The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1995), by Susan Buck-Morss (government) is a reconstruction of the magnum opus Benjamin did not live to write.
Ethnic Politics (Cornell University Press, c. 1994), by Milton J. Esman (John S. Knight Professor of International Relations), notes that virtually no contemporary nation-state is ethnically homogeneous. He surveys ethnicity as a factor in the politics of nations and asks, among other things, whether economic growth eases ethnic conflicts. He treats ethnic pluralism and ethnic politics not as collective psychoses, but as realities to confront and manage.
International Organizations and Ethnic Conflict (Cornell University Press, c. 1995), by Milton J. Esman and Shibley Telhami (government) "addresses two related themes: first, how the role of international organizations in ethnic conflict and civil strife has generally evolved and, second, the actual response to two specific cases of ethnic conflict, Lebanon and Yugoslavia" (p. 291).
The Winner-Take-All Society: How more and more Americans compete for ever fewer and bigger prizes, encouraging economic waste, income inequality, and an impoverished cultural life (The Free Press, c. 1995), by Robert H. Frank (Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy) and Philip J. Cook (Duke University) points to the increasing (since the 1970s) number of interactions where being best is rewarded vastly more than being even marginally less good. The resulting inequality is much greater than standard economic theory would predict and helps explain the widening contrast between the superrich and the rest of us.
The Same and Not the Same (Columbia University Press, 1995), by Roald Hoffmann (John A. Newman Professor in the Physical Sciences and Nobel laureate), is a personal and humanistic account of the science of molecules. At the crossroads of the physical and biological sciences, chemistry deals with neither the infinitely small, nor the infinitely large, nor directly with life. But this middle ground is precisely where humans exist, Hoffmann asserts. He shows how the world at its molecular level is complex and agitated, as are the emotions of the supposedly dispassionate scientists who explore it, and addresses the social responsibility of scientists.
The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1996), by Michael Kammen (Newton C. Farr Professor of American History and Culture). In his 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts, Seldes (1893-1970) made the then-controversial claim that popular entertainment and culture should be treated just as seriously, and as rigorously, as the so-called high arts. Krazy Kat and Irving Berlin were worthy of critical attention, he said; and arts criticism in America hasn't been the same since. Kammen stresses the "hands-on" aspect of Seldes+s long and versatile career as a historian, novelist, scriptwriter, journalism school dean, newspaper and magazine columnist, and CBS's first director of television. (Substantially quoted from Publisher's Weekly, February 6, 1996.)
Farewell Revolution: The Historians' Feud, France, 1789/1989 (Cornell University Press, 1995), by Steven Laurence Kaplan (Goldwin Smith Professor of History), is an account of the contemporary debates over the meaning of the French Revolution and of the impact of the historians' bitter quarrel from Parisian academic circles to the public arenas of the bicentennial celebration. Kaplan has much to say about relationships between memory and collective identity, history, and politics.
Mandelstam the Reader (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), by Nancy Pollak (Russian literature), is a study of this Russian, Jewish, modernist writer's late verse and prose (from 1930, when he began to write again after five years of poetic silence, to the end of his exile and his death in 1938). Pollack shows that as for Dante, poetry links Mandelstam to the very substance of contemporary culture: identity, genealogy, religion, and language.
Islamic Law and Society (E. J. Brill, Netherlands) is a relatively new journal (began in 1994) of which David S. Powers (Near Eastern studies) is now the sole editor. Powers, along with M. K. Masud and B. Messick, is also the editor of Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (Harvard University Press, 1996), a presentation of the origin, classical diversity, and modern development of the fatwa and a casebook of analyses of fatwas from a wide range of times and places.
Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), is the second volume of Margaret W. Rossiter's (Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science) pioneering and comprehensive study. In a film produced by the Office of War Information, Katharine Hepburn narrated a script written by Eleanor Roosevelt urging women to apply for jobs in government; that same year, Greer Garson starred in Madame Curie. But most "scientific" jobs for women were entry-level and did not lead to promotion. Women scientists responded (both Margaret Mead and Rachel Carson worked well outside their areas of expertise). After the war, however, they were replaced by male faculty. Despite these persistent obstacles, women made genuine contributions to their fields and laid the foundation for the period after 1972, when American women made real breakthroughs into positions of higher status.
What's Love Got to Do with It? The Evolution of Human Mating (Doubleday, c. 1995), by Meredith F. Small (anthropology), explores why and how humans mate and considers the role of our evolutionary history in determining our sexual behavior. Human females are probably more active in initiating sex and in encouraging or discouraging pregnancy than is usually recognized.
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Makiko's Diary: A Merchant Wife in 1910 Kyoto (Stanford University Press, 1995), by Nakano Makiko,
translated, with an introduction and notes by Kazuko Smith (modern languages), is one of
the few accounts available in English of the private family life of the Japanese merchant class.
The Moths and Other Stories (Arte Publico Press, 1995), by Helena Maria Viramontes (English) creates female characters of different ages whose lives are limited by patriarchal values in Latino society-social and cultural values particularly of family and church-and who struggle against it.
All articles are copyrighted by their respective author(s) and are used in this Newsletter with their permission. No other use is permitted without the express written consent of the appropriate author(s). All other materials are Copyright © 1996, Board of Trustees, Cornell University. All Rights Reserved. Cornell University is an equal-opportunity affirmative-action educator and employer. 595 58.5M CP