Entire Monograph Research Articles

The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era

The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature

A Quest for Remembrance: The Underworld in Classical and Modern Literature

Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965

Going to the Countryside: The Rural in the Modern Chinese Cultural Imagination, 1915–1965

Summarizing the medieval anatomy of the head and brain in a single image: Magnus Hundt (1501) and Johann Dryander (1537) as transitional pre-Vesalian anatomists

ABSTRACT Of the early-sixteenth century pre-Vesalian anatomists, Magnus Hundt in 1501 and Johannes Eichmann (known as Johann Dryander) in 1537 both attempted to summarize the anatomy of the head and brain in a single complex figure. Dryander clearly based his illustration on the earlier one from Hundt, but he made several improvements, based in part on Dryander’s own dissections. Whereas Hundt’s entire monograph was medieval in character, Dryander’s monograph was a mixture of medieval and early-modern frameworks; nevertheless, the corresponding illustrations of the anatomy of the head and brain in Hundt (1501) and Dryander (Dryandrum 1537) were both essentially medieval. This article examines in detail the symbology of both illustrations within the context of the medieval framework for neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. These two woodcuts of the head and brain provide the most detailed pictorial representation of medieval cranial anatomy in a printed book prior to the work of Andreas Vesalius in 1543.

Polyphony in Medieval Paris: The Art of Composing with Plainchant, by Catherine A. Bradley

<i>Polyphony in Medieval Paris: The Art of Composing with Plainchant</i>, by Catherine A. Bradley

Black Diamond Queens: African American Music and Rock and Roll by Maureen Mahon

Reviewed by: Black Diamond Queens: African American Music and Rock and Roll by Maureen Mahon Larissa A. Irizarry Black Diamond Queens: African American Music and Rock and Roll. By Maureen Mahon. (Refiguring American Music.) Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. [xiv, 394 p. ISBN 9781478010197 (hardcover), $109.95; ISBN 9781478011224 (paperback), $29.95; ISBN 9781478012771 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Race. Gender. Genre. These three themes are the refrain of Maureen Mahon's monograph Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll, in which she explores the forgotten, the rediscovered, and the memorialized Black women in rock. She pays special attention to how their individual vocal qualities, creative voices, and critical voices precipitated and stimulated a genre. Most importantly, Mahon brings to light how significant all the women she surveys were to rock, even while only a precious few became immortalized in the canon itself. An alternate, explanatory subtitle for this account of Black women's contributions to rock might have read, "How a Genre Erased Black Women." All chapters engage with race, gender, and genre. The Black diamond queens under discussion, however, did not share a singular experience. They were negatively affected in differing degrees depending on how they were forced to engage with these three areas. Chapters 2 ("LaVern Baker, the Incredible Disappearing Queen of Rock and Roll") and 3 ("Remembering the Shirelles") engage extensively with race by articulating the expectations of twentieth-century America for respectability in the Black middle class that hindered the soloist LaVern Baker and the teenage girl group the Shirelles. Mahon surveys Baker's treatment (or lack thereof) in college textbooks, rock-and-roll readers, and women-inmusic texts, noting even her own neglect of Baker in an earlier edited collection on the history of African American music (pp. 53–54). These artists' visual conformity to respectability—sleek hairstyles and coordinated, elegant dress—disqualified them from the genre of rock even while their rhythmic vocal approaches became a signature of the genre, covers of their songs topped charts, and their vocality explicitly influenced the sonic direction of such artists as the Beatles (pp. 52, 93). Chapters 4 ("Call and Response") and 5 ("Negotiating 'Brown Sugar'") focus on gender and the physically sidelined women of rock: the Black background singers, groupies, and paramours of famous rockers. Mahon explains how the labor of these cast-out women was rendered invisible, in some cases because of their gender, in others with the added strike of the gendered labor they provided their famous lovers. Chapter 5 is particularly rich with possibility as it takes a detour from the rest of the book in its analysis of the extramusical influence that paradoxically shaped the rock genre. I would have loved an entire monograph on this topic alone—Black women artists and groupies who worked and performed alongside White rockers—something along the lines of the work of Pamela Des Barres, but with a critical Black feminist orientation and focus on women of color (Pamela Des Barres, Let's Spend the Night Together: Backstage Secrets of Rock Muses and Supergroupies [Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007] and I'm with the Band: Confessions of a Groupie [Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005]). This chapter focuses on Devon Wilson, Marsha Hunt, Claudia Lennear, and their relationships with [End Page 221] famous White and Black rockers. Mahon carefully traces how Black women who performed as background vocalists and collaborators sonically authenticated White rock-and-roll artists (p. 107). A great example of the erasure of Black background singers, which surprisingly does not make its way into this work even when the specific artist is examined by Mahon in chapter 4, is the literal erasing of Darlene Love's authorship in the misattribution of her vocals by Phil Spector (John Clemente, "Blossoms, the," in Grove Music Online, doi:10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.A2248396, accessed 24 June 2021). Chapter 1, as well as chapters 6 through 8, take the reader through the treacherous terrain of genre for Black women in twentieth-century America, affecting Big Mama Thornton, Patti LaBelle, Betty Davis, and Tina Turner. Thornton represents one end of the rock-genre spectrum and Davis the other. Although Big Mama...

