Laurentian Reviews
Winter 2007

By Our Alumni

“No other field is as simultaneously important and misunderstood as sales,” says an announcement for Rainmaker, Closers & Other Sales Myths, by Arnold Tilden ’69 (University Press of America, 2007). Managers and salespeople search for success in sales myths that do not improve sales performance.” Tilden, who runs a consulting business with Harry Koolen ’69 debunks these myths and explains what strategies will work instead.

The undergraduate and graduate alumni team of Karen Duffy ’68 and Gary Krolikowski M’77, respectively, has co-edited the Seventh Edition of Social Psychology (McGraw-Hill Annual Editions, 2007). Duffy, a faculty member at SUNY Geneseo, and Krolikowski, who teaches there and at Empire State College, have generated a practical guide for instructors that provides convenient, inexpensive access to current articles selected from the best of the public press, as well as an annotated listing of selected Web sites.

Ann Renzi Haynes ’84 is the co-author, with three friends, of Love You, Mean It: A True Story of Love, Loss and Friendship (Hyperion Books, 2006).  All four women lost their husbands in the World Trade Center attack, an event that brought them together to form The Widows Club and share their grief and, as the publisher puts it, “mutual determination to find ways to go on with their lives.  Love You, Mean It is a book that will both console and inspire with its true story of friendship, empathy and emerging hope.”
Motown Burning, by wrestling coach and English teacher John Jeffire ’85 (Trafford Publishing, 2006), follows, with frank dialog and graphic situations, the struggles of Aram Pehlivanian, a high school drop-out and wrestler who battles his way through the 1967 Detroit riots and a tour in Vietnam. The novel won the 2005 Mount Arrowsmith Novel Competition. “Many people seem to raise an eyebrow when they learn I coach wrestling and teach writing, but I see the connection between wrestling and writing as a natural one,” Jeffire told an interviewer. “There's something about the discipline, solitariness, and work ethic needed in both that makes them compatible.”
 
Paul Fideler '58, professor of history and humanities at Lesley University, is the author of
Social Welfare in Pre-Industrial England (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), in which he establishes the five-centuries-long symbiosis between the pre-industrial market economy and parish-centered social welfare. Applying recent developments in numerous disciplines, he highlights the unique assumptions, perceptions and repertoire of relief initiatives that sustained the social welfare tradition until its demise in the early decades of industrialization.
 
Maxwell E. Eaton III ’04 is the author and illustrator of a children's book, The Adventures of Max and Pinky: Best Buds (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2006). Max, a little boy, and Pinky, a pink pig, are pals, but one day they get separated. The publishers state, “Nothing will stop Max from finding (Pinky) -- because a guy will do anything for his best bud!” They also indicate that this is the first in a series of Max and Pinky books about the meaning of friendship.

By Our Faculty

Rebels and Robbers: Violence in Post-Colonial Angola Nordic Africa Institute, 2006), about the political economy of violence, is a new book by Associate Professor of Government and Associate Dean of International and Intercultural Studies Assis Malaquias. Its publishers state, “This book provides the first comprehensive attempt at analyzing how the military and non-military dynamics of more than four decades of conflict created the structural violence that stubbornly defines Angolan society even in the absence of war. The book clearly demonstrates that the end of the civil war has not ushered in positive peace.”

Professor and Chair of English Peter Bailey is the author of Rabbit (Un)Redeemed: The Drama of Belief in John Updike's Fiction (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006). Bailey offers a selective reading of Updike's work, dramatizing the author's career-spanning dialog with his complexly fragile religious beliefs. Bailey interprets the Rabbit (those works that include the character of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom) saga as fictionalized spiritual autobiography. Between his aspirations to create fiction emulating patterns of transcendent meaning and his apprehension that a form of realism is all that he can achieve in prose, Updike has created, and Bailey has documented, one of the preeminent dramas of contemporary American culture and fiction: a literary engagement of the post-Christian with the postmodern.

Professor of Education Arthur J. Clark’s newest book is Empathy in Counseling and Psychotherapy: Perspectives and Practices (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2006).  According to the publishers, the volume “comprehensively examines the function of empathy as it introduces students and practitioners to the potential effectiveness of utilizing empathic understanding in the treatment process.” The text looks at historical and contemporary perspectives and practices in counseling and psychotherapy, as well as theoretical orientations, and offers a multiple-perspective model.

Other Words

*Elizabeth Ann Siematkowski ’08 is the author of The Amazing People You Meet, the Remarkable Person You Are (PublishAmerica, 2006). The publisher promotes it as an “inspirational book” in which Siematkowski, “an accomplished competitive figure skater and aspiring sports psychologist” from Canton, adjusts to the loss of her dream to be a top skater.

*Bobby Thomson N’49, who became a St. Lawrence student thanks to behind-the-scenes work by another Laurentian-turned New York Giant, “Prince Hal” Schumacher ’33, hit perhaps the most storied home run in baseball history, the walkoff “shot heard ‘round the world” that won the Giants the National League pennant in 1951. Joshua Praeger probes behind-the-scenes machinations in the 1951 pennant race in The Echoing Green (Pantheon Books, 2006). St. Lawrence and some of Thomson’s friends, particularly Vic Sacco ’51, are mentioned briefly.

*Professor of Anthropology John Barthelme had a role in Men of Salt: Crossing the Sahara on the Caravan of Gold, by Michael Benanav (Lyons Press, 2006). The book is about a camel caravan across the Sahara to the salt mines of Toudenni in Mali, Africa, a trip Barthelme made in 2001. The author contacted Barthelme about that trip, and Barthelme is quoted extensively in the Preface.