The Union
Bookshelf regularly features new books written by alumni
authors and other members of the Union community. If
you're an author and would like to be included in an
upcoming issue, please send a copy of the book as well as
your publisher's news release to Deborah Ludke, Public
Relations Office, Union College, Schenectady, N.Y.
12308-3169. (E-mail address: ludked@alice.union.edu.)
Martin Jay '65
Cultural Semantics:
Keywords of Our Time is the
latest book in the Critical Perspectives on Modern
Culture Series by Martin Jay. A selection of writings on
contemporary thought and culture, the book examines ideas
we have, exploring the “keywords” of today. Jay
gives his perspective on why our ideas matter. The book
also looks at what effect the words we use have on our
experiences.
Martin Jay lives in Berkeley, Calif.,
and is the Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History at
the University of California, Berkeley. His previous
books include The Dialectical Imagination: A History of
the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research
1923-1950; Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a
Concept from Lukas to Habermas; and Downcast Eyes: The
Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French
Thought.
Richard Anker
'65
Richard Anker '65 is the author of Gender and Jobs, a comprehensive analysis of the levels and
recent changes in the sex segregation of occupations on a
worldwide scope.
The book says that one major cause of
the considerable inequality persisting in women's access
to good jobs is the gender segregation of the labor
market, which increases sex inequalities at the same time
that it puts women at a disadvantage. He uses data from
forty-one countries as evidence that more than half of
all non-agricultural workers work in an occupation where
one sex dominates to such an extent that at least eighty
percent of workers are either one sex or another.
Anker is on the Task Force on Country
Studies on Globalization at the International Labour
Office in Geneva, Switzerland. The 456-page book is
available through the International Labour Office or by
e-mailing to pubvente@ilo.org.
Rev. Stuart
Stiles, Jr. '57
Over the past year, Stuart Stiles '57
has collected sixty-three stereoscopic photographs of
Saratoga Springs, N.Y., covering the Victorian era
between 1860-1904. Since the Stiles family's roots are
deeply embedded in Saratoga Springs, he was able to use
anecdotes and family first-hand stories to accompany the
photos. He plans to market the book at various Victorian
events in Saratoga Springs, beginning with a book-signing
and stereoscopic event at the Adelphi Hotel, a
“step-back-in-time” hotel, and ending with the
Victorian Stroll in the winter. (For the uninitiated:
stereoscopic photos are viewed through a device that
creates a 3-D image; they were popular before the days of
television and movies.)
In addition to his writing and
collecting, Stiles is pastor of a church in Howells,
N.Y., as well as professor of psychology at Orange County
Community College. He says that the cover design for the
book was done by one of his students. “I've helped
three or four 'old-timers' get their books published and
thought it was about time I did it, too,” he says.
Rodham E.
Tulloss '66, Ph.D.
The latest book from Rodham Tulloss '66
is titled Protocols
for an All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory of Fungi in a
Costa Rican Conservation Area.
Co-written with Amy Rossman, Thomas O'Dell, and R. Greg
Thorn, the book is a manual of instructions for
conducting a biodiversity inventory of fungi. In addition
to giving recommendations for isolating and sampling
groups of fungi, it includes lists of written material
useful for identification and outlines culture and
specimen collection proceedures.
Tulloss, of Roosevelt, N.J., is an
expert in systematics of the mushroom genus Amanita
including tropical species. He has developed methods of
analyzing similarities in data sets from inventories of
fungi using his background as a mathematician and
engineer. The book is available through Parkway
Publishers, Inc.
Murad Wilfried
(Bill) Hofmann '50
Born into a Catholic family in 1931 in
Aschaffenburg, Germany, Bill Hofmann attended Union in
1950 and completed his studies of German law at Munich
University in 1957. In 1980, he embraced Islam,
performing 'umrah in 1982 and hajj in 1992. His book, Islam, the Alternative, which first appeared in German in 1992, caused
a public scandal. Hofmann was called a
“fundamentalist” by leftist and feminist
circles in the German media and parliament. Now published
in English, the book is available through Amana
Publications, Beltsville, Md.
Hofmann lives in Istanbul with his
Turkish wife. He is the author of Islam 2000, which
describes where the Muslim world is at the threshold of
the twenty-first century. Voyage to Makkah, and Diary of
a German Muslim.