Alleged Sex and Threatened Violence: Doctor Russel, Bishop Vladimir, and the Russians in San Francisco, 1887-1892, Terence Emmons, professor of history, Stanford University Press, 1997; $45 (history).
Just over 100 years ago, the newly appointed Russian Orthodox bishop arrived in San Francisco to take up his post. The position was a holdover from the early 19th century, when Russia owned Alaska and Russian influence stretched as far south as California. Bishop Vladimir brought with him a colorful entourage of 20 clergymen and 11 boys from a seminary in Russia and almost immediately clashed with Nicholas Russel, a Russian revolutionary exile and leader of San Francisco's small Russian community. What followed were three-and-a-half years of bitter enmity between the combative bishop and the self-proclaimed nihilist. In this "microhistory," Emmons writes of the stories of "sex abuse and libel, murder plots and duels," gleefully reported in Hearst's Examiner and the rival Chronicle. But Emmons also shows how the sordid conflict reflected the ongoing clash between church and state in Russia itself.
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Business Law, Constance E. Bagley, '74, and Craig E. Dauchy, JD/MBA '75, West Educational Publishing, 1997; $19.95 (business law).
After coming up with the brilliant business plan, taking over the family garage and sweet-talking the venture capitalist, the would-be Silicon Valley entrepreneur still needs to know a copyright from a conversion right. Enter Bagley and Dauchy with their guide to all things legal. This 546-page manual walks prospective entrepreneurs through every legal step of starting and running a business, from the implications of quitting a corporate job to the intricacies of the ultimate start-up triumph--going public. Bagley is a senior lecturer at the Graduate School of Business, and many of the book's examples are drawn from a variety of companies started by Stanford alums.
Cooking with Dad, R.J. Turner, MS '70, and T.J. Turner, Turner Enterprises, 1997; $12.95 (cooking).
Turner was making a sausage and tomato omelet when his 10-year-old son, T.J., suggested writing down the recipe. One thing led to another and now, less than two years later, the team has written and self-published a cookbook stocked with recipes that include peanut butter and jelly bagel pizza, chocolate fish cake, jello jigglers and pink soup (the secret ingredient: beet juice). The lessons go beyond basic cooking. Roasting a turkey, for example, requires "direct application of physics and linear algebra." Each recipe takes just 30 minutes to prepare--not including "any time spent at the emergency room." The Turners clearly have no illusions about competing with Martha Stewart. They are writing for a less refined audience that might actually appreciate their instructions for using a paint-removing heat gun to make a grilled cheese sandwich.
Menachem's Seed, Carl Djerassi, professor of chemistry, University of Georgia Press, 1997; $21.95 (fiction).
The father of the birth-control pill started his second career as a writer a decade ago. Djerassi has developed a genre he calls "science-in-fiction," in which he smuggles science into storylines to provoke interest in important issues. The characters in this novel are high-flying scientists whose sex lives and research expertise intertwine in startling ways. Ethical problems spring up when the female protagonist, desperate to conceive a child, procures sperm by questionable, high-tech means. Ever the experimentalist, the author mixes some unlikely elements in his literary lab: erotic fantasy, global nuclear politics, rabbinic law, operatic librettos and biochemistry minilectures. The author has an inventive imagination, but the book's science is real and so are its moral issues. Menachem's Seed is the third in a tetralogy, with the final book, NO, due out in 1998.