The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture

The Translatability of Revolution: Guo Moruo and Twentieth-Century Chinese Culture

Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness. Jonathan Kramnick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. ix+198.

Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness. Jonathan Kramnick. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Pp. ix+198.

Emeline Jouve, Susan Glaspell’s Poetics and Politics of Rebellion

“[T]he different elements in your book must not be detached things, but thread held together, as a weaving pattern” (44) : this quote by Susan Glaspell is taken to heart by Emeline Jouve, who offers a tightly woven “comprehensive analysis of the dramatist’s work, from the perspective of rebellion” (12). The choice to devote an entire monograph to Glaspell, a long neglected dramatist, “relegated to the margins of literary history” and “marginaliz[ed] from the canon” (10), constitutes in itself...

Mimesis in the Johannine Literature: A Study in Johannine Ethics

As the author notes in his preface, various earlier versions of portions of this book were presented at scholarly conferences in 2012–15. Two preliminary studies appeared in Novum Testamentum (2014) and in a WUNT volume (2016; (p. 3 n. 12). This volume gathers these various studies united around the theme of mimesis (imitation) in the Johannine writings (by which Bennema means the Gospel and Epistles but not Revelation).As Bennema notes at the outset, perhaps the most popular publication on this topic is Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century work The Imitation of Christ. Toward the end of the 20th century, the rallying cry “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) became popular in North-American evangelical circles. The author chooses to remain agnostic regarding the authorship of both Gospel and Epistles as well as regarding the order in which they were written (which raises the important but unanswered question “Whose ethic are we talking about?”).Bennema notes that some are skeptical regarding the concept of imitation as they perceive it to detract from the Gospel’s focus on the uniqueness of Christ and the centrality of the redemption he provides (though unfortunately, he summarily dismisses any such concerns at the very outset without ever seriously addressing them). Others, such as Wayne Meeks, have alleged that ethics is altogether absent from John’s Gospel (though admittedly this is a rather extreme position).Bennema credits Ruben Zimmermann and Jan van der Watt, co-authors of Rethinking the Ethics of John (2012) to whom he dedicates this work, with the exploration of Johannine ethics, though he believes they failed to identify correctly the center of John’s moral thought, which he believes to be mimesis. In fact, Bennema notes later that Zimmermann explicitly distances himself from such a notion, contending a “role model Christology should not be confused with a misunderstood imitatio ethics” (Zimmermann, “Ethics in the Gospel of John,” 73, cited on p. 13).While a few others have explored the topic previously, the author claims that his is “the first organized study that elucidates the Johannine concept of mimesis” (p. 4). Since the mimesis word group is virtually absent from John’s Gospel and Letters, Bennema argues for the centrality of the idea on a conceptual level (see appendix 1, somewhat misleadingly titled “Occurrences of Mimesis in the Johannine Literature,” pp. 207–9). He says that the Johannine text, not the Greco-Roman background, informs his study.Chapter 1 is devoted to a survey of previous research. However, the survey is not always to be trusted, as the author paints with an unduly broad brush. A single, ten-line paragraph discusses the 30-year period 1970–2000 (!). My work on the subject is lumped together with sectarian views simply because he focuses on John’s love ethic, even though he does so within a context of the Johannine mission motif, which is anything but sectarian. These kinds of inaccuracies do not inspire confidence in the author’s fairness in representing the views of others (though hopefully this example is the exception rather than norm).The author posits the following “working definition” of mimesis: “Person B represents or emulates person A in activity or state X [in order to become like person A].” He contends that “believer-Jesus” and “believer-God” are the primary forms of mimesis in John’s Gospel and Epistles, with the divine Son-Father mimesis serving as the underlying paradigm (pp. 25–26; on the author’s aim and method, see pp. 26–27).Bennema explains the lack of attention to Johannine mimesis in previous scholarship by the lack of the actual term in the Johannine writings (except for 3 John 11) and the neglect of Johannine ethics until recently. However, he unduly presupposes the validity of his thesis at the outset without sufficiently engaging any objections, which means the entire monograph essentially represents an advocacy piece of his position.What if scholars did not discover the centrality of mimesis in John’s writings because the concept is not in fact as central as Bennema contends? If any real and lasting impact on the broader field of Johannine scholarship were to be made, the author should squarely consider and address this possibility. As it stands, the most viable approach continues to be one that finds John’s ethic centered in Jesus’s “love commandment” (13:34–35) as demonstrated at the footwashing (13:1–20).This is not to say that Bennema’s monograph is entirely without merit. He raises a number of interesting questions and interacts with a broad range of scholarship. If a work is as strong as its main thesis, however, the jury is still out as to whether Bennema has proven his point. At least to my mind, after everything is said and done, the case for mimesis as central in Johannine thought remains rather weak, though I’m sure that there will be some who will be more receptive to this novel proposal.

