Embracing Victory: Life Lessons in Competition and Compassion, Mariah Burton Nelson, ’78, William Morrow, 1998; $23 (women’s issues/psychology).
A former basketball player at Stanford and then in a European pro league, Nelson writes to encourage women to buck tradition by savoring competition. Women, she says, should compete openly and honorably – in sports, in relationships, in careers. “Competition can enhance confidence and intimacy,” she declares. “[It] doesn’t have to be cruel or destructive or hateful.” Part self-help, part social science, the book integrates personal stories, interviews and the results of Nelson’s survey of more than a thousand women and girls. One conclusion: Women who describe themselves as athletes – even casual athletes – are more comfortable than nonathletes with the notion of competition.
The Paradoxes of the American Presidency, Thomas E. Cronin, MA ’62, MA ’64, PhD ’69, and Michael Genovese, Oxford University Press, 1998; $35 (politics).
What exactly do Americans want from their president? Starting with that question, Cronin and Genovese examine the history of the office and its increasingly complex relationship with ordinary citizens. “It is characteristic of the American mind to hold contradictory ideas without bothering to resolve the conflicts between them,” they write. The authors go on to list nine major paradoxes of the presidency. These range from our demand for a powerful leader, even as we place significant limits on presidential power, to our expectation that presidents must both lead and follow at the same time. They also caution against complacency, saying that the fact that “the presidency is an office full of clashing expectations” does not relieve the public or presidents of the responsibility to reconcile these paradoxes.
From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America, Vicki L. Ruiz, MA ’78, PhD ’82, Oxford University Press, 1998; $30 (social history).
It was women who largely shaped Mexican-American immigrant communities. Yet, Ruiz argues, previous studies have paid scant attention to them. She details how many Mexican-American women worked long days in fields or factories and at the same time managed huge households, mobilized labor unions, fought for and won civil rights and instigated anti-war protests. Through personal interviews, letters, photographs and other primary sources, Ruiz brings to light these unsung Mexicanas and their roles over the course of this century. Her book shows how, in drawing strength from their own community and parish groups, they found avenues of integration into American life – often against considerable odds.
Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life, bell hooks, ’73, Henry Holt & Co., 1997; $20 (memoir).
In the second installment of her autobiography, hooks (no upper-case letters, please) recounts the early years of her career as a writer, academic and intellectual. A chunk of the narrative takes place at Stanford, where hooks (then known as Gloria Watkins) studied English. As the first member of her poor, black, Southern family to attend college, she is lonely and feels out of place. She finds her anchor in Mack, a Stanford graduate student in poetics. They meet at a Gary Snyder poetry reading and embark on a 12-year relationship that intertwines sex, writing and politics. Her vivid and frank account is written in an experimental style that ignores strict chronology and switches between first- and third-person narration. But the themes – literary aesthetics, race, class, gender and sexuality – echo those in her 14 other books, most of them cultural and literary criticism.
