Arts & Sciences

Newsletter
Fall 1995 Vol. 17 No. 1

Books by Alumnae/i

John Cypher '52 was assistant to the president of King Ranch until 1988 and is now a contributing columnist to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. His book Bob Kleberg and the King Ranch: A Worldwide Sea of Grass (University of Texas Press, 1995) is a biography of the man who extended the holdings of the south-Texas cattle ranch into Latin America, Cuba, Australia, the Philippines, Europe, and Africa. The biography is also the history of an extraordinary agricultural enterprise -- its growth and dismemberment after Kleberg's death.

Faye Duchin '65 is director of the Institute for Economic Analysis at New York University and vice president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. Winner, for Europe and North America, of the 1995 Boutros Boutros-Ghali Award for her contributions in the area of global development and the environment, she and Glenn-Marie Lange have written The Future of the Environment: Ecological Economics and Technological Change (Oxford University Press, 1994). N. Goodwin writes: "The World Input-Output Model was pioneered by Wassily Leontief in the 1970s . . . . The progressive refinement of this demanding methodology, presented here in the form of scenario analysis, represents the best available approach for understanding and evaluating different paths into the future." Future warns that only slightly adjusting technologies and lifestyles will not be enough. Earlier books by Duchin are Military Spending (Oxford, 1983), co-authored with Wassily W. Leontief, and The Future Impact of Automation on Workers (Oxford, 1986).

Malcolm S. Gordon '54 is professor of biology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His seventh book, Invasions of the Land (with Everett C. Olson, Columbia University Press, 1995), reviews the varied literature on the transitions of plants and animals from aquatic to terrestrial environments and summarizes studies of both fossils and living organisms, from molecular to organismic levels.

Judith Thompson Hamer '60 and her husband Martin co-edited the anthology Centers of the Self, Short Stories by Black American Women from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994).

The Rev. Canon Eckford J. de Kay '49 has produced Heraldry in the Episcopal Church: How Ecclesiastical Coats of Arms Depict the History of the Church (Acorn Press, 1993).

Joan C. Kessler '78 is associate professor of French at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Demons of the Night: Tales of the Fantastic, Madness, and the Supernatural from Nineteenth- Century France (University of Chicago Press, 1995) is an edition and translation of French fantastic tales by such authors as Balzac, Merimee, Dumas, Verne, and Maupassant. These haunting stories explore the dark, irrational side of the human psyche.

Meredith Parsons Lillich, M.A. '57, is professor of medieval art at Syracuse University. Armor of Light: Stained Glass in Western France, 1250-1325 (University of California Press, 1994) begins with the region's new vitality following the knights' return from the crusades and ends with the onset of economic uncertainty and unrest that preceded the Hundred Years' War. Lillich argues that this art's forceful, dramatic, and dazzling characteristics justify its being considered a major style with its own development and character, not just a transitional and provincial phenomenon.

Adam Potkay '82 is assistant professor of English at The College of William and Mary. He and Sandra Burr have edited and Potkay introduces Black Atlantic Writers of the 18th Century (St. Martin's Press, 1995). Four black writers (Gronniosaw, Marrant, Cugoano, and Equiano) crisscross the Atlantic from West Africa to the West Indies, from the American mainland to the British Isles and share stories of captivity and liberation, wayfaring and adventure; they also share a Christian faith that allows them to tell their stories as allegory of spiritual salvation. These writers, only the last of whom is currently in print, lay the foundation for what has been called the black Atlantic world, the hybrid sphere of broadly located black culture.