Michigan Books

While conventional wisdom might say that we have been in a golden age of conspiracy theories ever since the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Michael Pfau contends that conspiracy rhetoric has been prevalent in American politics from the time of the revolution. If we want to point to a time in American history where conspiracy rhetoric proved manifestly successful, then Pfau makes the case for that period being the eve of the American Civil War. In "The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln," Pfau provides a trio of case studies focusing on three of the major figures who defined the ascendancy of the Republican Party. Richard Hofstadter's essay on "The American Style in American Politics" provides the foundation for contemporary conspiracy scholarship and Pfau's starting point in terms of rhetoric and social theory.

In Chapter One, "Problems of Interpretation: Approaching Conspiracy in Text and Discourse," Pfau establishes his theoretical groundwork, but also focuses on the example of William Lloyd Garrison, to show how the paranoid style and conspiracy discourse was on the fringe of American politics, setting up how his three figures will move the slave power conspiracy of the radical abolitionists into the mainstream of American political rhetoric. Pfau focuses on how aristocrats and demagogues were established as traditional conspiratorial enemies, the creation of powerful slave narratives at the center of this rhetoric, and the shared ideology of civic republicanism that Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln grew up on. As the Republic Party emerged in the 1850s, Pfau establishes their goal as being to seek the center of the mainstream and then looks at the chronology of the Republican narrative of the slave power conspiracy in terms of the rhetoric of its most prominent mainstream politicians.

Chapter Two, "The Slave Power According to Salmon P. Chase: Entering the Mainstream of Partisan Rhetoric, 1845-1854," examines a pair of texts by Chase. The first is his 1845 "Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention," a major landmark in the political antislavery movement (as well as of slave power conspiracy rhetoric), and the second is his 1854 "Appeal to the Independent Democrats," which drove the anti-Nebraska movement that would coalesce into the Republican Party. Pfau underscores Chase's achievements as a party builder and see his texts as being pivotal examples of party mobilization. Towards that end Chase employs partisan rhetoric, civil republican ideology, and conspiracy narratives, which looking at the audiences Chase has targeted.

Chapter Three, "Charles Sumner's 'Crime against Kansas': Conspiracy Rhetoric in the Oratorical Mold," reminds us that there was a reason why Sumner was attacked and nearly beaten to death on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Preston Brooks in 1856. That was the year that Sumner delivered his philippic, "Crime Against Kansas," which is what Pfau examines. After looking at Sumner's political evolution from Whig to Free-Soil Senator, the essay looks at the text of the speech that was largely forgotten once Sumner was brutally assaulted. The speech is largely imitative of oratorical tradition of conspiracy going back to ancient times, but Pfau is again able to show how such elements combine again with civic republicanism. Pfau is also attuned to the fact the speech digresses at points, engaging more in personal attacks and insults than logical argument, but the emphasis is on how Sumner not only details "The Crime Against Kansas," but also attack the "apologizes" for the crime as additional evidence. Although Sumner speaks of a "true remedy," his final part of the speech covers a lot of possible remedies on the Kansas question.

Chapter Four, "Lincoln, Contemporary Rhetoric, and the 'House Divided': Assessing the Judgment of History," presents an analysis of the best-known text in this volume. Despite the viewpoint of Southerners to the contrary, Lincoln was not a radical within the Republican Party. Pfau looks at this famous speech as one of the best-known slave power conspiracy texts, which implicated Stephen Douglas as part of the well-coordinated conspiracy to nationalize slavery, and which has been condemned by scholars and critics in the last century. What Pfau reveals, to no one's surprise, is that Lincoln's speech is constructed on a move logical framework than either Chase or Sumner as Lincoln stands in the present and evaluates the past. There is a key section in the essay on Pluralist Preunderstandings and the Reception of the "House Divided" speech that deals with Douglas as a protopluralist and also with pluralist revisonism by later scholars and critics who argued popular sovereignty might have been a better policy than what Lincoln advocated. In the end, Pfau is able to make a case for Lincoln as the last in a long line of hortatory civic republican rhetors who succeeded in part because of their practice of conspiracy rhetoric.

