Reviews
More World/Less Bank
- Globalization and Its Discontents, by Joseph E. Stiglitz '64
- The Dickinsons of Amherst. Photographs by Jerome Liebling; essays by Christopher Benfey, Polly Longsworth, Barton Levi St. Armand
- Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era, by Kathleen E. Smith '87
- Moment of Truth, by H.R. Coursen '54
Amherst College Books
What They Are Reading
Globalization and Its Discontents. By Joseph E. Stiglitz '64. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002. 282 pp. $24.95 hardcover.
In the nation's capital, on April 16, 2000, according to the not atypical column Jonathan Yardley wrote in The Washington Post the next day, a demonstration was “staged—and 'staged' is certainly the word for it—by a ragtag band of '60s recidivists and assorted 'activists' against the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. [The protesters] obviously want to bring back the '60s, but the '60s, mercifully, are dead.”
I was there. If ever you wake up in a city that is experiencing one of these curiously post-modern events, as I did, go see it. Being there is like catching a game at the ballpark: it's at once both larger and smaller than it seems on TV. The protest was colorful and clever. Black-clad anarchists and tie-dyed hippies carrying signs supported ideas that might have been pithy, or perhaps simplistic: “Spank the Bank” and “More World/Less Bank.” “World Bank: Global Shark” was scrawled on the fin of a man dressed like a fish. A puppet monster marched stiffly as “World Bankenstein.” Young people chanted the oddly rhythmic “The people, united, will never be defeated!” The day was hot and muggy and hugely entertaining. The discontents were manifold, but the sole culprit was globalization.
Globalization, according to Joseph E. Stiglitz '64, the author of Globalization and Its Discontents, means simply the “closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world which has been brought about by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and (to a lesser extent) people across borders.”
It sure seems harmless. The consensus in Washington was that the protesters were not merely motley, but fools and ingrates. Yardley—like me, not an economist—wrote: “Nothing's perfect, but by and large these would seem to be the best of times. Employment is so high . . . consumer confidence is as high as it's ever been. Government treasuries are so rich . . . . You'd think this would put people in a laid-back, non-confrontational frame of mind, yet in the midst of all this plenty we seem to have entered a new age of protest.”
Earlier that same spring, in part in protest, Joseph E. Stiglitz had resigned his post as chief economist at the World Bank. In Globalization and Its Discontents, now published two years later—years that saw corporate scandal, the end of the bull market, the collapse of the Internet bubble, hanging chads, terrorist attacks, war and the threat of war—Stiglitz writes that “globalization today is not working for many of the world's poor. It is not working for much of the environment. It is not working for the stability of the global economy.”
Stiglitz would not abolish the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, or even the International Monetary Fund. That last institution earns his heaviest criticism, but he believes “globalization has also brought huge benefits.” He advocates more democracy and openness in the operations of these organizations, but says there will be no reform until they critically examine the tacit assumptions on which their policies are built.
The Washington consensus, Stiglitz writes, is that the developing nations—that is, what once we called the “third world,” the “wretched infidels” or the “white man's burden,” depending on the age—must embrace “fiscal austerity, privatization, and market liberalization” before the wealthy nations lend them money. Stiglitz criticizes the IMF harshly for its continued reliance on those conditions, first articulated as a response to the particular economic problems of Latin America in the '80s and '90s. Nobody who ever shuffled papers in a large bureaucracy will be shocked to learn that IMF staff wrote reports about what X-land needed to do to prove itself worthy by taking a similar document about Y-land and just letting the computer “search and replace.” That cookie-cutter approach infuriates Stiglitz, not only because he knows “the world is a complicated place,” but also because this approach accepts without doubt the neo-liberal ideological orthodoxy espoused by Thatcher and Reagan: “the competitive equilibrium model, in which Adam Smith's invisible hand works, and works perfectly.”
