Dartmouth Authors
Joaquin Aguirre Lavayen '44. Guana Maldito. Bogota, Tercer Mundo, 1976. 233 pp. Ah alumnus writes a book the title of which translates into Damned Guano, dedicates it to his Dartmouth English professor, and watches his first edition eagerly consumed by South Americans in less than two months. Aguirre has put this tragicomedy of laughs, tears, and blood in the mouths of the pelicans, cormorants, and gulls that produced the excrement in Bolivia's Desert of Atacama which became the black gold of Europe in the 19th century. Competition for the profitable market dragged Bolivia, Chile, and Peru into the bloody Pacific War of 1879, but has provided Aguirre with fertile material for a historical satire. One is left curious as to exactly what the Dartmouth connection might be - if indeed Professor Herbert F. West deserves all the credit or whether that famous Dartmouth inner sanctum called the Bull Session, so abundant in primal matter, may deserve a part.
Romance Languages
Henry J. Pratt '58. The Gray Lobby. University of Chicago, 1976. 250 pp. $15.00. In this "first full-length treatment of the development of federal policy toward the aged in the past two decades," Pratt, a political scientist at Wayne State University, examines the processes by which the "purposeful lobbying" of those special interest groups devoted to the problems of the aging achieved such notable legislative successes as passage of the Medicare bill and the Older Americans Act of 1965 and the legislation establishing income floors and increased Social Security benefits of 1972. The "modern senior movement" has succeeded, he concludes, because it attracted politically sophisticated leaders capable not only of articulating the demands of the aged to Congress but also of stimulating widespread "collective awareness" and support among the American public at large.
Wilton S. Sogg '56, co-author. Criminal Law. West Publishing Co., 1977. Smith's Review Series. 183 pp., paperback. The third edition of this casebook, brought up to date. For attorneys and bar exam aspirants.
Alan Clark Miller '64. Photographer of AFrontier: The Photographs of Peter Britt. Eureka, California, Interface Corp., 1976. 107 pp., 70 full-page plates. $20.95. In 1852 Peter Britt, a Swiss emigre photographer lured west by the affluence created by the Gold Rush, made his way across the Oregon Trail to Jacksonville, Oregon. There, until his death in 1905, he photographed the scenes, people, and events of his region. A few years ago Miller uncovered a neglected trove of thousands of Britt's plates and negatives - daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, cyanotypes, tintypes, wet- and dry-plate negatives - in the Jacksonville Museum. The result is this photographic record of the look and texture of life as it actually was in the frontier Pacific Northwest. Britt was no mere journeyman photographer. His achievements, as demonstrated by the plates in this book, afford evidence for the author's claim that Britt must take his place among the finest pioneer photographers of the 19th century.