Chapter Five, "Lessons of the Slave Power Conspiracy: Conspiracy Rhetoric at the Center and Fringe," explores the broader ramifications of Pfau's findings and suggests future avenues of research. In mapping the slave power conspiracy formation Pfau is able to talk about both sacred and secular ideologies. After talking about the two traditions of conspiracy discourse, namely those on the fringe and those in the center, Pfau is able to move on to contemporary conspiracy discourse and look at those two traditions today. The final lesson of this volume is that the marginalization of conspiracy discourse that has presumed such rhetoric to be both logically flawed and ethically problematic is undercut by the fact this political style is now indigenous to the mainstream of American political discourse. By the time Pfau finishes his book, such a conclusion seems patently obvious.

Pfau uses Richard Hofstadter's seminal essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" are a matrix for his own study; except where Hofstadter sees the "paranoid style" as mostly at the fringes of political activity and rhetoric, Pfau sees it as central to this in the years leading up to the Civil War. Starting most notably with Salmon P. Chase, a politician from Ohio, the Southern slaveholders were inferred to be a group working to take over the Federal government to insure the perpetuation of slavery throughout the country, not just the South and some western states as the U.S. expanded. This repeated rhetoric strengthened the Abolitionist movement, and also effectively spread antislavery sentiment and prompted political alertness and activism to work against this alleged design of the slaveholders. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts picked up on this perspective spawned by Chase. In coming to Abraham Lincoln, Pfau paints him not to be the compromise, moderate choice of the Republican Party he is usually seen as, but another in the line of like-minded politicians fostering a picture of the slaveholders as a monolithic group bent on taking over the government. Lincoln was more subtle and artful in extending this paranoid style viewing the opposition as a threat to democratic, majority-rule government. Lincoln's "house divided" speech which is generally agreed among historians to have sealed his nomination is closely analyzed for its characterization of the slaveholders and cultivation of a "paranoid style" to thwart their aims. An assistant professor of Communication Studies at the U. of Minnesota-Duluth, Pfau casts much of American politics and history in a new light.

a brillant, insightful exposition of a fascinating subject -- a must read for historians and all persons interested in government regulation.

This engaging and colorful account of the history of U.S. food regulation provides excellent perspective for better understanding the recent spate of high-profile, food regulation trade disputes between the U.S.and Europe, and within Europe, such as the "Banana Wars", "British Beef", and "Genetically modified corn" incidents. A must-read for anyone who who has interest in the unique nature and psychology of government actions in dealing with issues around "our daily bread". This book appears to have been subjected to a very rigorous "peer review" and I expect it will become a classic reference work.

I have lived in Portland Michigan all my life, but until I purchased this book did I find out the incredible history of my town.

This book contains hundreds of outstanding historic photographs of Portland, Michigan. Highly recommended for any fan of Michigan history or local history. What really stands out are the many candid photos of townspeople from the 1890s. The camera captured them smiling and enjoying life (not stiff and stoic like we tend to think of people from that era).

Overall, a great book!

"A Portrait of Tradition" chronicles the history of the Michigan Marching Band, through spectacular photographs, in celebration of the band's centennial season. As the most visible symbol of the University, the Michigan Marching Band's unique mixture of tradition and innovation shine through in this beautiful 160 page pictorial. A "must-have" for anyone who enjoys one of America's great Saturday traditions-- the Michigan Marching Band.

This book is an exciting look into the history of the Michigan Marching Band. Produced in part by the band members, it has a unique and colorful examination of that which makes the band what it is today -- an organization of class, commitment and excellence. I truly enjoyed this book.

This is one of the best, perhaps the best, construction scheduling books available in the market. The book contains all important contents in this issue. The book is very easy to understand, therefore ones without knowledge in scheduling can understand readily. Moreover, it contains several advanced topics in scheduling, including PERT, overlapping networks, and time-cost tradeoff. The author, Robert Harris, is a well-known pioneer in this field and has been a professor teaching scheduling classes at the University of Michigan for many decades. I strongly recommend this book for everyone who wants to own an excellent scheduling book.