Mimesis in the Johannine Literature: A Study in Johannine Ethics

As the author notes in his preface, various earlier versions of portions of this book were presented at scholarly conferences in 2012–15. Two preliminary studies appeared in Novum Testamentum (2014) and in a WUNT volume (2016; p. 3 n. 12). The present volume gathers these various studies united around the theme of mimesis (imitation) in the Johannine writings (by which Bennema means the Gospel and Epistles but not Revelation).As Bennema notes at the outset, perhaps the most popular publication on this topic is Thomas à Kempis’s 15th-century work The Imitation of Christ. Toward the end of the 20th century, the rallying cry “What Would Jesus Do?” (WWJD) became popular in North-American evangelical circles. The author chooses to remain agnostic regarding the authorship of both the Fourth Gospel and the Johannine Epistles as well as regarding the order in which they were written (which raises the important but unanswered question “Whose ethic are we talking about?”).Bennema notes that some are skeptical regarding the concept of imitation as they perceive it to detract from the Gospel’s focus on the uniqueness of Christ and the centrality of the redemption he provides (though unfortunately, he summarily dismisses any such concerns at the very outset without ever seriously addressing them). Others, such as Wayne Meeks, have alleged that ethics is altogether absent from John’s Gospel (though admittedly this is a rather extreme position). Bennema credits Ruben Zimmermann and Jan van der Watt, co-authors of Rethinking the Ethics of John (2012) to whom he dedicates this work, with the exploration of Johannine ethics, though he believes they failed to identify correctly the center of John’s moral thought, which he believes to be mimesis. In fact, Bennema notes later that Zimmermann explicitly distances himself from such a notion, contending a “role model Christology should not be confused with a misunderstood imitatio ethics” (Zimmermann, “Ethics in the Gospel of John,” p. 73, cited on p. 13).While a few others have explored the topic previously, the author claims that his is “the first organized study that elucidates the Johannine concept of mimesis” (p. 4). Since the mimesis word group is virtually absent from John’s Gospel and letters, Bennema argues for the centrality of the idea on a conceptual level (see appendix 1, somewhat misleadingly titled “Occurrences of Mimesis in the Johannine Literature,” pp. 207–9). He says that the Johannine text, not the Greco-Roman background, informs his study.Chapter 1 is devoted to a survey of previous research. However, the survey is not always to be trusted, as the author paints with an unduly broad brush. A single, ten-line paragraph discusses the 30 year-period 1970–2000 (!). My work on the subject is lumped together with sectarian views simply because he focuses on John’s love ethic, even though he does so within a context of the Johannine mission motif, which is anything but sectarian. These kinds of inaccuracies do not inspire confidence in the author’s fairness in representing the views of others, though hopefully this example is the exception rather than norm.The author posits the following “working definition” of mimesis: “Person B represents or emulates person A in activity or state X [in order to become like person A].” He contends that “believer-Jesus” and “believer-God” are the primary forms of mimesis in John’s Gospel and epistles, with the divine Son-Father mimesis serving as the underlying paradigm (pp. 25–26; on the author’s aim and method, see pp. 26–27).Bennema explains the lack of attention to Johannine mimesis in previous scholarship by the lack of the actual term in the Johannine writings (except for 3 John 11) and the neglect of Johannine ethics until recently. However, he unduly presupposes the validity of his thesis at the outset without sufficiently engaging any objections, which means the entire monograph essentially represents an advocacy piece of his position.What if scholars did not discover the centrality of mimesis in John’s writings because the concept is not in fact as central as Bennema contends? If any real and lasting impact on the broader field of Johannine scholarship were to be made, the author should squarely consider and address this possibility. As it stands, the most viable approach continues to be one that finds John’s ethic centered in Jesus’s “love commandment” (John 13:34–35) as demonstrated at the footwashing (13:1–20).This is not to say that Bennema’s monograph is entirely without merit. He raises a number of interesting questions and interacts with a broad range of scholarship. If a work is as strong as its main thesis, however, the jury is still out as to whether Bennema has proven his point. At least to my mind, after everything is said and done, the case for mimesis as central in Johannine thought remains rather weak, though I am sure that there will be some who will be more receptive to this novel proposal.

