Illinois Books

Adds substantially to the ethnography of Melanesian mortuary ritual. . . . The cumulative result is a forceful demonstration of how mortuary ritual can organize and channel the flow of Melanesian social life.

This is a fantastic book of poetry! I found its website online at http://www.adeedtothelight.com . Check it out!

I happenned across this gem in a used bookstore, attracted by the content and the combination of two major institutions in America- medicine and law.

Although this non-fiction account of a psychiatrist being sued by a patient for medical malpractice was written in the mid 80's, I found it informative and thought-provoking, especially in the areas of mental illness, psychotherapy, and courtroom tactics and techniques.

A graduate student filed suit against her psychiatrist after a suicide attempt resulted in major injuries requiring her to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life. The plaintiff contended her doctor's psychotherapy was ineffective in preventing her from trying to kill herself, thus asserting that psychiatrist, Sara C. Charles was negligent and liable for damages.

The plaintiff had been given a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), considered by many in the mental health field, one of the most difficult conditions to treat, let alone understand and describe to a judge and jury. It was a challenging and stimulating experience to read descriptions and rationale for the plaintiff's behavior, the treatment strategies used by Dr. Sara Charles, and the difficulty the plaintiff's lawyer had in grasping the dynamics and essential features of BPD.

THE DEFENDANT should whet the historical appetites of reflective mental health professionals. It can broaden the views of present day therapists if they compare and contrast the perceptions and treatment of BPD in 1985 to those of today. Interested readers can speculate how effective newer treatment approaches, such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy, would be. Would it have helped the plaintiff regulate her moods, tolerate her distress and develop her sense of self-acceptance? Would it have had enough impact to prevent the tragic results of the plaintiff's self-destructive communication of her emotional pain? Interesting questions indeed. Questions and subject matter that arise for many satisfied readers of the well-written and highly recommended DEFENDANT.

Hull House founder and Nobel Peace Prize winner Jane Addams spent twenty years working with the poverty-stricken immigrant poor in Chicago. She writes here with understated passion and unqualified empathy for their plight.

Anyone who wants to know why we have a fourty hour work should read this book. Addams writes about the desirablity of factory work over household work for young women, due both to the lack of isolation and the relatively short working hours, "only" from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., six days a week.

Anyone who wants to know why we minimum wage laws, social security disability laws, age discrimination laws, social security laws, welfare laws, etc. should read this book. Addams writes about people earning pennies an hour, having their peak earning years in their twenties, being disabled in their thirties, and being dependent on children for financial support. The children, in turn had their education stop before high school so they can support their families.

Anyone who wants to know why governments spend so much money on education should read this book. Addams writes about children having a choose limited to factory employment or household service, with the more intellectually oriented being doomed to spend a lifetime haunting public libraries and public lectures, but having virtually no chance of escaping the circumstance of their birth.

Anyone who wants to know why poverty-stricken people are suspicious of political reform movements should read this book. Addams writes about the major efforts Chicago's political powerhouses made to help individual poverty-stricken people, and the irrelevance of wisdom advocating personal savings to people who could not pay for food for their family, or of wisdom urging them to stay out of taverns when they were a great source of personal help and friendship.

One hundred and five years after Addams wrote this book, the United States is a far better place to live than it was then. But our country's improvements, urged by great progressive leaders like Addams, are under relentless right-wing assaults today. This book is extremely relevant to our country's future, if our future is going to continue to better than our past.

The introduction of Charlene Haddock Seigfried, the past president of the Society for the Advancement of American philosophy, adds a great deal to this work, as it places Addams and her fellow reformers into the context of both their times and the prevailing systems of thought.

Addams saw democracy as a way of life, and not just a series of electoral choices. She sought a major expansion of municipal services, to both improve the living standards of the desperately poor and to wean them away from dependence on corrupt political machines. She advocated the existence of "A reformer who really knew the people and their great human needs, who believed it was the business of government to serve them, and who further recognized the educative power of a sense of responsibility...."

Addams addresses this book to the philanthropic community which provided the base of her financial support. She clearly saw them as providing seed money for demonstration projects to create greater governmental and societal commitment.