This book is one of the best construction scheduling books in term of quantitative analysis. The book does a good job on explaining the fundamental concepts of construction scheduling and further the concept to calculation part. Every concept is presented with examples and solutions, which are very useful. The contents of the book are:

1. Introduction. This chapter gives readers background in general about construction scheduling (such as resources, network, bar chart, and schedule).
2. Project Breakdown. This chapter is about deciding, preparing and organizing information (such as level of detail, activity data and constraints).
3. Basic Arrow Diagramming (or Activity On Arrow, AOA). This chapter is all about how to construct an arrow network (activities are represented by arrow shapes). If you don't plan to do manual calculation, he might want to skip this chapter. Moreover, commercial software these days does not use arrow diagram (AOA) anymore. However, redundant link, dummy activity (which is very tricky for AOA) and how/when to use dummy activity are well explained in this chapter.
4. Basic Precedence Diagram (or Activity On Node, AON). This chapter presents how to construct Precedence Diagram (AON) and show step-by-step how to eliminate redundant link.
5. Establish Activity Durations. This chapter is 5 pages long. However, I never read it. :P
6. Scheduling Computations for Arrow Networks (AOA) and 7. for Precedence Networks (AON). These chapters focus on the calculation of both types of the networks. The author shows how to use network diagrams (drawings) and how to use table (like spreadsheet but manually calculate) to calculate activity properties (such as early start date and floats). Formula for the calculation is well explained along with many examples. In both chapters, four types of floats and their formula are presented according to the type of the network (AOA and AON). In addition, the concept of using matrix (another kind of table) to update total float (TF) and free float (FF) is presented in the chapter 7. This matrix becomes handy when manual calculations of updating TF and FF are required. (You better get familiar with this matrix if you want to study one of the unlimited resource leveling concepts called Minimum Moment Method, explained later in chapter 11)
8. Communication the Schedule. This one is more like "How GUI of scheduling software (such as report format and bar chart) looks like 30 years ago". Surprisingly, nothing has changed much from today software. What a shame.
9. Project Control. This chapter discusses level of control, setting target scheduling, monitoring project, evaluating and forecasting project, control period, and updating project progress. This chapter shows you what can be done in term of project management and scheduling according to the knowledge discussed in previous 8 chapters. Moreover, it also guides readers to a new topic, Time-Cost Tradeoff.
10. Time-Cost Adjustments. This chapter presents the concept and the calculation of time-cost tradeoff analysis during pre-construction phase. The idea of varying crew sizes associated with their direct costs is discussed. A good example is used to demonstrate the idea and also the application of Fondahl's technique. Besides the concept of time-cost tradeoff which is well explained, I am not a big fan of Fondahl's technique because it is very tedious, error prone, and not guarantee an optimal solution. I suggest you to read the concept and try to use EXCEL to optimizing a time-cost tradeoff problem. Moreover, the author does not discuss cash flow analysis.
11. Resource Leveling. This is one of my favorite chapters since I am so into "resource leveling". This chapter discusses two different types of resource leveling which are Limited Resource Allocation and Unlimited Resource Leveling. For limited resource allocation, a traditional method (very simple and used in most commercial software) is explained. For unlimited resource leveling, the author uses an example to show how to level (reducing the fluctuation in resource required per day) unlimited resource by using Minimum Moment Method (MOM). Later, he furthers the leveling concept of single resource to multiple resources, and also demonstrates how to schedule activity so that the schedule will accommodate resource constraints. In brief, the author did a good job in this chapter compared to those in other scheduling books. Since this book was written in the early stage of construction engineering and management, the concept of leveling resources for multiple projects and the idea of leveling resource and still maximize resource learning curve are not discussed. In addition, later the author developed a new unlimited resource leveling called PACK which is more effective and less computational effort than MOM. Unfortunately, PACK method is not presented in the book. Last word about this chapter, MOM and PACK are most likely to outperform those resource leveling features some commercial software.
12. Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT). PERT is a probabilistic scheduling method that calculates chance of finishing project within a particular period. This book as well as many other books probably say the same thing and show how the calculation of PERT. So, nothing is special. However, I would like tell you that these days we use simulation to get the same information from PERT with less pain. However, if you are old school, please read a method called Probabilistic Network Evaluation Technique (PNET). PERT only considers the longest path while PNET considers the longest path and other high independent paths with high variation in duration. Since variation exists in activity duration, the longest path may not always the critical path (hmm this sounds confusing).
13. Overlapping Network. From chapter 1 to 12, activity dependency is only described as finish-to-start relationship. This chapter introduces new types of activity constraint: start-to-start, start-to-finish, finish-to-finish. Formula and an example (which is enough) are used to explain the idea of overlapping network.
14. Selected Application. I never read this chapter since it is 30 years old.

