New Books

And When I Dream: Faces in San Francisco, by Bert Katz '53, DayBue Publishing, 2002, 128 pages, more than 60 full-color photos

With this full-color collection of stunning portraits and insightful text, author and photographer Bert Katz has once again taken to the streets of San Francisco and documented the lives and dreams of the city's widely varied populace. And When I Dream: Faces in San Francisco is a striking and moving testament to the spirit of those who live in San Francisco. Katz is a veteran observer of the human condition who has been photographing and interviewing hundreds of people for decades, culminating in this collection of real-life characters that is passionate, witty, and authentic.

Within the pages of And When I Dream are Suzanne, a sightless San Franciscan from South Africa who sees more in one day than most see in a lifetime, and Kelly, who was constantly harassed in other cities but finally feels like he belongs in his adopted city. Edward, a Vietnam vet and amputee, shares his dreams, passions, and sobering perspective, which is complemented with an emotional portrait that seems to leap straight off the page.

Bernard struggled to come to terms with his homosexuality and his religion but boasts of his triumphant construction of a gay and lesbian synagogue. Raoul waxes on the heyday of the sixties and the maturity of the city in the subsequent decades. Heigo spent his childhood engrossed in thoughts of a new life in America and is living that dream in the City by the Bay.

Each story engrosses the audience and alters the way we look at the people who share our cities and our lives.

"Luscious and startlingly beautiful," says a review penned for Networking Alternatives for Publishers, Retailers and Artists. "When I first opened this book and looked into these faces, I didn't want to put the book down."

The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas, by James R. Schultz '41, University of Missouri Press, 2002, 200 pages, 120 illustrations

James Schultz offers a unique pictorial study of a cultural movement that started in 1904 and spread across the country. For almost thirty years, tent shows known as "chautauquas" brought popular education and entertainment to small towns in America. With more than a hundred photographs and other illustrations from the era, Schultz's book presents a captivating overview of the tent chautauqua movement from its inception to its demise in 1932.

Keith Vawter, owner of the Chicago branch of the Redpath Lyceum, came up with the idea of bringing to rural America the same quality of lectures and other forms of entertainment that were available through the lyceum movement. His concept was a circuit of traveling tents that moved from town to town. Vawter named his traveling circuits "chautauquas," modeling them after New York's Chautauqua Institution.

The Romance of Small-Town Chautauquas contains many previously unpublished photographs that reflect the styles and customs of a bygone era, as well as photos and anecdotes about people of prominence who toured as speakers or entertainers. These included President Warren G. Harding, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, journalist and Allegheny alumna Ida Tarbell, and poet Carl Sandburg.

Schultz contributes much new information from the files of his father and uncle, both of whom were involved in the management of the Redpath Chautauquas, as well as interviews he conducted with individuals who remember attending chautauqua performances.

"Delightful," says Bruce Clayton, Harry A. Logan, Sr. Professor of American History. "It is stylishly, virtually flawlessly written, and the author's subjects-small towns, the personalities running the operations, the work gangs, and the performers-all come to life in these pages."

The CRS Team and the Business of Architecture, edited by Jonathan King and Philip Langdon '69, Texas A&M University Press, 2002, 352 pages, 45 photos

At Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS), once one of the world leaders in architectural design, the way someone shot down an idea at a meeting was to say, "There's nothing new about that." It was part of the fiber of the company to lead the way for others.

CRS got its start in the 1940s as a three-man operation above a grocery store in College Station, Texas. By the 1970s it had earned a global reputation, and in 1983, with thirty-one hundred employees, CRS merged with the South Carolina-based firm Sirrine. The CRS Team and the Business of Architecture traces the company's origins to its emergence as the largest architecture/engineering firm in the United States.

"The firm was a leader, an innovator, pushing the design and construction industry toward construction management, fast-track scheduling, and better ways of working," the authors write.

Based on oral histories from leaders and staff members of CRS, the book explores the ways mid-twentieth-century architects developed methods that allowed professionals to analyze projects. AIA Gold Medal winner Bill Caudill, its intellectual leader, set up a "troika," whereby the branches of design, management, and technology all pooled their talents to produce results. And CRS was one of the first firms to publish studies conducted by experts as well as seek grassroots suggestions from clients. Interspersed throughout the volume are memos written by Caudill that show life and work at CRS and Caudill's strong belief in teamwork. The book is heavily illustrated with pictures of firm members at work and views of important CRS buildings.

The interviews and narrative within this volume connect the CRS story to today's developments in architecture, the economy, and society while showing how this groundbreaking company continues to influence the practice of architecture even today.

Encountering Global Environmental Politics: Teaching, Learning, and Empowering Knowledge, edited by Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Science Michael Maniates, Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, 280 pages

Recognizing that many undergraduate courses on global environmental ills, though well intentioned, erode students' sense of the possible, this collection of thirteen essays-all by teacher-scholars in the field-draws students and teachers of global environmental politics into classroom conversation about the overwhelming nature of global environmental threats, the tenuous and sometimes counterproductive links between knowledge and power, and ways of acting powerfully in the world in service of "sustainability."

"Human society is now encountering any number of critical environmental thresholds of global magnitude," Maniates writes in the book's preface. "Cultivating the faith and nerve we need to act on our growing knowledge of global environmental degradation is the primary focus of this book."