More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics by Richard Menkis and Harold Troper, and: Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation ed. by Russel Field

Reviewed by: More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics by Richard Menkis and Harold Troper, and: Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation ed. by Russel Field Robert K. Barney Menkis, Richard and Harold Troper – More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. 280. Field, Russel, ed. – Playing for Change: The Continuing Struggle for Sport and Recreation. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2015. Pp. 466. Almost since governments started directing public tax monies toward sport matters, the question of priority has existed. Whom to select: athletes who train and compete at high levels representing municipalities, provinces, and nations, or the masses, folks like you and me, who pursue exercise options in various "other" sport and recreation programs? It is evident that the elites have won the day. In the midst of such a situation one can often spot the litter of struggle between the voices of discontent, sometimes successful, more often unsuccessful, and their opponents. More than Just Games and Playing for Change are two recent works that deal in part with the effort by various individuals and parties to address the primary debate—the "struggle" of those who feel compromised, indeed disenfranchised, versus those whom government has favoured, indeed empowered. Just when one believes that "everything possible" has appeared on Olympic history's most written-about event, the both "glorious and notorious" Olympic Games of 1936 in Berlin, there arrives More than Just Games, a book I conclude to be the most thorough scholarly treatment available in any language on the events surrounding one country's decision to participate—or not—in those historic competitions some eighty years ago. There have been many excellent (along with [End Page 186] some not quite so superb) examinations of participation at Berlin; most have been articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals or chapters in thematic anthologies; there never has been, to my knowledge, an entire monograph on one country's grappling with the dilemma of whether to "show up or not" for the Games that the Nazis shaped and Adolf Hitler endorsed and that, in the end, Canadian athletes, like their British brethren and American neighbours, dignified with their presence. Bruce Kidd, considered one of the foremost chroniclers and analysts of Canadian sport, and a staunch defender of athletes' rights, in The Struggle for Canadian Sport (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) brushes aside in two sentences the quest to which the authors of More than Just Games devote some 200+ pages of text, plus 40 more in endnotes. Stated Kidd: "Despite considerable opposition to the 1936 Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, when the British Olympic Association decided to send a team Canadian Olympic officials simply voted to do the same. There was no further discussion" (p. 71). That was "it!" Although the issue of boycotting participation in the United States receives cursory attention from Richard Mandell in The Nazi Olympics (London: Macmillan, 1971), and in Great Britain from Duff Hart-Davis in Hitler's Games (London: Harper & Row, 1986), more penetrating are the treatments by William Murray, George Eizen, and Stephen Wenn. Murray focuses on France: "France, Coubertin and the Nazi Olympics" (Olympika: The International Journal of Olympic Studies, I-1992). Eizen and Wenn explore U.S. boycott events, in Eizen's case: "Voices of Sanity: American Diplomatic Reports from the 1936 Berlin Olympiad" (Journal of Sport History, vol. 26, 1999; in Wenn's: "A Tale of Two Diplomats: GeorgeS. Messersmith and Charles H. Sherrill on Proposed Participation in the 1936 Olympics" (Journal of Sport History, vol. 16, 1989). Far more than Canada's, the U.S. boycott debate aroused widespread attention and opinion on whether "to go or not to go." The idea for More than Just Games, and indeed its title, evolved from the exhibits More than Just Games: Canada and the 1936 Olympics and Framing Bodies: Sport and Spectacle in Nazi Germany, both of which opened on October 15, 2009, at Vancouver's Holocaust Education Centre in British Columbia. The writing and research experts for the exhibit More than Just Games were the Jewish-Canadian writers Richard...