The only major thing that is missing from this book is a scheduling concept of linear scheduling. Since this book was published when construction was not interested or not really appreciated the idea of maintaining resource utilization, eliminating resource idle time, the concept of scheduling linear project or repetitive project (such as high-rise buildings and highway projects) were not presented. Besides that, this book is an excellent book with cost of $60.

40 years ago the family took a summer vacation to Isle Royale National Park. When we arrrived my father took me to a block of concrete in the ground at one of the campsites and said "Here's where the mess hall steps were when I was in the CCC's". I had no idea. It's a great book - long overdue.

Here in photos and frequently in their own words are the highlights of the CCC in Michigan. Boys from poor families went off to places like Isle Royale to keep from starving, to learn job and life skills and to help send home money to their destitute families. Well edited. Highly recommended. Great quotes from the CCC men.

In T.M. McNally's "Quick," you will find an array of characters struggling. Whether it's with their addictions, their propensity toward violence, their immortality, or simply their own pasts, these struggles rise off the page and make themselves known without embarrassment or apology. Complex and richly layered, McNally doesn't shy away from difficult images or emotions. And although at times it seemed to me to be trying too hard, it's easy to see why this collection won the Michigan Literary Fiction Award.

T. M. McNally is a wildly talented writer from Arizona of whom I had never heard till a friend urged me to read his collection, QUICK. "This is just the sort of book you should be reading," she said. "And writing." When she had gone I opened it up and plunged right in, as if to the bottom of one of the Tempe swimming pools McNally specializes in. My friend was correct. This writing is intense, with sordid encounters and strange, almost surreal things happening to his leading characters as a matter of course. I thought things were crazy here in SF, but the "Copper State" has us beat by a country mile.

In "Insomnia" a man wonders if his wife is having some kind of affair with their pool boy. He switches addictions, from cigarettes to booze, and takes a second honeymoon trip to St. Louis to celebrate. The vertiginous span of the Arch is perfect McNally material, and he makes the most of it. "The Last Year of the Soapbox" is a sad tale of a boy teased in school, pissed on in the showers and the target end of many a snapped jock. When he asks his father to help him defend himself he uncovers his dad's bruised, stoic masculinity, and he grows up with a certain wariness about his body which leads him to wear underwear in the jacuzzi and three condoms at the same time. Tellingly, he becomes an ace race driver, counting on speed to help him make the escape his father never could. Other stories tell equally heartbreaking tales of American life, often with women's lives, an arena in which he seems only slightly less familiar.

I sort of figured out how to write one of McNally's short stories. You divide your material into a series of two page "scenes." Half of these will take place in the past, the other half in the present tense. You can jumble them up if you like. Half of the scenes will begin with a proverb-like general statement that has something a little askew to it, like "Tragedy is what happens when you don't think anything will." The other half will be direct, first person, and often from somewhere deep in the narrator's past, such as, "Of course no one had ever touched my balls." Separate these scenes with some cryptic asterisks-in this case, three or four black squares. All your narrators use them. Add in some hot weather, a saguaro or two, and you're pretty much there.

Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going? These labor intensive identity questions take a lifetime to answer. For adopted persons, sharing nature and nurture with two mothers and two fathers, responses are often more complicated. Fiction and drama involving adopted people have provided conscious and unconscious answers, advice and role models to deal with such complex family situations over the centuries.
In Reading Adoption: Family and Difference in Fiction and Drama, Marianne Novy, an adopted person who is a Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, gives astute commentary about adoption literature from Oedipus to the novels of Barbara Kingsolver. As a sensitive memorist, Dr. Novy also reveals how adoption literature has enhanced and sometimes hindered her own search for self-definition. This author's goal is to "more of the next generation of adopttes to feel less alone" and to make adopted parents aware (through literature) of the stuggles necessary to meeting their children's needs.
If you love reading, if you are connected to the world of adoption, if you crave making connections between literature and drama and people's interior lives, this is the book you are looking for. As an English teacher and parent by adoption, I found it spoke directly to both my professional expertise and to my personal experiences. I applaud Marianne Novy for her fair, generous and interesting book, the work of a gifted scholar and mature daughter.

