The University of Chicago Magazine

June 1997

Books

ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Sarah L. Burns, AB'68, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (Yale University Press). Examining the relationship between U.S. culture and artists during the transition from Victorian to modern values, Burns discusses how artists such as James Whistler, William Merritt Chase, Cecilia Beaux, and Winslow Homer reacted to increasing media power, expanding consumerism, the problem of gender, and the need for an American artistic type.

Eleanor T. Heartney, AB'76, AM'80, Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads (Cambridge University Press). Heartney chronicles events in the American art world from 1985 to 1994. That "tumultuous" decade, she argues, ushered in an art boom and bust; saw the emergence (and, in some cases, disappearance) of such developments as multiculturalism; witnessed an ongoing attack on art from political and religious conservatives; and revealed a crisis of values in American culture. With a particular focus on public art, Heartney also examines the mechanisms of the gallery and media system, and the debate on art and pornography.

Arline Meyer, AB'55, Apostles in England: Sir James Thornhill and the Legacy of Raphael's Tapestry Cartoons (University of Washington Press). This catalogue, which accompanied an October-December 1996 exhibition at the Wallach Art Gallery of Columbia University, resurrects Raphael's seven cartoons of the Acts of the Apostles, alongside replicas by British painters.

BIOGRAPHY AND LETTERS

Richard W. Clement, AM'85, The Book in America (Fulcrum Publishing). Numerous illustrations from the Library of Congress collections help the author detail the impact of books and reading on the history and development of the nation. He also discusses the changing roles of authors, publishers, and readers.

Peter P. DeBoer, PhD'68, Coming of Age in Prospect Park (Ponsma Books). DeBoer reflects on growing up in the conservative Dutch Calvinist subculture of Prospect Park, New Jersey. During the Great Depression and WWII, his family, the neighbors, the school, church, and state all intersected to create a village fit for child-rearing.

Bernice Brown Hanson, AM'38, From the Distaff Side: Fifty Years around the Third World (Rutledge Books). This autobiography chronicles the adventures of the author and her late husband--a teacher, writer, and Associated Press reporter--from their early days together in China, through the McCarthy period, and on through travel and work destinations such as Burma, Iran, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Mexico.

David A. Loxterkamp, AM'84, A Measure of My Days: The Journal of a Country Doctor (University Press of New England). A general practitioner in the small, working-class town of Belfast, Maine, gives an account of one year in his practice. For him, 1992 was a year of births, deaths, and treatments; of meals served in the local soup kitchen; and of time spent with colleagues in a hospice they helped found. As medical practice increasingly favors large health plans and specialists, Loxterkamp looks to his everyday activities to resuscitate his sense of moral purpose and religious conviction.

BUSINESS AND ECONOMICS

W. John Leverence, AM'69, And the Winner Is... (Merritt Publishing). This guidebook for administrators of awards competitions provides a behind-the-scenes look at the production of these culturally influential events.

Janice A. Zobel, AM'70, Minding Her Own Business: The Self-Employed Woman's Guide to Taxes and Recordkeeping (EastHill Press). Zobel's nuts-and-bolts guide to managing the figures involved in a small business is meant not only to educate but also to reduce the isolation women entrepreneurs may experience.

CRITICISM

James L. Kastely, AM'72, PhD'80, Rethinking the Rhetorical Tradition: From Plato to Postmodernism (Yale University Press). In examining works by writers from Plato to Jane Austen, Kastely identifies an intellectual tradition that values rhetoric but also questions the viability of rhetorical practice. While Kastely's chief concerns are literary theory, rhetoric, and philosophy, he also considers practical issues, including the issue of individual responsibility for such problems as injustice, inadvertent harm, and the silencing of the powerless.

Joanna Brizdle Lipking, AM'61, editor, Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave, by Aphra Behn (Norton Critical Edition). To accompany an authoritative text of Behn's 1688 story, the editor supplies critical responses, current interpretive essays, and fiction and nonfiction texts on colonizers and slaves.

Charles S. Ross, AM'72, PhD'76, The Custom of the Castle: From Malory to Macbeth (University of California Press). Instead of discussing romance conventions as literary and narrative devices, the author focuses on a familiar romance motif--a knight arrives at a castle, seeking hospitality, and finds strange activities under way. Ross interprets the motif as a metaphor for a confrontation between a dominant home culture and an "other"; then demonstrates the impact these romance motifs had on Shakespeare's plays--particularly Macbeth--and considers how the romances reflect the strengths and weaknesses of social customs.

