their survey of African higher education, Teferra and Altbach compile essays on each of Africa’s 54 countries and on such key topics as financing and economics, gender issues, technology, and university-state relations.

Dane S. Claussen, MBA’86, Anti-intellectualism in the American Media: Magazines and Higher Education (Peter Lang Publishing). Analyzing news magazines’ coverage of higher education since 1944, Claussen finds that the media contribute to anti-intellectualism by presenting campuses as places rampant with drinking, drug use, sex, and political dissent rather than as centers of thought and study.

Cassandra Torrico, AM’93, and Mario Yapu, Formacion Docente y Escuelas Rurales en Tiempos de Reforma Educativa: Lectoescritura y socializacion (PIEB). This work is a study of teacher training and the conditions of rural schools under new educational reforms in Bolivia.

David Gerwin and Jack Zevin, AB’62, MAT’64, Teaching U.S. History as Mystery (Heinemann and Co.). This 7th- through 12th-grade teacher’s guide to U.S. history instruction recommends that materials be set out as a mystery for students to solve. Taking primary sources as evidence, they are taught how to think through conflicts and differing viewpoints, mimicking the work of professional historians.

Fiction & Poetry
Marie Borroff, PhB’43, AM’46, Stars and Other Signs (Yale University Press). Written over the course of 50 years, Borroff’s poems explore the nature of time, old age, literary acquaintances, and the author’s beloved New England landscape.

Jack Eadon, MBA’74, The Armstrong Solution (Vantage Press). Fast-food executive Kathy Armstrong enters a dangerous world of corporate corruption and intrigue in Eadon’s latest novel.

Adam Freedman, LLM’92, Elated By Details (Mayhaven Publishing). Troubled characters seek ways to escape their lives in Freedman’s debut collection of prize-winning short fiction, which has won critical acclaim for its satire, wordplay, and comic timing.

Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, AM’61, AM’63, PhD’66, The Snow Fox (W.W. Norton and Co.). The tale of an aristocratic love triangle in medieval Japan, Schaeffer’s novel concerns a samurai and a beautiful poet who are forbidden to meet. In exile, the lovers adopt foxes and name them after each other. Schaeffer is visiting professor of English at the University of Chicago.

Gender Studies
Laurel Richardson, AB’55, AB’56, with Verta Taylor and Nancy Whittier, Feminist Frontiers (McGraw-Hill). The sixth edition of this gender studies anthology includes new articles on masculinity, the media, war, and “third-wave” feminism.

Geology
Robert R. Reynolds, SB’39, The Last Bonanza (Trafford Books). Reynolds charts the geology, history, mining techniques, and equipment of a northwestern Illinois mining district.

Health and Medicine
Ellen Siobhan Mitchell, SB’97, Antidepressants (Drugs: The Straight Facts) (Chelsea House Publications). Writing for high-school and college-aged readers, Mitchell describes the effects and side-effects of common antidepressants.

David Kritchevsky, SB’39, SM’42, Parodies and Commentaries (American Organic Chemists’ Society). In this booklet, Kritchevsky spoofs the field of chemistry and nutrition.

Mitchel B. Sosis, SM’72, PhD’74, editor, Anesthesia Equipment Manual (Lippincott). Sosis has compiled a comprehensive user’s manual for modern anesthetizing equipment, covering hazards, complications, and safety features.

History & Current Events
Nathan J. Brown, AB’80, Palestinian Politics After the Oslo Accords (University of California Press). Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews with Palestinian leaders, Brown offers an internal perspective on Palestinian politics, arguing that Palestinian state-building efforts are attempts to recover from an interrupted history and rejoin the Arab world.

Susan L. Burns, PhD’94, Before the Nation: Kokugaku and the Imagining of Community in Early Modern Japan (Duke University Press). Burns’ book centers on the Kojikiden by Motoori Norinaga, part of the late-18th-century scholarly movement in Japan known as kokugaku, “the study of our country.” The Kojikiden celebrates early 8th-century mythohistories of pre-modern Japan.

Francis J. Gavin, AB’88, Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–1971 (University of North Carolina Press). Assessing recently declassified documents from the United States and Europe, Gavin contends that the Bretton Woods system of exchange rates was a highly politicized and crisis-prone institution that dramatically affected U.S. international policy during the Cold War.

Ralph M. Goldman, AM’48, PhD’51, The Mentor and the Protégé: The Story of Presidents Calles and Cardenas (Xlibris Publishers). Tracing the long and changing relationship between revolutionary leaders Plutarco Calles and Lazaro Cardenas, Goldman shows how ending Mexico’s civil war and establishing peaceful transfers of presidential power cost them their friendship.

James D. Le Sueur, AM’90, PhD’96, editor, The Decolonization Reader (Routledge). This collection of essays on post-1945 worldwide decolonization offers comparative and interdisciplinary assessments in the emerging academic field of postcolonial studies.
James W. Lowry, AM’60, Hans Landis: Swiss Anabaptist Martyr in Seventeenth-Century Documents (Ohio Amish Library). Lowry compiles and translates historical documents relating to the life and legacy of the Anabaptist religious leader executed in 1614.

Lawrence W. McBride, PhD’78, Reading Irish Histories: Texts, Contexts, and Memory in Modern Ireland (Four Courts Press). McBride’s essays examine several Irish authors who wrote between 1840 and 1914, considering how they would have been received by contemporary readers.

Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, AM’82, PhD’93, Legislating the French Family: Feminism, Theater, and Republican Politics, 1870–1920 (Rutgers University Press). Examining a range of material from controversial plays, feminist congresses, and parliamentary papers, Pedersen illuminates the connections between family-legislation debates, the significance of French citizenship, and imperial authority.

Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin, AB’84, Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography (Oxford University Press). Two veteran writers on Middle-Eastern affairs trace Arafat’s history from his student days in Cairo to his command of nationalist militant groups to his emergence as leader of the Palestinian people. The authors argue that he has been consistently duplicitous and a poor decision-maker, and that his influence is now waning.

Robert Vare, AB’67, AM’70, editor, Things Worth Fighting For: Collected Writings (Penguin Books). With an introduction by Ted Koppel, this volume is a collection of articles and columns written by Michael Kelly, an editor at the Atlantic Monthly and columnist for the Washington Post, who was killed while covering the war in Iraq.

Linguistics
J. Marshall Unger, AB’69, AM’71, Ideogram: Chinese Characters and the Myth of Disembodied Meaning (University of Hawaii Press). Refuting the notion that Chinese characters are ideograms—non-linguistic signifiers—or logograms—symbols representing whole words, Unger formulates an approach to linguistics contrary to the mind-as-computer metaphor that has dominated the field since the 1960s.

Music
Craig B. Leman, AB’46, A Write of Strings (Chamber Music Corvallis). For three decades Leman has written the performance notes for concerts at Chamber Music Corvallis, covering virtually every important chamber music composer. This book is a selection of his highlights.

Political Science & Law
James E. Block, PhD’98, A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Harvard University Press). Reinterpreting American political culture in the context of Protestant and liberal traditions of agency, Block theorizes a complex relation of self to society at the core of the American character.

Raymond Tatalovich, AM’68, PhD’71, and Thomas S. Engeman, The Presidential Policy Scene: Two Hundred Years of Constitutional Debate (Johns Hopkins University Press). This book surveys the history of presidential scholarship from the drafting of the Constitution to the late 20th century. Drawing on the writings of more than 60 thinkers, the authors work towards a theory of presidential power.

Psychiatry and Psychology
Paddy Greenwall Lewis, PhD’74, and Jessica G. Lippman, Helping Children Cope with the Death of a Parent: A Guide for the First Year (Greenwood Publishing Group). Designed to help families and community members anticipate situations that will be painful for bereaved children, this guide also includes vignettes from therapists’ encounters with kids.

Carol Maxym and Leslie B. York, AM’94, Teens in Turmoil: A Path to Change for Parents, Adolescents, and their Families (Viking/Penguin). This guidebook for parents of out-of-control teens helps them gain insight into themselves in order to better understand and become a catalyst of change for their teenager.

Religion & Philosophy
George Anastaplo, AB’48, JD’51, PhD’64, and Laurence Berns, AB’50, PhD’57, Plato’s Meno (Focus Publishing). This new translation of Plato’s seminal dialogue includes extensive annotations by Anastaplo and Berns on textual details and on the larger philosophical issues raised in the work.

Randall C. Bailey, AM’72, editor, Yet With a Steady Beat: Contemporary U.S. Afrocentric Biblical Interpretation (Society of Biblical Literature). The essayists employ new literary, historical, and sociological tools for Bible criticism to explore issues of concern to the black religious community.

Nancy A. Hardesty, PhD’76, Faith Cure: Divine Healing in the Holiness and Pentecostal Movements (Hendrickson Books). Exploring the practice and cultural milieu of divine healing during the late-19th and early-20th centuries, Hardesty considers the biblical and theological foundations of the faith-healing movement and its continuing relevance.

Alan E. Johnson, AB’68, AM’71, First Philosophy and Human Ethics: A Rational Inquiry (Philosophia Publications). Addressing fundamental philosophical questions, Johnson explores issues of faith and ethics, the limits of human knowledge, and the application of ethical principle to ordinary life.

Leon R. Kass, SB’58, MD’62, The Beginning of Wisdom: Reading Genesis (Free Press). Casting Genesis as a coherent anthropology of immense philosophical importance, Kass probes the first book of the Bible for new truths relevant to modern life.

Steven B. Smith, PhD’81, Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics (Yale University Press). Smith argues that the Ethics should be read as a personal, existential work, written out of Spinoza’s confrontation with solitude and intended to show the moral and psychological conditions of liberty.

Martin P. Starr, AB’81, X’82, The Unknown God: W. T. Smith and the Thelemites (Teitan Press). This documentary study of the American followers of the British mystic Aleister Crowley is told through the life of their leader, Wilfred Talbot Smith, founder of Los Angeles’ Church of Thelema.

Science
James E. Bobick and Naomi Baer Balaban, AB’76, AM’79, The Handy Science Answer Book (Visible Ink Press). This 660-page compendium contains definitions and explanations of a range of science topics, including how fiber-optic cable works and why leaves change colors in the fall.

Technology
Linda L. Brennan, MBA’88, and Victoria Johnson, AM’73, editors, Social, Ethical, & Policy Implications of Information Technology (Information Science Publishing). Arguing for the inclusion of legal and ethical issues in computer-science and information-technology curricula, Brennan and Johnson assess the social implications of developing information systems.

Peter J. Silverman, AB’75, et al., DSL Advances (Prentice Hall). This book explains and describes the recent technical, architectural, and regulatory developments that have given rise to mass-market digital subscriber line (DSL) services.

Travel & Leisure
Valerie Gwinner, AM’90, Paris With Kids (Open Roads Publishing). Filled with trip-planning tips, Gwinner’s guidebook balances Paris’ romantic side with the more family-friendly features of the City of Lights.

RECORDINGS

Mark Greenberg, AM’67, AM’70, Vermont: Kitchen Tunks and Parlor Songs (Multicultural Media). The 49 selections in this anthology of old-time music reflect Vermont’s Yankee and French-Canadian traditions as well as the influence of Southern styles and popular music.