In an interview with the Financial Times, Stiglitz noted that “most people who are not involved agree with my views. They make common sense,” and it would be hard for a non-involved non-economist to disagree. You don't have to be a Bolshevik or a muckraker to imagine that a world bank might have the interests of banks at heart, or that an international monetary fund might care more about monetary than social or environmental policy. Stiglitz admits that the international economic institutions are “dominated not just by the wealthiest industrial countries but by commercial and financial interests in those countries, and the policies of the institutions naturally reflect this.” He shows a predilection for such phrases as “naturally reflect” and “there is a natural reason.” It's the nature of institutions to reflect the interests of the people who run them, and globalization is also a clear expression of the nature of things. Local markets grow into regional markets, regional markets into national markets, and national markets must, Stiglitz argues, grow into global markets.
“The experience of the United States during the 19th century makes a good parallel for today's globalization—and the contrast helps illustrate the successes of the past and today's failures.” Stiglitz reminds us that the United States as we know it today—a nation with a well-regulated federal financial system, federal taxes, national standards for minimum wages and working conditions, and well-integrated communications and transportation from coast to coast—was the creation of government, not the work of an unfettered invisible hand of the market. “The markets were not left to develop willy-nilly on their own; government played a vital role in shaping the evolution of the economy.”
Markets may grow naturally, but untended, unweeded gardens go to seed. “Unfortunately, we have no world government, accountable to the people of every country, to oversee the globalization process in a fashion comparable to the way national governments guided the nationalization process. Instead, we have a system that might be called global governance without global government, one in which a few institutions—the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO—and a few players—the finance, commerce and trade ministries, closely linked to certain financial and commercial interests—dominate the scene, but in which many of those affected by their decisions are left almost voiceless.”
The game of historical parallels can teach, but only if we're willing to search deeply into their implications. Is “globalization” then just a worldwide extension of “manifest destiny”? If it is, Stiglitz seems to be arguing for world government to manage it.
“We cannot go back on globalization,” Stiglitz believes, “it is here to stay. The issue is how we can make it work. And if it is to work, we have to have global public institutions to set the rules.” But we have institutions. The IMF, the World Bank, and the WTO (at that time called the GATT) were founded at Bretton Woods in 1944, in part because the Great Depression had been a global disaster. “In its original conception . . . the IMF was based on recognition that markets do not always work well.” If the global public institutions can operate indeed in the transparent and democratic way Stiglitz imagines, the people, united or not, at least will never be deceived.
As an academic economist in the '70s, Stiglitz helped create “the economics of information,” an approach that observes that markets fail to work perfectly because participants have less-than-perfect information. Without good information, for instance, insurance underwriters and used-car buyers can lose their shirts. For this work he received a Nobel Prize last year. It seems obvious that global public institutions such as the IMF and World Bank must provide information freely if the “free” market is to work.
But Stiglitz knows that even global free markets will not address global environmental issues such as the depletion of the ozone layer, global health issues such as HIV/AIDS, or other “global public goods.” “As efficient as markets may be, they do not ensure that individuals have enough food, clothes to wear, or shelter.”
With Globalization and Its Discontents, Stiglitz offers intellectual support to us non-economists—like the protesters in Seattle, Washington or Genoa—who seem to the experts so comically naïve, who don't understand how it's “good for the economy” that some people suffer while others thrive.
The hungry, the naked, the homeless: the poor we always have with us. The world is a complicated place; and yet, we still must ask, does this revolt, that reform, this loan, that foreign aid, tend to the relief of the human estate? The word “globalization” first appeared in print only in the early '60s, referring to economic processes that involve all the world. The word “global” first came to mean “worldwide” in the late 19th century. Once, “global” simply meant “shaped like a sphere”—that geometric figure of which, geometers remind us, the surface is finite even while unbounded. Globalization, too, has its limits.
—Paul Statt '78
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The Dickinsons of Amherst. Photographs by Jerome Liebling; essays by Christopher Benfey, Polly Longsworth, Barton Levi St. Armand. Hanover and London: The University Press of New England, 2001. 209 pp. $55 hardcover.
