Book Notes: March-April 2010

The Global Game: Writers on Soccer.
Edited by John Turnbull '85, Thom Satterlee, and Alon Raab.
University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
316 pages. $19.95.

Turnbull has assembled essays and poetry by an eclectic group of writers, including Ted Hughes, Günter Grass, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Elvis Costello. From locations that span the stadiums of Burma and Iran to the northern lights over Greenland to the remotest areas of Sierra Leone, the writers celebrate the players, fans, rituals, and politics of the world's most popular sport.

Clos Pepe: A Vigneron's Quest for Great Dirt.
By Stephen P. Pepe J.D. '68.
Carneros Press, 2009. 228 pages. $25.

After a career as a labor lawyer, Pepe (pronounced "peppy") decided to pursue a lifelong dream of owning a vineyard and producing fine wine. With a family history of winemaking stretching back to Prohibition, he chronicles how he and his wife, Catherine, transformed a former horse ranch into a thriving vineyard with more than 40,000 Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapevines in California's Santa Rita Hills. Pepe is a member of a number of wine societies, including the Chevaliers du Tastevin and the California Vintage Wine Society.

Superpower Illusions: How Myths and False Ideologies Led America Astray— and How to Return to Reality.
By Jack F. Matlock Jr. '50.
Yale University Press, 2010.
368 pages. $30.

Drawing from his experience as the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, from 1987 to 1991, Matlock argues that Mikhail Gorbachev—not Ronald Reagan—undermined Communist Party rule and that the end of the Cold War was beneficial to both sides. He aims to show how the policies of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, which, he says, emphasized unilateral military power over diplomacy, compromised U.S. leadership. Finally, Matlock provides perspectives on how the Obama administration can revise foreign policy to strengthen America's global influence.

Debating Moral Education: Rethinking the Role of the Modern University.
Edited by Elizabeth Kiss and J.Peter Euben.
Duke University Press, 2010.
368 pages. $24.95.

Inspired by a conference at Duke on ethics in higher education, this volume contains essays by scholars of philosophy, politics, and religion that explore whether universities are responsible for teaching morality and ethics, what teaching ethics entails, and what moral education should accomplish. Contributors include Duke faculty members Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of theological ethics; Michael Gillespie, Jerry G. and Patricia Crawford Hubbard Professor of political science and professor of philosophy; Ruth Grant, professor of political science and philosophy; and Euben, a research professor of political science and classical studies and Kenan Distinguished Faculty Fellow in ethics. Kiss is founding director of Duke's Kenan Institute for Ethics and president of Agnes Scott College.

B Jenkins.
By Fred Moten.
Duke University Press, 2010.
120 pages. $19.95.

In his fourth collection of poetry, Moten, an associate professor of English at Duke, revisits themes he embraces as a literary and cultural critic: language, music, performance, improvisation, and the black radical aesthetic and political tradition. The first and last poems in the book pay tribute to his mother (the book's namesake), while the others invoke performers, writers, and scholars, including James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Cecil Taylor, and Billie Holiday. The book also includes an interview with Moten conducted by Callaloo editor Charles Henry Rowell.

Money Makers: Inside the New World of Finance and Business.
By David Snider '03 and Chris Howard.
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
272 pages. $28.

Snider and co-author Howard, president of Hampden-Sydney College, interviewed dozens of business leaders to provide an insider's perspective on investment banking, venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, management consulting, and the management of Fortune 500 companies. Participants include former Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz '72, Carlyle Group cofounder David Rubenstein '87, former General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner '75, and chair and cofounder of Boston Scientific Peter Nicholas '64.

Ariel Dorfman: An Aesthetics of Hope.
By Sophia A. McClennen A.M. '92, Ph.D. '96.
Duke University Press, 2010.
408 pages. $24.95.

McClennen analyzes the life and work of Dorfman, the Walter Hines Page Research Chair of literature and Latin American studies at Duke. Drawing from the broad range of Dorfman's work (novel, short story, poetry, drama), McClennen shows his influence on the Latin American literary canon, human-rights literature, and meditations on exile and displacement. McClennen claims that Dorfman's literary output forms an "aesthetics of hope" that considers how the arts are vital to our understanding of the world and our struggles to change it. McClennen is an associate professor of comparative literature, Spanish, and women's studies at Pennsylvania State University.