Wisconsin Books

Women's Wisconsin: From Native Matriarchies To The New Millennium is an anthology of essays by learned historians as well as primary sources such as letters, reminiscences, oral histories, articles and more previously published over numerous decades in the "Wisconsin Magazine of History." An impressive compendium of women's contributions to Wisconsin history, Women's Wisconsin covers the lives of the first women in Wisconsin, the frontier era, statehood, women's organizations, women's involvement in the war effort during World War II and much more. Many sections feature extensive notes or citations. As enjoyable for lay readers as it is informative, Women's Wisconsin is an excellent contribution to both library and private history shelves, and a valuable resource for state history teachers.

Written by Jo Ortel (an associate professor of art history and recipient of the James R. Underkofler award for excellence in undergraduate teaching), Woodland Reflections: The Art Of Truman Lowe is an artbook featuring the abstract wooden sculpture and other works of native american artist Truman Lowe, whose bold and original creations set him apart. An extensive philosphical commentary ranging from reflections upon native traditions and cultural survival through art to education and identity, the distinctions between art and craft, and much more adds a thoughtful dimension to the captivating gallery of full-color photographs of Lowe's eye-catching creations. A most welcome addition to avante-garde and Native American artbook collections.

"The Word from Below" is a fine book of interesting, vital literary criticism. It's a real breath of fresh air, for Langbaum has the confidence in his own literary judgment to discuss and express his thoughts on literature in beautifully clear prose that's a pleasure to read in itself--no postmodern jargon, no citations from theory critics misused as premises or proofs, no radically-leftist snobbery. Not that he's got his head stuck in the sand. Several passages show that he is more than aware of this type of criticism and of its strengths and weaknesses, but he has his own priorities. If I had to express it in a nutshell, he's interested in tracing a new form of modern spirituality in literature, one characterized by moments of aesthetic epiphany triggered in the individual by contemplating nature--one that finds the sacred within such subjective psychological states instead of in a god "out there" somewhere. This tendency has its roots in the Romantic movement in poetry, especially with Wordsworth, and develops in diverse ways: Browning's poetic monologues, Modernist poetry and fiction (Joyce after all coined the term "epiphany" in the sense used here), even the historical fiction of Norman Mailer of all things. And if you think of cold scientific theories like Darwinist evolution and Freudian psychology as challenging these kinds of humanistic, spiritualistic values in literature, Langbaum argues counter-intuitively and convincingly that instead they deepen and empower them, fortifying them with complexity and toughness. As Mr. Spock might say, fascinating! This is the way literary criticism should be done. Highly recommended.

The essays included in this book are:
1. Freud and Sociobiology: Reflections on the Nature of Genius
2. Can We Still Talk about the Romantic Self?
3. The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature
4. Wordsworth's Lyrical Characterizations
5. The Victorian Idea of Culture
6. Is Guido Saved? The Meaning of Browning's Conclusion to "The Ring and the Book"
7. Browning and the Question of Myth
8. A New Look at E.M. Forster
9. The Importance of Trilling's "The Liberal Imagination"
10. The New Nature Poetry
11. Mailer's New Style
12. Pound and Eliot

In this insightful survey of Hollywood films between the World Wars, the author shows that the increasing proportion of revenue from foreign markets dictated not only greater attention to their political, social, and religious sensitivities, but also influenced the very form of the medium, e.g., a tendency toward "action pictures" at the expense of "dialogue pictures",
Admirably researched asnd clearly written, Vasey's work will be essential for film students and others interested in Hollywood's impact on the world, and vice versa.
(The numerical rating above is a default setting with Amazon's format. This reviewer does not employ numerical ratings.)

Wright In Racine is an analysis of all the Racine, Wisconsin architecture projects of the celebrated and often controversial Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), well-known for his revolutionary designs that spurred an awakening in American architecture. Full-color photographs and an extensive discussion of Wright's amazing designs for private homes, public buildings, and affordable housing tie together all of Wright's diverse works with a commen search for vision and expression. Written by award-winning photojournalist Mark Hertzberg, Wright In Racine is enjoyable to browse through for its own sake and especially recommended for anyone interested in an in-depth analysis of Wright's breathtaking and groundbreaking architectural achievements in Wisconsin.

Cohler, Betram J. "Writing Desire: Sixty Years of Gay Autobiography." The University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.

