Unions and Universities: The Rise of the New Labor Leader, and: Theory and Resistance in Education: A Pedagogy for the Opposition, and: Exit 13: Oppression and Racism in Academia (review)

reviews 159 "paths of least waste." In these images, they succeeded in visually representing the alienation of the worker from his or her labor; it appears here, quite UteraUy, as a thing in itself, an abstraction. What could compensate the worker for this aUenation? Photography could come to the rescue here, just as it could hdp increase productivity. The Gilbreths often honored a good worker with one of their experimental pictures in which he was included, so that, in the words of Lillian Gilbreth, he could "carry home a record and impress his family with what he ha[d] done." It is the nature of"what he ha[d] done" that is at the same time represented and obscured by photography. The very great achievement of Mining Photographs is that by focusing carefuly on a single, typical body of photographs it is able to reveal a great deal about this process by which photography interprets our Uves for us. Without denying the fasrination appearances hold for us on many levds, the editors ask us to imagine a new way of looking at photographs in which seeing is only the first step in recovering a densdy-layered meaning. The book presents us with an apparently seamless illusion ofthe ordered life of a community at the same time that it formulates the questions we need to ask of such pictures to understand how life was actually Uved. Ultimately, we are looking at these photographs because we want to understand—and to challenge—the photographs that claim to define our own Uves. Mining Photographs gives us the theoretical tools to open up all areas of photographic culture to such an investigation. UNDA ANDRE Notes [The Massachusetts Review, 19 (Winter 1978), 859-883. 2An Journal, 41 (Spring 1981), 15-25. Joel Denker.Unionsand Universities: The Rise ofthe New LaborLeader. Montclair,N.J.: Allanhdd, Osmun & Co., 1981. Pp. xviü + 177. $20.00 (paper). Henry Giroux. Theory andResistance in Education: A Pedagogyforthe Opposition. South Hadley, Mass.: Bergin and Gravey, 1983. Pp. xiv + 280. $24.95 (hardbound), $12.95 (paper). Monte PiUawsky. Exit 13: Oppression andRacism in Academia. Boston: South End Press, 1982. Pp. xvii + 252. $7.50 (paper). These books make a very odd trio indeed. Unions and Universities originated as what the author calls his "final doctoral paper" at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. It is an amiably institutional account of the development of labor studies or labor education into a proper academic field, perhaps even a disdpUne, with purveyors as able as anyone to fill faculty slots in various seminaries of the higher learning, even such as CorneU, Rutgers, and the College at Old Westbury. Theory andResistance In Education is an endlessly theoretical discussion of "educational critique" (44), generally asking "how do we make education meaningful by making it critical, and how do we make it critical so as to make it emancipatory" (3). As put, the first question either answers itsdf or has no answer. As to the second question, I think it means (in the author's own idiolect and trying to foUow his own "rationaUty") where can we find or develop a theorv that will allow us to posit a "critique" that wiU let us see that "at stake is the goal ofdeveloping an understanding of the immanent possibilities for a radical critique [in children and teachers] and a mode of sodai action [in schools] based on the creation of a culture of critical discourse" (115). The author, it is clear, has been steeped in Education; but there's no evidence that he's been in a classroom since his own schooldays. So it is a lit- 160 the minnesota review tie hard to see how he wUl ground the desired theory, or test it. Exit 13—the title comes from the exit off Interstate 59, which gives access to the University of Southern Mississippi, in Hattiesburg—is in two parts. The first is a fine muck-raking "case study" of the way ofUfe at the Universityin the administration of General WiUiam D. McCain, holder of a Duke PhD in history, for righteen years Director of the Mississippi State Department of Archives and History, for an unstated time during World War...