Das Meer als Versprechen: Bedeutung und Funktion von Seeherrschaft bei Thukydides by Hans Kopp

Reviewed by: Das Meer als Versprechen: Bedeutung und Funktion von Seeherrschaft bei Thukydidesby Hans Kopp Stephan Renker Das Meer als Versprechen: Bedeutung und Funktion von Seeherrschaft bei Thukydides. By hans kopp. Volume 1 of Thoukydideia Series. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. 303 pp. €90.00 (hardcover). Thucydides (ca. 450–390 b.c.), in his History of the Peloponnesian War, written as a "possession for ever," brought forth the famous argument that the rise of Athens and the resulting fear of the Spartans made a conflict between the two city states inevitable. This idea has recently attracted the attention of a wider audience due to Graham Allison's successful book Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides' Trap?(2017). Since then, interest in Thucydides has spread across the globe, beyond scholars of classics. It is thus timely that the German publishing house Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht has decided to devote an entire monograph series with the title THOUKYDIDEIA, Studies in Thucydidesto the most influential of ancient Greek historians. Hans Kopp's book, the revised and updated version of a 2015 Berlin dissertation, is the first volume of this new series. In this monograph, the author tries to investigate how far the concept of thalassocracy ( Seeherrschaft) emerges as a literary phenomenon in Thucydides' Peloponnesian Warand what its concrete historical function is (pp. 11–12). [End Page 423] The structure of Kopp's work is very clear and straightforward. In chapter 1 ("Einleitung"; pp. 9–49) he formulates the goals and methods of his investigation and provides the reader with an extensive and very helpful literature review. With the underlying argument that the concept of Seeherrschaftmanifests itself on various layers of the text, Kopp investigates this idea in the following chapters through several lenses. Thus, in chapter 2 ("Die Archäologie"; pp. 51–73), he directs the focus to one of the most prominent and programmatic parts of Thucydides' work, the so-called "Archaeology" (Th. 1.2–19). Here, Thucydides supplies the reader with an overview of Greece's early history from Minos to his own times. Kopp argues reasonably that naval power is not only a source of economic and political stability but conversely also of domination and suppression (pp. 67–68). In chapter 3 ("Leitworte"; pp. 75–110) he analyzes the usage of various characteristic lexemes and phrasings denoting the concept of thalassocracy. In this section Kopp puts a strong emphasis on the formula τò τῆς ταλάσσης κράτος, which in his opinion defies a static meaning but is rather dependent on context and thus characterized by a dramatic "Schicksal" (p. 47). Chapter 4 (" Logoiund Erga"; pp. 111–207) focuses on the dialectics between speeches ( λó γοι) and deeds ( ἔργα), with a strong emphasis on Pericles' speeches. Here, Kopp contrasts Pericles' claim that the Athenians have reached an uncontested position of power over the sea with various incidents where this power was challenged or weakened (most prominently during the Sicilian expedition). In chapter 5 ("Die Funktion von Seeherrschaft bei Thukydides"; pp. 209–236) Kopp pays attention to the function of the argument of thalassocracy in the valedictory passage on Pericles (Th. 2.65), in which Thucydides—according to Kopp—praises his capacities in managing the Athenian naval forces during the Peloponnesian War. The last chapter ("Fazit: Thukydides im Kontext"; pp. 237–272) sums up the results of the study and puts them into the contemporary discourse of Könnens-Bewusstsein(a term coined by Christian Meier) of the fifth century. A bibliography (pp. 273–290) and two indices ("Namen, Orte, Sachen" and "Quellen" pp. 291–303) conclude the book. This is a timely book and Kopp shows that he is capable of managing an eclectic wealth of secondary literature with great composure. His arguments are clear and concise. In addition, the author displays complete command of the original Greek, which allows him to work with great philological accuracy instead of relying on translations. This book should be recommended to anyone who is interested in the history of ancient naval power in general and the thought world of Thucydides in particular. The reviewer hopes that [End Page 424]the book will reach a wide audience, not only among German readers, but also internationally. Stephan Renker...

