Further Mention

The target for some praise and much abuse, David Bergamini '49, is the author of Japan's Imperial Conspiracy: How EmperorHirohito Led Japan into the War (Morrow, 1239 pp., $14.95), reviewed in the January Dartmouth Alumni Magazine by Donald Bartlett '24, Professor of Japanese Studies, Emeritus. In the heated controversy Mr. Crowley has called the book "skullduggery"; Mr. Okahoto damns it as "a crude sham"; and Mr. Reischauer, "rather appalled," refers to Mr. Bergamini as "Mr. Molehill." In the Columbia University Faculty Club on March 10, Bergamini faced fifty of his most censorious academic critics, and they heard him give his rebuttals to a prepared paper by a Japanese professor. Then they questioned him for an hour and a half. So persuasive under pressure was Bergamini that the critics gave him a vote of gratitude and an apology.

The New Yorker of March 25 devoted its leading book review, "The Error of Their Ways" by Naomi Bliven, to a serious consideration of the Bergamini dispute. Although she declines to make a final pronouncement about the main thesis that Emperor Hirohito himself plotted and managed his country's military expansion, she exonerates Bergamini from many bigoted charges. Particularly she praises- his assiduous and meritorious attention to the fine points of the Japanese language. (Born in Japan, a prisoner of war during youth in a Japanese internment camp in the Philippines, he spent countless hours relearning the language.) Bergamini, she says, has so well documented nearly every important point that the book reads like "a true bill, a plausible grand-jury indictment."

Naomi Bliven submits that Bergamini means his book as warnings: (1) the power of the Emperor remains intact, (2) Japanese parliamentary politics are "a charade" with self-deluded actors, (3) Japan could easily engage again in military ventures. Skeptical, however, about Bergamini fears that Japan could again embark on a war of conquest against China, the Bliven considered judgment is: "The value of Bergamini's work is less in its judgments or predictions about Japan's present and future than in its total immersion in the Japanese past and its insistence on the intelligence of Japanese public men."

Improvements in Curriculum, a current and relevant anthology useful as a college textbook or a book for supplementary reading, is a collection of articles by 60 authors writing for 27 different publications. At the end of each article are thoughtprovoking and project-oriented questions. Included is "Development as a Means for Improving Instruction" by John J. Patrick '57, Assistant Professor of Education at Indiana University. It is a reprint from the March 1970 issue of Viewpoints, Bulletin of the School of Education.

Author of Gray Matters, A Novel, evaluated by Professor Robert H. Ross '38, in the February issue of the DartmouthAlumni Magazine, William Hjortsberg '62 in The New York Times Book Review of March 19 has reviewed Hermaphrodeity:The Autobiography of a Poet by Alan Friedman (Knopf, $7.95). Mr. Hjortsberg allies it with The Tin Drum by Giinter Grass and Memoirs of a Midget by Walter de la Mare. The complicated plot concerns the rise of androgynous Millie/Willie to prominence in her various fields and her escapes with various lovers. "The manner is rich and comic, the language elegant ..." and "certain scenes are not only memorable but startling."

Dr. Stewart F. Alexander M'35 is an editor of Hazards of Medication, published by J.B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and New York. Comprising 895 pages which include many charts and monographs, the volume is subtitled "A Manual of Drug Interactions, Incompatibilities, Contraindications, and Adverse Effects." Dr. Alexander is Director of Medicine, Bergen Pines Hospital, Paramus, N.J., and Instructor in Medicine, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He figured prominently in the recently Disaster at Bari.

Among the five authors of Research andInnovation in the Modern Corporation are Professor Edwin Mansfield '51, currently at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and Professor of Economics at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and John Rapoport '65, Assistant Professor of Business at Columbia University. Advertised as "the latest report on the basic research now being conducted on the economic effects of technological change," this book focuses on the individual firm and its attempt to develop and apply new technology. Utilizing their original studies with particular empha- sis on the drug industry, the authors consider the total cost and time involved in production innovation, the extent to which the largest firms tend to be innovators, and the lag between invention and commercial application. As the impact of technological change goes beyond the shop floor to the boardrooms of corporations large and small, economists for the past dozen or 15 years have been engaged in an intensive effort to expand knowledge of how new processes and products are invented, commercialized, and accepted. As older industries are forced to adapt to changes in the marketplace, ever-expanding consumer wants and needs encourage the birth of new industries. Professor Mansfield, who has taught at Carnegie Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Yale University, and California Institute of Technology, is a consultant to the RAND Corporation, the Institute for Defense Analysis, and the National Science Foundation. Associated with him and Professor Rapoport in the Norton publication are Jerome Schnee, Assistant Professor of Business at Columbia University, Michael Hamburger, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Samuel Wagner, Assistant Professor of Management at Temple University.