"Will there be a doctor―a good doctor―when I need one?" This is the bedrock health care concern for Americans, encompassing as it does additional concerns about affordability, accessibility, efficiency, and specialty expertise. Richard M. Scheffler brings an economist's insight to the question, showing how shifts in market power underlie the changes we have seen in the health workforce and how they will affect the future availability of doctors. Predicting the "right" ratio of doctors to population in the future is only a small piece of the puzzle, and one that has been the subject of much forecasting, and little agreement, over the past several decades. In this concise and readable analysis, Scheffler goes beyond the guessing game to demonstrate that today's health care system is the product of financial influences in both the policy realm and on the ground in the offices of medical centers, HMOs, insurers, and physicians throughout America. He shows how factors such as physician income, medical training costs, and new technologies affect the specialties and geographic distribution of doctors. Scheffler then brings these findings to bear on a set of predictions for the U.S. and international physician workforce that extend five and ten years into the future. As part of his vision of tomorrow's ideal workforce, he offers a template for enhancing the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the health care system overall. In the groundbreaking second half of the book, the author, a health policy expert himself, tests his ideas in conversations with leading figures in health policy, medical education, health economics, and physician practice. Their unguarded give-and-take offers a window on the best thinking currently available anywhere. Finally, Scheffler combines their insights with his own to offer observations that will change the way health care's stakeholders should think about the future.

Is There a Doctor in the House?: Market Signals and Tomorrow's Supply of Doctors

Business & Money

Richard M. Scheffler

Economics

Stanford General Books

Two questions have intrigued observers of the Lou Henry Hoover House, built at Stanford University in 1919 by Lou Henry and Herbert Hoover and now the official residence of the university’s president. Who was the building’s architect? And what was the motive for its unusual, cubic, flat-roofed, undecorated form? Although professional architects were involved in the project, this book shows that the architect was actually Lou Henry Hoover herself, who conceived the design of the house and worked out its details, using her architects largely for technical matters and to produce the drawings and supervise construction. As for the design, the book argues that it was inspired mainly by the Native American Pueblo architecture of New Mexico and Arizona. Herbert Hoover, in fact, called it a “Hopi house,” and Lou referred to her “Pueblo walls,” but the Pueblo connection was later denied by others involved in the project. The book reveals that both of the Hoovers were interested in Native American culture, and that Lou, in particular, was fascinated with the “primitive” architecture of the non-Western world, which she had studied during the years when she and Herbert had lived and worked in Asia and elsewhere. Primitive forms did not appeal to her for their exoticism, as was typical at that time, but for the virtues she found in them. The Hoover House is a remarkable example of the contribution of non-Western or indigenous architecture to the development of modernism.

Mrs. Hoover's Pueblo Walls: The Primitive and the Modern in the Lou Henry Hoover House

History

Turner, Paul V.

Americas

This lavishly illustrated book explores the vast publicity surrounding eight milestone transcontinental auto trips in the early twentieth century, and how this publicity produced a variety of changes in American life. Earlier coast-to-coast trips (described in the author's Coast-to-Coast by Automobile: The Pioneering Trips, 1899-1908 (Stanford, 2000) were also attention-grabbing events, but it was not until Pennsylvania lumberman Jacob Murdock became the first man to drive his family across the continent, that the average American began to see the automobile as a useful, practical means of traveling long distances. Murdock's trip ended the period when automakers (and others) would sponsor a cross-country trip merely to prove that it could be done. The later trips chronicled in this book reflected the remarkable developments in automobile technology and durability, and demonstrated the automobile's recreational, military, and commercial possibilities as well. The accounts of these exciting trips―carried in newspapers and magazines across the land―captivated Americans. Our familiarity with modern interstate highways only increases our wonder that in the early twentieth century adventurous motorists were resourceful and determined enough to establish cross-country driving records when the few roads connecting cities were snow-clogged in winter, mud-bogged in spring, and pockmarked with deep and dusty ruts the rest of the year. These trips, which vividly illustrated what one observer called the "crying need for good roads" in the United States, are illustrated by some 125 rare photographs.

