Reviews | Short Takes
Short Takes
Abnormal Psychology. By Lisa K. Damour and James H. Hansell ’79. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. 656 pp. $80.95 paperback.
Assisted Living. Written and directed by Elliot Greenbaum ’99. Feature film, 2005.
Elliott Greenbaum’s pseudo-documentary follows a slacker janitor (Michael Bonsignore) in the Masonic Homes of Kentucky Assisted Living (where the film was actually shot) as he plays cruel tricks on the elderly residents, like placing prank phone calls to them “from heaven.” But he comes to love one of the tenants, a cranky woman named Mrs. Pearlman (Maggie Riley), and both characters end up experiencing complete emotional reversals. Shot in the raw documentary style of Christopher Guest’s films, it deftly balances black humor and genuine poignancy. The film has won prizes at several major festivals, including the 2003 Sundance Film Festival, where it was named Best Feature Film.
Best Entry-Level Jobs: Paying Your Dues Without Losing Your Mind. By Ron Lieber ’93 and Tom Melzer. New York: Random House/Princeton Review. 288 pp. $16.95 paperback.
Lieber and Melzer’s book reveals where to find the best first-job opportunities and what one needs to do to get one of them. They offer an inside look at hiring procedures, salaries, benefits and where entry-level hires usually work. The authors interviewed hundreds of entry-level job holders, who share their experiences and opinions about the hiring process, salaries, job responsibilities, training, the corporate culture and opportunities for advancement. Lieber works for The Wall Street Journal.
Bloomsbury Rooms: Modernism, Subculture and Domesticity. By Christopher Reed ’84. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. 320 pp. $45 hardcover.
Reed’s book traces the development of Bloomsbury’s domestic aesthetic over 20 years, beginning with the group’s influential promulgation of Post-Impressionism in Britain around 1910. In detailed studies of rooms and environments created by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry for Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes, among others, Reed challenges the accepted notion that these artists drifted away from modernism. He presents their work as an alternative form of modernism, later suppressed by sexist and homophobic attitudes that disparaged the decorative arts and domesticity in general and Bloomsbury in particular. The aesthetic and ideological implications of the Bloomsbury interiors were international in scope, Reed argues, and constitute important episodes in the history of modernity.
The Dollarization Discipline: How Smart Companies Create Consumer Value…and Profit From It. By Jeffrey Fox and Richard Gregory ’87. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. 272 pp. $24.95 hardcover.
Many companies’ products and services have economic values that may not be apparent to the consumer or well articulated by the companies themselves. Without such information, consumers rely on the only value they know about, which is price. Gregory and Fox’s book is written to help executives not only explain a product’s benefits and features, but also calculate the relationship between the price paid and the monetary gain a customer receives. The authors show marketers and salespeople how to handle price objections, shorten sales cycles and protect business from competition.
Drowning in Laws: Labor Law and Brazilian Political Culture. By John D. French ’75. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 233 pp. $24.95 paperback.
Since 1943, the lives of Brazilian working people and their employers have been governed by the Consolidation of Labor Laws, or CLT. Seen as the end of an exclusively repressive approach, the CLT was hailed as one of the world’s most advanced bodies of social legislation. In this book, French examines the CLT’s juridical origins and the legislation’s role in the cultural and political formation of the Brazilian working class. French is an associate professor of history at Duke University.
Economic Development Finance. By Karl Seidman ’78. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE Publications, 2004. 520 pp. $79.95 hardcover.
Economic Development Finance pulls together an enormous array of information on development financing and is one of the first books to cover the field comprehensively. It tells readers where to look for financing and explains the policies and methods that govern development loans. Through abundant case studies, the book provides students and professionals with a foundation in the technical aspects of business and real estate finance. A glossary of finance terms is also included.
Einstein A to Z. By Karen Fox ’91 and Aries Keck. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. 320 pp. $17.95 paperback.