EDUCATION

Jeanine Minkin Meyer, SB'67, Multimedia in the Classroom (Allyn and Bacon). Providing K-12 teachers with both technical background and practical ideas for using multimedia in the classroom, Meyer suggests independent and group projects that introduce students to text, hypertext, graphics, images, audio, and video. The projects culminate in a research effort in which pupils use the Internet to collaborate with students at other schools.

Vivian Gussin Paley, PhB'47, The Girl with the Brown Crayon (Harvard University Press). Interweaving the themes of race, identity, and gender, and exploring the human needs to create and to belong, Paley, who taught at the U of C Lab Schools from 1971 until her retirement in 1995, tells a simple, personal story of a teacher and a child. This book celebrates the self-discovery of a little girl with a fondness for the color brown, even as it marks a teacher's farewell to teaching.

R. Keith Sawyer, AM'92, PhD'94, Pretend Play as Improvisation: Conversation in the Preschool Classroom (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Maintaining that everyday conversations--including gossip, flirting, and small talk--are highly creative and improvisational, the author explores how social play provides children with the opportunity to practice the improvisational creativity required in adult conversation. Sawyer draws on his experience performing with Off-Off Campus at the U of C.

FICTION AND POETRY

Edmund F. Kimbell, AB'94, translator, The Barometer-Maker on the Magic Island and The Diamond of the Spirit King, by Ferdinand Raimund (Peter Lang Publishing). Kimbell presents in English the first two of eight plays by the 19th-century Austrian comic dramatist. Still popular on German-speaking stages, the plays blend fantasy and fairy tale with ironic social commentary.

E. Laura Kleiner, AM'66, PhD'71, This Sacred Earth and Other Poems (Mellen Poetry Press). In this collection, poems such as "Driftwood," "The Cliff," and "Cave," can stand alone or be taken together to represent a unified meditation on the planet.

HISTORY/CURRENT EVENTS

Wi Jo Kang, AM'62, PhD'67, Christ and Caesar in Modern Korea: A History of Christianity and Politics (State University of New York Press). Paying particular attention to the period from the end of the 19th century to the present, this book traces the development of modern Korea. Beginning with the Christian missionaries, the author examines Korea's culture and history, seeking to clarify issues of church and state.

J. Victor Koschmann, PhD'80, Revolution and Subjectivity in Postwar Japan (University of Chicago Press). Addressing issues of nationalism, postcolonialism, and identity formation, Koschmann studies the postwar arguments of politically and ideologically diverse Japanese intellectuals as they debated who could lead a democratic revolution to align their nation with a course of world history these intellectuals then believed to be inexorable: toward bourgeois democracy and then socialism.

Richard A. Schwartz, AM'74, PhD'77, The Cold War Reference Guide (McFarland & Company). This basic history of the cold war provides a narrative overview, punctuated with detailed descriptions of such important events as the Red scare, the Berlin crisis, the Cuban missile crisis, the arms race, and the Korean and Vietnam wars. The book also contains an annotated chronology and biographical sketches of the era's major leaders.

LINGUISTICS

Saul Levin, AB'42, PhD'49, Semitic and Indo-European: The Principal Etymologies (John Benjamins). Levin attributes vocabulary commonalities in Semitic and Indo-European language families to prehistoric periods of bilingual contact. He argues that such contact occurred not through casual trading, but through intimate association--most clearly in the herding and breeding of livestock. Levin goes on to explore in depth more than 80 etymologies of basic words, as well as numerals.

Victor H. Yngve, SM'50, PhD'53, From Grammar to Science: New Foundations for General Linguistics (John Benjamins). Setting aside the traditional foundations of linguistics, with semiotics and grammatics as the foci, Yngve instead investigates language's physical components--including the sound waves that transport speech, and the people who speak and understand that speech. By allowing linguists to test theories and hypotheses against their observations of physical reality, he seeks to lay a foundation for linguistics that is consonant with modern scientific methods employed in physics, chemistry, and biology.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH

Brian P. Quinn, AB'78, AM'79, The Depression Sourcebook (RGA/Lowell House). Arguing that mental health professionals often misdiagnose and inappropriately treat milder forms of depressive and manic-depressive illness, the author outlines the criteria for diagnosis and proper treatment of all forms. He reviews treatments, lists resources, offers practical guidelines for patients, and profiles celebrities who have suffered from mood disorders.

Hardeo Sahai, SM'68, and Anwer Khurshid, Statistics in Epidemiology: Methods, Techniques, and Applications (CRC Press). Written for researchers who lack extensive backgrounds in statistics, this is a clear, concise description of statistical tools used in epidemiology. The book covers prospective, retrospective, and cross-sectional approaches and, through examples, shows how to apply common statistical techniques to epidemiologic problems.