The Record-Setting Trips: By Auto from Coast to Coast, 1909-1916

Curt McConnell

This is a lavishly illustrated history of the Oregon-American Lumber Company, during its heyday one of the most important lumber firms in the Pacific Northwest. Operating from 1922 until its closure in 1957, the company provides an illuminating example of the history of lumbering in the region, showing in detail both the opportunities and problems encountered by firms seeking to exploit the area’s rich natural stands of Douglas fir. The story is enhanced by the inclusion of 285 illustrations, most of which are previously unpublished, that depict logging, railroading, and sawmilling activities, and 17 period-specific maps that give the reader a unique perspective on the growth of the company. The lumbering industry was pivotal to America’s settlement and development, reaching its zenith in the period covered by this book, which shows how Oregon-American’s survival depended on successfully adapting to great changes in market forces and in industry structures, to natural disasters, and to economic crises like the Great Depression. Essential to the company’s objective of supplying lumber to markets in the Midwest farm belt was its relationship with the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads; accordingly, the book provides much information on the railroad networks that made timber extraction possible. The study is based on fifteen years of archival and on-the-ground research and draws heavily on the extensive collection of Oregon-American records, notably the correspondence files of Judd Greenman, the company president who conceived and executed most of the company’s operating policies. It also includes, as sidebars, engaging oral histories related by employees, which enrich the text and provide a vivid contrast between management and employee viewpoints.

The Oregon-American Lumber Company: Ain’t No More

Kamholz, Edward J.

Blain, Jim

Kamholz, Greg

Biography & History

This book brings together 57 of the best black-and-white photographs of Marion Patterson, who describes her work as “photographs of the intimate landscape, simple and contemplative like a zen garden.” The images focus on the natural surroundings of the central California coast and Sierra―rocks, waterfalls, creeks, trees, seashells, sand, driftwood, and kelp washed ashore by the tides―as well as images from the Southwest and the deserts of California. The book provides a quiet meditation on the beauty of our natural environment in a manner that reflects the author’s lifelong ties to the West Coast school of photography, deeply influenced by Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. Although Patterson’s work is in some sense a virtual homage to those two giant figures, what sets it distinctly apart is her ability to use some of their stylistic and technical methods to express her own individual and deeply felt responses to the natural landscape. Where so many have understood the West Coast school as a graphic or technical exercise, Patterson has grasped the expressive language that originated in photographic modernism and has used that language to the most sincere and guileless ends. Patterson has also contributed a short introductory essay on her photographic inspiration and techniques, and endnotes that comment on a number of the plates.

Grains of Sand: Photographs by Marion Patterson

Arts & Photography

Patterson, Marion

Individual Artists

Architect Goodwin Steinberg presents an insider’s view of the development of Silicon Valley―what went right, what went wrong, and how conditions conspired to create the high technology capital of the world. Enlivened by anecdotal brushes with Silicon Valley’s influential and famous, this is the richly illustrated (including 69 color illustrations) personal story of a man whose fifty-year career―and thousands of architectural projects―helped transform an area of farms and ranches known as The Valley of Heart’s Delight to the economic engine named Silicon Valley. The range of Steinberg’s buildings is remarkable: public buildings, business parks, churches, hotels, community centers, libraries, museums, courthouses, homes for Silicon Valley titans, senior housing, and high-density housing developments. Enchanted by the San Francisco Bay Area’s physical beauty, Steinberg early made a conscious choice to build community, and his creativity and talent, combined with good timing, put him at the heart of a regional metamorphosis. But his story is more than buildings and money and their interplay. As a citizen he has been deeply involved in regional planning, measures to minimize urban sprawl, and ordinances to limit development in the hills above the Valley. As impressive as his work on buildings, one of his proudest achievements was serving as citizen advisor to the creation of Guadalupe River Park, a long ribbon of watery green, with walks and public spaces, in the heart of San Jose, a project as challenging as it is spectacular. With Steinberg as your guide, this behind-the-scenes look at the politics and personalities of the development of a region is as entertaining as it is informative. His contributions are inseparable from the community, from the mango-colored Tech Museum of Innovation and the Santa Clara County Courthouse, restored to its 1890 historic grandeur, to the hard-won Children’s Shelter and many parts of the campus of Stanford University. All Steinberg’s work testifies to his interest in and talent for beautiful lines and public spaces, allowing people to explore and enjoy their surroundings.

