New Books

In a Valley Surrounded by Hills: Stories of Growing Up in a Pennsylvania Town, by Don Skinner ’56, Franklin Street Books, 2003, 508 pages, 42 pen-and-ink drawings

Reviewed by Rebekah Ashmore Woodworth ’94

Generations of Alleghenians know Don Skinner ’56—whether as the youngest son of biology professor and college physician Clifford “Doc” Skinner, as a student with a less-than-exemplary academic record, or later as the dean of students and chaplain of the College.

Now Skinner, the college’s chaplain emeritus, has written and illustrated a memoir of his childhood in Meadville. In a Valley Surrounded by Hills is a chronicle often laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes throat-catchingly poignant, and always vividly and expertly presented. His account of growing up here in the 1930s and ’40s is a must-read for folks with a small-town upbringing, or those with a passing interest in the Meadville of half a century ago, or the hundreds (thousands?) of Alleghenians who know and love the Rev. Dr. Skinner.

In a Valley Surrounded by Hills recounts a time when Meadville seemed a smaller place, a thriving, culturally vibrant community where the lines between town and gown were blurred to nonexistent. Skinner’s imagery is beautiful: Whether he is describing an unanticipated trip down North Main Street attached by his snowsuit to the bumper of a Model T Ford, or an impoverished African-American man plucking lumps of coal from the floodwaters of French Creek, or a squabble with his sister and brothers to claim the cream at the top of the morning milk-bottle, the reader is instantly and charmingly transported into young Don’s world.

While the greater part of the book describes a gentle community and a child’s life in a loving, close-knit family, Skinner doesn’t shy away from tackling more troubling issues, both personal and societal: his father’s untimely death when Skinner was only seven; the failure of the local educational system to recognize and address his learning disability; the years of World War II, when an unbearable number of the town’s sons and daughters left and never returned; the tacit subculture of racism; the simmering anti-Catholic bias of some of Meadville’s Protestants. Though the rose-colored spectacles come off from time to time, Skinner treats the Meadville of his youth with his characteristic wisdom, sagacity, and affection.

Rebekah Woodworth served as chapel organist for Don Skinner from 1991 to 1993 and copyedited In a Valley Surrounded by Hills. The book is available in both hardback and paperback from all book distributors. For each book purchased by alumni directly from the author, however, Don Skinner will contribute 25 percent of his royalty to the College’s Annual Fund.

A Good Life Wasted, or Twenty Years as a Fishing Guide, by Dave Ames ’77, The Lyons Press, 2003, 247 pages

By the author of the cult classic True Love and the Woolly Bugger, A Good Life Wasted offers a unique perspective on an implausible period in the recent history of human civilization. When Dave Ames started guiding, Rocky Mountain locals rode horses and dug camas roots—now they’re trading stock options on cell phones. The collision of stone and computer ages was short-lived, but the deep-rooted themes of this book remain.

A chronicle and celebration of the fishing-guide life, A Good Life Wasted is a vicarious pleasure for anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like not to have a “real job.” The book is poignant and spiritual; it’s Blackfoot Indians and copper miners’ daughters; it’s fiddles and guitars and the fabric of space; it’s about what happens to wild people when the wilderness is gone.

From the first chapter—in which Ames recalls bluffing his way into a job as a fishing guide to the rich and famous—we’re hooked. We gladly follow Ames as he describes the rite of tasting clouds of mating midges to better match the hatch, tells the story of a fabled Blackfoot fishing guide, and shares his further adventures as a guy with no job, no office, and no stress—well, maybe some stress.

“Moving, thought-provoking, sometimes powerful, and always entertaining, this is an important and welcome addition to the literary side of the angler’s world,” writes the Library Journal. A Good Life Wasted spins a fascinating, compelling web—a web that entices the deskbound to make a break for it and head west to big sky and fast, cold water, ASAP.

Noor, A Novel, by Sorayya Khan ’83, Alhamra Publishing, Islamabad, 2003

Noor, an unlikely child, forces her family to confront secrets of its past. Among them, the 1971 conflict that gave birth to Bangladesh is the most frightening. Set in modern-day Pakistan, in a home in an outlying sector of Islamabad, the novel takes Noor’s mother, Sajida, and her grandfather, Ali, a former army officer, on haunting trips to their previous lives. Noor is the story of Sajida’s quest to understand who she is, where she has come from, who her father is, and what he has done.

This is a novel about the effects of war and the possibilities inherent in love and forgiveness. It explores what this means for a father, his daughter, and the family they have made.

Claire Messud (The Last Life) writes, “Rich, resonant and lyrical, Noor is a novel which tackles, unflinchingly, the legacy of war, and, like the extraordinary child for whom it is named, makes of great suffering a work of beauty. Sorayya Khan has written a powerful and haunting novel, and a wholly original book.”