Social History and Personal Biography

Amos Lassen and Literary Pride

Bertram Cohler in "Writing Desire" explores nearly sixty years of memoir and autobiography. He looks at the changing identity of gay men and at the historical context in which they lived. Cohler looks at the lives of ten men, among whom are performance artists, historians, poets, historians, social activists, bloggers and journalists. The writing of these men, when taken together as a whole, chronicles the history of gay life. What we get in the book is both personal biography and social history by the people who were most influential in American gay life. Heavily documented, the book is an excellent way to begin looking at our history.
The amount of scholarship that went into Cohler's research is staggering. Here is nothing short of a remarkable telling of how both the social context and history shape the things we do as well as an excellent explanation of how the gay movement took form. Additionally Cohler shows how people influence and understand their lives and write about them.
It is safe to say that the social climate and the age in which people live determine how people act. Cohler goes one step further and presents the idea that they also influence how people write and read about the events that bring them to any period in time. Our life stories reflect and constitute our sense of self and the one constant thing to which we all aspire is the desire to "maintain a sense of personal continuity" about our lives. Our own concept of who we are is perhaps the reason all of us want to know from where we came and how will that benefit to where we are going. Our ego allows us to talk about ourselves and relate our desires and our interpretations of our relationships with other people.
This book is about life and life stories and the lives of men in the times in which they live. It spans sixty years of American gay life from 1930-1980. We see the changes from before World War II when we did not like to label ourselves as queer or gay as we do today. It is fascinating to see how gay men changed both their public and self images and how what we were ashamed to call ourselves became accepted terminology in America and the world at large.
Cohler uses an approach which he refers to as "grounded theory" by which he chose the men he writes about. He chose what he calls "particularly salient" life stories for his study of "writing desire". By doing so he gives us a cross section of influential gay men among whom are Martin Duberman, Paul Monette, and Mark Doty--all three men who have been influential in shaping the way we see ourselves.
It is so important that we have a way to learn about the people who shaped gay life and Bertram Cohler gives us this in "Writing Desire". I wish I had had a book like this years ago. It would have made understanding homosexual culture, history and myself so much easier.

This is an important and imaginative study of the work literary and cultural anthologies do to embody and prefigure forms of politican transformation and to represent engagement. It is an act of an "organic intellectual" in the best Gramscian senses, and makes an important intervention into the makings of Asian American, Pacific, and American studies in this strange and mongrel postcolonial/transnational moment of US remaking. This is a splendid first book, and suggests further scholarship and anthology-making on the Asian/Pacific horizon from Hawai'i.

Yahweh Versus Yahweh: The Enigma Of Jewish History is an in-depth scrutiny of duality of God's nature as perceived in virtually all forms of Judaism and throughout all of history. On one side is a merciful and loving God; another is the jealous, vengeful, and ruthless god who visits the sins of the fathers upon the children. This seemingly schizophrenic dichotomy has had tremendous psycho-historical reverbations, claims author Jay Gonen, and has instilled a deep sense of precariousness concerning the self in relation to God, Gentiles, the land of Israel and the End of Days. The shared dual view of God, Gonen argues, continues to condition Jewish expectations in the wake of the Holocaust and the rise of modern-day Israel, and the incongruity between the two natures of God as depicted in holy scriptures has yet to be resolved despite all attempts - if it can be resolved at all. Chapters include reflections on "When Will the Messiah Arrive?", "Fateful Holidays", "Messianism, Zionism, and Holocaust" and more. Yahweh Versus Yahweh is unflinching and unflattering in its close scrutiny of Judaic holy texts, beliefs, and history, yet it is that same blunt and valuable full honesty - regardless of whether one agrees with the author's scriptural interpretations and psycho-historical claims - that make it valuable reading for religious philosophers and social scientists.

This classic book on zoning practices in the US provides a thorough look at the state of land use regulation in the 1960's.

Another book that Dr. L had us read. During the 2008 presidential debate I see one party is trying to buy votes even though the failures of socialism have been proven time and time again throughout history. This is the singular short work on the failures of socialism.

Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom was written at a time when the Labour Party of Britain was openly socialist. Although modern social democrats renounce the 's' word, socialism is indeed the root of their thinking, and in this exposition, his magnus opus, Hayek unabashedly sends socialism to the gutter where it belongs. Hayek's thesis, that socialism and totalitarianism are two birds of the same feather, has stood the test of time, and it continues to show up today in the cases of Venezuela or Bolivia. Hayek was arguably responsible for Labour's (and the Democrats') turn to the right, set in stone by former PM Tony Blair (and former President Clinton). This book is, however, still very relevant, exemplified by the Democrats' plan to invade the health care sector, the countless bureaucracies located in Washington, and President Bush's reckless invasion of privacy (which is related to Hayek's arguments about war time and peace time). Although Hayek often comes off as soft on a number of issues, he could not be nearly as dedicated as Milton Friedman to absolute freedom because the intelligentsia was on the far-left in the 40's.

For classical liberals, modern leftists, and conservatives alike, The Road to Serfdom is extraordinarily eye-opening.

Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel prize winning economist, wrote this brilliant classic as a critique of government intervention and manipulation in markets. I am neither an economist nor a political scientist, but I was led to this book after watching with horror the recent outrages that are consciously being inflicted on us by our elected officials, most recently the bailout and socialization of the two giant mortgage lenders, Freddie and Fannie. I couldn't remember that I ever received any share of the loot when those companies were making huge profits and their CEOs were earning tens of millions per year, but now I find that our elected officials have written a blank check in my name, the taxpayer, to bail out these companies' losses and stupidity, and then handed the check to a group of unelected officials (and, surprise, surprise, those two companies spend hundreds of millions on congressional lobbying). Privatize the gains, socialize the losses: sounds like a win-win situation for somebody.

This kind of disastrous socialism is exactly what Hayek critiques in devastating form in this book, specifically government control of the economy. Apparently, they say, this book has been very influential, but a layman could certainly never tell by looking around. Hayek was writing from the perspective of a central European who had recently witnessed first-hand the unfolding development of National Socialism (Nazism) in Germany, and he is warning that the exact same attitudes and policies that had been followed in Germany were uncritically being followed by the Allies, merely at a few years distance.

He begins by recollecting the ideals of old, classic liberalism, "the forgotten road". Of course, in Hayek's context, "liberal" means the true, historic liberalism of limited government, free markets, and private property, not "liberal" in the bastardized sense somehow hijacked by Leftists to mean unlimited government, socialized markets and massive forced wealth redistribution. He looks at the rise of collectivist thinking versus individual (it's all for the greater good); the problems of central planning in a democracy (someone in power makes the economic decisions for everybody else); the downfall of the Rule of Law (government is no longer bound by fixed rules announced beforehand but instead possesses arbitrary power limited only by its own discretion); the inextricable link between centralized economic planning and totalitarian regimes (if we're going to follow a plan, someone's got to force everyone to follow it); the problem of deciding how the society's production will be distributed; a chapter showing that "nothing is more fatal than the present fashion among intellectual leaders of extolling security at the expense of freedom" (Republicans apparently didn't get the memo); how in a socialized economy the worst individuals inevitably rise to the top (Really? Can it be? Obama and McCain?); the necessity of manipulating truth in a socialized society; and the fact that Nazism was a direct outgrowth of socialism and socialist ideology.

The relevance of the points enumerated above does not require comment. We are running madly down the road to serfdom, which is the road of socialism. Unfortunately for those of us who are being dragged along against our will, history is not neutral, and we will suffer the consequences of other peoples' decisions, just as the Jews in Germany did and the Russians in the Soviet Union did. Socialism has always led to poverty and oppression, and freedom, on the rare occasions it has been tried, has produced unparalleled prosperity. Hayek shows in detail why. We've decided to give socialism another try. God help us.

The only, effective way to reject socialism is by attacking it's fundamental philosophical ideas. That collectivism is good and the individual must be sacrificed for the "good of the people". Attacking a philosophy such as communism or socialism, because it is not "practical" is a contradiction and undercuts any argument against such a corrupt philosophy. These ideas are not good in theory but bad in practice. They are evil in theory and therefore evil in practice.

I would like to also recommend Ayn Rand's, "The Virtue of Selfishness". This is THE work to understand Man's Individual Rights based on His Rational Nature. It is from these fundamental Truths that the ONLY proper function of a legitimate government is derived - The protection of Individual Rights.

Considering it my duty as an economics major, I took it upon myself to read this book, with little expectations as to its brilliance, and was completely swept away. Not only is Hayek extremely eloquent in articulating the case for free trade, he supports his arguments with facts (e.g. what was then going on in Nazi Germany) and with theory (e.g. why without even the historical evidence that we do have we must conclude that a centralized system cannot equally favor everyone).

Since it is my tendency to look at the 1 star reviews before making a 5 star one, I recognize that some people don't like Hayek because he doesn't recognize the great things about socialized medicine (like how a guy in Canada signed up for a CAT scan under his dog's name because animals are not covered under their highly efficient centralized health care...true story by the way) or the kind thoughts of socialist thinkers (please don't make me choose my selection of Marx quotes). But what Hayek does is present a prima facie case against socialism; before anyone can advocate socialism, they MUST address Hayek's arguments.

This is why I think before any socialist and libertarian face each other in a squabble, both must have read The Road to Serfdom so that they can hit on the applicable issues instead of babbling on about poverty statistics. Are you a socialist and disagree with Hayek? Fine, but read the book so that you know where your opponents stand. I really think that socialists think lovers of capitalism are greedy and have no ethics. But if you read our spokesman Hayek, you'll see why we think that the free market is actually BETTER for society.

Let's change the scope of the argument. Socialists should stop arguing about how some people are poor...yes, some people are poor...and demonstrate how a centralized system can make people BETTER than they would be under the free market system. How planning the systems of production would be more efficient and prosperous than under the system of competition. How giving all our freedoms to one entity would guarantee them for all. If you can effectively address these issues and the many more that Hayek brings up, we will soon see a blessed change in the current headache of debates on socialism.