The Rochester Review, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA
Community Building: Values for a Sustainable Future by Leonard Jason '76 (PhD). Praeger Publishers 1997. 176 pp., $55.
Caprice Variations for Solo Violin by George Rochberg, based on Paganini's 24th caprice. Recorded by Zvi Zeitlin, Distinguished Professor of Violin at the Eastman School. Gasparo 1998.
John Michael, associate professor of English
BOOKS
Describes the vulnerabilities that help account for many of the problems facing industrialized populations, including crime, homelessness, substance abuse, and loss of a sense of community. Jason is professor of psychology at DePaul University.
This collection provides a survey of computational complexity theory and a provocative look to the future.
Evangelista recounts her struggles as a mother of a young woman with severe and misdiagnosed depression.
Examines ethics and issues basic to principled nursing practice and health care delivery moving into the 21st century.
A study of the major 17th-century thinker and theorist of science who is commonly regarded as one of the founders of the Scientific Revolution.
The author is winner of the 1996 Editor's Choice Award of the National Library of Poetry and a nominee for the International Society of Poets' 1997 Poet of the Year award.
Intended for students, postdoctoral fellows, faculty, career counselors, and anyone else interested in learning more about different career paths in the biosciences.
Integrates chapters on the scientific basis of opiate addiction with a comprehensive survey of the latest treatment methods, among them traditional and new pharmacotherapies, adjunct therapies, and management of comorbid substance abuse and medical conditions. Stine is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine.
An interdisciplinary analysis of the contentious policy reforms that changed the enforcement and definition of property rights in the South after the Civil War.
The biography of Tate's brother Elwis, deaf from his first year and an adventurer until his death at age 88.
The author is a senior medical officer in WHO's Division of Emergency and Humanitarian Action.
Prolific Bly's 38th book.
Summer programs at colleges in New York State for kids and teens 8-18 (updated annually at http://www.summeroncampus.com)
The author is assistant professor of history at Randolph-Macon College.
The Animal Within Us: Lessons About Life from Our Animal Ancestors by Jay Glass '71 (PhD). Donington Press (Independent Publishers Group).
Explores behaviors that have been honed by the evolutionary processes of natural and sexual selection, allowing the human species to survive and avoid extinction. "The very core of our humanity, our prayer, and our belief in God is a direct mimic of behavior patterns in animals," writes the author, a former neuroscientist and teacher at the University of Pittsburgh who, in a second career, founded what may be the largest single-person venture capital fund in the United States.
RECORDINGS
"I like books that combine insight and style and that open up perspectives I had not considered," Michael says. "As for the type of book I enjoy, I am promiscuous. Novels, memoirs, reportage, poetry, criticism, popular science--all these different sorts of books if they address me in lively language and provoke me to new thoughts (no matter how trivial those thoughts might be) may appear on my night stand or in my beach bag."
"I have always liked hard-boiled crime stories, and Mosley's Easy Rawlins series is one of the best contemporary examples of the genre. Mosley forces us to consider the irreducible and frequently tragic moral complexities of U.S. society. The series unfolds the history of AfricanAmerican communities, especially that of men."
"I would read (and have read) Gould on any topic from baseball to brontosaurs. I especially liked this book, which describes how evolutionary scientists discover and reconstruct evidence and demonstrates how they extract the meanings--frequently controversial--from the fossil records they read."
"The contemporary Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Mahfouz is often compared to Balzac. These three novels (Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street) depict three generations in the life of a middle-class family in Cairo from the early decades of the century through World War II, against the backdrop of British colonialism and the altering mores of an unevenly modernizing Egypt. The translations are elegant, and the glimpse into a mode of life and a history about which too many of us in the West remain ignorant is continuously engrossing."
"This is a truly remarkable book about the Gloucester swordfish boat, The Andrea Gail, which was lost with her six-man crew during a deadly freak of weather in 1991. Junger weaves accounts of the men's lives, the myriad decisions and indecisions that doomed them, and descriptions of the incredibly dangerous deep-sea fishing industry and the local Gloucester culture and economy it still supports. With these it blends explanations of meteorological and wave dynamics into a seamless, tragic tale. This book terrified and moved me. One of the best things I've read in a long time."
"This collection won the Pulitzer in 1996. Graham's poetry is remarkably varied, drawing out the metaphoric resources of an incredible range of sources from classical mythology, to personal experience, to contemporary science. Like all good poetry, Graham's work is accessible on many levels--I like to let the astringency of her language surprise me several times before I bother to wonder what exactly a given poem might 'mean.' "
"Ammons may well be the dean of living American poets. I've always liked his wry observations on nature and mortality and his ability to find large, abstract ideas in small, closely observed, concrete details. This is a long poem (which can be read as a series of shorter poems) and a sustained meditation on death and mourning and personal loss as forms of transformation and restoration. It manages to be quite funny and very moving, and, as always with Ammons, witty and elegant at the same time."
"Wills is particularly good on that quintessential icon of U.S. masculinity, John Wayne. He not only explicates the paradoxes of Wayne's character and the calculations of his career, but he offers some of the best analyses of classic film Westerns that I have ever read. Plenty of interesting history, juicy gossip, and strange personalities."
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