College and Research Libraries


482 College & Research Libraries 

by challenges to the definition of citizen-
ship from women, blacks, and Native 
Americans in the mid-nineteenth century 
and beyond. All this is discussed by Brown 
in an erudite and readable narrative. 

The significance of The Strength of a 
People transcends its function as a schol-
arly history. In a thoughtful and modest 
epilogue, in which the author makes clear 
that he is stepping outside his custom-
ary role of historian, Brown reflects on 
the idea of an informed citizenry within 
the context of the troubled state of Ameri-
can democracy today. In fact, his book 
can be read as a companion piece to other 
recent volumes that focus on the prob-
lems of American democracy at the end 
of the twentieth century, including works 
such as Robert H. Wiebe's Self-Rule: A 
Cultural History of American Democracy 
(1995) and Lawrence K. Grossman's The 
Electronic Republic: Reshaping Democracy 
in the Information Age (1995). Indeed, the 
subject of Brown's book is at the heart of 
much that is central to Wiebe's and 
Grossman's concerns. How can Ameri-
can democracy be revitalized in our time 
(Wiebe), how will it be shaped by the new 
information age (Grossman), and what 
is the role of an informed citizenry in this 
brave new world? 

If the idea of an informed citizenry 
is not fixed but dynamic, how will the 
idea function in a presumably open so-
ciety geared to instantaneous access to 
information? Will the age of democra-
tized electronic information promote 
a responsible citizenry, or will it con-
tribute to a more rapid fragmentation 
of society-toward the disuniting of 
America? Will the citizenry's ease of 
electronic access and response to infor-
mation lend itself to a tyranny of the 
majority or to a stalemate of conflict-
ing minorities? Certainly if education 
is presumed to be vital to an informed 
and responsible citizenry, it would 
appear that the current lack of reform 
in American education augurs ill for 
the future. 

September 1996 

Although a brief essay on sources 
would have been helpful, Brown has 
written a thoroughly researched and · 
carefully documented book. Both the text 
and the thirty-five pages of notes reveal 
a firm grasp of early American histori-
ography, as well as an informed reading 
of pertinent primary sources. Certainly 
Brown's Strength of a People provides the 
necessary historical perspective for the 
idea of an informed citizenry in America, 
and also reinforces the need for the high-
est civic responsibility on the part of edu-
cators, librarians, archivists, and informa-
tion managers. It also points to the need 
for the cultivation of civic virtue in an 
America that is increasingly strained by 
the tensions of multiculturalism, failing 
institutions, and an apparent inability to 
reform its educational system. Brown's 
book serves as both a valuable history 
lesson and a warning for the future.-
Gerald F. Roberts, Berea College, Berea, Ken-
tucky. 

Nonacademic Writing: Social Theory 
and Technology. Eds. Ann Hill Duin 
and Craig J. Hansen. Mahwah, N.J.: 
Lawrence Erlbaum Pubs., 1996. 376p. 
$29.95, acid-free paper. (ISBN 0-8058-
1628-3.) 

Odd as it might sound, most of the writ-
ing done in academe is nonacademic, es-
pecially by those of us in service and ad-
ministrative roles. By "nonacademic," 
these editors mean writing "that gets 
something done, that matters," that will 
not appear in the scholarly or popular 
media. It means writing that is special-
ized for a technical audience (e.g., memos 
and annotations). And it means the kinds 
of writing done by workers in business 
and other real-world locations. 

Why put together a book about it? (1) 
Nonacademic writing, according to these 
editors and their twenty-three chapter 
authors (many of them graduate students 
or junior faculty), is important for shap-
ing the communication and cultural pat-
terns of our work sites. (2) It bears closer 



watching, presumably because technol-
ogy increasingly shapes how nonaca-
demic writing is done (even, perhaps, 
how writers think). (3) The part of aca-
deme responsible for teaching aspects of 
technical writing (with some 200 degree/ 
certificate programs) has had too little 
apparent success: Studies suggest that 
employees who can write well are in-
creasingly difficult to find; the second 
leading deficiency among job candidates 
(beyond problems of.interpersonal sorts) 
is a lack of writing skills. 

At first glance, this book seems prom-
ising and exciting. All of us, I think, 
would like to learn more about this ubiq-
uitous, necessary activity. And most of 
us, I suspect, would like to be part of a 
higher education that effectively teaches 
and improves nonacademic writing. To 
an extent, this edited book helps readers 
see the way to making these changes. 
There are chapters on: how to apply a 
sociotechnology to the study of nonaca-
demic writing (i.e., it takes the whole 
communication, technological, and social 
pattern into account); how to apply re-
search to the problem; how sexism 
haunts the technology undergirding non-
academic writing; problems of translat-
ing what we do in classrooms to the 
workplace; how nonacademic' writing 
influences broad social institutions; and 
how technologies such as hypertext 
might modify our usual notions of things 
such as authorship. 