Bapsi Sidhwa (Cracking India) writes, “This eerily beautiful and imaginative novel explores the savant nature of special children and the complex bonds they forge as deftly as it portrays the chilling brutality of the Bangladesh war of Independence.” Muneeza Shamsie writes in her review that “Noor is both courageous and remarkable because it breaks a long literary silence and is the first Pakistani English novel to focus on East Pakistan during the war of 1971 and come to terms with its brutality.”

Sorayya Khan was a U.S. Fulbright Research Scholar in Creative Writing in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia Regional Program. The award allowed Khan to travel to Pakistan and Bangladesh during 1999–2000 and interview people involved with the 1971 war. Noor will be published by Penguin India in January 2004.

Booktalks and More: Motivating Teens to Read, by Lucy Schall ’68, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2003, 275 pages

An indispensable tool for librarians, media specialists, and teachers, this sequel to Lucy Schall’s popular Booktalks Plus is perfect for anyone who works with students in grades seven through twelve. It offers motivational, ready-to-use booktalks for more than a hundred of the best new reads for teenagers, guaranteed to pique teen interest.

The diverse topics in this resource-packed guide reflect issues, concerns, problems, and challenges that confront young adults, helping them explain and explore the complex world around them.

Each booktalk comes with complete bibliographic information, a detailed plot summary, helpful presentation tips, curriculum connections, and suggestions for related books and media. Schall also provides engaging follow-up discussion questions and activity ideas that will enhance every teen’s reading, writing, and speaking skills.

With a focus on recently published fiction and nonfiction titles in a wide variety of genres and topics, the booktalks are organized thematically on such topics as families, good and evil, hate and prejudice, nations, nature, physical limits, and looking toward the future.

Lucy Schall is a retired English teacher with more than 30 years of experience.

Like Spring Without Flowers: Why Older Women and Churches Need Each Other, by Janet Eldred ’79, MHA Care Group, 2003, 111 pages

This book is for those interested in the areas of the spirituality of ageing, older women, and personal communities.

Eldred was awarded the Ph.D. in theology and religious studies from the University of Leeds (United Kingdom) in 2002. Her doctoral research project—an investigation of the lives of older churchgoing women—compared the women’s experiences of community, connection, and caring with themes from feminist theology.

This book explores the words and stories of today’s older churchgoing women in order to better understand their lives, concerns, needs, and aspirations, and to develop practical outcomes for churches. It includes a straightforward action plan for both churches and older women themselves.

Pray Like This …: Sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, by Alex A. Gondola ’71, CSS Publishing, 2003, 70 pages

In Tennyson’s oft-quoted phrase, “more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.” But the Lord’s Prayer, Alex Gondola says, is so familiar that it is often taken for granted, recited by rote and its deeper meaning missed. Pray Like This … is an informative volume that helps the reader rediscover the simplicity and strength of the prayer that Jesus taught.

Gondola carefully analyzes each of the prayer’s ten petitions and explores how it is Christ’s template for communicating with God. Suitable for personal devotions, adult study groups, sermon preparation, or gift-giving, Pray Like This … is a versatile resource.

“ The sermons in Pray Like This … are inspirational in their poetic language and their passionate engagement of a listening congregation,” says Eddie O’Neal of the Andover Newton Theological School. “I endorse the full flower of Alex Gondola’s preaching here, and I vigorously inhale its fragrance.”

“ Gondola has made the old and familiar alive and new,” says Pastor Donna Schaper of the Coral Gables Congregational Church.

Gondola is senior pastor of the Dennis Union Church in Dennis, Massachusetts. He has also authored Come As You Are and Don’t Forget the Child.

A three-volume set by Professor of Mathematics Anthony Lo Bello: The Commentary of al-Nayrizi on Book I of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry; Gerard of Cremona’s Translation of the Commentary of Al-Nayrizi on Book I of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry; The Commentary of Albertus Magnus on Book I of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, Brill Academic Press, 2003

For more than two millennia, the Elements of Geometry by the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria (ca. 300 B.C.E.) was held to be “the supreme example of the exercise of human reason” and “a paradigm of rational certainty” (from the preface, after Simon Blackburn). The Commentary of al-Nayrizi on Book I of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry introduces readers to the transmission of Euclid’s Elements from the Middle East to the Latin West in the medieval period and then offers the first English translation of al-Nayrizi’s (d. ca. 922) Arabic commentary on Book I.

Lo Bello’s second volume is the first modern translation of Gerard of Cremona’s (1114–1187) Latin version of al-Nayrizi’s famous Arabic commentary. Lo Bello gives an introductory account of the twenty-two early extant Arabic manuscripts of the Elements, an annotated English translation of Gerard’s translation of al-Nayrizi’s commentary, and finally a critical analysis of the idiosyncrasies of Gerard’s method of translation.

In the third volume in Lo Bello’s series on the Elements, he provides the first modern translation of a key Latin text of the Elements in the Middle Ages, the commentary of the Dominican scholastic philosopher Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), the teacher of Thomas Aquinas. The volume includes a translation, notes on the translation, and a critical examination of the mathematical content of the three commentaries on Euclid’s Elements of Geometry thus far treated in this series.

