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Downsizing the U.S.A.
By Thomas H. Naylor and William H. Willimon. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 289 pages. $25.
In this trenchant analysis of American society, Naylor, economics professor emeritus at Duke, and Willimon, current dean of Duke Chapel and a divinity school professor, take an unabashed stance against the belief that "bigger is better." They argue that our government, cities, corporations, schools, churches, military, and social welfare system are all too big, powerful intrusive, insular, and unresponsive to the needs of individuals and small, local communities. The authors audaciously call for the peaceful dissolution of the United States through secession and provide a thoughtful game plan for achieving this controversial objective.
The Mythical Man-month: Essays on Software Engineering
By Frederick P. Brooks Jr. '53. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company. 322 pages.
Few books on software project management have been as influential and timeless as Mythical Man-month by Brooks, founder of UNC-Chapel Hill's computer science department, where he is a Kenan professor, and best known as "the father of the IBM System/360." This twentieth anniversary edition has four additional chapters.
Women, Poverty, and AIDS: Sex, Drugs, and Structural Violence
Edited by Paul Farmer '82, Margaret Connors, and Janie Simmons. Common Courage Press. 470 pages. $19.95.
Co-editor Farmer is a physician and anthropologist and the author of The Uses of Haiti and AIDS and Accusation. In 1993, he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award for his work. This book begins with a series of portraits of poor women with HIV disease from Haiti, India, the United States, and elsewhere. Although they share neither language, culture, race, nor ethnic background, they do share their poverty and their gender. Women, Poverty, and AIDS brings together community activists, physicians, and social scientists to explore one of the greatest threats to women's health in our times.
The Essential Guide to Cosmetic Laser Surgery
By Tina Alster B.S.N. '81, M.D. '86 and Lydia Preston. Alliance Publishers. 198 pages. $16.
Alster, internationally recognized as one of the leading practitioners of cosmetic laser surgery, offers this comprehensive consumer guide, subtitled "The Revolutionary New Way to Erase Wrinkles, Age Spots, Scars, Birthmarks, Moles, Tattoos...and How Not to Get Burned in the Process." The director of the Washington Institute of Dermatologic Laser Surgery, she also teaches at Georgetown and Harvard medical schools.
Changing Channels: Television and the Struggle for Power in Russia
By Ellen Mickiewicz. Oxford University Press. 340 pages. $35.
"From the days when Leonid Brezhnev clung to power through the tumult of Mikhail Gorbachev and the election victories of Boris Yeltsin, Russian leaders have struggled over the control of television," writes David Gergen, editor at large at U.S. News & World Report. "In this fine and penetrating book, Ellen Mickiewicz traces those struggles and examines the larger question still ahead: whether a free and independent television can emerge that will bolster prospects for a stable, democratic nation. No one else has better captured the important saga." Mickiewicz is director of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism at Duke's Sanford Institute of Public Policy.
The Hidden Welfare State: Tax Expenditures and Social Policy in the United States
By Christopher Howard '83. Princeton University Press. 272 pages. $39.50.
Howard, an assistant professor of government at the College of William and Mary, analyzes the "hidden" welfare state created by such
programs as tax deductions for home mortgage interest and employer-provided retirement pensions, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the Targeted Jobs Tax Credit. Basing his work on the histories of these four tax expenditures, he highlights the distinctive characteristics of all such policies and the reason why individuals, businesses, and public officials support them.
Romantic Theatricality: Gender, Poetry, and Spectatorship
By Judith Pascoe '82. Cornell University Press. 251 pages.
In a significant reinterpretation of early romanticism, Pascoe shows how English literary culture in the 1790s came to be shaped by the theater and by the public's fascination with it. She focuses on several intriguing historical occurrences of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, emphasizing how writers in all areas of public life relied on theatrical modes of self-representation. Pascoe is an assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa
Worship With One Accord: Where Liturgy and Ecumenism Embrace
By Geoffrey Wainwright. Oxford University Press. 276 pages.
In his book, Wainwright, Cushman Professor of Theology at Duke, "explores a theme that is vital for ecumenism but perhaps has not always received adequate attention: the relationship between liturgical renewal and the search for Christian unity," writes Edward Cardinal Cassidy, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, Rome. "While illuminating ecumenical progress, he also speaks forthrightly about present dangers to the movement for Christian unity."
Women Imagine Change: A Global Anthology of Women's Resistance, 600 B.C.E. to Present
Edited by Eugenia Delamotte, Natania Meeker, and Jean O'Barr. Routledge. 509 pages. $29.95.
Organized around themes of concern to contemporary readers, this collection presents vivid, diverse life experiences. The relationships between sexuality and spirituality include a feminist rabbi's account of her struggle with religious traditions, and a thirteenth-century French peasant's explanation to the Inquisition of her self-invented doctrine of free love. Introductions enhance the writings with historical and biographical information, enabling readers to see each writer in her unique context. Co-editor O'Barr is the director of Women's Studies at Duke.
Friday's Footprint: How Society Shapes the Human Mind
By Leslie Brothers M.D. '80. Oxford University Press. 187 pages. $25.
Neuroscientists have long used the Robinson Crusoe metaphor--a starkly isolated figure, working, praying, writing alone--when discussing the notion of the brain. Now the question arises: Is the brain truly isolated, or is it an extension of, and an organ shaped by, a larger, more complex network--society? Brothers begins her exploration of the brain at the individual neuron level, looking at in particular the response of brain cells to social events. More importantly, she connects neuroscience, psychiatry, and sociology as never before, showing how our daily interaction creates an organized social world--a network of brains that generates meaningful behavior and thought.
Balkan Justice: The Story Behind the First International War Crimes Trial Since Nuremberg
By Michael P. Scharf '85, J.D. '88. Carolina Academic Press. 250 pages. $25.
Based on extensive interviews and other sources, the book describes the key players in this international judicial drama: the investigators, prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, and the defendant himself--Dusko Tadic. It's the inside story of the politics and diplomacy behind the establishment of the Yugoslavia War Crimes Tribunal and the launching of its investigations. Scharf draws from his own experiences as the State Department attorney responsible for drafting the Security Council Resolutions leading up to the establishment of the tribunal and the U.S. proposals for the tribunal's Statute and Rules of Procedure.
Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England
By Huston Diehl A.M. '71, Ph.D. '75. Cornell University Press. 238 pages. $39.95.
The author, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, sees Elizabethan and Jacobean drama as both a product of the Protestant Reformation--a reformed drama--and a producer of Protestant habits of thought--a reforming drama. According to Diehl, the popular London theater, which flourished in the years after Elizabeth re-established Protestantism in England, rehearsed the religious crises that disrupted, divided, energized, and, in many respects, revolutionized English society.
Susanna Wesley, The Complete Writings
Edited by Charles Wallace Jr. Ph.D. '75. Oxford University Press. 504 pages. $65.
Long celebrated in Methodist mythology as mother of the movement's founders, Susanna Wesley now takes her place as a practical theologian in her own right. This collection of her letters, edited by Wallace, Williamette University's chaplain and religion professor, includes her spiritual diary and longer treatises (only one of which was published in her lifetime). Her writings show her to be a well-educated woman conversant in the historical and contemporary theological, philosophical, and literary works of her day.
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