Some Shang Antecedents of Later Chinese Ideology and Culture

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; Although the Shang dynasty sometimes seems archaic and alien from the point of view of later periods, there are important elements of Shang culture that persevered in recognizable forms, even after allowing for adaptation to new historical realities, beyond the Zhou conquest in 1045 B.C. These points of continuity being generally underappreciated, five of the most salient are sketched below, in the hope of spurring renewed interest in China’s first historical dynasty: the ritual use of writing, particularly as a mode of communication with the spirit world; the status of Chinese as the sole written language; the notion that some days are auspicious and others inauspicious; a patrilocal and patrilineal family structure that nevertheless accommodated mothers within its ritual order; and “the Deity’s command” (di ling). In keeping with the genre of “brief communication,” the examples adduced are illustrative rather than exhaustive; a full study of these themes would require an entire monograph.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Spiritual Purification in Islam: The Life and Works of al-Muhasibi

Spiritual Purification in Islam: The Life and Works of al-Muhasibi

National Pastime: U.S. History Through Baseball by Martin C. Babicz and Thomas W. Zeiler

Reviewed by: National Pastime: U.S. History Through Baseball by Martin C. Babicz and Thomas W. Zeiler David Lucander Martin C. Babicz and Thomas W. Zeiler. National Pastime: U.S. History Through Baseball. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 277 pp. Cloth, $36.00. The game of baseball and the United States are so intertwined that pointing this fact out is a veritable cliché. From its beginnings in the antebellum era, baseball has been “a window through which we can examine and clarify American history” (ix). This remains as true for us today as it was for Walt Whitman in the 1850s. Then and now, the game reflects many of the developments that made modern America. Some of the parallels between sport and society include the professionalization and specialization of labor, the rise of various reform movements, demographic shifts, globalization, and the spread of revolutionary technologies that changed the way we consume media. Martin C. Babicz and Thomas W. Zeiler’s National Pastime: U.S. History Through Baseball is a fact-laden survey of the game’s history that seeks to wed baseball history and American history in a neatly organized single-volume. This is the newest installment in the increasingly prestigious American Ways Series and is rooted in academia, but the book is a crossover text that targets a general reading audience. The fifteen generally chronologically arranged chapters are roughly twelve pages each, making it an unintimidating read and a quick study for those who are specialists in sports history. There are only two endnotes in the entire monograph, but a lengthy bibliographical essay directs readers to the vast amount of readily accessible books used in the research for this study. Roughly half of the book’s fifteen chapters are devoted to baseball’s early history, with names like Henry Chadwick, Alexander Cartwright, Alexander Spaulding, and Cap Anson being central to the narrative. This early history is essential, but the disproportionate emphasis on the game’s earliest era could be difficult for younger readers to connect with because this past seems so far [End Page 184] removed from the game that they know. Absent from this is even a mention of recent Hall of Famers Nolan Ryan or Carlton Fisk and the cultural significance of their personas. This imbalance also manifests in the omissions of generationally famous moments such as Dirk Denkinger’s missed call in the 1985 Cardinals-Royals World Series, the significance of curse-breaking championships by the Red Sox and Cubs, and the deep symbolism of Mariano Rivera’s retirement as the last player to wear uniform number 42. “Babe Ruth and the Roaring Twenties” is one of the book’s strongest chapters. In this section, the authors most concretely connect the subject of baseball with broader societal events. Babe Ruth “personified” much of what we know about this era by being “big, loud, and rambunctious, like the decade itself ” (89). This period of previously unprecedented prosperity is marked by the rapid growth of cities, a tremendous rise of immigration, the flaunting of excess, and technological innovations in mass media. All of this led to the creation of celebrity, and Babe Ruth fit the bill perfectly. Another especially strong section is a chapter on the Negro Leagues. Jackie Robinson has unquestionably attained iconic status as an American hero, but the general public is veritably unaware of the African American ballplayers and business people who came before him. The authors fill this lacunae by shining the spotlight on Gus Greenlee, Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, and Josh Gibson. These figures should be household names and carry the kind of cultural esteem that Babe Ruth, Cy Young, and Stan Musial enjoy. By contextualizing the Negro Leagues within the history of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Great Migration, and the Harlem Renaissance, Babicz and Zeiler tell a story of survival and resilience in the face of Jim Crow. Various appendices constitute over forty pages of National Pastime. These franchise histories, and charts of playoff results are interesting to have on hand, but this valuable space could have been allocated to incorporate more detailed historical analysis. For instance, the short-lived Player’s League is discussed alongside the 1892 Homestead Steel Strike...

