By Amy Mericle et alia, Inter-Cooperative Council, Ann Arbor, 1994, $15.
Founded in 1932 by students who needed affordable housing during the Great Depression, the Inter-Cooperative Council has grown to become one of the largest student housing co-ops in the nation, with 19 houses and 575 members. (“Because of the housing crunch, we’re as much in demand as we’ve been since the ‘70s,” says ICC Director Amy Clark ‘91.)
This book tells a story not just of its economics, but of its principles of racial and sexual equality and living and learning communities, a story that has proved the ICC to have been far ahead of its time. Splendid illustrations and the reminiscences of members down through the years make this a delightful addition to U-M history.
Unsportsmanlike Conduct
By Walter Byers, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, $27.50
Did he suddenly “get religion,” or is he an opportunistic traitor and snitch? That’s what watchers of the amateur athletic scene were asking when Byers, the executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, published his explosive book earlier this year. Byers charges the NCAA is a misguided monopoly that controls college sports for its own interests, demeans and exploits college athletes and requires Congressional and judicial intervention. In his “bill of rights” to free athletes from their “plantation” relationship with universities, Byers argues that players deserve much more of the money they earn for schools, and should be free from restrictions on switching schools and hiring agents.
The Darker Side of the Renaissance
By Walter D. Mignolo, the U-M Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, $39.50
The author, who recently moved from U-M to Duke University, carries readers on a dense, exciting meditation on the development of colonialism by exploring the impact of literacy, and of contrasting writing systems, upon the conquering Spanish and the colonized Amerindians. Language, history, map-making and historiography are all unfolded and examined in rich detail. A profoundly modern work—but not written in modernist jargon.
Under the Moon: The Unpublished Early Poetry
By William Butler Yeats, edited by George Bornstein, Scribner, New York, $22
Professor Bornstein of the U-M English department has collected and edited 38 works by one of this century’s greatest poets. Bornstein culled some poems from Irish archives and found others in Yeats’s library, now the property of his children, Anne and Michael, who entrusted Bornstein with this literary legacy from the years 1880-95. Some of the works are juvenalia that the poet may well have intended never to see the light of day. But all of them, Bornstein points out, show Yeats developing his rhyme and meter, and tackling themes of nature, nationalism and love that are the lifeblood of his mature verse.
. . . October 1995