The Poets light but Lamps—
Themselves—go out—
The Wicks they stimulate
If vital Light
Inhere as do the Suns—
Each Age a Lens
Disseminating their
Circumference—
Disseminating the circumference of Emily Dickinson's life and art is both theme and purpose of The Dickinsons of Amherst, a study in essay and photograph of the family's two houses on Main Street in Amherst and the people who inhabited them. We are initially drawn to Jerome Liebling's stunningly vivid photographs of the details of architecture, grounds and decor. Then we are invited to look closely at apparently random objects found in the houses—china, lace, even shoes. Interspersed are meticulous reproductions of portraits of residents from various generations and periods and of documents pertaining to their lives. And here and there we encounter something really strange, like the bedroom of a dead child maintained untouched for more than a century.
Attracting us thus with an intense visual exposure to their immediate domestic environment, this unique volume goes on to offer a learned introduction to the eccentric, intriguing denizens of these historic homes. Our guides are three scholars who have already done much to define the social and cultural circumference of Emily Dickinson and her poetry: Polly Longsworth, whose Austin and Mabel and The World of Emily Dickinson brought mid-century Amherst and its tangled relationships to life; Barton Levi St. Armand, who, in Emily Dickinson and Her Culture, placed the poet in her Puritan and Victorian context; and Christopher Benfey, whose work has shown that tension between self and surroundings is integral to the meaning of Dickinson's art. Each contributes an essay. Through Longsworth we meet the key figures who moved within these buildings.
There is Edward Dickinson, the poet's father, who in 1855 repurchased after 15 years the home of his boyhood and birthplace of his three children. There is his son, Austin, for whom he built The Evergreens next door, a house unlike any previously seen in Amherst. And there is Susan Huntington Gilbert, the bride with whom Austin planned and furnished his new dwelling, a learned and accomplished woman who soon established what might be called Amherst's first salon. And, finally, from the time of her arrival in Amherst in 1881 down to the present day, there has always been the vivacious, charismatic, and indefatigable figure of Mabel Loomis Todd. Wife of the college's rising young astronomy professor, Mrs. Todd began her visits to The Evergreens as the life of the party and remained an unshakable presence long after her affair with Austin had banned her from the premises. Her role as Susan's nemesis extended beyond her relations with Austin; after Emily's death the two women (and their daughters after them) became rivals as custodians, editors and promoters of the poet's literary legacy.
Barton Levi St. Armand speaks of the “unique chemistry” between these two houses. The one, a two-story Federal red brick structure of solid respectability, became Emily Dickinson's bastion of privacy. At the other, an elaborately furnished yellow Italianate villa, the Austin Dickinsons established a local center of taste and culture. The older building, never formally named, came to be known generically as the Dickinson Homestead; it has been owned and managed by Amherst College since the 1960s. The newer building, Amherst's first named house, was dubbed “The Evergreens.” There Susan and Austin assembled an impressive art collection, entertained trustees, faculty and students of the college and welcomed such visiting luminaries as Frederick Law Olmsted and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Emily and Susan had developed a intense and complex friendship in the preceding years and they remained close for several years after the marriage. “One sister have I, in the house” the poet wrote (referring to her sister Lavinia), “And one a hedge away.” As Emily began to write more and more poems, in the late '50s and early '60s, she frequently shared them with her sister-in-law. Susan was a sympathetic, discerning reader. But their closeness was emotional as well as literary and, as Longsworth points out, Susan was aware of the anxieties that eventually led the poet to restrict herself to her home.
Longsworth traces these anxieties, as they can be discerned from Dickinson's letters and poems and from the recorded observations of her family and correspondents, and examines the domestic context in which they arose. The return to the home of her infancy marked an increasingly exclusive devotion to domestic duties and family attachments and a new focus on her writing and the inner life it expressed. As her brother and sister-in-law next door opened themselves and their home to a wider world of fashion and culture, Emily selected her own society and shut the door.
The subsequent story of these two houses holds many ironies. After their parents had died and their brother had begun his affair with Mrs. Todd, Emily and Lavinia's respectable, self-absorbed homestead came to serve as a site for clandestine trysts. The tragedies of failed marriage and the death of a beloved son put an end to the gaiety at The Evergreens. By mid-20th century the vital light that burnt at the Homestead had been disseminated around the world while The Evergreens had become a sterile shrine where the legacy of the Dickinson family was preserved rather than disseminated.