“I am not a hero, I am a composer”: Hanns Eisler in Hollywood by Horst Weber (review)

am not a hero, I am a Hanns Eisler in Hollywood. By Horst Weber. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 2012. [536 p. ISBN 9783487147871. i48.] Music examples, illustrations, personalia, bibliog- raphy, filmography, index.Horst Weber's study of Hanns Eisler in Hollywood is without a doubt a big book. This biography of the Austrian composer focuses on a tumultuous period of his exile in the United States. Weber synthesizes wide-ranging detail-archival documents, close music analysis, psychoanalytical excur- sions, and reception history-to tell a story about earning money, writing music, nego- tiating shifting global politics, and living as a foreigner in California from 1942 to 1947. The German musicologist consis- tently taps into the debates that drive scholarship on the composer: How do we reconcile Eisler's politically-engaged com- positions with those for commercial film? How did the devoted Schoenberg student come to write almost entirely diatonic mu- sic in the German Democratic Republic? It is precisely the varied nature of Eisler's professional activities in Los Angeles that Weber isolates in order to stress continu- ities with the composer's life and musical language before and after. He thus coun- ters musicological narratives that under- stand exile as the cause of a decisive break in compositional style. Instead, in this sub- stantial scholarly study, the California exile comes to stand for the complex and often contradictory musical figure that Hanns Eisler was throughout his life.Weber's writing style sets the pace of the text, and his dedication to detail shapes the entire monograph. Most of the chapters re- produce substantial excerpts from primary documents, and Weber goes to consider- able efforts to set these off from his inter- pretation and synthesis, inviting other scholars to take advantage of the material's textual and musical richness. Of twin im- portance are Eisler's Hollywood composi- tions and the California papers of the com- poser and his wife, Louise Eisler-Fischer, which recently became available as a part of the Lion Feuchtwanger Memorial Library at the University of Southern California. From film score to lied to piano sonata to incidental music for Bertolt Brecht's the- ater, the musical works span genres. Weber accords each measured analysis, drawing out gestures, tonal spaces, and formal ten- sions to paint a picture of the composer's musical value system. Fragments of scores- many of which are currently unpublished- enable the reader to follow the nuances of Weber's close readings. Sometimes his insights come across as meant for scholars familiar with the voluminous literature on the composer, much of which is in German. But the author also contributes by synthesizing existing knowledge, such as the publication history of Composing for the Films and the sources and composition history of the Hollywood Songbook, and the resulting charts are a clear and helpful resource for musicologists of any stripe.The book's scope is vast, but the thick de- scription that pervades it evokes Eisler inti- mately and humanly. Weber sustains his own scholarly and personal reflections on exile and other traumas of twentieth- century history throughout the book, giv- ing the five-hundred-page tome a unified voice. An opening sequence serves as the introduction to the five thematic sections that clearly structure the book. It sets the author's ambition to study Eisler as a com- poser hidden by his exile, and it advo- cates for his originality and significance. The first section is devoted to Eisler's tran- sition to living in Los Angeles. After an evocative retelling of the composer's depar- ture from New York City and cross-country road trip-the section's first chapter con- tains some of the most dynamic writing in the entire book-Weber discusses his final compositions on the East Coast. Piecing together letters, receipts, and newspaper clippings that reveal Eisler's negative im- pressions of Los Angeles and frustrated re- ception in New York, Weber establishes the fundamental personal unhappiness and professional outsider status that define, through this book, Eisler's exile on the West Coast. …

