Recalling Lewis Feuer

This essay examines a brief stretch of the career of the noted sociologist Lewis S. Feuer, paying particular attention to his relationship to Communism during the thirties and forties. With the aid of archival sources, it reconstructs several key episodes of his political involvement that help to explain his eventual deradicalization. This essay first considers Feuer’s geopolitical outlook at the beginning of the Second World War, demonstrating the extent to which his views accorded with the official stance of the Communist Party. It then details Feuer’s experience as an American soldier stationed in New Caledonia, highlighting his independent efforts to abolish forced labor under the French colonial regime. These previously unexamined aspects of his early life shed new light on his later struggles to define himself politically. The purpose of this essay is to complicate Feuer’s posthumous memory, which has been overshadowed by his belated neoconservatism, and to assert the continuing importance of leftist commitment to his thought even until late in his career.     

The role of limited‐equity cooperatives in providing affordable housing

Abstract

This article develops an economic analysis of the role of limited‐equity cooperatives (LECs) in providing affordable housing. Using a model of the user costs of housing that focuses on housing externalities, it examines methods for overcoming externalities in multiunit rental dwellings.

Investment in management can reduce these externalities and thereby improve the quality of the housing environment, but the added cost excludes low‐income households from housing with a high level of management. LECs can reduce housing externalities without imposing the dollar costs of management on residents. They do this principally by attempting to attract a favorable resident population and by substituting self‐management for traditional hierarchical management. Given these findings, the article makes recommendations regarding the structure of a federally sponsored LEC program and draws implications for affordable housing policies in general. Finally, it calls for further empirical research into the desirable (and undesirable) features of self‐managed affordable housing.     

Leaving Homelessness Behind: Housing Decisions Among Families Exiting Shelter

Because homelessness assistance programs are designed to help families, it is important for policymakers and practitioners to understand how families experiencing homelessness make housing decisions, particularly when they decide not to use available services. This study explores those decisions using in-depth qualitative interviews with 80 families recruited in shelters across four sites approximately six months after they were assigned to one of four conditions (permanent housing subsidies, project-based transitional housing, community-based rapid re-housing, or usual care). Familiar neighborhoods near children's schools, transportation, family and friends, and stability were important to families across conditions. Program restrictions on eligibility constrained family choices. Subsidized housing was the most desired intervention, and families leased up at higher rates than in other studies of poor families. Respondents were least comfortable in and most likely to leave transitional housing. Uncertainty associated with community-based rapid re-housing generated considerable anxiety. Across interventions, many families had to make unhappy compromises, often leading to further moves. Policy recommendations are offered.     

Literary Reviews

Classic realism. The Time of the Hero. Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated from the Spanish by Lysander Kemp. London: Picador. 1986. 409pp. £4.50pb

The Green House. Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. London: Picador. 1986. 405pp. £3.95pb

Colluding with darkness. Of Love and Shadows. Isabel Allende. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. London: Cape. 1987. 274pp. £10.95hb

The Lizard's Tail. Luisa Valenzuela. Translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa. London: Serpent's Tail. 1987. 279pp. £7.95pb

Brazilian journeys. The Land. Antônio Torres. Translated from the Portuguese by Margaret Neves. London: Readers International. 1987. 136pp. £3.95pb

Sergeant Getulio. Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro. Translated from the Portuguese by the author. London: Faber and Faber. 1986. 146pp. £3.95pb

Macunaíma. Mário de Andrade. Translated from the Portuguese by E A Goodland. London: Quartet. 1984. 168pp. £8.95hb

Philosophy and intuition. Family Ties. Clarice Lispector. Translated from the Portuguese with an Afterword by Giovanni Pontiero. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 1985. 140pp. £8.95hb/£3.50pb

The Foreign Legion. Clarice Lispector. Translated from the Portuguese with an Afterword by Giovanni Pontiero. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 1986. 219pp. £8.95hb

The Hour of the Star. Clarice Lispector. Translated from the Portuguese with an Afterword by Giovanni Pontiero. Manchester: Carcanet Press. 1986. 96pp. £8.95hb

Western filters. Genesis. Eduardo Galeano. Translated from the Spanish by Cedric Belfrage. London: Methuen. 1987. 293pp. £3.95pb

Cultures of resistance. The Last Song of Manuel Sendero. Ariel Dorfman. Translated from the Spanish by George R Shivers with the author. New York: Viking. 1987. 450pp. S18.95hb

Power and polemics. End Papers. Breyten Breytenbach. London: Faber and Faber. 1986. 270pp. £12.50hb