Frances Moore Lappé, co-author of Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet, wrote the book's foreword. "We need not protect ourselves from the bleak news of planetary decline nor prod ourselves with it either," she writes. "We needn't guilt trip ourselves about some pay back demanded by virtue of our privilege. We have only to create environments in which educators and students alike can come to hear-through the clatter of opposing messages-and to trust their own yearning for effectiveness in the larger world."

"All the academic speechifying around environment and development will get us nothing if our students are not inspired to learn, and then to act," says Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security, and author of The World's Water 2002-2003: The Biennial Report on Freshwater Resources. "This book shows how to make a real difference, at a time when making a difference is crucially important. Use it in the classroom, use it in the field, and slap a few policy makers with it too."

The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, by Horace Walpole, edited by Professor Emeritus of English Frederick S. Frank, Broadview Press, 2002, 450 pages

This Broadview edition pairs the first Gothic novel with the first Gothic drama, both by Horace Walpole.

Published on Christmas Eve, 1764, on Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill, his Gothicized country house, The Castle of Otranto became an instant and immediate classic of the Gothic genre as well as the prototype for Gothic fiction for the next two hundred years. The novel is exemplary in terms of its use of devices that were to become conventional elements of the Gothic genre, such as frantic characters in claustrophobic predicaments or confronted by malign supernatural forces with which they cannot contend.

In contrast with the elaborate plot of The Castle of Otranto, The Mysterious Mother is starkly simple in a manner reminiscent of ancient Greek tragedy. Brooding and intense, the drama focuses on the protagonist's angst over an act of incest with his mother and includes the appearance of Father Benedict, Gothic literature's first evil monk.

Appendices in this edition include selections from Walpole's letters, contemporary responses, and samples of work revealing the aesthetic and intellectual climate of the period, such as a selection from Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. This edition also includes Sir Walter Scott's introduction to the 1811 edition of The Castle of Otranto.

"Frederick Frank brings together Walpole's controversial play The Mysterious Mother and his seminal Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto in this authoritative edition," writes Marie Mulvey-Roberts, of the University of the West of England, Bristol. "Frank's masterly introduction transports the modern reader back to a fresh appreciation of Walpolian 'gloomth.' The edition is an indispensable addition to every Gothicist's book-shelf as well as an invaluable text for students, scholars, and general readers alike."

Theory and Method in the Study of Religion: Theoretical and Critical Readings, by Professor of Religious Studies Carl Olson, Thomson/Wadsworth, 2003, 496 pages

This anthology provides students with a useful collection of theoretical essays concerning the nature of religion and the methodological means by which scholars analytically approach the subject. Organized in a point/counterpoint fashion, this volume will foster in-class discussion and the honing of a student's own critical perspectives.

Olson notes in the book's preface that the idea for this anthology came about as he taught a junior seminar on the topic of method and theory in the study of religion-and discovered a lack of good anthologies of critical readings. "Thus, this anthology was born," Olson says, "in an undergraduate college course that wanted to explore the nature of religion as defined by different authors from diverse fields and to explore different methodological approaches to the subject of religion."

The anthology includes readings from such well-known thinkers as Mircea Eliade, Emile Durkheim, Carol Christ, Jacques Derrida, Claude Lévi-Strauss, William James, and Carl Jung-as well as writers whose names might be less well known to readers but who have done important work in the field of religious studies.

Indian Philosophers and Postmodern Thinkers: Dialogues on the Margins of Culture, by Professor of Religious Studies Carl Olson, Oxford University Press, 2002, 347 pages

This thought-provoking study is a welcome addition to the discipline of comparative philosophy. In a unique scholarly undertaking, classical as well as contemporary Indian philosophies and their authors engage in a hermeneutical dialogue with western post-modernism.

The book takes as its central theme the cornerstone of postmodern thought: its attack on rationality and representational modes of thinking, and its radical questioning of the place of reason in philosophy. The theme is informed and developed through a cross-cultural exchange on a number of subjects. These range from desire, suffering, abjection, and death to the nature of being and the self, and the nature of language and writing. Thus, on the subject of desire, for example, the Upanishads and Nikaya Buddhism come into contact with Deleuze and Guattari, while the discussion of language and writing sets Derrida against early Buddhism and Abhinavagupta.

Olson brings a variety of thinkers and divergent traditions of thought into a lucid, penetrating debate, which serves to remind us that classical Indian philosophy is not a dead cultural artifact, but has enduring intellectual value. A significant contribution to the field of comparative philosophy in India and abroad, this book will be read with great interest by students and scholars of philosophy, as well as the general reader interested in Indian and Western thought.

During the 2002-03 academic year, Olson was a visiting fellow at Clare Hall of the University of Cambridge. He recently was elected to life membership at Clare Hall by its Board of Governors.

Confronting Consumption Wins Top Award

Confronting Consumption, co-edited by Associate Professor of Political Science and Environmental Science Michael Maniates, has been named the best book on international environmental affairs for 2002 by the International Studies Association.

The ISA's annual Harold and Margaret Sprout Award is given to the book that best manages to make a contribution to theory and interdisciplinarity, show rigor and coherence in research and writing, and offer accessibility and practical relevance. It is the highest award in the field of global environmental problem-solving and assessment.

Maniates and his co-editors-Thomas Princen of the School of Natural Resources and Environment at the University of Michigan and Ken Conca of the University of Maryland-traveled to the ISA's annual meeting in Portland, Oregon in late February to accept the award. Confronting Consumption was reviewed in the fall/winter 2002 issue of Allegheny magazine.