All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s
by Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, MA ’84, PhD ’88
Harvard University Press, 1998; $27.95 (history)
A bright star of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, the Peace Corps was created to offer young Americans the chance to put their ideals into practice through service overseas. Since 1961, more than 150,000 volunteers have gone to work in 132 countries. This history recounts dozens of their experiences and compares programs launched by other countries. Above all, the author -- an American foreign policy professor at San Diego State University -- analyzes the agency in relation to its “evil twin,” the Vietnam War. Exploring the paradox of a foreign policy that simultaneously embraced altruism and destruction, she observes: “desirous of but uncomfortable with power, the nation is driven to find ways of convincing itself that its power is beneficial.”
The Monkey Suit
by David Dante Troutt, ’86
The New Press, 1998; $24 (fiction)
In this genre-bending collection of short stories, the author has fictionalized the history of 10 classic legal cases involving African Americans. Spanning more than a century, the cases include Buchanan v. Warley (1917), the first challenge to the constitutionality of segregation, and Mapp v. Ohio (1961), in which searches without warrants were deemed unconstitutional. In the title story, a Yale-educated black attorney in a mostly white law firm sues when he is passed over for promotion. Troutt, a graduate of Harvard Law School and now an associate professor of law at Rutgers, calls the technique “storytelling scholarship.”
The Renaissance in Rome
by Charles L. Stinger, MA ’67, PhD ’71
Indiana University Press, 1998; $19.95 (history)
Rome is the Eternal City. But in the 14th and 15th centuries, the capital of emperors and popes had become a cultural backwater. The Papacy ruled from Avignon, France -- while Rome itself, “built on the half-buried ruins of the ancient city,” had fallen into disrepair. Stinger chronicles its short period of triumphant rebirth, from Pope Eugenius IV’s return in 1443 to its sacking by the armies of the Emperor Charles V in 1527. “In Rome the idea of rebirth meant not just an intellectual and artistic revival,” he writes, “but the restoration (instauratio) of the Roman Church and the renewal (renovatio) of the Roman Empire.”
Harvests of Joy: My Passion for Excellence
by Robert Mondavi, ’36
Harcourt Brace & Co., 1998; $27 (autobiography)
Mondavi had been in the wine business for almost 30 years when he made his first trip to Europe in 1962. He visited the great wine-producing regions in France, Italy and Germany and came home with a new vision for the sleepy Napa Valley, where he ran the family winery, Charles Krug, with brother Peter, ’37. “I wanted to take American technology, management techniques and marketing savvy and fuse them together with Old World tradition and elegance in the art of making fine wine,” he writes. This memoir -- written with journalist Paul Chutkow -- recounts how Mondavi made good on that inspiration. Portraying himself as hard-driving and restless, Mondavi tells his version of the famous split with his brother (Robert Mondavi was banished from the Krug winery in 1965) and gives an insider’s view of the creation of the American wine business.
