. . . October 1994

---

Suggested Reading: Michigan Today takes notice of or reviews books by U-M faculty, graduates and students, and works published by the University of Michigan Press.

They Also Served: Citizen Soldiers in the Air Force Training and Service Commands
Edgar I. McCormick '37, '50 PhD, Burd Street Press, 1993

Edgar McCormick was studying at the U-M for a doctorate in English when he was called into the service in 1942. They also Served retraces his service in the 318th Air Service Squadron in Italy and Algeria. Drawing upon his diaries and memory, McCormick surveys the problems as well as the joys of the men and women who served as rear echelon soldiers, or "casuals" during WWII. It's a story that hasn't often been told.--Derek Green.

A Rape of Justice: MacArthur and the New Guinea Hangings
By Walter A. Luszki '37, '50 PhD, Madison Books, Lanham, Maryland, 1991, $24.95

On October 2, 1944, six African-American soldiers were hanged for an alleged rape of two US Army nurses in New Guinea by order of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Re-examining the arrest, investigation, trial and execution of the six soldiers, Luszki (who was serving as an Army captain and was present in New Guinea at the time of the hangings) comes to the conclusion that the soldiers were not adequately represented, and that at least two of them were probably innocent.

Luszki, who served as senior psychologist at the U-M Medical Center between 1964 and 1966, concludes that MacArthur's decision to execute the six men reflects the depth of racism in the Army in that era.--DG

Cold River Running
By David N. Gassuto, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994, $15.95

The Pere Marquette River originates from a spring about two-thirds of the way up the Lower Peninsula, and meanders west to Lake Michigan. Cassuto tells the river's "ecological biography" from prehistory into the 19th century, when the logging industry almost destroyed the Pere Marquette's watershed. This sometimes gripping and always witty narrative describes the river's recovery in the 20th century and looks to the turbulent and perhaps devastating environmental changes that may lie ahead--DG.

Lake Country
By Kathleen Stocking '68, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1994, $14.95

An artist-in residence at St. Mary's School on the Leelanau Peninsula, at the top of the state's "little finger," essayist Kathleen Stocking has been compared to E.B, White and Garrison Keillor. In this, her second collection, Stocking recounts visits to such places as Drummond and Mackinac islands, Provemont Pond, and a nostalgic return to Ann Arbor 25 years after her graduation. In "Ann Arbor Again" Stocking writes about the sense of deja vu that any alum might feel coming back to Ann Arbor 25 years after graduation. She finds some of the changes in the U-M welcome and exciting, but is disturbed by others.--Sunil Iyenger.

The Tempter's Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature
By Eric Jager '87 PhD, Cornell University Press, 1993, $42.50

Prof. Eric Jager of Columbia University examines one of the most pervasive myths in Western culture: the Fall of Adam and Eve, and how this biblical event has influenced all types of literary discourse.

Jager's book centers on the way in which medieval authors discussed the Fall to combat many practical and theoretical problems posed at the time. On a higher level, Jager's study re fleets "underlying cultural anxieties" about language itself, and how Adam, Eve and the Serpent compose a metaphor that has not yet been effaced from the fields of cultural history, linguistics and gender theory. Medieval discussions of the Fall focused on the abuse of eloquence, of the power of verbal persuasion and its misuse as a tool of disinformation, first by Satan and then by Eve, Jager notes. The ethical questions he traces remain relevant today.--SI.

The Writing of Melancholy: Modes of Opposition in Early French Modernism
By Ross Chambers, University of Chicago Press, 1993, $29.95

This recent critical study by Ross Chambers, the University's Marvin Felheim Distinguished Professor of French and Comparative Literature, shows us how works of literature can capture not only the spirit of their time, but also inform later generations of readers of the spirit in which they are to be read. In Chambers's view, texts are "situationally marked," capable of anticipating the very questions and issues that we, as readers, bring to them.

To illustrate his point, he delves into the writings of Flaubert, Nerval, Baudelaire, Gautier, Hugo and others--literature written shortly after France's failed revolution of 1848--exploring how these works reflect the widespread melancholy of their generation. The melancholic experience, Chambers says, has imbued these texts with guidelines for the way they are to be received, and perceived, in our era. The sense of a clouded identity that pervades much post-1848 French literature is a direct response to the mixed "exaltation and disillusionment" of the failed revolution, an impression readily transferable to the post-1968 generation who, as Chambers observes, faced their own "enthusiasm and frustration" in that turbulent period.--SI.

Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change
By Nadine Cohodas '71, Simon and Schuster, 1993, $27.50

Strom Thurmond, Republican Senator from Carolina, began his career over 60 years ago as a leader of the so-called Dixiecrat Democrats. In 1964 he switched parties because of his opposition to legislation curbing racial segregation. But in 1982 Thurmond broke ranks with the GOP and voted for the Voting Rights Act, marking his first support of civil rights legislation.

Those changes reflect a life marked by change, and it is this complex and often contradictory nature that Nadine Cohodas, a former editor of the Michigan Daily, has captured. Described by the Kirkus Review as "an appealingly affectionate, warts-and-all portrait of a uniquely American figure," Cohodas's book is a chronicle not just of the changing political landscape of the South in the last half century as well.

"To examine the sweep of Thurmond's public life," Cohodas writes in the opening chapter, "is to explore the power of race to shape politics, to see first the unquestioned acceptance of segregation, then the fierce resistance to any challenge to custom and tradition' ... and finally to witness the accommodations that were required when southern blacks stepped forward to claim their place in southern political life."--DG.

Medical Lives and Scienfific Medicine at Michigan, 1891-1969,
Edited by Joel D. Howell (U-M Press, Ann Arbor, 1992, $37.50).

Michigan's was the first major medical school in the country to admit women and to run its own hospital. Long recognized as one of the finest medical schools in the country, it served as a model for the medical school portrayed in Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith, and led the way for early 20th-century reform of medical education. Among its early graduates were William James Mayo (1883), founder of the Mayo Clinic, and Alice Hamilton (1893), a pioneer in industrial medicine.

Howell, a U-M associate professor of internal medicine, public health and history, traces the development of the Medical School in eight biographical essays of six key figures 'in the medical school's history. Howell and the other contributors draw on archival research to weave a richly nuanced portrait of how personal, social and scientific influences have shaped the medical community at Michigan.--DG.

Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music
By John Chilton (U-M Press, Ann Arbor, 1994, $29.95).

This story of the band leader-vocalist-saxophonist's career--which began in Brinkley, Arkansas, and spanned the globe--traces through Jordan's life the evolution of the major strains in 20th-century American popular music, from minstrel to jump blues, to rhythm and blues, to swing, bebop, pop and rock.

Jordan (1908-75) performed from the mid-1920s to the mid-50s, and his bouncy, humorous, smoothly polished style appealed to all kinds of audiences. Told straight, jammed with facts and devoid of pretentious theorizing, Chilton's meticulous biography shows how the characteristic ease of Jordan's masterful performances--his swinging blend of verbal and musical wit--rested on the 99 percent hard work of relentless practicing, his extraordinary control of diction and the highly coordinated ensemble playing that resulted from his talent at leadership.--JW.