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New titles from Indiana University faculty

To Rise in Darkness: Revolution, Repression, and Memory in El Salvador, 1920-1932. Jeffrey L. Gould, James H. Rudy Professor of History and director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Indiana University, conducted more than 200 interviews with survivors and descendents of an uprising in El Salvador in a book that provides a new perspective on a defining moment in the country's history. In January 1932, thousands of indigenous rural laborers, provoked by electoral fraud, took control of several municipalities in El Salvador. Within days, the military and civilian militias re-claimed the towns and executed thousands of people. To Rise in Darkness investigates memories of the massacre and its long-term cultural and political consequences. Gould combined individual accounts with documentary sources from archives in El Salvador, Guatemala, Washington, London and Moscow. The book describes the political, economic and cultural landscape of El Salvador during the 1920s and early 1930s, and offers a detailed narrative of the uprising and massacre. Gould's work focuses on Central American social movements, ethnic conflicts and political violence. He is also the author of To Lead as Equals: Rural Protest and Political Consciousness in Chinandega, Nicaragua (The University of North Carolina Press, 1990), and To Die in This Way: Nicaraguan Indian Communities and the Myth of Mestizaje, 1880-1965 (Duke University Press, 1998). He is the recipient of a 2002 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2001 Fulbright-Hays Research Fellowship. Published by Duke University Press, To Rise in Darkness is available in paperback and hardback and includes 36 illustrations and five maps. Gould co-wrote the book with Aldo A. Lauria-Santiago, associate professor of history and chair of the Department of Latino and Hispanic Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University.

The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Andrew H. Miller, an IU professor of English, recently released The Burdens of Perfection (Cornell University Press), a commentary on the study of literary criticism. Miller notes that literary criticism has, in recent decades, fled from discussions of moral psychology and in doing so has lost the basic concepts needed to recognize and assess much of what distinguished 19th-century British literature. That literature was inescapably ethical in orientation, he writes, and to proceed as if it were not ignores a large part of what these texts have to offer, making less reasonable the desire to study them, rather than other documents from the period. Commenting on the period's essayists (Mill, Arnold, Carlyle), poets (Browning and Tennyson), and especially its novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James), Miller provides an extensive response to Stanley Cavell's contribution to ethics and philosophy of mind. In the process, he offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers. "In some moods, or for some people, the desire to improve can seem so natural as to be banal," he writes. "The impulse drives forward so much in our culture that it can color our thoughts and shape our actions without being much noticed. But in other moods, or for other people, this strenuous desire becomes all too noticeable, and its demands crushing. It can then drive a sleepless attention to ourselves, a desolate evaluation of what we have been and what we are."

The Writer Uprooted: Contemporary Exile Jewish Literature. Edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, professor of English and Jewish Studies at IU Bloomington, The Writer Uprooted is the first book to examine the emergence of a new generation of Jewish immigrant writers in America. Rosenfeld, the founder and former director of the Borns Jewish Studies Program at IU, writes in the introduction that some scholars believed the "absorptive powers of Americanization" would exhaust the tradition of Jewish literary creativity exemplified by Saul Bellow, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Philip Roth. But the new generation of writers, most of them from formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe, has challenged that assumption. "It is still too soon to know," Rosenfeld writes, "but as they continue to explore the bafflements and enticements of a life that moves between two countries, two cultures and two or more languages, one senses that this emerging generation of foreign-born Jewish novelists, short-story writers and poets may contribute some new and especially interesting dimensions to American literature in the years ahead." Writers represented in The Writer Uprooted, an Indiana University Press book, include three IU faculty members: Matei Calinescu, professor emeritus of Comparative Literature and West European Studies; Dov-Ber Kerler (pen name Boris Karloff), the Dr. Alice Field Cohn, chair in Yiddish Studies; and Bronislava Volkova, professor of Slavic Languages and Literature and director of the Czech Program.

Connecting the Dots to Future Electric Power. While politicians, lobbyists and activists debate the short-term merits of coal, oil, nuclear, wind and ethanol as power sources, Edward J. Bair takes the long view. In Connecting the Dots to Future Electric Power, he examines the promises and failings of various energy technologies against the backdrop of ever-increasing demands and finite resources. "Most people take it for granted that technology will provide power in the future," he writes. "This is not as certain as it may seem." Bair concludes with a chapter on what he calls "the one exception to this generally gloomy outlook," the prospect for tapping solar radiant power outside the Earth's atmosphere. Bair, a third-generation Colorado native, spent summers on his uncle's gold-mining property, an ideal environment for developing his independent-minded iconoclasm. He joined the Manhattan Project during World War II, then earned a Ph.D. from Brown University and spent his academic career at Indiana University, where he is professor emeritus of physical chemistry. Connecting the Dots is published by AuthorHouse in Bloomington.

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