Mating Birds. Lewis Nkosi. London: Constable. 1986. 184pp. £8.95hb

The Scaffold. Edward Lurie. London: Zed Books. 1986. 237pp. £4.95pb

A mind of winter. Memory of Departure. Abdulrazak Gurnah. London: Cape. 1987. 159pp. £9.95hb

Yoruba destinies. Pauper, Brawler and Slanderer. Amos Tutuola. London: Faber and Faber. 1987. 156pp. £9.95hb/£3.95pb

Shared history: novels from the francophone Caribbean. The Ripening. Edouard Glissant. Translated from the French by Michael Dash. London: Heinemann Educational Books. 1985. 195pp. n/p

Cathedral of the August Heat: A Novel of Haiti. Pierre Clitandre. Translated from the French by Bridget Jones. London: Readers International. 1987. 159pp. £8.95hb/£4.95pb

A Caribbean poet questing. Mother Poem. 1977. 122pp. £3.95pb Sun Poem. 1982. 104pp. £4.95pb X/Self. 1987. 131pp. £6.95pb Edward Kamau Brathwaite Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Fatal passivity: women in Arabic fiction. From Sleep Unbound. Andree Chedid. Translated from the French by Sharon Spencer. London: Serpent's Tail. 1987. 160pp. £4.95pb

The Story of Zahra. Hanan al‐Shaykh. Translated from the Arabic by Peter Ford with the author. London: Pavanne. 1986. 184pp. £2.95pb

Death of an Ex‐Minister. Nawal El Saadawi. Translated from the Arabic by Shirley Eber. London: Methuen. 1987. 110pp. £9.50hb/£2.95pb

Rival unrealities. Sorraya in a Coma. Esmail Fassih. Translated from the Persian. London: Zed. 1985. 287pp. £9.95hb/£4.95pb

Indian truths. Truth Tales. Edited by Kali for Women. London: Women's Press. 1987. 201pp. £8.95hb/£3.95pb

Stories. Satyajit Ray. Translated from the Bengali by the author. London: Secker and Warburg. 1987. 190pp. £10.95hb     

The Jews of early modern Marburg, 1640s—1800

This article examines Jewish household and family organization in a middle-sized German city, the Upper Hessian regional center of Marburg, the population of which ranged from 2500 to 6000 from the Thirty Years War to the end of the 18th century. Some general hypotheses about population development, household structure, and family life conveniently summarized by Toch [Toch, M. (1995). Aspects of stratification in early modern German Jewry: Population history and village Jews. In R. P. Hsia & H. Lehmann (Eds.). In and out of the ghetto: Jewish-Gentile relations in late medieval and early modern Germany (pp. 77-89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press] serve as an organizational frame for the case study. In Toch's view, Jews' comparative wealth, as well as governmental restrictions on their settlement and marriage in central Europe, led to their having larger and more complex households than those of the Christian majority. While household enumerations over time confirm several of Toch's observations, especially the larger size of Jewish families, neither Hessian settlement policy nor local Marburg opposition prevented the Jewish minority of about 1% from keeping pace with general population growth. Moreover, Jews did not respond to their regulated living conditions and status as cultural outsiders with a family organization exhibiting remarkably more internal complexity than did Christian households.     

Ill-Treatment of Pain in the DSM-5

The just-published psychiatric diagnostic manual, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5), American Psychiatric Association (2013), has been lauded by its organizers (e.g., Regier, Kuhl, and Kupfer in World Psychiatry 12, pp. 92–98, 2013), but has been criticized on multiple grounds, as well. Several of its major diagnostic categories concern the area of psychological injury and law (e.g., tort cases involving posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), chronic pain, and traumatic brain injury (TBI)). The one for chronic pain seems the one most greatly changed. The approach to chronic pain in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edition, text revision (American Psychiatric Association 2000) and the DSM-5 are compared, leading to an alternative diagnostic criteria list partly based on the changes in the DSM-5. The DSM-5 should be used with caution in forensic assessments. This applies especially to the psychological injury patient, including the pain one, given the high stakes involved and the need for accuracy in assessment based on a reliable and valid diagnostic system. Future iterations of the manual should be improved in both these regards.     

Our Land Was a Forest: An Ainu Memoir,by Kayano Shigeru

Abstract

In an Asahi Shimbun interview (31 May 1994) Kayano Shigeru (1923-), author of Ainu no ishibumi (An Ainu Memoir, 1980), recalls the fireside uwepekere or folktales told to him in the Ainu language by his grandmother and remarks that “since there's no written Ainu language, it's only the ear, not the eye, that matters.” Our Land Was a Forest, Kayano's autobiographical memoir, impresses the ear as well as the eye of the reader, as Ainu voices—seldom listened to in the past—reverberate between the lines of the original Japanese version and this English language translation by Kyoko Selden and Lili Selden.