 . . . Fall 2001
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Suggested Reading: Books by U-M faculty and graduates, and works published by the University of Michigan Press. Michigan Today cannot review or acknowledge all books received. |
REMAKING RESPECTABILITY: AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN IN INTERWAR DETROIT
By Veronica W. Wolcott '95 PhD, U. of North Carolina Press, 2001, $19.95 paper.
 Many historians have explored the migration of Southern Afro-Americans to Detroit and other industrial cities of the North, but few have focused on the experiences and roles of the women who made that transition between World Wars I and II. 
Wolcott |
Wolcott, an assistant professor at St. Bonaventure University, has told their stories, showing how they molded Detroit social life through their work and leisure in settlement houses, employment bureaus, social organizations, domestic jobs, storefront churches, beauty parlors, restaurants, gambling, prostitution, politics and blues clubs.
Most black women saw their legitimate businesses, as well as their work in reform institutions such as schools and clinics, as an avenue to prove the respectability of the Black community, Wolcott says. "That was how they were going to get ahead-respectability-to prove to whites that they were beyond respectable, and worthy of being members of the community," she said.
The book grew from Wolcott's U-M doctoral dissertation but wound up taking eight years of further research. She has now moved on to a new research focus, though still in her area of race and urban history: an examination of the 1956 riot between black and white teen-agers aboard the Canadiana, the Crystal Beach amusement park steamer near Buffalo.—JW.
FROM CENTRAL PARK TO SINAI: HOW I FOUND MY JEWISH SOUL
By Roy S. Neuberger, Jonathan David Publishers, $24.95, hardcover.
 Over-tired and panic-stricken, Roy Neuberger, '65, MA'66, awoke ten minutes before his Old English final. Weaving through Ann Arbor traffic on his bicycle the tears were streaming down his face. Amid the pressures of graduate school and a new marriage, Neuberger was cracking up, falling into a deep depression.
"And then, as I fell, a thought brushed by me. A little thought, a little voice, like a feather floating by in the midst of the void, a crazy little idea." Until that moment an atheist, Neuberger began to think about God. His spiritual search led him to the great cathedrals of Europe, to Hinduism and Buddhism. He explored all the great religions but his own. Neuberger had been raised in a secular home, devoid of the teachings of the Torah. He had never even gone to synagogue. He was assimilated to the point of being embarrassed by his heritage,
Then, in his early '30s, still searching for that missing something, he asked friends to take him and his wife to their congregation. That night, the synagogue's guest speaker, Rebbetzin (rabbi's wife) Esther Jungreis, billed as the "Jewish Billy Graham," transformed Neuberger's life. In short order, Neuberger sold his business and moved his family from Cornwall, NY to North Woodmere, Long Island. Neuberger writes of the effect on his two young daughters: "Our children didn't just switch schools and friends; they switched planets. Do you understand the transition from 'Bishop Dunne Parochial School' to 'Torah Academy for Girls'? It's mind-boggling." As for Neuberger, he had to learn the Jewish alphabet, adopt a Hebrew name, receive a bris, and be remarried to his wife, Linda, according to the dictates of Jewish law.
His story, the account of radical and complete conversion, is an inspiring and heartfelt tale of one man's difficult road to happiness and fulfillment. His, is a tale of love, devotion, and miracles—JW.
JOHN FORD MADE WESTERNS: FILMING THE LEGEND IN THE SOUND ERA
By Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein, Indiana U. Press, 2001, $19.95, paper.
 The Western movie continues to be mined for all it tells about America, and this book indicates that motherlode of John Ford's contribution to the genre is inexhaustible. Studlar is U-M's Rudolf Arnheim Professor of Film Studies, director of the film and video program, professor of English and professor of Women's Studies. Bernstein is an associate professor of film studies at Emory University. They have collaborated here to write two and edit seven other scholars' essays on Ford's Westerns, addressing such issues as masculinity and ender roles, capitalism and community, as well as racial, sexual and national identity. Sixty-two black-and-white photos are included—JW.
BEFORE MOTOWN: A HISTORY OF JAZZ IN DETROIT, 1920-1960
By Lars Bjorn with Jim Gallert, University of Michigan Press, 2001, $33.95 paper, $42.50 hardcover.
 Bjorn, a U-M-Dearborn professor of sociology, grew up in Sweden as a jazz buff. After moving to the United States, he became interested in the jazz club as a social institutions and, for his class "Society and the Arts in Detroit," began interviewing jazz musicians, club owners and anyone else familiar with the Motor City's rich jazz history. Now, 20 years later, he has produced a fascinating and definitive history of Detroit musicians' seminal role during what some term the classical era of American jazz. The creativity, tenacity and ingenuity of the Detroiters who built this global cultural resource has never received the recognition that it gets here.
Bjorn's text is packed with interviews, anecdotes, reminiscences and news items from the neglected Black press as well as the majority newspapers and magazines. Plus 75 photos, ads, posters, cartoons, playbills and postcards. Everyone is included, from white society bands to Motown Records backup hornmen. The architecture, business, social structure and community response-everything is here to suit and satisfy the range of curiosity and interest in a glorious and vexed era of American history.—JW
ALL FOR THE REGIMENT: THE ARMY OF OHIO, 1861-1862
By Gerald J. Prokopowicz '80, '83 JD, University of North Carolina Press, 2001, hardcover $34.95.
 The Army of the Ohio in the Civil War was like a dinosaur, "big sinews, tiny brain, writes Prokopowicz, currently the Lincoln Scholar at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, Indiana. All for the Regiment, based on original documents, explores the performance of the commanders and concludes that the lack of coordination among the leaders meant the 1,000 or so soldiers in each regiment had to depend on themselves. The regiments were formed from family members and friends who had known each other all their lives. Their loyalty lay with their regiment and to each other, not the Corps or Army, when they went into battle. The history of the Army of the Ohio "reflects this combination of resilience and clumsiness," Prokopowicz writes. He also notes: "At the army's major battles, Shiloh and Perryville, the leaders of its higher echelons of command were unable to perform their assigned functions, but the army nonetheless survived because its individual regiments maintained their organizational integrity. In each case, it was not technology or generalship but the regiment-based culture of the army, developed in the processes of recruitment, organization and training, that determined how well or poorly the Army of the Ohio fought. Whether the same statement can be applied to other Civil War armies (as I believe it can) is a question that invites the participation of other scholars, to confirm or reject this thesis, in either case advancing the study not just of the Civil War, but of the nature of human conflict."—Richard J. Zieg.
REMEMBERING RAOUL WALLENBERG: THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CELEBRATES TWENTIETH-CENTURY HEROES
edited by Penny Schreiber and Joan Lowenstein, The U-M Wallenberg Committee, distributed by U-M Press, 2001, $24.95 (lower bulk prices).
 Story of alumnus Raoul Wallenberg '35 Architecture, and his years in Ann Arbor in the 1930s. Also of his time in Budapest at the end of World War II when he save thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis. Also, the stories of the 11 U-M Wallenberg Medalists: Elie Wiesel, Jan Karski, Helen Suzman, the Dalai Lama, Miep Gies, Per Anger, Marion Pritchard, Simha Rotem, John Lewis, Nina Lagergren, and Marcel Marceau. For more information contact:
The Raoul Wallenberg Endowment
Rackham Graduate School
915 East Washington Street
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1070
(734) 764-1125
Or e-mail your inquiry to wallenberg@mediaone.net
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