Dartmouth Authors

Hans-Joachim Heinz '40 and Marshall Lee Namkwa: Life Among the Bushmen. Houghton Mifflin, 1979. 272 pp. A parisitologist on the staff of the University of Witwatersrand Medical School, Dr. Heinz began studying the Xko Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert of Botswana (then a part of South Africa) in 1961. His fascination with this diminutive tribe of hunters who still lived much as did their Stone Age ancestors intensified until the detached anthropological observer became the wholly involved participant. Heinz lived among the Bushmen, and was himself initiated into membership in the tribe by rites which, in accordance with his oath of secrecy, he only partially reveals. He also entered into a form of "marriage" with Namkwa, a young woman of the tribe. (The union was valid in the eyes of neither the Bushmen nor, certainly, the government of South Africa.) Consequently, the "drama," as the late Margaret Mead calls it in the foreword, sometimes seems to overshadow the anthropology.

Chandler A. Robinson '41, ed. J. Evetts Haleyand the Passing of the Old West. Jenkins Publishing Co., 1978. 239 pp. Best known nationally perhaps for his heated attack on Lyndon Johnson, A Texan Looks at Lyndon:A Study in Illegitimate Power (1964), J. Evetts Haley also has a regional reputation as a solid biographer and historian of West Texas. In this expanded and updated revision of his first Haley bibliography published 15 years ago, Robinson collects and edits 15 essays by divers Texan hands on the various aspects of Haley's career which, in its 75-year span, epitomizes the momentous changes that have overtaken Texas in this century. The man who when young, Robinson notes, had "ridden bucking horses in rodeos" has now also "piloted a Mercedes-Benz along dusty roads ... of the Texas panhandle." The book includes Robinson's exhaustive bibliography of some 400 books, pamphlets, essays, and other materials written by Haley.

Gregory Rabassa '44; trans. Seven Serpentsand Seven Moons, by Demetrio Aguilera-Malta. University of Texas Press, 1979. 305 pp. A new novel by the Ecuadorian playwright and novelist whose mode of "magic realism" has become a major influence in Latin American literature. Rabassa, the foremost American translator of original Spanish and Portugese literary works, has won both the National Book Award for translation and the P.E.N. Translation Prize.

William D. Carter '49 and Richard S. Williams Jr. eds. ERTS-1, A New Window onOur Planet. U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977, 2nd Printing. 362 pp. A collection of over 80 analyses by various specialists on the potential of the first Earth Resources Technology Satellite (ERTS-1) for inventorying the resources and environmental changes on our planet. Data gained from ERTS-1 are applied to such diverse fields as cartography, geology and geophysics, water supplies, land-use planning, agriculture and forestry management, environmental monitoring, conservation, and oceanography. The ERTS program, the editors believe, "may very well represent the most important accomplishment yet of our space program. . . . For the first time in history the entire world is at everyone's fingertips. . . . The changing face of our planet, whether the changes are caused by natural forces or by man's often disruptive forces, is available on an 18-day cycle."

Marianne Jelinek, assistant professor of business administration. Institutionalizing Innovation:A Study of Organizational LearningSystems. Praeger, 1979. 173 pp. CareerManagement for the Individual and theOrganization. St. Clair Press, 1979. 393 pp. In the first book Jelinek constructs a theory of how organizations "learn." The book begins with "a personal quandary": Some corporations, she had observed, "respond more effectively to changing environments than others: some survive, while others do not." To find out why, she not only examined all the historical literature on administrative systems for innovation, but also conducted an in-depth field analysis of the evolution of the OST (Objectives, Strategies and Tactics) system by which one pioneering corporation, Texas Instruments, has successfully evolved "a formal system for developing new ideas into products, integrated with day-to-day management of the firm." The second book, edited by Jelinek, is a collection of readings covering all phases of career management. It aims first at helping those just beginning their management careers to develop insights and make informed judgments and, secondly, at helping the more experienced corporate managers to understand their responsibility for aiding their juniors in developing careers.

Dennis E. Logue, associate professor of business administration. Legislative Influenceon Corporate Pension Plans. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1979. 109 pp. An examination of the future of private, industrial, defined-benefit pension programs. Both the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 (ERISA) and the recent increases in Social Security benefits will have the net effect, Logue argues, of discouraging private corporate pension plans in the future. Increasingly, therefore, older Americans will be required to look to public, not private, sources for a greater portion of their retirement income. "The conclusion of this study," Logue writes, "is pessimistic." ERISA "has raised the cost of corporate pension programs and simultaneously reduced the benefits of those programs to firms" while "recent sharp increases in social security benefits have made corporate pensions less valuable. . . . There seems to be a type of Gresham's Law at work: bad retirement income programs are driving out the good."