Book Blurbs
Cameras in the Courtroom: Television and the Pursuit of Justice by Marjorie Cohn and David Dow, '59, McFarland & Co., 1998; $32.50 (television/law).	Lurid court trials hold a magnetic appeal for American TV viewers. While cameras are still forbidden in federal proceedings, all but two states (Mississippi and South Dakota) allow them in their courts. Does this interfere with the defendant's right to a fair trial? Or is the public's "right to know" paramount? Dow, the veteran CBS radio correspondent who covered the O.J. Simpson and Rodney King trials, explores these questions with legal scholar Cohn of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. After interviewing jurors, judges, journalists and even convicted murderers, they reject blanket rules on camera coverage and argue that judges must assess each case individually. A concluding chapter suggests guidelines for decision-makers and speculates on the future of televised trials.
Sleep by Stephen Dixon, '65, Coffee House Press, 1999; $15.95 (fiction).	Dixon's world explores the inner lives of some obsessive characters. In this collection of 22 stories written over two decades, the rippling effects of even the simplest moments are fodder for internal monologues. In the title piece, for example, a man turns over and over again in his head the thought he has just after his sick wife finally dies: "Now I can get some sleep." He agonizes about it as he stumbles through his newly widowed world. Dixon, a National Book Award finalist, also uses a quick-fire, almost stream-of-consciousness technique to describe a father whose little girl leaves for school without giving him a kiss goodbye and a boy who wants to divorce his twin brother and the rest of his dysfunctional family.
Understanding the Euro: The Clear and Concise Guide to the New Trans-European Currency by Christian Chabot, '94, McGraw-Hill, 1999; $29.95 (business).	When 11 nations in the European Monetary Union adopted a single official currency, the euro, on January 1, an economic Goliath was born. Yet most people have no grasp of how this monetary milestone will affect them. Chabot spent a fellowship-sponsored year working in the economics and EMU divisions of the German national bank during the euro's development. He wrote this primer to fill in the "massive professional blind spot" of executives, investors, lawyers and politicians. What legal problems does the euro present to businesses worldwide? The book's Q&A format, glossary and extensive website listings make it both accessible to the lay reader and informative to the specialist.
Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography by Robert Stepto, MA '68, PhD '74, Beacon Press, 1998; $23 (autobiography).	In this memoir, Stepto takes a metaphor -- life as a journey -- literally. The trip begins in the author's golden-tinged youth in Idlewild, Mich., a summer resort popular among middle-class blacks in the 1940s and '50s. Through stops in Virginia, Missouri, Maryland, Illinois and Massachusetts, Stepto intertwines his family's journey from slavery to prosperity with his own path to New Haven, Conn., where he is now an English professor at Yale. "When my clan gathers together these days," he observes near the end of the book, "we are most obviously a clan of black and white Americans . . . of New England, the Midwest and the West, partly by way of the South, and of the West Indies, by way of Panama."