The Dickensian story of the fate of The Evergreens, begun by Longsworth, is picked up by St. Armand in his utterly absorbing character study of Mary Landis Hampson, who lived alone in The Evergreens for 35 years. Martha Dickinson Bianchi, who had inherited The Evergreens from her parents, left it to her secretary for his lifetime and that of his spouse with instructions that it should ultimately be destroyed to keep it from becoming a tea room or fraternity house. By the time of her death in 1988, Mrs. Hampson had set in motion the process that overturned this draconian instruction and established the trust that is now restoring and exhibiting the house and its contents. These contents, as Liebling's photographs attest, have remained virtually unchanged since the death of Susan Dickinson nearly a century ago.
In the book's final essay, Chistopher Benfey examines Liebling's “intensely personal angle of vision” and finds in his concentration on inanimate objects a poetry of “the afterlife of buildings and their peculiar sorrows.” Benfey relates Liebling's work to the 19th-century idea that cameras could photograph spirits and to Dickinson's own preoccupation with the tricks played by light and time. He has much to tell us about the place of photography in 19th-century Amherst and in the lives of the Dickinsons and the Todds. He shows us how Liebling and Dickinson share an ability to concentrate our attention on the present and concrete in such a way as to evoke an awareness of the absent and the unseen.
The particularities of Emily Dickinson's domestic circumstances, so lucidly presented in this beautiful book, provided the poet herself with perhaps her most memorable metaphor for the artist's calling:
I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows
Superior for Doors—
Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of Eye—
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—
Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—
—Harrison L. Gregg
Poems are from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin, ed., Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999.
Photo: Jerome Liebling
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Mythmaking in the New Russia: Politics and Memory in the Yeltsin Era. By Kathleen E. Smith '87. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. 223 pp. $29.95 hardcover.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, Russia seemed to face a series of daunting transitions: from totalitarianism to democracy, from a command to a market economy, from being an empire to becoming an ordinary nation state. A decade later, these multiple transitions look even more formidable, partly because powerful forces in Russian society have resisted all of them, but also because underlying the challenges has been a crisis of national identity, a struggle about memory, a debate about the nature and meaning of the past and how it is to be interpreted in the present as a guide to the future.
This battle is the subject of Kathleen E. Smith's fine new book, a battle, as she puts it, about “how and to what effect memories of the national past were . . . negotiated and propagated during the Yeltsin era.” The politics of memory is a particular focus of history and social science these days. Amherst Prof. David Blight's recent prize-winning work, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, is one of the very best of this breed. Smith's own previous book is Remembering Stalin's Victims: Popular Memory and the End of the USSR. At times the very history and politics that are the subject of such studies can be obscured by the theories that are meant to explain them. But Smith's book, like Blight's, illuminates its subject in all its vivid complexity.
Mythmaking in the New Russia documents a series of important cases: how the history of the Soviet Communist party was whitewashed in a crucial Constitutional Court case; how the abortive August 1991 coup against Gorbachev and Yeltsin has been depicted both as a founding act and a farce; how the spoils of World War II triggered a debate between liberals who favored returning cultural artifacts to their rightful owners and Communists and nationalists determined to demonstrate Russia's power and self-worth by keeping possession; about the struggle to recast the commemorative calendar by establishing new or reviving old holidays; about Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov's renovation of the capital's landscape with the rebuilding of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior and the construction of new monuments to victory in World War II, and to Peter the Great; about the 1996 presidential election and how it centered around the history of Stalinism; about Yeltsin's search for a “national idea,” which ended up with his declaration of a “Year of Reconciliation” to commence on the November 7 anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, a date which Yeltsin officially recast as an occasion for forgiveness and tolerance, but which produced all too little of either.