Édouard Glissant: Creolization and the Event

Édouard Glissant: Creolization and the Event Lincoln Z. Shlensky (bio) L’être est repos, une violence qui s’arrête, dans un procès dont l’étant est le seul événement. —Édouard Glissant Introduction: Creolization and the Event The writings of the Martiniquan novelist, theorist, poet, and playwright Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) frequently privilege place and landscape as central to a concept of Caribbean poetics, and recently critics have tended to place greater emphasis on his use of geographical tropes.1 Glissant’s earliest published collection of essays, Soleil de la conscience (1956), gives some indication of the importance he thereafter was to place on the imagery of land (and, almost equally, of sea). In a memorable passage in that book, for instance, he remarks on the sense of displacement that the European terrain, newly encountered first-hand as he begins his university studies, inspires in him: “Mon paysage est encore emportement; la symmétrie du planté me gêne. Mon temps n’est pas une succession d’espérances saisonnières, il est encore de jaillissements et de trouées d’arbres” ‘My countryside is still an enthusiasm; the symmetry of planted fields disturbs me. My time is not a succession of seasonal hopes, there are upsurgings and breaks in the trees’ (25). Glissant’s first novels, La Lézarde (1958) and Le quatrième siècle (1964), actively assert a homology between the Martinican landscape and a sense of collective destiny. Marronnage, the historical phenomenon of maroon slaves transformed by him into a geo-social principle of resistance and reclamation of the island hinterlands, would continue to fascinate Glissant throughout his career. Soleil de la conscience also introduces the phrase lieux communs (“common places”) in a reversal of the typically negative valence of the term “commonplace,” a topological pun which functions equally well in English and French. Much later, in his novel Tout-monde (1993), Glissant would construct a narrative that corresponds to the geographically “chaotic” dimensions of the Deleuzian concept of the rhizome. Glissant at the time was becoming interested in ecological activism as a means of creating a conceptual bridge between his poetics and his politics. His idiosyncratic elaboration of concepts indicative of transit, such as errance, or errantry, also demonstrates the prominence of spatial metaphors in his later thinking, even when (and, often, especially when) such terms convey a deterritorializing tendency.2 Glissant’s exploration of the fiction of William Faulkner, the only anglophone author who attracted his sustained attention and the only writer to whom he devoted an entire monograph, likewise announces its critical cartographical approach in the title of his book, Faulkner, Mississippi (1999). The centrality [End Page 353] of such place-based analysis in Glissant’s oeuvre reaches a conceptual apotheosis, it now appears, with the introduction of the term la pensée archipélique (“archipelagic thinking”) as a prominent theoretical direction in his writings in the new millenium (Glissant, La cohée du Lamentin 231; Traité du tout-monde 31).3 A critical focus on Glissant’s approach to landscape, despite its manifest significance to his writing, nevertheless threatens to obscure our understanding of a different aspect of his analysis of Caribbean culture: his complex and relatively little studied stance toward historical chronology and, in particular, toward the phenomenology of historical events. While it is true that, as Mary Gallagher points out, “a more balanced, less schismatic approach to the relation between space and time” (Soundings 5) must inform any perceptive critical discourse on Caribbean identity, such balance will remain elusive in discussions of Glissant’s contribution, I maintain, until there is a great deal more attention paid to his conception of history, historical narratives, and historical events. In what follows, I aim to unpack Glissant’s understanding of historical events as an element of his larger analysis of history because I believe that the cautious, indeed ambivalent, attitudes he expresses towards events, especially in his earlier writings, reveal much about the difficulty he perceives in integrating traumatic and often unwritten narratives of history into any ethical representation of Caribbean identity. Glissant is obviously aware of the ways in which those with little political power typically lack access to communications...

The Monty Hall Problem and beyond: Digital-Mathematical and Cognitive Analysis in Boole’s Algebra, Including an Extension and Generalization to Related Cases

The Monty Hall problem has received its fair share of attention in mathematics. Recently, an entire monograph has been devoted to its history. There has been a multiplicity of approaches to the problem. These approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The design of the present paper is to add one more approach by analyzing the mathematical structure of the Monty Hall problem in digital terms. The structure of the problem is described as much as possible in the tradition and the spirit—and as much as possible by means of the algebraic conventions—of George Boole’s Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), the Magna Charta of the digital age, and of John Venn’s Symbolic Logic (second edition, 1894), which is squarely based on Boole’s Investigation and elucidates it in many ways. The focus is not only on the digital-mathematical structure itself but also on its relation to the presumed digital nature of cognition as expressed in rational thought and language. The digital approach is outlined in part 1. In part 2, the Monty Hall problem is analyzed digitally. To ensure the generality of the digital approach and demonstrate its reliability and productivity, the Monty Hall problem is extended and generalized in parts 3 and 4 to related cases in light of the axioms of probability theory. In the full mapping of the mathematical structure of the Monty Hall problem and any extensions thereof, a digital or non-quantitative skeleton is fleshed out by a quantitative component. The pertinent mathematical equations are developed and presented and illustrated by means of examples.

Labour Costs for Inventory Control Less Expensive than Repurchasing

Labour Costs for Inventory Control Less Expensive than Repurchasing