We welcome review copies of books by alumni. The books are donated to the Swarthmoreana section of McCabe Library after they have been noted for this column.
Elizabeth Abel '67, Barbara Christian, Helene Moglen (eds.), Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, University of California Press, 1997. Exploring a range of cultural formations, traditions, and ways of talking about the female subject, this anthology is a collaboration between leading African American and white feminists.
James B. Atkinson '56 and David Sices (eds.), Machiavelli and His Friends: Their Personal Correspondence, Northern Illinois University Press, 1996. In this first complete collection in English, this book contains the letters Niccolò Machiavelli wrote and received during his adult life, which reveal his personality and present a panorama of life, people, and critical events in Renaissance Italy.
Robert D. Austin '84, Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, Dorset House, 1996. Intended for managers and project staff who strive to create a successful program for managing organization performance, this book covers such topics as measurement dysfunction, measurement as a motivational tool, and measurement for information gathering.
Jacqueline Carey '77, The Other Family, Random House, 1996. In her first novel, Carey explores what she considers one of the most significant legacies of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the surge in middle-class divorce. The story follows two families and how they break apart.
Jed Hartman '90 and Josie Wernecke, The VRML 2.0 Handbook: Building Moving Worlds on the Web, Silicon Graphics, 1996. This guide offers practical, platform-independent tips on how to create robots and people that walk and run, dogs that bark, and other interactive animations using the Virtual Reality Modeling Language.
Neil R. Ericsson and John S. Irons '92 (editors), Testing Exogeneity, Oxford University Press, 1994. This collection of papers includes original sources of the clarifications and tests for exogeneity and provides a unified perspective on applied econometric modeling in general and on exogeneity tests in particular.
John M. Kerr '83, Dinesh K. Marothia, Katar Singh, C. Ramasamy, William R. Bentley (editors), Natural Resource Economics: Theory and Application in India, Oxford & IBH Publishing, 1997. This book, organized under the headings of concepts, methods, and applications, focuses mainly on what distinguishes natural resource economics from agricultural economics and other applied economic fields.
Hugh Rosen and Kevin R. Kuehlwein '83 (eds.), Constructing Realities: Meaning-Making Perspectives for Psychotherapists, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1996. Offering a wealth of theoretical and case-based studies, this collection presents the perspectives of scholar-practitioners on the themes of narrative, constructivism, social constructionism, postmodern- ism epistemology, developmental constructivism, language, and social discourse.
William Lashner '79, Veritas, ReganBooks, 1997. In this follow-up to his first novel, Hostile Witness, Lashner takes his hapless attorney hero from his shabby Philadelphia life to the jungles of Belize, where he gets caught up in a mob war and the machinations of an avaricious cult.
Margaret Hodgkin Lippert '64, Finist the Falcon: A Russian Legend, Troll, 1996. Lippert retells the Russian legend of the son of a czar who, in the guise of a falcon, finds his true love, Galya. But her sisters conspire to thwart the romance, sending Galya on a long and arduous journey.
Terence McIntosh '79, Urban Decline in Early Modern Germany: Schwäbisch Hall and Its Region, 1650&endash;1750, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. During the Middle Ages, southwest Germany was one of the most prosperous areas of Central Europe, but the Thirty Years' War brought devastating social and economic dislocation to the region. Focusing on the town of Schwäbisch Hall, McIntosh explores the causes and consequences of the sluggish recovery of the region's urban communities.
Peter B. Murray '50, Shakespeare's Imagined Persons: The Psychology of Role-Playing and Acting, Barnes & Noble, 1996. Challenging our understanding of ideas about psychology in the Elizabethan era, Murray uses a new reading of B.F. Skinner's radical behaviorism to demonstrate its consistency with the psychology of character formation and acting in writers from Plato to Shakespeare.
Casey King and Linda Barrett Osborne '71, Oh, Freedom! Kids Talk About the Civil Rights Movement with the People Who Made It Happen, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. In a series of 31 interviews conducted by children with family members, friends, and civil rights activists, this book tells the story of the civil rights movement through the people who were there.
David L. Pike '85, Passage Through Hell: Modernish Descents, Medieval Underworlds, Cornell University Press, 1997. Taking the culturally resonant motif of the descent to the underworld as his guiding thread, Pike traces the interplay between myth and history in medieval and modernist literature and suggests new approaches to the practice of comparative literature.
Rachel Pomerantz (nom de plume), A Time to Rend, A Time to Sew, Feldheim Publishers, 1996. This novel explores the challenges of Orthodox Judaism as two sisters struggle to resolve the conflicts between their secular ambitions and a rewarding Jewish life.
Bruce L. Rockwood '68 (ed.), Law and Literature Perspectives, Peter Lang, 1996. Through classic and contemporary voices, this book shows what the new field of law and literature may contribute to our common understanding of law, justice, and human na-ture in the 21st century.
Bruce L. Venarde '84, Women's Monasticism and Medieval Society: Nunneries in France and England, 890&endash;1215, Cornell University Press, 1997. Interweaving narrative and statistical data, Venarde un-covers the story of women's religious lives and puts female monasticism in the mainstream of medieval ecclesiastical history.
P.T.M. Marope and S. (Sheldon) G. Weeks '54, Education and National Development in Southern Africa, Comparative Education Interest Group, 1996. This volume represents a sample of the 40 papers that were presented at the fourth annual Southern African Comparative and History of Education Society Conference.
Anne (Perry) Weir '64, Marlowe: Being in the Life of the Mind, 2nd ed., self-published, 1996. This collection includes letters written by the 16th-century author as well as histories of the real-life people who functioned as a core for his plays.