Each of these cases is a wonderful story in itself. But Smith uses them all to make larger points. Whereas the Communists “compensated for the unpopularity of Marxism-Leninism by rapidly embracing patriotism,” democrats “mistakenly shunned patriotic rhetoric and rituals as somehow exclusive to totalitarian regimes.” Liberals looked for national symbols in pre-Revolutionary history but found that “Russia had no experience with democracy that could be tapped for inspiration.” Symptomatic of liberal ineptitude is the fact that the Communists took the initiative in bringing their own case to the Constitutional Court, challenging Yeltsin's ban on the party, which the Court proceeded, in effect, to nullify.
According to Smith, it is Yeltsin's successor, President Vladimir Putin, who has finally learned the lessons of mythmaking in the new Russia. Whereas Yeltsin “never invested heavily in propagating countermemories of the Soviet period or in institutionalizing its own heroes or myths,” Putin has benefited from seeming an “unabashed patriot,” and from committing himself to “strengthening the state” in ways good and bad which resonate with the Russian tradition. His attempted crackdown on corruption is long overdue. His muzzling of the independent media seems an ominous throwback to the Soviet era. His acceptance of pre-revolutionary symbols (the two-headed tsarist eagle emblem and tricolor flag) while readopting the Soviet national anthem and the red flag as the armed forces' banner is a clever compromise. Yet rather than ending the “battle over what to take from the past,” Smith concludes, Putin's maneuvering has “simply reaffirmed the deep divisions among the Russian people” over the meaning of their own history.
—William Taubman
Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science
Photo: Lu-Hovasse Diane/Corbis SYGMA
Moment of Truth. By H.R. Coursen '54. Waxahachie, Texas: Windsor House Publishing Group, 2002. 219 pp. $21.95 hardcover, $14.95 paperback.
It's a few days shy of April 1942 in Germany but not exactly “springtime for Hitler.” The troops of his powerful Wehrmacht are getting their butts kicked by the Russians and Der Fuehrer is in the throes of a round-the-clock tantrum. He could use some help. It isn't likely to come from his Fascist buddy Mussolini. Perhaps another Fascist comrade, Franco. Two years earlier Hitler had attempted to recruit Spain to the Axis side, but the Generalissimo demanded too high a price. By 1942 the price seems much cheaper. Not that the Nazi leader expects a great infusion of troops or munitions from the impoverished Spaniards. But, with them on board, the Germans could block entry and exit to the Mediterranean, holding the Brits and Yanks at bay, controlling North Africa and protecting Italy and the Balkans from attack. These are the circumstances that launch H. R. (Herb) Coursen's eleventh novel, a lively, entertaining stew of thrills, politics, and romance.
A skilled emissary is needed to sweet-talk Franco. Enter Hauptman (Captain) Karl Hoeft of the Waffen SS, an armed branch of the SS, resembling the Wehrmacht but with different priorities. As the captain explains, “We are soldiers, not secret police.” Decorated with the Knights' Cross and other medals, the handsome Hoeft graduated from the University of Heidelberg with a degree in modern history. He had been a member of Germany's Davis Cup team in 1938 along with the famous Baron Gottfried Von Cramm. His tennis career ended in the Polish campaign when a grenade blasted metal fragments into one leg. He kept the leg but was left with a limp.
Thanks also to Poland he is no longer a dedicated Nazi, just a loyal soldier. When he witnessed Polish elementary school girls lined up against a wall and massacred by machine guns, an already shaky Naziism evaporated. Hoeft is fluent in Spanish and has been dispatched to Madrid to corral Spanish support. His true objective is to fail in his mission, even though he knows failure could send him home to face a firing squad.
After checking in, he heads for the hotel's patio. There he is introduced to Consuela Alvaro, a journalist known to all as Concha. “Luminous skin framed her dark eyes . . . . Her body was . . . fuller . . . than those of the androgynous young women who swung their arms in exercise with the huge formations of the Third Reich festivals.” Her family and friends fought—and many died—on the Nationalist side against Franco in the civil war of the 1930s. Just to make things really interesting, Concha is a Socialist. She's also Jewish. And she's married.
Concha treats Hoeft to a moonlit tour of Toledo and introduces him to the pleasures of southern Spain, including the fighting bulls of Andalusia.
