College and Research Libraries


578 College & Research Libraries 

and Colleges. It contains eighteen essays 
by an international set of scholars focus-
ing on the creation of "expert knowl-
edge" through university research and 
on the social and economic role of that 
knowledge in the United States and 
European countries. The essays are of two 
kinds: (1) case studies of particular issues 
in specific countries (e.g., the Historiker-
streit among West German scholars con-
cerning the Nazi era; the impact of 
nineteenth-century student activism on 
the formation of Swedish research univer-
sities; the role of the Organization for 
Economic Co-Operation and Develop-
ment in setting research agendas); and (2) 
concise general surveys of larger themes 
(e.g., the exceptionalism of American 
higher education; the growing fragmen-
tation of research, teaching and study; 
the dominance of scientific discourse in 

. modem higher education). The strength 
of the collection is in its international 
(and historical) view of higher educa-
tion; its weakness is .the random nature 
of its topics so typical of a Festschrift. 
(Robert Walther) 

The Politics of Liberal Education. Ed. by 
Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein 
Smith. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Pr., 
1992. 305 p. alk. paper, $34.95 (ISBN 
0-8223-1183-6); paper, $14.95 (0-8223-
1199-2). LC 91-29303. 
The theme of this stimulating and 

thoroughly readable collection of fifteen 
papers is the democratization of higher 
education. All but two were originally 
published in the Winter 1990 issue of the 
South Atlantic Quarterly. The conference, 
described by one of the participants as "a 
rally of [the] cultural left," covered top-
ics as varied as technology, pedagogy, 
homophobia and television, framed in 
discussions of "the canon" and the rela-
tionship between politics and learning. 
The contributors include scholars such 
as Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 
Richard Rorty, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 
and Barbara Hermstein Smith. They 
share the premise that the educational cur-
riculum-any educational curriculum-is 
historically contingent, and they therefore 
embrace, with varying degrees of enthusi-

November 1992 

asm, the demand to open the curriculum 
to African Americans, gays, women and 
others who have been kept outside, a 
project that Gates describes as "the nec-
essary work of canon deformation and 
reformation." (Stephen Lehmann) 

Theodore Besterman, Bibliographer and 
Editor: A Selection of Representative 
Texts. Ed. by Francesco Cordasco. 
Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1992. 479p. 
(ISBN 1-8108-2497-3). LC 91-45136. 
Theodore Besterman, as every student 

in library school learns, was one of the 
preeminent systematic bibliographers of 
the twentieth century. Both his World 
Bibliography of Bibliographies and his 107-
volume edition of Voltaire's letters are 
massive works of modem scholarship. 
This volume reprints four biographical 
essays on Besterman and a selection of 
his own scholarly writings, mostly on 
various aspects of bibliography and on 
Voltaire. The book ends, inevitably, with 
a bibliography of the "Great Cham of 
Bibliography's" own works (revealing 
his strong interest in theosophy and the 
paranormal) and a bibliography on him. 
(Robert Walther) 

Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of 
Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill, N.C.: 
Univ. of North Carolina Pr., 1992. 
416p. alk. paper. (ISBN 0- 8078-2010-
5). LC 91-22241. 
Examining the popularization and 

commercialization of culture in the years 
between the two world wars, Rubin an-
alyzes "middlebrow" institutions such 
as the Herald Tribune's weekly supple-
ment Books, the Book of the Month Club, 
"great books" teaching and publishing 
programs, Will Durant's 110utlines,11 and 
radio book-chat programs. The book fo-
cuses largely on the women and men 
who shaped these institutions-a 
strategy that is itself characteristically 
"middlebrow'' -and on the tensions be-
tween elitist and democratic values they 
reflected and worked through. Although 
for the most part not an explicit theme of 
the book, relationships between the 
academy and the popularizing media are 
evident on virtually every page. Rubin's 



book is gracelessly written and madden-
ingly condescending but sheds light on 
a fascinating dimension of American in-
tellectual life. (Stephen Lehmann) 

Wiener, Jon. Professors, Politics and Pop. Lon-
don and New York: Verso, 1991. 366p. 
(ISBN 0-8W91-356-2). LC 91-025645. 
Jon Wiener, professor of history at the 

University of California, Irvine, covers 
the higher education beat for The Nation, 
where he is a contributing editor. Profes-
sors, Politics and Pop is a collection of 
short pieces from that weekly (October 
1984 through September 1990), plus a 
sprinkling of items from other mag-
azines of the center-left. A quartet of 
heftier considerations of recent radical 
history and historiography first ap-
peared as review articles in scholarly 
journals. Wiener has a nose for con-

Book Reviews 579 

troversy and likes to seek out subjects-
either persons or "cases"-that define 
the battle lines between the academic 
and cultural left and the center-right. 
Broadly speaking, he contends-and 
anecdotally demonstrates-that the en-
trenched establishment in academe is 
conservative (and not liberal or radical 
as one would conclude from the media 
of late) even though the left, at least his-
torically, enjoys superior intellectual cre-
dentials. Wiener manages to engage in 
this polemical discussion without using 
the much abused Newspeak phrase 
"politically correct." But that is definitely 
what he is talking about: the attempt of 
"the neocons ... to persuade the center 
that it's the left rather than the right that 
threatens the integrity of the university 
by injecting external political issues into 
academia." (Jeffry Larson)