Marianne Novy's "Reading Adoption" is a breath of fresh air in the dismal swamp of sentimentalism and sloppy journalism that characterizes too much of adoption literature, both pro-adoption and pro-adoption reform. Ms. Novy, a professor of English Literature and an adopted person, intersperses her own story with examples of adoption and illegitimacy in literature, from such diverse sources as Shakespeare, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Barbara Kingsolver, and Edward Albee. Her examples range from Tom Jones to The Diary of Brigid Jones, from Oedipus to Carol Schafer's Sacred Virgin. She discusses both familiar favorites, and those new to some of us that makes us want to look into them, or to look at old favorites with a fresh viewpoint.

Unlike many adopted persons who have written their stories, when Ms. Novy found her birthmother and family, she did not find soul mates or people with whom she had a great deal in common, even though she was welcomed and values the ongoing relationship she has with them. She wrote, " There are two simple views that public discourse about adoption falls into too easily. One is the view that only adoptive relationships matter; the other view is that only birth relationships matter. Some people have articulated a third viewpoint, that both matter but probably in different ways, that it depends on the circumstances, that adoptees have a choice about how to negotiate their identity and their relationships. But this approach still is not as widespread as it should be. I hope that this book, by analyzing places in literature where simplifications are found and places where they are transcended, will show more people how their world looks with a third view."

Marianne Novy admirably succeeds in doing this, and illuminates the tension between families, birth and adoptive, that is always there, and is always much more complex than the all-nature or all-nurture camps try to make it. She makes us all question our dearly held myths and icons. By not accepting without comment either the "forever family" fairytales beloved of many adoptive parents, or the reunion fairytales beloved of many birthmothers and adoption reformers, she makes all of us think, not just feel, and she stretches our imagination to encompass the complexity and diversity of adoptees and adoption as it is lived.

This is a groundbreaking book that should be read and discussed by all who are touched by adoption.

Mary Anne Cohen
Feb.2006

Countless Americans patiently trace genealogies and histories through slowly crumbling archives and weathering marble, seeking answers to questions about the ones who preceded us. This is a story of the meaning of such a search to one searcher. As the book's title alludes, Recovering Ruth: A Biographer's Tale focuses on how recovering Ruth Edgerton Douglass' history affects her biographer, Robert Root. Parts of Ruth's journal are excerpted in Recovering Ruth, and those who are interested in reading her journal in its entirety can look to Time by Moments Steals Away: The 1848 Journal of Ruth Douglass, edited by Robert Root.
Root's task, as the book begins, is seemingly simple and straightforward: edit the 1848 journal of Mrs. C. C. Douglass for publication. The Michigan library catalog attributes the authorship to Lydia Douglass, the clan matriarch who lived to be an octogenarian. However, Root soon discovers that the journal was actually penned by the first Mrs. C. C. Douglass, Ruth Edgerton Douglass. This discovery compels him to reconstruct the people and places of the mid-nineteenth century Michigan frontier, from the then-booming young city of Detroit to the remote Lake Superior outpost, Isle Royale. Although his search begins in libraries and archives, he soon journeys to the places where Ruth triumphed over fears common to us all: loneliness, hardships, and loss.
In retracing her life's journey, Root travels from Detroit to Chicago to Lake Superior's Isle Royale. Root uses his carefully researched details to evoke the Michigan Ruth would have known. He describes their approach of Isle Royale thus: "At last the island begins to rise in the distance, a long thin line above the water that slowly thickens as we thump our way steadily across the waves" (109). His language not only shows the vastness of the Great Lake, but also the treachery and danger inherent in crossing the world's largest freshwater lake even for a modern traveler. Imagery such as this gives us insight into the courage and determination of settlers such as the Douglasses.
During the course of his timely yet timeless search, Root comes to realize that he is in search of the meaning not only of Ruth's life, but of his own. As Root says, "Perhaps I needed to recover Ruth in order to keep from losing myself" (xvi). History is comprised of a series of chance meetings and fortunate accidents not readily apparent by perusing a family tree. Our lives would be immeasurably different if our great-grandparents had decided that it was, after all, too difficult to make their way by wagon train westward to Kansas, if our grandmother had stayed home rather than attended a dance, if our father's soulful brown eyes hadn't met our mother's at a crowded wedding. Root directly acknowledges those subconscious murmurs: "Genealogy identifies lines of descent, who begat whom, the aftermath of events; what it doesn't recount are the myriad alternatives barely missed, the intangibles of attraction and attachment, the possibilities avoided, ignored, or rejected" (25). In recovering Ruth's story, Root sees the ways in which his own choices will impact the future course of history: a painful divorce, a hopeful remarriage, his beloved children.
Root's work serves as a window for us to view the interconnections between our world and Ruth's. As George Eliot wrote at the end of Middlemarch, "the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." In Recovering Ruth, Root has recorded Ruth's historic acts and unveiled her hidden life.
This book was chosen by the Library of Michigan as a 2004 Michigan Notable Book.