Having spent some time in Andalusia I can assure readers that Coursen's evocations of the stark, angular countryside of the region and its cities, such as Seville, are not only accurate but sensitive, vivid, and loving. Quicker than you can say “Te amo, querida,” Hoeft falls in love with Concha, and his blond German fiancée Helga begins to fade from memory. But can he trust Concha? That takes longer.
Trusting anybody is a daily challenge for Hoeft. It seems some German or Spaniard is forever trying to draw him into a conversational trap that will expose his true intentions and feelings about the Third Reich. For instance he visits the palatial home of a German prince and his Spanish wife, the Marquesa. She is “hot”—“a Spanish beauty, with dark, amused eyes and the high cheek bones of the nobility of Madrid.” The royals quiz him about various aspects of the war and the Nazi leadership. Hoeft is a model of caginess since a slip of the tongue could be regarded as treasonous. Turns out this pair is a part of a large, influential group plotting to replace Hitler as chancellor with Heinrich Himmler. They prefer a murderous chicken farmer to a bloodthirsty house painter. Goering, Heydrich, and others in the hierarchy won't do. Intrigue fills the air. A Gestapo agent seems to lurk behind every pillar. Franco's Falangist goons wait in the shadows.
The Prince and Marquesa include Hoeft on the guest list for a soirée at their home. Barely inside the door he is whisked onto the dance floor by the Marquesa, who presses her hips against him as they spin to an Austrian waltz. She issues another invitation: “When you want . . . a night without commitment, but with whatever else, simply leave your name at the gate . . . .” I am especially fond of the subsequent scene wherein the Marquesa gets the Hauptman into bed. Coursen has a special gift for capturing the romantic and sensual side of life, and this episode is an erotic gem.
But Hoeft's heart belongs to Concha; he feels confident that she reciprocates.When a couple of Franco thugs kidnap her, Hoeft grabs a couple of lugers and races to the rescue, darn near getting killed in the process. He himself is abducted by an Austrian general who grills him for incriminating evidence. But Spaniards pull his knockwurst out of the fire.
Eventually there is the promised audience with Franco. They parry and thrust over the pros and cons of Spain making a deal with Germany. The Caudillo senses Hoeft's lack of commitment to the cause, and he is highly skeptical anyway of Hitler's chances against the Allies. Hoeft departs without an answer. That comes in a wire from Berlin and an editorial in a Madrid newspaper.
Life grows darker and more dangerous as he and Concha have a blowup and she walks out of his life. It gets worse. The Gestapo is on his tail. Time to get outta town. The novel nears its conclusion with a night-time chase through the Spanish countryside worthy of The Fugitive. It is natural to wonder if Hoeft escapes; the odds are against him. Even so, can he reunite with Concha? The answers to these and other questions lie in the pages of Moment of Truth. In case you didn't recognize it the title stems from that instant when a matador plunges his sword into a bull for the kill. For devotees of literary thrillers and romances it is well worth traveling with the Hauptman on his mission to Madrid. Buen viaje!
—Eugene Walter '54
The reviewer is Secretary of his Class.
Amherst College Books
Self-Same Songs: Autobiographical Performances and Reflections. By Roger J. Porter '58. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 272 pp. $24.95 paperback.
The author contributes to the literary study of the autobiography with his broad-based examination of the autobiography and its uses over time. Porter uses examples from a range of authors to study the motivations and functions of the autobiography for the writer, and discusses the texts both as avenues in the search for self-identity and as attempts to change life through the act of writing about it. At the end of each chapter, the author treats his readers to an autobiographical account of his professional and personal interactions with the autobiographers he discusses, creating an autobiographical account of his own within the academic text.
Cleveland Anonymous. By Keith Gandal '82. Berkeley, Cal.: Frog, Ltd., 2002. 316 pp. $15.95 paperback.
This novel tells the story of Sam and Mary Jane, a brother and his foster sister growing up in Cleveland in the late 1960s. When the Cuyahoga River catches fire, Mary Jane disappears and Sam reacts to the loss with physical pain and disability. Twenty years later, the novel finds Sam in San Francisco. After the 1989 earthquake, Sam feels compelled to go to New York and find his missing sister. The search involves Sam with a cast of eclectic characters and intriguing situations, as well as with a haunting series of fires.
