Laurentian Reviews
Spring 2007

“No other field is as simultaneously important and misunderstood as sales,” says an announcement for Rainmaker, Closers & Other Sales Myths, by Arnold Tilden ’69 (University Press of America, 2007). Managers and salespeople search for success in sales myths that do not improve sales performance.” Tilden, who runs a consulting business with Harry Koolen ’69 and is a career coach in the MBA Program at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business, debunks these myths and explains what strategies will work instead.

Ottoman Army Effectiveness in World War I: A Comparative Study (Routledge Publishing, 2007) by Edward J. Erickson M'84 explains why the Turks, with an illiterate, non-industrial peasant army, were still on their feet and fighting in late 1918. It analyzes the battles of Gallipoli, Kut-Al-Amara, Gaza-Beersheba, and Megiddo using previously unseen Ottoman archival sources. This is Erickson's fourth book about the Ottoman Army. He retired from the Army in 1997 as a lieutenant colonel, but was recalled to duty in 2003 and served in Iraq.

The role that American military families played as ambassadors abroad during the Cold War years is the subject of Unofficial Ambassadors: American Military Families Overseas and the Cold War, 1946-1965, by Assistant Professor and Margaret Vilas Chair of History Donna Alvah (New York University Press, 2007).  In this previously untold story of Cold War diplomacy, Alvah describes how the wives and children of American servicemen stationed at overseas bases in the years following World War II represented "a friendlier, more humane side of the United States' campaign for dominance in the Cold War." These "unofficial ambassadors" spread the United States' perception of itself and its image of world order. The publishers state, "Alvah broadens the scope of the history of the Cold War by analyzing how ideas about gender, family, race and culture shaped the U.S. military presence abroad."

Rick Henry ’79, associate professor of English and communications at SUNY Potsdam, is the author of Lucy’s Eggs, Short Stories and a Novella (Syracuse University Press, 2006). The compact volume contains four stories and the title novella, which tells the story of Lucy Delano, whose hens prove to be the only thing she can count on when nothing else in her life quite works out.  In this and the short stories, set in small-town New York State in a vaguely defined past, Henry writes with a blend of poignant humor and sadness about the fundamental fact that we are not quite in control of our lives and that forces we do not fully understand compel us to do the things we do.  If we cannot bond emotionally with his characters, we can at least identify with their inner struggles, because we ourselves have experienced many of them.

Kirk Douglas '39 is the author of a fourth memoir, Let's Face It: 90 Years of Living, Loving and Learning (Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2007). In this one he reflects on his long career, during which he has acted in some 70 films and been nominated for three Academy Awards; his near-fatal helicopter crash; and his continuing recovery from a stroke. In addition to the previous memoirs The Ragman's Son, Climbing the Mountain and My Stroke of Luck, Douglas is the author of novels and a children's book. In 1958, the University awarded him an honorary degree and he returned to campus in 1999, announcing a gift to St. Lawrence of $1 million, to be used for scholarships to increase campus diversity.

The undergraduate and graduate alumni team of Karen Duffy ’68 and Gary Krolikowski M’77, respectively, has co-edited the Seventh Edition of Social Psychology (McGraw-Hill Annual Editions, 2007). Duffy, a faculty member at SUNY Geneseo, and Krolikowski, who teaches there and at Empire State College, have generated a practical guide for instructors that provides convenient, inexpensive access to current articles selected from the best of the public press, as well as an annotated listing of selected Web sites.