From the Ground Up: Building Silicon Valley

Wolfe, Susan

Steinberg, Goodwin

Using the expansive vernacular of black and white night photography to modify the antiquarian sensibility ordinarily brought to the study of Mexico's colonial architectures, Colonial Noir brings together the unsettling tenor of Mexico's colonial legacies with the ambiguous landscape of noir. Set against the backdrop of Baroque and Neoclassical architecture, the images in this collection draw on the aesthetics of Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism to create the collection's existential tone―where the innuendo of chiaroscuro becomes an analog to the tenuous relationship between Mexico's celebrated cultural plurality and its nefarious colonial history. Composed over a period of five years, the images in this collection reflect elements of Reid Samuel Yalom's background in modernist architectural photography and bear the subtle influence of Mexican works by Edward Weston and Paul Strand. The images also pay homage to the work of George Brassai and collections of Guillermo Kahlo and Henry Ravell that celebrate the architectural landscape of colonial Mexico. The book includes an essay by Frederick Luis Aldama, which uses ephemera of personal experience and elements of Latin American literary culture to provide an interpretive window into Yalom's work, and it includes an introduction by Santhosh Daniel, which places Yalom's work in the context of the history of photographic work on Mexico. The book also includes a foreword by the photographer Mark Citret.

Colonial Noir: Photographs from Mexico

Yalom, Reid Samuel

Photography & Video

The remarkable collections of the Hoover Institution Archives are for the first time showcased for the reading public in a large-format, generously illustrated book. Drawing upon a vast trove of rare historical documents and artifacts, A Wealth of Ideas tells the story of the institution and its treasures. The result is a visually attractive, engagingly written, and altogether thought-provoking book that also stands as a work of quality scholarship.The subject matter is epic in scale, covering the great wars, revolutions, political and intellectual movements, and personalities of the twentieth century. The author, Bertrand Patenaude, has assembled an impressive cast of characters, including many of the most influential figures of the age, among them Woodrow Wilson and Leon Trotsky, Friedrich von Hayek and Henry Ford, Karl R. Popper and Joseph Goebbels, Chiang Kai-shek and Boris Pasternak, and Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes. The book contains nearly 300 illustrations, including political posters, photographs, film stills, original artwork, typed and holograph public and private manuscripts, letters, and diaries.

A Wealth of Ideas: Revelations from the Hoover Institution Archives

Bertrand M. Patenaude

Jane Stanford, the co-founder of Stanford University, died in Honolulu in 1905, shortly after surviving strychnine poisoning in San Francisco. The inquest testimony of the physicians who attended her death in Hawaii led to a coroner’s jury verdict of murder―by strychnine poisoning. Stanford University President David Starr Jordan promptly issued a press release claiming that Mrs. Stanford had died of heart disease, a claim that he supported by challenging the skills and judgment of the Honolulu physicians and toxicologist. Jordan’s diagnosis was largely accepted and promulgated in many subsequent historical accounts. In this book, the author reviews the medical reports in detail to refute Dr. Jordan’s claim and to show that Mrs. Stanford indeed died of strychnine poisoning. His research reveals that the professionals who were denounced by Dr. Jordan enjoyed honorable and distinguished careers. He concludes that Dr. Jordan went to great lengths, over a period of nearly two decades, to cover up the real circumstances of Mrs. Stanford’s death.

The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford

Cutler M.D., Robert W. P.

Lincoln’s heritage is as rich as that of any car built anywhere in the world, and more impressive than all but a few. The Continental produced in the 1940s was one of the first cars to be universally recognized by classic car cognoscenti. The list of Lincoln-built cars in the postwar era certified with classic―or comparable “milestone”― status by various sanctioning bodies is likewise lengthy. The Mark II tops that list, but the slab-sided Continental sedans of the 1960s led the industry in design, and the forthcoming Mark 9 promises to continue the tradition. In recent years, Lincoln has risen from an also-ran in the sales race to a leadership role opposite arch-rival Cadillac. Today, it is vying for preeminence in what has suddenly become an international market. Along the way, the cars have been unfailingly interesting, frequently magnificent and―in several instances―quite literally legends in their own time.

The Lincoln Story: The Postwar Years (Stanford General Books)

Bonsall, Thomas

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Stanford General Books publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Stanford General Books