Lying on the Couch , Irvin D. Yalom, professor of psychiatry, BasicBooks, 1996; $25 (fiction) .
Four Corners: History, Land and People of the Desert Southwest , Kenneth A. Brown, '82, BS '83, HarperCollins, 1996; $25(natural history) .
In Black and White: Race and Sports in America , Kenneth L. Shropshire, '77, New York University Press, 1996; $24.95 (race relations) .
Book Blurbs
Two San Francisco psychotherapists with opposing styles are at the
center of this
novel: Ernest Lash, an unconventional idealist and his supervisor,
Marshal Streider, a stickler for the prescribed rules of therapy.
Lash's methods backfire when a woman patient who perceives him as
meddling in her disastrous marriage sets out to sabotage his career.
Streider's downfall comes when he crosses ethical lines and seeks to
get rich by investing with one of his patients. The plot streams come
together for the major theme of the book: whether a therapist can ever
know if a patient is telling the truth or "lying" on the couch.
Just five decades ago, the deserts of the Colorado Plateau were
regarded as
barren wasteland best suited for reservoirs and radioactive dumps.
Today, the fabled Four Corners region of Colorado, Utah, Arizona and
New Mexico draws millions of visitors who hike its canyons, photograph
its delicately tinted sandstone and breathe its air of mystery. Brown,
who spent a year trekking the region, chronicles the shifting of its
landscape and the succession of its peoples--Anasazi, Utes, Navajos,
Spaniards, Mormons and tourists. He worries about the land's fate: "The
conflicting demands being placed upon it today for water, work and play
seem to be pushing the land here to the point of exhaustion." The headlines are hard to forget: CBS commentator Jimmy "The
Greek" Snyder saying
in 1988 that blacks had "been bred . . . to jump higher and run
faster"; Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott in 1993 referring to two
star players as "million-dollar niggers." Shropshire begins with such
incidents and then lays out the 100-year history of blacks and racism
in sports. A lawyer who teaches sports and business law at the Wharton
School, Shropshire analyzes Supreme Court decisions and interviews
athletes and owners to explain the dearth of African Americans in the
front offices of the sports industry. In the end, he calls for
aggressive affirmative action programs, community pressure and
league-imposed financial sanctions on the most recalcitrant teams.