Books for review Liste des ouvrages à recenser

Christine Alexander & Juliet McMaster eds.,The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)—Claire Bazin, University of Paris X Nanterre, France. Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies (Picador, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2006)—Frédéric Dumas, University of Grenoble 3, Stendhal, France. Sacvan Bercovitch General Ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume Three: Prose Writing, 1860-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005)—Robert Sayre, University of Marne la Vallée, France. David Cannadine, ed., Empire, the Sea and Global History. Britain’s Maritime World, c.1760-1840 (Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke and New York, 2007)—Trevor Harris, University of Tours, France. John Channing Briggs, Lincoln’s Speeches Reconsidered (Baltimore & London : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005)—Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, University of Paris 7, France. Daniel Burston & Roger Frie, Psychotherapy as a Human Science (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2006)—Patrick Favro, University of French Polynesia, Tahiti. Michel Dumong, Christine Knott, Jean Pouvelle, Rose-Anne Huart, Du mot au texte Anglais : Vocabulaire anglais thématique et exercices (Paris : Ellipses Marketing, 2006) —Laetitia Deracinois, University of Marne la Vallée, France. Walter Hirtle, Language in the Mind: An Introduction to Guillaume's Theory (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007)—Dennis Philps, University of Toulouse Le Mirail, France. Michael Makovsky, Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism And Statecraft, A New Republic Book (New Haven, Conn. & London: Yale University Press, 2007)—Antoine Capet, University of Rouen, France. Sophie Marret & Pascale Renaud-Grosbras dir. Lectures et Ecritures du Mythe (Collection Interférences, Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2006)—Claude Maisonnat, University of Lyon II Lumière, France. Peter H. Matthews, Syntactic Relations. A critical survey (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 114.Cambridge: CUP, 2007)—Olivier Simonin, University of Paris 13, France. Craig Raine,T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)—Marylin Mell, Dillard University, New Orleans, USA. Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels (Aldershot†: Ashgate, 2007)— Fabienne Moine, University of Parix X, Nanterre, France. Michael Toolan & Jean-Jacques Weber eds., The Cognitive Turn: Papers in Cognitive Literary Studies (European Journal of English Studies (EJES) Volume 9, Number 2, August 2005, London: Routledge)—Manuel Jobert, University of Lyon 3, Jean Moulin, France. Elizabeth L. Wollman, The Theater Will Rock. A History of the Rock Musical from Hair to Hewig (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006)—Claude Chastagner, University of Montpellier, France.

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Obituary

Dear Friends,

We are sad to announce the death of a pioneer of the field of existential-phenomenological psychology.

Adrian van Kaam

         The Psychology department greets the recent death of Father Adrian van Kaam with considerable sadness. Born April 19th 1920 in the Hague, he was in seminary when the Nazis invaded. In 1944-1945, he endured the Nazi inflicted "hunger winter" in western Holland that permanently damaged his health, organizing the delivery of scarce food supplies to Jews and others in hiding. In retrospect, he said, this experience shaped his subsequent development more than any other.

        Van Kaam was ordained in 1946, and in 1954, was sent by the Vatican to pursue work in spiritual formation he had undertaken at the request of  Msgr. Giovanni Baptista Montini - later Pope Paul VI. However, shortly after his arrival, Vernon Gallagher, Duquesne's President, asked him to lead the psychology Department at Duquesne University. To that end, he cultivated warm contacts with humanistic psychologists like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers and with psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, but felt that their approaches were an insufficient counterbalance to the "science of measurement psychology." To foster psychology as a "human science," he drew extensively on Continental thinkers like Max Scheler and Viktor Frankl, and brought Amedeo Giorgi, Charles Maes and Tony Barton here. Being fluent in German, French, Dutch and English, Father van Kamm was also deeply versed in the existential-phenomenological literature, much of which had not yet been translated. Together with Father Henry Koren and Duquesne University Press, he was responsible for bringing many European luminaries here to speak in the 1950's and 1960's, and worked with Rollo May and Henry Elkin in editing The Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry - a lively and remarkable conduit for the dissemination and integration of Continental thought in the English language.

        In 1963, Father van Kaam left the Psychology Department, but continued his exploration of the spiritual development at the Institute of Formative Spirituality, and later, the Epiphany Academy, which he founded with Dr. Susan Muto in 1979. He died on November 17, 2007. In an interview with Shane Chaplin that appeared in our student journal Grammata in 2005, he gave the following advice to graduate students: "Follow your heart. Be faithful to your unique communal-life calling. Do not let functionalistic pressures of careerism, money-making, or fame and fortune obfuscate your original ideals to make a difference in this world and to make it a better place when you leave it." Then he added: " . . . dream your dreams and with God's help do what you can to shore up your foundation at the highest level of integrity and service to others. Nothing serves humanity so well as the truth. No wonder we read in scripture that it alone can set us free."

Daniel Burston, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Chair
Psychology Department
McAnulty College Hall
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, PA 15282-1707