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BOOK FARE
 come
celebrate the written word
Bountiful year for faculty authors
If you’ve ever wondered what keeps UCLA faculty and staff
chained to their computer keyboards on weekends and holiday breaks,
look no further than the new releases section of your local bookstore
or public library.
The past year has been “particularly fecund” for UCLA
authors, whose works of fiction and nonfiction are selling at a
brisk pace, according to the UCLA BookZone’s Richard MacBriar,
who tracks sales by campus authors. “Collapse: How Societies
Choose to Fail or Succeed,” by the geography department’s
Jared Diamond, has been burning up the New York Times bestseller
list (no. 9 last week), but many more titles have also been getting
attention.
Each spring, in advance of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books,
held on campus, UCLA Today celebrates campus authors who have published
in the last year. You can browse more works by UCLA authors at the
faculty/staff books table in the BookZone tent in front of Royce
Hall at the festival April 23 and 24.
Here’s a preview of some of the works by faculty that you
might find at the ASUCLA BookZone booth and at other festival exhibits:
“Conquering Your Child’s Chronic Pain: A Pediatrician’s
Guide to Reclaiming a Normal Childhood” (HarperResource,
2005) by Lonnie K. Zeltzer and Christina Blackett Schlank
American children are in the midst of a pain epidemic. Some 20%
of them have chronic headaches, another 20% complain of stomach
pain on a regular basis, and juvenile arthritis affects 300,000
youngsters. Yet doctors tend to dismiss children’s pain as
psychosomatic. For despairing parents, help is just a paperback
away. Lonnie K. Zeltzer and Christina Blackett Schlank have written
this holistic, accessible guide to understanding and alleviating
pain in children.
Zeltzer, director of the Pediatric Pain Program at Mattel Children’s
Hospital at UCLA, lucidly explains how the mind-body connection,
including past memories of pain, contributes to chronic conditions
that can be overcome by practicing complementary and alternative
therapies ranging from acupuncture and yoga to meditation and art
therapy. A key factor in confronting chronic pain is to expect it
to get better — in the long term rather than through a quick
solution, Zeltzer stresses. Her inspiring stories of children and
their parents who have found ways to effectively assuage their joint
misery make this a valuable and compassionate book.
— Ajay Singh
“Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”
(Viking, 2005) by Jared Diamond
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” In his
latest book, Geography Professor Jared Diamond invokes Shelley’s
king Ozymandias, whose ruins haunt a lonely desert. But awareness,
not despair, is Diamond’s goal. Understanding why ancient
civilizations collapsed, he reasons, has implications for today’s
fragile world. Thirteen weeks on The New York Times’ bestseller
list, “Collapse” follows Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning
“Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.”
While the earlier work examined reasons for the rise of Western
civilization, “Collapse” investigates the environmental
factors — overpopulation, overfishing, deforestation and drought
among them — behind the failure of societies, such as the
Anasazi, Maya, Easter Islanders and the Norse Greenlanders.
But note the word “choose” in Diamond’s title.
The author also recounts success stories. Japan rebounded from a
deforestation crisis in the 17th century because of wise choices
made by rulers and now leads developed nations in percentage of
forested land area. Calling himself a “cautious optimist,”
Diamond offers suggestions for those interested in preventing an
environmental catastrophe that might trigger the next collapse.
He concludes, “The future is up for grabs, lying in our own
hands.”
— Dawn Setzer
“Right to Rock: The Black Rock Coalition and the Cultural
Politics of Race” (Duke University Press, 2004)
by Maureen Mahon
The architects of rock were black — think Chuck Berry, Ruth
Brown, Bo Diddley or Little Richard. But after Jimi Hendrix’s
death in 1970, “black rock” fell out of favor. The conventional
wisdom was that no one — not record producers nor white audiences
nor black audiences — was interested in black rockers. When
a righteous rock band like Living Colour came along, the music industry
tried to push it into stereotypical genres of rap, reggae and blues.
In “Right to Rock,” Maureen Mahon, assistant professor
of anthropology, tells the story of how a loose coalition of African-American
musician/activists — led by Living Colour’s Vernon Reid,
artist manager Konda Mason and Village Voice writer Greg Tate —
set out to reclaim their role as rock’s rightful heirs.
Mahon’s book chronicles the Black Rock Coalition (BRC) from
its beginnings in 1985 New York, when Living Colour couldn’t
get a record deal, to the formation of a Los Angeles BRC chapter
in 1989, and the group’s survival into the 21st century. While
the author is a big-time rock fan herself, her book is the work
of a serious anthropologist. “Right to Rock” explores
important questions about racism and black identity in post-civil
rights America.
