This book began as an inquiry into why Minnesota—a state with an overwhelmingly white population, a state where blacks made up less than half a percent of the population—became a leader in civil rights in the 1940s. Why were so many of the most important congressional leaders in civil rights legislation—people like Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCarthy, and Walter Mondale—from Minnesota? In answering that question, the author recounts the creation of Minnesota’s Farmer-Labor Party, its merger with the Democrats, and the acrimonious battle for control of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party just after World War II. Delton argues that the Humphrey liberals won this battle in part because antiracism activities enabled previously antagonistic groups, divided by ethnicity, religion, and class, to unify around a common cause.

What Is Community Justice?

by David Karp, Assistant Professor of Sociology, and Todd R. Clear
Sage Publications, 2002

The standard model for probation and parole relies on caseworkers who monitor their “clients” as best they can. However, increasing numbers of clients threaten the traditional model, making new ideas worthy of consideration. Community justice seeks to explicitly integrate the community and the criminal justice process in probation programs. David Karp and Todd Clear recommend building partnerships between the community and its supervision agencies and urge preventing problems rather than reacting to them. They suggest expanding the definition of “client” to include crime victims, the family of the offender, and the community itself. They also suggest that agencies take into account important local differences in neighborhoods. Through six case studies, Karp and Clear explain how to achieve these goals in a new approach to the issues of probation and parole.

Hard Bread

by Peg O'Higgins Boyers ’75,Executive Editor of Salmagundi
University of Chicago Press, 2002

This, the author’s first book, is a collection of poems “spoken” in the imagined voice of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg. Part of the book is based on Ginzburg’s life—her upbringing in Turin, her brief marriage to the resistance activist Leone Ginzburg, her experience of fascism and war, her work as a novelist, playwright, editor, and newspaper columnist—and some of it is invented. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky praises Boyers’s originality, saying, “Within a few pages it’s clear that this is true poetry, giving voice with unforgettable specificity to the woe, comedy, and heroism of a 20th-century life.”

Arcade

by Marc Woodworth ’84, Lecturer in English and Associate Editor of Salmagundi
Grove Press Poetry Series, 2002

This debut collection contains writing that is both narrative and lyric, love poem and elegy. The opening sequence, titled “The City,” is set in an unnamed, continental metropolis between the world wars. (Early poems in the sequence were featured in The Paris Review’s new writers issue.) In other poems, Woodworth enters the mind of Sophia Tolstoy as she mourns at her husband’s grave, and depicts the mythical German filmmaker Herr Soma’s strangely generative breakdown before the making of his best film. In his foreword, former New York State Poet Laureate Richard Howard cites Woodworth’s eloquence, noting, “For him…the significance of an event is not to be found within it, as within a nutshell, but without, enveloping the language which has generated it, as a light generates a vapor.”

Nursing, Physician Control, and the Medical Monopoly

by Thetis M. Group ’60 and
Joan I. Roberts
Indiana University Press, 2001

Thetis Group and Joan Roberts trace the history—from the early 1900s—of efforts by physicians to dominate the health-care system, often by subordinating nurses. The authors illustrate how attempts by nurses to reform many aspects of health-care have been repeatedly opposed by physicians, often to the detriment of patients’ health and safety. Their review of the activities of early women healers and nurses as well as nurse-physician relations argues that the sexist domination of nursing by medicine was not accidental, but rather an institutionalized phenomenon. The growing unease in nurse-physician relations escalated into the 1960s and ’70s, but stereotyped gender roles in nursing and medicine remained in place into the 1990s. In examining the results of the medical monopoly, the book addresses the impact on patients’ health and safety, the development of HMOs, and the fragmentation of the current health-care system.

Thetis Group is professor emerita at Syracuse University, where she was dean of the college of nursing for ten years. She and Joan Roberts also co-authored Feminism and Nursing.

A Circle of Sisters

by Judith Flanders ’80
Viking, 2001

From their humble beginnings as children of a poor, Methodist minister in Victorian England, the four Macdonald sisters went on to spend much of their lives in the company of aristocrats, politicians, and viceroys. Each had either offspring or husbands who were among the most influential men of their time. Alice, Georgie, Agnes, and Louisa were, respectively, the mother of writer Rudyard Kipling, the wife of baronet and painter Edward Burne-Jones, the mother of prime minister Stanley Baldwin, and the wife of painter Edward Poynter. In her debut biography, Judith Flanders not only tells the story of the Macdonald sisters, but also provides a social and domestic history of women in the nineteenth century. The book illuminates the public, private, and artistic realities of Victorian and Edwardian society, using the sisters’ lives to illustrate how that world was changing at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Flanders is a freelance journalist and writer in London.

Practical Law Enforcement Management

by Roger Fulton, UWW ’81
Gould Publications, 2002

A compilation of more than fifty articles divided into five major topic areas Supervision, Management, Administration, Leadership, and Your Career this manual is designed to assist police supervisors, managers, and administrators in better understanding their duties and responsibilities. It balances the practical aspects of police management with the necessity of the underlying theories of police supervision, management, and leadership. According to the author, the book is geared toward helping police sergeants, lieutenants, and captains face the practical realities of today's demands on police managers. We cut to the chase and give police supervisors the practical guidance they need to be successful.

Roger Fulton is a retired captain for the New York State Police.

Round the Bend and Over the Hill From My Desk at Skip’s Place

by Patricia Claire Peters ’65
Edwin Mellen Press, 2001

These are the latest books of poetry by Patricia Peters. Critics have previously said of her poems, “Peters make us see and feel the ordinary and extraordinary happenings and emotions we all share” (Shelby Stephenson in The Pilot). “An edge of raw feeling gives some of [her] poems real power. Now and again Peters shows an unexpected sense of humor” (Fred Chappell in The Georgia Review). Kathryn Stripling Byer of the Asheville Citizen-Times writes, “[Her] voice can sing of the most heart-breaking experiences without losing its deeper music, which springs from its faith in the healing power of language and human connectedness. Peters has her own poetic sources and influences—Hart Crane, John Donne, Theodore Roethke…. She is a poet capable of …verbal and visionary playfulness. [Her poems] have wit and zaniness. And through it all, we have Peters’s linguistic verve animating these characters. Her rhythms dance a poetic ballet, with a grand jeté now and then leaping from the pages.” —MTS

Correction
In the headline citing the book Au Pairing Up!, the summer 2001 Scope misspelled the author’s last name. She is Ruth Kawecki Liebermann ’72.

Alumni authors are urged to send copies of their books, publisher’s notes, or reviews, so that Scope can make note of their work in the “Books” column.