To See With Two Eyes: Peasant Activism and Indian Autonomy in Chiapas, Mexico, by Assistant Professor of Political Science Shannan Mattiace, University of New Mexico Press, 2003, 224 pages, 3 maps.

Throughout Latin America, native peoples have long been viewed as obstacles to development. In Mexico, beginning in the late 1930s, the government organized indigenous peoples into peasant organizations tied to the official party in an attempt to assimilate them into mestizo society. The unexpected result was the emergence of political consciousness among Indians in Chiapas, Mexico.

Since the 1994 Zapatista uprising, indigenous peasants increasingly have cast their demands within a framework of legal and cultural autonomy. In this book, based on fieldwork in eastern Chiapas with the Tojolabal-Maya people, Shannan Mattiace shows that on the ground, the struggle for autonomy is integrally related to peasant politics and everyday struggles for survival. Her years of fieldwork prior to 1994, and after, have provided her with important ethnographic accounts and extensive interviews. To See With Two Eyes will be of interest to scholars in Latin American political science, anthropology, and history.

“ Mattiace has conducted original research on an incredibly important topic,” says Professor Deborah Yashar of Princeton University. “While she is particularly interested in Chiapas, she situates the Zapatista experience in broader perspective—analyzing the Zapatistas against Mexico’s historical record of popular organizing, contemporary indigenous movements in other parts of Mexico, and other indigenous movements in Latin America.”

Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias: The Indigenous Peoples of Chiapas and the Zapatista Uprising, edited by Jan Rus, Rosalva Aida Hernandez Castillo, and Shannan L. Mattiace. Rowman and Littlefield, 2003, 336 pages.

The Mayan Indian peoples of Chiapas had been mobilizing politically for years before the Zapatista rebellion that brought them to international attention. This authoritative volume explores the different ways that Indians across Chiapas have carved out autonomous cultural and political spaces in their diverse communities and regions.

Offering a consistent and cohesive vision of the complex evolution of a region and its many cultures and histories, this work is a fundamental source for understanding key issues in nation building. In a unique collaboration, the book brings together recognized authorities who have worked in Chiapas for decades, many linking scholarship with social and political activism. Their combined perspectives, many previously unavailable in English, make this volume the most authoritative, richly detailed, and authentic work available on the people behind the Zapatista movement.

“ Mayan Lives, Mayan Utopias is a book of deep wisdom; canny insight; trustworthy accounts from the inside; radical honesty from the outside; comprehensive sympathy with its subjects; precise sensitivity to nuance and difference; acute social, political, and cultural analysis; masterly evaluation; cogent argument; and wonderful clarity in explanation,” says Harvard University professor John Womack. “Fruit of more than two hundred years of scholarship on Chiapas that the ten American and Mexican scholars together here represent, it is the most authoritative work in any language on Chiapas’s contemporary Mayans, their struggles, and their hopes.”

The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh: Memoirs of an American Diplomat, by Archer K. Blood. Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 2002, 373 pages

Archer Blood served as Diplomat in Residence with the political science and international relations programs at Allegheny from 1982 to 1990. The events described in this fast-reading volume indirectly led to this good fortune for the College. Blood, for his questioning of U.S. policy and prediction of the outcome of the East Pakistan rebellion that led to the creation of Bangladesh, was nudged out of the promotion that was his due within the State Department.

Posted as United States consul general to Dhaka in March 1970, the experienced diplomat took charge of a consulate that was significant as the chief U.S. post in populous East Pakistan, separated by a thousand miles of India from the U.S. embassy in West Pakistan. That November he played a key role coordinating aid to the sections of the country devastated by storm and flood.

The events of 1971, when elections led to a political standoff with West Pakistan and imposition of martial law on the eastern part of the nation by the West Pakistan–controlled army, are the focus of the narrative. The selective genocide that followed and the refusal of Washington officials and especially national security adviser Henry Kissinger to accept the truth and import of messages sent by the Dhaka consulate are chronicled. Blood’s descriptions of Pakistani leaders, the moods and conditions in Bengal, and the occasionally inaccurate and influential role of the press are enlightening. The best adjective for what is revealed regarding the internal politics of the foreign policy establishment (and the possibility that this condition continues today) is “disturbing.”

Blood’s document-based account is in his own words “a hybrid, being both an intensely felt personal memoir and, from one perspective, a serious account of many aspects of the Bangladesh crisis … It portrays exactly what my staff and I were thinking and reporting during the Bangladesh crisis. In this ‘warts and all’ rendering our anger, mixed with alternating hope and despair, is all too evident.” The narrative is a personal one and does not attempt a definitive analysis of the rebellion from all viewpoints. It is well worth reading for what it tells about a cruelly bloody event, the workings of our foreign policy establishment (both excellent and unfortunate), and the mind of a man of exceptional integrity.

--Reviewed by J.E. Helmreich