Dartmouth Authors
Nelson M. Blake '30, Land into Water Water into Land: A History of Water Management in Florida. University Presses of Florida, 1980. 344 pp. The story is familiar. First there was too much: The first settlers who came to Florida in 1821 found "a watery Eden" with bounteous lakes, overflowing rivers, the vast Everglades, deep limestone aquifers, an average annual rainfall of almost 60 inches. Nature had over-endowed Florida with water. But now, by 1980, there is too little. What happened to turn overabundance to scarcity in something less than 150 years is the subject of Blake's book. His is a story of human greed, carelessness, mismanagement, and, above all, simple ignorance, changing slowly by the 1970s into a story of gradual enlightenment, hope, and cooperation as the state government began to legislate into existence the rudiments of an effective water-management program. Now retired, Blake was a professor of history at Syracuse and has written a previous book on urban water problems.
Philip Weeks and James B. Gidney '36, Subjugation and Dishonor: A Brief History of theTravail of the Native Americans. Krieger Publishing, 1980. 130 pp. From the extensive scholarly bibliography on the history of the subjugation of Native Americans by English, French, and Spanish colonizers and settlers in North America the authors have distilled out the essences and produced a short, readable account of 300 years of "dishonor," much of which, they believe, was inspired by inherent European, and later American, racism. Though designed'primarily as an auxiliary text for students in upper-level college courses in American History, the book also provides the general reader a quick, non-specialized source of background information on the subject. Gidney teaches American history at Kent State University.
William J. Augello '46, Freight Claims inPlain English. Shippers National Freight Claim Council, 1979. 744 pp. Anyone who can write about technical matters in plain English or, better yet, teach others how to deserves boundless praise from his or her particular segment of the reading public. An attorney specializing in transportation and administrative law, Augello was named 1980 National Transportation Man of the Year by the industry fraternity. The citation, noting "his brilliant activities in the field of claims management," calls his new book the new "bible" of the business.
John Clark Pratt '54 and Victor A. Neufeldt, George Eliot's "Middlemarch" Notebooks:A Transcription. University of California Press, 1979. 305 pp. With publication of Middlemarch in 1871-72 George Eliot achieved the goal she had defined for herself 30 years earlier: "to unclothe all around me of its conventional, human, temporary dress, to look at it in its essence and in its relation to eternity. ..." But a novel of the stature of Middlemarch did not just happen; it was rather the result of immense erudition, years of intensive reading and historical and literary research. Fortunately, during four years of work, George Eliot also entered notes on and impressions of her extensive prose and poetry readings in two notebooks, which thus become, in effect, the "sources" for the novel. Having discovered these hitherto neglected notebooks among the holdings of two major American research libraries, Pratt and Neufeldt not only transcribe and edit them but also provide an extensive introductory essay analyzing their significance.
Gordon C. Bjork '57, Life, Liberty, andProperty: The Economics and Politics ofLand-Use Planning and Environmental Controls. D. C. Heath, 1980. 137 pp. "I began writing this book in 1975," Bjork says in his preface, "as an ardent advocate of land-use planning and environmental legislation. I finished writing this book in 1979 as an opponent of environmental controls founded on the premise that progressively higher levels of government should tell individual citizens how they should behave in their management of land and the environment." The root problem with present environmental protection policies, he argues, has been "our failure to define and protect individual and collective property rights to the use of the environment." He therefore proposes a number of drastic policy changes relating to the treatment of air, water, and solitude as public property, to private rights to land use vis-a-vis zoning, to land-use planning and governmental land purchases, to modifications in tax laws, and to cost pricing of public utility systems. Bjork is a professor of economics at the Claremont Colleges.
Judith Worrell and William E. Stilwell '58. Psychology for Teachers and Students. McGraw-Hill, 1981. 698 pp. "We wrote the book," the authors say, "primarily for undergraduates who are beginning their studies in educational psychology and teacher education." The purpose: "to offer an eclectic and practical behavioral approach to the application of psychology to classroom teaching."
Dewitt Jones '65, Visions of Wilderness: APhotographic Essay. Introduction by Ralph Steiner '21. Graphic Arts Center Publishing, 1980. 87 pp. Over a century and a half ago, John Keats summed it up in the opening line of a sonnet: "The poetry of earth is never dead." It is difficult to conceive a more splendid evocation of the poet's perception than is afforded by this collection of photographs of our North American wilderness 48 in all made by the nature photographer Dewitt Jones. Language cannot substitute for photographs; words and visual images communicate by radically different means. But language can complement images, and so with his photographs Jones also includes short passages from the writings of Loren Eiseley, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, and Robinson Jeffers, four observers whose quasireligious perceptions of nature harmonize with Jones's own. But it is the photographs that carry the theme: an overwhelming love of life and of natural forms. In "this ice age of the spirit," as Ralph Steiner concludes in his introduction, Jones's "work is filled with enough beauty, light, and magic to warm us all. ..."