It is fashionable in some quarters to say that nothing has been done and nothing can be done to improve the plight of the poverty-stricken. Anyone who believes that, or must deal with others who believe that, should read and quote liberally from this book.

I had the fortune of taking Professor Johannsen's Civil War history class at the University of Illinois. "Democracy on Trial" was the main text used in that course and I could hardly put it down. Dr. Johannsen draws together speeches, articles, personal correspondences, and contemporary works of poetry and fiction that really provide the reader a look back at the years leading to and including the Civil War. Each selection is insightfully introduced by the author and gives added value and enjoyment to the reader. An important work that provides grassroots history together with American culture, politics, and war.

Occasionally a slim volume appears that shatters old expectancies, recasts an entire way of thinking. Modernly, Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" comes to mind; or Machiavelli's "The Prince," if one traces back in time. "Democracy's Constitution" is such a book. Without apology, John Denvir argues his case for where and when constitutional jurisprudence abandoned the path set by the ideal vision of a "pursuit of happiness" and the nation of equal opportunity demanded in the Civil War Amendments (i.e., the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth). More pointedly, he also guides the reader through a scrupulously reasoned constitutional means for solving the most vexing policy tangles the U.S. faces in the Twenty-first Century. Specifically, the privileges or immunities clause of the Fourteenth Amendment grants affirmative rights of national citizenship, which it is time the courts recognize fulsomely. They include rights: of an opportunity to earn a living; to a first-rate education; to have a voice that's heard; and to cast a vote that counts. Denvir's writing has clarity to please any layperson, and precision to satisfy any lawyer. The goal of reforming campaign contributions, for instance, is confronted in Chapter 4, "A Voice That's Heard." Current constitutional doctrine creates a condition where without effective spending limitations political equality among citizens is obscenely farcical. Put simply, that enormous wealth should constitutionally overwhelm the political voice of those with modest means is antithetical to democracy. Is the book utopian? Professor Denvir concedes its opposition to current Supreme Court decisions. But that is also the reason for writing it. His prescriptions are not, he insists, "wildly impracticable," beyond either "the fiscal or administrative reach of the United States." Finding the political will is all that's needed.

When reading of the locations Dennis goes to you feel you were in the back seat with him. He gives very vivid detail of exact places.
One place he reviewed was Manistee Michigan the Victorian Port City. the Milwaukee House was owned by Great Grandfather and Grandfather Diefenbach and we know the information was factual and interestingly portrayed.
There are many such articles that make you want to go to these byways he deplicts.

The book is dated ofcourse, but was very well done with tons of effort on the author's behalf. He deserves tons of respect.

As a decendent myself, I have a copy of this book. It is not for sale. If your want to make contact, look me up!

Best wishes
lmwold AT aol

Writing from what is clearly a Freudian perspective, he nevertheless acknowledges two forms of commodity fetishism: the first he describes as the passive Marxist view--commodities appear to have value all their own which operates as a blind to the real social labor process by which that value is created; and, second, the active Freudian view: rendered powerless by the watchful eyes of others, but especially the state, first female, then male, consumers invest commodities with a phallic significance, hoping to become powerful through the act of their consumption (surely the Romans did something similar.) While Stratton artfully describes the way consumerism has become sadomasochistically fetishized, culminating in, for example, a celebration of man-made women, such as those found in Pygmalion to Fritz Lang's Metropolis (should we count Madonna among their number?); and there are certainly analogies which can be made between the worker-capitalist relations and the sadomasochistic scene; and doubtless purchases are made on advertizers' promises of sexual prowess; nevertheless casting feelings of psychosexual powerlessness as the engine of consumerism, not only fails to consider who has the means to consume, but utterly fails to answer whether wealthy men do in fact consider themselves powerless?

Richard McKenzie does an excellent job of taking all of the dry economic theories that college professors "think" they understand and applies them to real world examples.

Economics is never more "Alive" than it is in this book. This is one of those rare books that brings a lot of loose ends of economic theories together, in easily understandable language. It puts them in real life situations where they make sense.

You don't know as much about Economics as the readers of this book do. Jeff B.