The author not only feels and understands the love of research, he writes of it with eloquence and charm. It reminds me of sections of Robert Penn Warren's ALL THE KING'S MEN, the quest to uncover the hidden truth. Or Byatt's POSSESSION. It is that good.

This author understands history. This author understands style. There are literary references and refreshing asides. It is a marvelous book.

My only regret is that I could not obtain it in hardcover--a luxurious gold gilted edition, say, with easy-to-read print, its own ribbon bookmark, and an annotated index. But it reads fine like it is. Highly recommended.

There is a problem in getting going with alg. geo. To learn the geometry you need commutative algebra and to contextualize commutative algebra you need algebraic geometry. Mumford is an excellent book to get going without the need for the heavy prereqs of the more classic books like Hartshore or G&H. A really good read.

This is not however a terrific reference text, you'll need something else as a reference. Its much to expository and their is no index.

In a nutshell, reading this book is like reading the mind of a great mathematician as he thinks about a great new idea. Anyone interested in schemes should read it. But a review needs more detail:

The RED BOOK is a concise, brilliant survey of schemes, by one of the first mathematicians to learn of them from Grothendieck. He gives wonderfully intuitive pictures of schemes, especially of "arithmetic schemes" where number theory appears as geometry. The geometry shines through it all: as in differentials, and etale maps, and how unique factorization relates to non-singularity. There is a bravura discussion of Zariski's Main Theorem (the algebraic property of being "normal" implies that a variety has only one branch at each point) comparing forms of it from older algebraic geometry, topology, power series, and schemes. Mumford cites proofs of these but does not give them. In fact, this theorem was one of the first things Mumford could use, to get Zariski to respect schemes.

Many accomplished algebraic geometers say this book got them started. But you probably cannot learn to work in the subject from this book alone--you either have to work with people who work with it, or use some other books besides (maybe both). The other book would probably be Hartshorne ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY, which is far more detailed, has far more examples, goes very much farther into cohomology--and is very much longer and denser (though also clearly written).

Eisenbud and Harris GEOMETRY OF SCHEMES covers a lot of the same ground as THE RED BOOK, with fewer advanced topics but many more details and examples, including classical geometric constructions like blow-ups and duals to projective plane curves. They use slightly more category theory than Mumford, more like Grothendieck.

Probably none of these books will work for you unless you already know some algebraic geometry: how polynomials define a variety, the Zariski topology, what regular and birational maps are. There is more than enough in Myles Reid's humorously titled UNDERGRADUATE ALGEBRAIC GEOMETRY and UNDERGRADUATE COMMUTATIVE ALGEBRA with vividly geometric ideas in slightly scheme-theoretic language.

The RED BOOK now includes the Michigan lectures, which are reputedly terrific, but I have not worked through them.