— Anne Burke
“Desert Blood: The Juárez Murders” (Arte
Público Press, 2005) by Alicia Gaspar de Alba
El Paso, Texas, native Alicia Gaspar de Alba, an associate professor
of Chicana/o studies, has set her first novel, a suspense thriller
based on the unsolved maquiladora killings of Ciudad Juárez,
in familiar terrain. Ivon Villa is a Los Angeles college professor
who hopes to adopt a baby with her lover, Brigit. Ivon returns to
her hometown of El Paso to meet the pregnant Cecilia, a 15-year-old
factory worker from Juárez. But before Ivon and Cecilia can
get together, the teenager becomes the latest victim in a string
of grisly killings that mirror the real-life rapes and murders of
young women in post-NAFTA Juárez. When Ivon’s sister
is the next to disappear, the academic sets out to solve the mystery
on her own.
The Juárez murders have consumed Gaspar de Alba since 1998;
in 2003, she organized an international conference on the subject
at UCLA. More than a page-turner, “Desert Blood” casts
an academic’s eye on the killings by examining factors that
help explain why the killings still remain unsolved.
— A.B.
“The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American
Worker” (Viking Penguin, 2004) by Mike Rose
In three well-received books for mainstream readers, Mike Rose,
a professor of education, takes commonly held perceptions and tries
to shift our perspective so that we no longer see things the same
way. In his most recent book, “The Mind at Work,” Rose
puts under his microscope service and blue-collar workers, including
plumbers and hairstylists, and examines the intelligence and cognitive
processes they need to do their jobs. Rose learns by interviewing
career waitresses (one of whom is his mother) that the job requires
an ability to function at a high level in a dynamic and demanding
environment; react with an economy of movement; reassess and prioritize
tasks; and develop visual, spatial and linguistic cues to aid memory.
All while balancing four plates of food and two cups of hot coffee
on their forearms and weaving between tables.
“The book is a reminder to the nation that even though we’re
entranced with electronic media, symbolic analysis and new-knowledge
work, our lives are still held together by the service and blue-collar
worker,” Rose said. “It takes a lot more intelligence
to do these jobs than you think.”
— Cynthia Lee
“Are We Hardwired?: The Role of Genes in Human Behavior”
(Oxford University Press, 2005) by William R. Clark and Michael
Grunstein
Whether or not human capabilities are hardwired into the brain
is one of the most durable debates in neuroscience. The subject
is also of enduring appeal to science buffs and general readers
alike, as the publication of this paperback, five years after its
original hardback edition, shows. William R. Clark, a professor
emeritus of immunology at UCLA, and Michael Grunstein, a professor
of biological chemistry, present an informative and convincing overview
of the nature-nature controversy, which has received a fresh boost
lately as scientists map the human genome and unearth increasingly
genetic causes for our physical, behavioral, even intellectual attributes.
Citing case studies of identical twins separated during infancy,
the UCLA professors offer forceful proof of the genetic basis for
behaviors ranging from eating disorders and aggression to sexuality
and drug abuse. But Clark and Grunstein aren’t genetic determinists.
Both environment and experience, they argue, influence how genes
are expressed. Their conclusion, based on chaos theory, that random
neurological occurrences can have capricious consequences, is one
of this book’s most interesting aspects.
— A.S.
“The Last Duel: A True Story of Crime, Scandal, and Trial
by Combat in Medieval France” (Broadway Books,
2004) by Eric Jager
Hollywood couldn’t have come up with a better script for
this gripping true story of the “duel to end all duels”
between a knight, Jean de Carrouges, and his former friend, Jacques
Le Gris, the squire accused of brutally raping the knight’s
beautiful wife, Marguerite. English Professor Eric Jager, a medieval
specialist, paints a vivid picture of the events leading up to the
trial by combat in 1386, including the bitter falling-out between
the two friends, the sexual attack and the knight’s official
challenge.
The battle itself is a nail-biter, for the duel will end in one
man’s death and possibly the death of Marguerite — if
her husband and champion loses, she will be burned at the stake
as a false accuser. “If it wasn’t the trial of the century,
it was certainly the trial of the decade in France,” said
Jager. The fight was the last judicial duel sanctioned by the Parlement
of Paris.
“There was the 14th-century equivalent of a media circus
around this, and the duel itself was attended by thousands of people,”
Jager said. “It was a ‘must-see’ event.”
— Wendy Soderburg
Festival of Books
Leading literary lights will be on campus this month
when the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books returns to UCLA on
April 23 and 24.
The event will feature panel discussions, book signings,
poetry readings, music and fun for the kids. The festival will run
from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on April 23 and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on April
24.
Speakers include the geography department’s
Jared Diamond, who will discuss his bestselling “Collapse:
How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” at 12:30 p.m. April
24 in Ackerman Grand Ballroom. Panel moderators include history’s
Russell Jacoby, “Outsourcing Democracy: Can It Work?”
at 2 p.m. April 23; English’s Carolyn See, “Fiction:
Literary Lives” at 2:30 p.m. April 23; and history’s
Eugen Weber, “Finding the Truth in Fiction” at 10 a.m.
April 24.
Admission is free, but tickets are required for talks
and lectures. More info is at: www.latimes.com/events.
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