Stephen M. Shortell, MBA'71, PhD'72; Robin R. Gillies; David A. Anderson; Karen Morgan Erickson; and John B. Mitchell; Remaking Healthcare in America: Building Organized Delivery Systems (Jossey-Bass). Presenting the results of a comprehensive, four-year study of 11 health-care systems' responses to growing managed-care and cost-containment pressures, this book examines the successes and failures of the current system. At the same time, it provides case-study examples and recommendations for developing and implementing a more integrated, cost-effective delivery system.

Wendell W. Weber, MD59, Pharmacogenetics (Oxford University Press). An introductory text for students and professionals in pharmacology, genetics, epidemiology, medicine, nursing, and public health, this book describes how genes modify human response to drugs, hormones, and toxins. It illustrates how basic pharmacogenetic principles apply to real-life situations and provides evidence for the genetics, molecular basis, and clinical significance of 33 human pharmacogenetic traits.

POLITICAL SCIENCE AND LAW

Lee Ann Banaszak, AB'81, Why Movements Succeed or Fail: Opportunities, Culture, and the Struggle for Woman Suffrage (Princeton University Press). Drawing on interviews with activists, legislative histories, census data, and archival materials, Banaszak compares suffrage campaigns in 48 American states and 25 Swiss cantons, arguing that tactics, beliefs, and values are crucial for understanding why a political movement succeeds or fails.

William R. Domnarski, AM'78, In the Opinion of the Court (University of Illinois Press). Domnarski defines judicial opinions as a literary genre, then proceeds to trace the genre's history, function, and place in the broader body of legal literature. The author devotes a chapter to the influential work of Law School lecturer and Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, whose decisions, Domnarski argues, continue the tradition of such earlier opinion writers as Learned Hand and Henry Friendly.

Martha Rice Martini, AM'73, PhD'83, Marx Not Madison: The Crisis of Contemporary Legal Education (University Press of America). Martini laments the current influence of critical legal studies and the overall moral and political drift of American legal education, calling for law schools to offer close examinations of the thinking of the nation's founders.

Richard C. Reed, AB'43, JD'48, Billing Innovations (American Bar Association Law Practice Management Section). Analyzing alternatives to hourly billing in legal practice, this handbook also explores the six functional components of legal organizations and the relationships between those parts.

Gregory H. Siskind, JD'90, The Lawyer's Guide to Marketing on the Internet (American Bar Association). Designed for attorneys seeking to establish or increase their Internet presence, Siskind's guidebook provides practical advice, including how to develop an Internet marketing plan, design a Web site, create E-mail listservs, and manage ethical issues.

Kenneth W. Thompson, AM'48, PhD'51, The Reagan Presidency: Ten Intimate Perspectives of Ronald Reagan (University Press of America); Schools of Thought in International Relations: Interpreters, Issues, and Morality (Louisiana State University Press); editor, Papers on Presidential Disability and the Twenty-Fifth Amendment (University Press of America). In its ten papers, the first book presents insiders' perspectives on the Reagan presidency; commentaries on the administration's domestic policy; and reflections on international-relations since Reagan, Bush, and the end of the cold war. The second book covers aspects of the intellectual history of American international-relations theory, including three broad schools of thought: the Chicago school, the Yale/Princeton school, and the Harvard school. Generated during a national commission on presidential disability, the third book's papers were written by medical and legal experts concerned with the problem of when to apply the 25th Amendment (how to proceed if a president dies, resigns, or becomes unable to discharge his duties).

PSYCHIATRY/PSYCHOLOGY

Jerrold R. Brandell, PhD'82, contributing editor, Theory and Practice in Clinical Social Work (Free Press); editor, Narration and Therapeutic Action: The Construction of Meaning in Psychoanalytic Social Work (Haworth Press). In the first book, scholars and clinicians draw upon case illustrations to explore theoretical models, practice methods, intervention strategies, and clinical dilemmas. In the second volume, a collection of original essays, contributors explore how meaning is constructed in psychoanalysis and clinical social work. Chapters range from discourse on narrative theory to specific applications of narrative concepts useful in treating adult survivors of childhood traumas.

Cecil H. Patterson, AB'38, and Suzanne Hidore, Psychotherapy: A Unitary Theory (Jason Aronson); and C. E. Watkins, Theories of Psychotherapy, 5th edition (Addison-Wesley Longman). Building on the common principles of therapeutic relationships, the first book presents a universal system of psychotherapy for psychosocial disturbances. The second book summarizes and evaluates 14 major schools of psychotherapy, with concluding chapters on areas of overlap and dissimilarity.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY

Robert S. Ellwood, AM'65, PhD'67, The Fifties Spiritual Marketplace: American Religion in a Decade of Conflict (Rutgers University Press). In this book, a companion to Ellwood's Sixties Spiritual Awakening, the author posits that the 1950s--far from being an era of unconflicted spirituality--was a decade of tension between alternative modes of spiritual and religious expression, a decade in which a wide range of religious groups and leaders competed for members, and church attendance peaked.