Einstein A to Z provides a vibrant overview of Time’s Man of the Century and his remarkable achievements, with more than 100 lively, informative essays that explain and celebrate his life, his work and his cultural influence. From absentmindedness to Zionism, each entry features a fascinating account of one aspect of Einstein’s world, from lucid explanations of his work to insights into his personal life, predilections and interests. The book offers a unique glimpse into the mind of the shabbily dressed man who would become so engrossed in his ideas that he often neglected to sleep or eat; the father who never met his first child and proposed marriage to one of his stepdaughters; the avowed pacifist who was torn between pride in his German heritage and disgust at the country’s militaristic ideology.
Law and the Liberal Arts. By Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. 256 pp. $45 hardcover.
The study of law is, and ought to be, one of the liberal arts, according to Sarat, and “law just might be saved from the lawyers,” if it were taught to more undergraduate college students. He argues that the liberal arts need the study of law, but also that the American legal system can learn from the liberal arts. “In the liberal arts,” Sarat writes, “the failure to more fully articulate and institutionalize legal scholarship deprives them of a subject of enormous richness and interest. Systematic study of law advances the goals of a liberal education because of the importance of law in culture and society, as well as the capacity of legal study to engage and enhance the intellectual, analytic and imaginative capacities of undergraduates.”
Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography. By Fritz Ringer ’56. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 264 pp. $19 paperback.
Max Weber was one of the most influential and creative intellectual forces of the 20th century. In his methodology of the social sciences, he both exposed the flaws and solidified the foundations of the German historical tradition. Throughout his life, he saw bureaucracy as a serious obstacle to cultural vitality but as an inescapable part of organizational rationality. And in his most famous essay, on the Protestant ethic, he uncovered the psychological underpinnings of capitalism and modern occupational life. Ringer locates Weber in his historical context, relating his ideas to the controversies and politics of his day. Ringer also considers the importance of Weber to contemporary life, discussing his insights into the limits of scholarly research and the future of Western capitalist societies. Ringer is the Mellon Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Pittsburgh.
Murder at the B-School. By Jeffrey Cruikshank ’74. New York, N.Y.: Warner Books, 2004. 336 pp. $24.95 hardcover.
A graduate and former administrator of the Harvard Business School, Cruikshank returns to his old haunt in a novel that is anything but administrative. A mystery set at Harvard, Murder at the B-School twists and turns through wealthy Boston families, freak accidents and an “ingenious murder” featuring a campus hot tub. Cruikshank is the founder of The Cruikshank Company, a Boston-based communications consulting firm.
Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism and Cause Lawyering. By Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, and Stuart Scheingold, professor emeritus of political science, University of Washington. Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. 182 pp. $35 hardcover.
In their new book, Sarat and Scheingold explore the controversial work of cause lawyers—human-rights lawyers, feminist lawyers, right-to-life lawyers, civil-rights and civil-liberties lawyers, anti-death-penalty lawyers, environmental lawyers, property-rights lawyers and anti-poverty lawyers. Lawyers in the United States are trained to see lawyering as a technical activity, not a moral or political calling, and are supposed to be willing to set aside their own beliefs and work for any client. Cause lawyers, according to Sarat and Scheingold, refuse to deny their own convictions and challenge the conventions of what lawyers should do and how they should behave. Something to Believe In examines the role of social commitment in cause-based practice, and explores the lawyers’ relationships to the organized legal profession and the contributions they make to democratic politics.
Yourcenar. By George Rousseau ’62. London: Haus Publishing, 2004. 176 pp. £12.99 paperback.
In his new book, Rousseau explores the complexities of a lesbian who wrote mainly in the voices of gay men, a fiercely controlled intellectual who wrote brilliantly about overwhelming sexual passion. Marguerite Yourcenar (1903-87) was born into an aristocratic Flemish family in Brussels. She first started to write in her adolescent years. After the death of her father, she was able to support herself independently by her pen, producing many novels, plays, poems, critical essays and letters, as well as three volumes of personal memoirs, most of which were written in French and translated into English. Rousseau is a member of the Faculty of Modern History at the University of Oxford.
—Compiled by Samuel Masinter ’04