New
Books on the Shelf
Several new books written by Smith
faculty were published this fall and are receiving good reviews.
Among them are
works on the human impulse to repair by Elizabeth
V. Spelman, Barbara
Richmond 1940 Professor in the Humanities; sexuality in
the 19th century by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Sylvia Dlugasch
Bauman Professor in American
Studies; and the process of formulating the Japanese constitution
after World War II by Donald Robinson, Charles N. Clark
Professor of Government
and American Studies.
 Professor Horowitz is the author
of Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression
in Nineteenth-Century America (Alfred Knopf, 2002). In conjunction
with the release this fall of her latest book, which has been described in
reviews as richly detailed and highly readable, Horowitz was invited
to speak at a number
of institutions including The American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts,
and the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University.
Horowitz’s new work falls
into the categories of both historical and sociological
literature. Publisher’s Weekly says: “Horowitz offers a sharp and
insightful scholarly examination of these conflicting frameworks [of the sexual
culture], steeped in 19th-century history, cultural politics, religion, legal
battles, science and medical practices.”
Horowitz’s other studies
in American history have explored cultural philanthropy, higher education and
American landscape. In addition to Rereading Sex, she is
the author of The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas, Culture and the
City and several other works.  Partners
for Democracy: Crafting the New Japanese State Under MacArthur is co-written by Robinson
and Ray A. Moore, professor of history
and Asian studies at Amherst
College. Robinson says the book tells the story “of how the American
occupation, under General Douglas MacArthur, and the Japanese cabinet, led
by Prime Minister
Yoshida Shigeru, cooperated to lay the foundation of constitutional democracy
in the ashes of postwar Japan.”
Published last fall by Oxford University
Press, the book -- which Robinson
says has been almost 10 years in the making -- is given high praise by
various reviewers. Says Susan J. Pharr, Edwin O. Reischauer Professor of
Japanese Politics,
Harvard University, “Here at last, in a riveting book by historian
Ray Moore and political scientist Don Robinson, is the inside story of one
of the
world’s greatest experiments with planned social change.
This fall,
Robinson participated in a panel discussion, “Japanese Democracy,
Past and Present,” at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for
Scholars in Washington, D.C. He traveled to Japan on a trip that included
lectures
at Doshisha University and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.
Robinson and Moore
have also co-edited The Constitution of Japan: A Documentary History
of Its Framing and Adoption, 1945–1947.
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