Dartmouth Authors

Charles (30) and Babette Jacobs, EUROPETRAVEL DIGEST, Paul, Richmond & Company, 1985, 112 pp., $8.95. GREAT RAILTRIPS OF THE WORLD, 1985,128 pp., $9.95. The Jacobses are seasoned travelers - in fact, they led an Alumni College Abroad trip down the Rhine this past summer and they share their decades' accumulation of knowledge in these two travel companions. The Europe Travel Digest, they are careful to warn, is not meant to replace the venerable Michelin or Baedecker guides, but to supplement them with suggested trips and itineraries while lending a hand with the complete planning process and offering helpful tips borne of long experience. It includes sections about individual countries (basically everything west of Turkey), what to do before you go, how to get around when you get there, and the advantages and disadvantages of group travel.

Great Rail Trips similarly documents the travel worlds still available by train on every continent but Antarctica, and even while AMTRAK still exists in this country. Again the reader benefits from the authors' firsthand experience and those who can't manage to get away will marvel at the richness and variety of great rail trips that offer what is still the most romantic and least enervating way to see the world.

William G. Nisen '73, Allan Schmidt, andIra Alterman, MARKETING YOUR SOFTWARE, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company,1984, 218 pp., $16.95. If you have been squirreled away in your basement for two years perfecting the computer program that will make you rich, this is the book that will help you determine what your realistic expectations should be. It is a step-by-step guide to basic marketing principles as applied to the volatile world of computer software, a world in which, according to the authors, "you don't play to win the match. You play to win the round, and get a crack at the next." Starting from the premise that "what the world does not need is new software package," this manual leads you through a series of worksheets and easy-to-read flow charts that allow you to evaluate your program, define its market and estimate its sales potential, package it, explore and select the correct mode of distribution, establish support and service procedures, test market it, and conduct the sales campaign. Bill Nisen is a product manager at Lotus Development Corporation and his coauthors are similarly well-qualified to dispense this kind of advice.

Jim Schley '79, editor, WRITING IN A NUCLEAR AGE, University Press of New England, 1985, 230 pp., $9.95. As a poet, coauthor of NER/BLQ: New England Review andBread Loaf Quarterly, and political activist, Jim Schley had occasion to wonder at the gulf that separated his professional life and his political activities. "Why was it so easy to write a letter to the editor about disarmament, the war in Central America, investment in South Africa, yet so difficult to write a poem that adequately reflected my concern on these matters?" Bearing in mind that art and politics have a history of not mixing too well, but determined to investigate writers' responses to the spectre of nuclear apocalypse, Schley set out to compile this collection of poetry, short stories, and essays addressing "not just the subject of nuclear danger, but nature of our awareness of that danger, our insights and evasions, and the forms of our responses." The 47 pieces selected range from serious, thoughtful poems, essays, and stories, to occasionally disjointed mumblings, and at least one gem - Louise Erdrich's Lardneresque satire Nuclear Detergent. Not all of the contributors are well-known, but the status of the most visible of them W.H. Auden, Robert Penn Warren, Grace Paley - demands that this collection be taken seriously. Orignally published as an issue of NER/BLQ.