Daniel C. Fouke, AM'83, PhD'86, The Enthusiastical Concerns of Dr. Henry More: Religious Meaning and the Psychology of Delusion (E. J. Brill). Fouke examines the role of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More in discrediting religious radicals, alchemists, and mechanical atheists by branding them as "enthusiastical," or deluded.

Terry F. Godlove, Jr., AM'79, AM'82, PhD'84, Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief (Mercer University Press). The author traces the framework model of religions from Kant to Durkheim, then argues for the model's replacement. Maintaining that certain constraints on our modes of expression permit us to see even dramatic religious differences as largely theoretical, Godlove offers an alternative approach to linguistic interpretation that, he argues, illuminates differences against a background of commonalities.

Cynthia L. Miller, PhD'92, The Representation of Speech in Biblical Hebrew Narrative: A Linguistic Analysis. Miller analyzes the ways speech is represented in the Hebrew Bible. She argues that speech, whether conversation or narration, gets reported in a variety of ways, and that these modes of reporting provide significant information about the overall discourse and facilitate the task of biblical interpretation.

Richard B. Miller, PhD'85, Casuistry and Modern Ethics (University of Chicago Press). The author argues that casuistry, or case-based ethics, is a practical approach to reasoning about moral issues, including such contemporary issues as the gulf war, pornography, and the use of fetal tissue in medical transplants. Miller also addresses certain methodological problems associated with casuistry.

Daniel C. Noel, AM'60, The Soul of Shamanism: Western Fantasies, Imaginal Realities (Continuum Publishing). Noel assesses texts and workshops that constitute the neoshamanism movement and declares it to be a religiously enticing--but dangerously delusional and colonialist--cross-cultural fantasy constructed by Western scholars, storytellers, and spiritual seekers. He then proposes an alternative to this fantasy: consciousness about the process of imagining that creates the fantasy.

William W. Quinn, Jr., AM'78, PhD'81, The Only Tradition (SUNY Press). Quinn argues for a return to the first principles inherent in the tradition of perennial philosophy, or ancient wisdom, as expressed in the writing of Rene Guenon and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy. Maintaining that value, meaning, and culture have broken down in the West as these principles have declined since the 13th century, Quinn discusses the future development of a homogeneous, worldwide belief system to restore value and meaning to people's lives.

Stephen Ainlay, Robert Siemens, and Calvin W. Redekop, PhD'59, Mennonite Entrepreneurs (Johns Hopkins University Press); and Benjamin Redekop, Entrepreneurs in the Faith Community (Herald Press). The authors of the first book present evidence that even the most financially successful Mennonites remain orthodox and faith-based by adapting the sect's communal ethic. The second book profiles a dozen such entrepreneurs to show how these individuals overcame the apparent contradiction between the communal values of their credo and the capitalist values that inform their business success.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Ludwig W. Bruch; Milton W. Cole, SM'65, PhD'70; and Eugene Zaremba, Physical Adsorption: Forces and Phenomena (Oxford University Press). This book discusses the forces that bind a single layer of atoms together to create a surface film. Such films, the authors posit, can serve as useful media in which to test theoretical models of a two-dimensional world.

Susan Young Crawford, AM'55, PhD'70; Julie Borromey Hurd, PhD'70, AM'75; Ann Ziegenfuss Weller, AM'71; From Print to Electronic: The Transformation of Scientific Communication (Information Today for the American Society for Information Science). Examining the changes in scientific communication brought about by emerging information technologies and the developing National Information Infrastructure, the authors consider space sciences, high-energy physics, and human genome research as examples.

Ugo Fano, a U of C professor emeritus of physics, and Ravi P. Rau, PhD'71, Symmetries in Quantum Physics (Academic Press). Both a text and a reference, this book provides an advanced mathematical treatment of reflections, rotations, and angular momenta. In addition to symmetry groups, it includes research on applications of non-invariance and non-compact groups to many-particle atomic and nuclear physics.

Robert Roskoski, Jr., MD'64, PhD'68, Biochemistry (W. B. Saunders); and Jack D. Herbert, Biochemistry Review (W. B. Saunders). The first book, designed for medical and dental students seeking to learn biochemistry in the context of molecular medicine, provides the fundamental principles for understanding intermediary metabolism and molecular biology. The second book, which contains some 600 questions and explanations, reviews the essentials of biochemistry and molecular biology.

