BiblioVault - Books about Change

Viet Nam

Tradition and Change

H?u Ng?c

Ohio University Press, 2016

During his twenty-year tenure as a columnist for Việt Nam News, Hà Nội’s English-language newspaper, Hữu Ngọc charmed and invigorated an international readership hungry for straightforward but elegant entrees into understanding Vietnamese culture. The essays were originally collected in the massive Wandering through Vietnamese Culture. With Viet Nam: Tradition and Change, Ohio University Press presents a selection from these many treasures, which are perfectly suited to students of Vietnamese culture and travelers seeking an introduction to the country’s rich history, culture, and daily life.

With extraordinary linguistic ability and a prodigious memory, Hữu Ngọc is among Việt Nam’s keenest observers of and writers about traditional Vietnamese culture and recent history. The author’s central theme—that all tradition is change through acculturation—twines through each of the book’s ten sections, which contain Hữu Ngọc’s ideas on Vietnamese religion, literature, history, exemplary figures, and more. Taken on its own, each brief essay is an engaging discussion of key elements of Vietnamese culture and the history of an issue confronting Việt Nam today.

[more]

The View from the Helm

Leading the American University during an Era of Change

James J. Duderstadt

University of Michigan Press, 2007

Widely regarded as one of the most active and publicly engaged university presidents in modern academia, Duderstadt—who led the University of Michigan from 1988 to 1996—presided over a period of enormous change, not only for his institution, but for universities across the country. His presidency was a time of growth and conflict: of sweeping new affirmative-action and equal-opportunity programs, significant financial expansion, and reenergized student activism on issues from apartheid to codes of student conduct.

Under James Duderstadt’s stewardship, Michigan reaffirmed its reputation as a trailblazer among universities. Part memoir, part history, part commentary, The View from the Helm extracts general lessons from his experiences at the forefront of change in higher education, offering current and future administrators a primer on academic leadership and venturing bold ideas on how higher education should be steered into the twenty-first century.

[more]

Voices of Change in Cuba from the Non-State Sector

Carmelo Mesa-Lago

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018

More than one million Cubans, representing thirty percent of the country’s labor force, currently make up the nonstate sector. These include self-employed workers and micro-entrepreneurs, sharecropping farmers, members of new cooperatives, and buyers and sellers of private dwellings. This development represents a crucial structural reform implemented by Raúl Castro since becoming Cuba’s leader in 2006, and may become the most dynamic economic force for the country’s future. Despite this phenomenon, little has been published about the demographic makeup of this group (age, gender, race, and education), as well as their economic conditions and aspirations.
Based on eighty in-depth interviews recently conducted in Cuba, this book captures actual voices from this evolving economic sector. It details workers’ level of satisfaction with what they do and earn, profits (and how they are allocated between consumption and investment), plans to expand their activities, receiving foreign remittances and microcredit, competition, forms of advertising, and payment of taxes. Perhaps most revealing are the speakers’ views on the obstacles they face and their desires for change and improvement. As such, the book offers fascinating insights into today’s Cuban economy from the nonstate sector, while also reflecting on its potential for development and the obstacles it faces.

[more]

Voices of Change in the Spanish American Theater

An Anthology

Edited and translated by William I. Oliver

University of Texas Press, 1971

The aim of this anthology is to present a selection of plays that are representative of a fresh spirit and of societal pressures and changes in Spanish American culture. The plays shun the earlier realistic, sentimental, and melodramatic conventions of Spanish American theater. Instead, they reflect the tenor of the dramatic imagination of the mid-to-late twentieth century—an imagination that sought new forms and ways of expressing a new awareness of the Spanish American dilemma.

In selecting these plays, William I. Oliver looked for more than mere illustrations of these changes. As a practicing director and playwright, he sought works that are effective on the stage as well as on the page. As an editor and translator, he sought works “that could be translated culturally as well as linguistically.” The six plays in this varied and vigorous anthology are the measure of his success.

The plays included are The Day They Let the Lions Loose, by Emilio Carballido (Mexico); The Camp, by Griselda Gambaro (Argentina); The Library, by Carlos Maggi (Uruguay); In the Right Hand of God the Father, by Enrique Buenaventura (Colombia); The Mulatto’s Orgy, by Luisa Josefina Hernández (Mexico); and Viña: Three Beach Plays, by Sergio Vodánovic (Chile).

[more]