But the appearance is deceiving. In 
fact, the book turns out to be a long-
winded polemic and an impractical, frus-
trating approach to a practical subject. 
Ironically, it is the sort of academic writ-
ing that may not matter to most of us. 
One of the earliest and most sensible of 
chapter authors, Elizabeth Tebeaux, 
warns about this very thing: 

Technical communication research-
ers, to give academic credibility to 
their work, have developed their 
own exclusionary language. This 

Book Reviews 483 

increasingly allusive, political, ideo-
logical, and abstract language gives 
.intellectual stature and a sense of 
erudition to our work, but also 
alienates nonacademic users of our 
research. 

The rest of this long, difficult series of 
chapters fits that description all too per-
fectly. 

There are, for instance, excursions into 
contemporary ethnographic theory 
("Working in the reflective and textual 
tradition.at Cambridge, Williams recog-
nized that Lukacs was mistaken when he 
thought that reification could be totally 
dominant. ... "); into feminist scholar-
ship on gender differences in nonaca-
demic writing ("the impulse to personify 
through metaphor what the program is 
designed to do for the user ... "); into 
architectural design ("The design prob-
lem is both rhetorical and semiotic .... "); 
into Marxist/ critical theories (which 
would require us to appreciate group 

~ ·~ CHRISTIAN 

-
PERIODICAL 

INDEX 

•!• Over 100 
Index covers a Titles 

•!• Beginning · 
broad spectrum of 

in 1956 knowledge from 

•!• Published 
an evangelical 

Three Christian 
Times a perspective. 
Year 

~~'"" u• CHRISTIAN LIBRARIANS 



484 College & Research Libraries 

members as mere tools for the organiza-
tion). Nowhere are there proven specif-
ics about how to improve nonacademic 
writing or how to better manage its ex-
panding technology. Nor are there any 
rules or hints for those of us who would 
like to make our everyday writing of e-
mail, technical manuals, and administra-
tive evaluations more efficient and effec-
tive. Instead, one of the chapter authors, 
Dorothy Winsor, concludes that it can-
not be taught by rules-although she of-
fers no practical, tested alternatives. (Cu-
riously, experts who go unmentioned in 
this and the other chapters have demon-
strated the worth of simple principles for 
improving nonacademic writing; e.g., 
Anthony Trollope, working to improve 
the reports written by officials of the 
postal system a century ago, brought 
about significant changes in the clarity 
of, and time invested in, administrative 
writing.) 

So would Nonacademic Writing make 
worthwhile reading? Perhaps only to · 
those interested in the theories and phi-
losophy of nonacademic writing and its 
technology. To me, a psychologist with a 
private practice for academic and non-
academic writers, this book offered no 
returns for a difficult read. Those of us 
who want to "get things done" (to para-
phrase the editors) might want to wait 
for a more nonacademic account of non-
academic writing.-Robert Boice, State 
University of New York at Stony Brook. 

Poverty: A Global View: Handbook on In-
ternational Poverty Research. Eds. Else 
Oyen, S.M. Miller, and Syed Abdus 
Samad. Oslo, Norway: Scandinavian 
University Pr., 1996. 620p. $59 (ISBN 
82-00-22649-2.) 

The United Nations has proclaimed 1996 
the International Year for the Eradication 
of Poverty. This fifth publication from the 
Comparative Research Programme on 
Poverty (CROP) compiles a prodigious 
amount of information on alternative 
poverty conceptualizations, theories, 

September 1996 

policies, and research, although it is not 
a handbook in the customary sense of the 
term nor strictly a comparative treatise 
on methodologies of poverty research, as 
the title might suggest. The Programme 
itself was created through the collabora-
tion of the International Social Science 
Council (ISSC) and UNESCO's Sector for 
Social and Human Sciences, both of 
which provided funds for this mono-
graph along with the Deutsche Gesell-
schaft fur Techcnische Zusammenarbeit 
(GTZ) and the Centre for Health and So-
cial Policy Studies of the University of 
Bergen, Norway. 

Poverty: A Global View is appropriate 
to both social sciences I social welfare and 
area studies collections. Its twenty-five 
chapters are organized into six parts, the 
first and last of which are composed of a 
total of six chapters providing a com-
parative review of poverty concepts and 
theories. The analysis reveals the politi-
cal nature of social research in general, 
and how political regimes and institu-
tional bases of research support influence 
the characterizations of the poor and the 
etiologies constructed to explain poverty 
within developed and developing coun-
tries. The diffusion of Western (especially 
U.S.) definitions and measures of pov-
erty around the globe is particularly in-
teresting given the lack of consensus for 
a standard among researchers and 
policymakers here. Having adopted the 
notion of a "poverty line," which demar-
cates the poor and nonpoor, researchers 
in other countries have waded into this 
intractable measurement mire. Taken to-
gether, these chapters elucidate the many 
different conceptions of poverty from ab-
solute to relative need, and from personal 
to structural explanations. 

The remaining central parts of the 
book provide country-specific poverty 
research approaches and findings. These 
four parts focus on, respectively, the 
Asian region (South Asia, Korea, India, 

"Southeast Asia, China, and New 
Zealand); the African region (Egypt,