SOCIAL SCIENCES

Thomas P. McDonald; Reva I. Allen, AM'76; Alex Westerfelt; and Irving Piliavin, Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Foster Care: A Research Synthesis (Child Welfare League of America). This review of foster-care research covers 29 studies published between 1960 and 1990 and seeks to determine the lasting impact of childhood foster care on adult lives. The authors offer recommendations for data collection and research, as well as for program and policy development.

Kevin A. Avruch, AB'72, and Walter Zenner, editors, Critical Essays on Israeli Society, Religion, and Government (SUNY Press). Avruch reviews current research on such topics as the conflict over water resources; the human dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; local governance; the court system; Israeli Judaism; Sephardic literature on the shock of immigration; and politically oriented cinema and literature of the 1980s and 1990s.

Paul H. Ephross, PhD'69, Ethnicity and Social Work (Oxford University Press). Aiming to help social workers build more effective interpersonal and intersystemic relationships, this social work text provides models of ethnic identities and suggests how these identities influence perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors of individuals, groups, families, and communities. Additional chapters cover ethnocultural dimensions of both health-care and social-policy issues.

Johannes Fabian, AM'65, PhD'69, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (University of California Press). This ethnographic study of popular historical consciousness is based on a history of Zaire as told and painted by Tshibumba Kanda Matulu.

Michael E. Harkin, AM'84, PhD'88, The Heiltsuks: Dialogues of Culture and History on the Northwest Coast (University of Nebraska Press). Harkin examines historical processes among the Heiltsuk Indians of British Columbia and, in a critique of ethnohistory, addresses their own construction of their history, particularly their self-transformation from resistance to accommodation vis-à-vis colonial powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Roger S. Horowitz, AB'82, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (Twayne Publishers). This collection of testimonies by ordinary people who worked as meatpackers highlights the centrality of packinghouse work to the economic vitality and political advances of black America in the 20th century.

E. Webb Keane, AM'84, PhD'90, Signs of Recognition: Powers and Hazards of Representation in an Indonesian Society (University of California Press). In a study of poetic speech performances, ceremonial exchanges, and valuable objects on the Indonesian island of Sumba, Keane argues that the dilemmas posed by the effort to use and control language and objects represent more general problems of power, authority, and agency.

Stephen J. Morewitz, PhD'83, Sexual Harassment and Social Change in American Society (Austin & Winfield). Beginning in the late 19th century and extending his inquiry to the present, Morewitz examines the historical and current foci of public concerns over issues of sexual coercion; investigates how law and society have reacted to pressure for public recognition of sexual harassment; and considers how public recognition of sexual harassment has affected Americans' social and economic lives.

Charles W. Nuckolls, AB'79, PhD'87, The Cultural Dialectics of Knowledge and Desire (University of Wisconsin Press). Synthesizing Weberian, Freudian, Hegelian, Kantian, Batesonian, and other approaches to the question of culture, Nuckolls develops a paradox-based thesis--that at the heart of every culture's knowledge system is a dialectic, formed of ambivalence and conflicts together with the desire to resolve them.

Fred L. Ramsey and Daniel W. Schafer, SM'81, PhD'82, The Statistical Sleuth: A Course in Methods of Data Analysis (Duxbury Press). Intended as a statistics refresher course for those who need to analyze data, this textbook examines case studies, articulates strategies for answering the questions posed in the studies, and provides tools for communicating the statistical findings.

Robert E. Schick, PhD'87, The Christian Communities of Palestine from Byzantine to Islamic Rule (The Darwin Press). Schick examines historical and archaeological evidence to construct a social history of Christians as Palestine evolved from Byzantine Christian to Arab Islamic rule in the seventh, eighth, and early ninth centuries A.D. He draws upon Arabic, Greek, and Syriac written sources, as well as results from excavations of hundreds of churches, monasteries, and other Christian sites in modern-day Israel, Palestine, and Jordan.

Helen Rippier Wheeler, AM'54, Women and Aging: A Guide to the Literature (Lynne Rienner Publishers) This guide to the literature on women and aging includes extensive cross-references and comprehensive indexes to more than 2,000 entries, including journal articles, book entries, chapters, essays, and doctoral dissertations.

TRAVEL AND LEISURE

Eric Schiller, AB'76, AM'84, PhD'91, World Champion Openings (Cardoza Publishing). In his 75th book on chess, Schiller surveys the opening moves of world champions. He provides an overview of general principles of opening moves and considers a specific example: a complete and annotated game played by a world champion.

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.

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