Technomanifestos: Visions from the Informational Revolutionaries. By Adam Brate (Brad Johnson '98 and Jena Pincott). New York: TEXERE LLC, 2002. 372 pp. $29.95 hardcover.
Brate explores the nature of the personal computer, the Internet, cell phones and other media of the Information Revolution by examining the philosophies and ideas at the core of the technological movement. Technomanifestos discusses and dissects the ideas of 20 of the original seminal innovators of the Information Revolution through excerpts of their works, and concludes that the original intent of the Information Revolution was to provide a venue for “collective empowerment” by making it easier for people to share information and collaborate to solve problems. The book follows the history and applications of the Information Revolution, serving as both a lesson of the past and a warning for the future.
Information Technology Strategies: How Leading Firms Use IT to Gain an Advantage. By William V. Rapp '61. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 336 pp. $65 hardcover.
Rapp, a professor of international trade and business at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, discusses the methods by which market-dominating firms use Information Technology (IT) strategically. Rapp argues that, rather than reorganize to accommodate IT, leading IT users find ways to bring the technology into previously existing core competencies, organizations and procedures. He goes on to explain how the incorporation of IT into a previously existing structure results in long-term competitiveness, in part by making the new IT-facilitated structure difficult to use as an applicable model for another firm hoping to integrate IT. The book explains the methods and reasoning behind leading IT strategies, in an effort to help managers answer the question, “How do we advantageously harness the new information revolution?”
From Buchenwald to Carnegie Hall. By Marian Filar and Charles Patterson '58. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 2002. 231 pp. $29 hardcover.
This memoir, co-written by Patterson and internationally acclaimed pianist Filar, is the story of Filar's fulfillment of his mother's blessing that he become a great pianist. The book traces the story of Filar's childhood in pre-War World II Warsaw, interrupted by the German invasion of Poland. After leaving Warsaw for Lemberg (Lvov) with the German occupation of Warsaw, he returned to his family in 1941. Filar and his brother Joel survived the Nazi killings of their parents, sister, and brother, but were captured after participating in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The memoir details Filar's harrowing journey through several German concentration camps, and details the resurgence of his musical career after the liberation. In 1950, Filar emigrated to the United States, where he quickly rose to prominence and made his debut performance at Carnegie Hall two years later. Filar's book comes full circle, ending with a trip back to Warsaw in 1992, where Filar visits the place where he last saw his mother.
The U.S. and Mussolini. By Louis A. DeSanti '44. McLean, Va.: The Millenium Publishing Company, 2001.
248 pp. $14.95 paperback.
Using U.S. State Department files as well as Mussolini's own papers, DeSanti explores Mussolini's relationship with the United States government over a 20-year span. An expansion of the author's dissertation, the account traces how, as Mussolini's regime came to power and cemented itself, the international community moved from a stance of cautious acceptance to one of direct opposition. DeSanti points out that, in the early years of his power, Mussolini's anti-democratic reign was seen by the United States as a productive and beneficial one, promoting law and order, patriotism and discipline in Italy and beyond. The mid-1930s, however, brought a rise in European dictatorships and, consequently, an American withdrawal from the scope of European politics. Mussolini turned to Hitler to replace Roosevelt's friendship, and the new alliance led to the Nazi-Fascist aggressions that sparked World War II.
—Compiled by Rebecca Binder '02
What They Are Reading
We asked Jan E. Dizard, Charles Hamilton Houston Professor in American Culture (Sociology), to tell us what he's been reading. His courses this year include “The Value of Nature” and “Environmental Risks and Environmental Choices.”
More and more of my reading is devoted to books that fall under the broad category, environmental studies. David Lowenthal's wonderful biography of George Perkins Marsh (George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation, University of Washington Press, 2000) is a good starting point for anyone interested in the roots of American environmentalism. Marsh is arguably the first person to chronicle systematically and thoroughly the environmental degradation for which humans have been responsible. Lowenthal clearly and carefully shows how Marsh helped lay the basis for what became, by the late 19th century, the unique American conservation movement that, among other things, provided the impetus needed to create our national and state parks.
Another early defender of the wild, Henry David Thoreau, inspired David R. Foster, the director of the Harvard forest in Petersham, Mass., to write a detailed landscape history of Concord (Thoreau's Country: Journey Through a Transformed Landscape, Harvard University Press, 1999). Drawing on Thoreau's painstaking observations of the flora and fauna in and around Concord, Foster gives us a fresh perspective on Thoreau, and draws an important but often overlooked lesson from Thoreau's work: Historical factors and past land-use activities determine current conditions. For better or worse, there is no way to return to a presumed pristine condition. It is thus ironic, to say the least, that in our own day Thoreau has become an inspiration to those who wish to see as much of the landscape as possible returned to forest (or plains) primeval.
Though his agenda is more modest, Dan O'Brien's new book, Buffalo for the Broken Hearted: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch (Random House, 2001), chronicles his attempt to convert his cattle ranch in the Black Hills to a bison range, in hopes of undoing the many sorts of damage cattle ranching in that arid part of the world has inflicted on the land. (Ted Turner is doing the same on a vastly larger scale with his ranches scattered across the Great Plains.) O'Brien hopes to turn the ecological clock back, healing the land and his soul in the process. Though I put the book down with my skepticism about returning to a more harmonious relationship with nature intact, O'Brien is a fine writer.
The desire to start over, to return somehow to a tabula rasa when virtue was clear and harmony between man and nature prevailed, seems as strong as ever. Most people only daydream about these things, but some become quite possessed. No one could possibly outdo Eustace Conway IV in going back to nature. At age 17, Conway left home in North Carolina in 1977 with the clothes on his back, a folding knife in his pocket, and his head filled with a fund of knowledge of the flora and fauna and Indian subsistence skills that would be remarkable for a person twice or more his age. He survived and still lives in his beloved mountains, though he no longer sleeps under the stars out of necessity. His is a remarkable story that Elizabeth Gilbert (The Last American Man, Viking, 2002) tells with zest, humor, and just enough critical distance to make clear the pathos and impossibility of Conway's quest for purity.
The conservation movement that George Perkins Marsh helped inspire did not seek purity so much as it sought to remove lands from intensive commercial exploitation. Three recent books by historians cast new light on this effort, demonstrating how the push to establish parks and the regulation of logging, hunting, trapping and fishing put elite reformers on a collision course with the people who thought nature and its fruits were theirs for the taking. Together these three books help us understand the continuing debates we are having over how best to think of nature: is it a cupboard filled with goodies for our pleasure and comfort, or is it a museum filled with treasures we'd best admire from a distance? The books are Louis S. Warren's The Hunter's Game: Poachers and Conservationists in Twentieth-Century America (Yale University Press, 1997); Daniel Justin Herman, Hunting and the American Imagination (Smithsonian, 2001); and Karl Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (University of California Press, 2001).
The question of how best to regulate our use of nature remains vexed. Bjorn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist (Cambridge University Press, 2001) argues that we needn't worry; despite all the environmental doomsayers, things are in fact improving and, if left to its own devices, the market will lead us to sustainability. Needless to say, Lomberg's book has set off a flurry of rebuttals, including an 11-page editorial in Scientific American (January 2002) devoted to demolishing his argument. A much more circumspect and modulated effort to reconcile conservation and our rising consumption can be found in Gretchen C. Daily's and Katherine Ellison's book, The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable (Island Press, 2002). Daily and Ellison describe a series of instances in which a combination of market incentives and regulation have created the ever-elusive win-win outcome. Doubters will find comfort in a slender but forceful book by Eric A. Davidson, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. In You Can't Eat GNP: Economics as if Ecology Mattered (Perseus, 2000), Davidson carefully explores the complex relationship between markets and natural resources, starting at the most basic level, the soil and the combination of geological and biological processes that make life as we know it possible. He concludes that while there is no intrinsic opposition between the market and a respect for nature, significant change in our attitudes and appetites will be necessary if we are to avoid calamity.