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Transformed: How Oregon's Public Health University Won Independence and Healed Itself by William Graves

2017; Oregon Historical Society; Volume: 118; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ohq.2017.0048

2329-3780

Carl Abbott,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

431 Reviews a rich variety of experiences, nearly all of them showing clearly how capitalists profited from inhuman treatment of the laborers. American History Unbound is a textbook for college and university courses in American immigration and ethnic history. Its prose is clear and readable, but it is likely too long and too detailed to attract wide readership beyond the classroom. The author’s stated goal for this book is to demonstrate how the Euro-American founders of the United States have used their economic and political power to develop and defend their global economic dominance. He contends, often successfully, that since the English invaded and colonized America they and their descendants created a society that has systematically excluded peoples of color from participating in a multicultural nation. Few scholars would argue with those observations. Okihiro’s central contribution is to narrate the experiences of Pacific Islanders and Asians in this developing industrial society, and he effectively introduces littleknown groups and immigrants from the Pacific to the broader context of American ethnic history. By narrating those experiences, the author makes several important contributions to the field of immigration history. His chapter on early Pacific history does what others have done for early Atlantic history. The focus on white versus people of color brings both American Indians and African Americans at least to the edge of the discussion. The narrative provides data on overlooked or unknown groups and the experiences of individuals unlikely to show up anywhere else in immigration history. It emphasizes the importance of the Pacific coast as the entry point for hundreds of thousands of Asians and Pacific Islanders, while demonstrating that those people made their way into the country through ports on the Atlantic side of the continent, too. The author’s analysis places these eastward migrations within the context of American social and economic developments and helps readers understand why the newcomers received the treatment they did. As a text about American immigration history, this book presents vast amounts of new data, up to now, available only in scholarly monographs about each group — that in itself if a major contribution . Unfortunately, the book’s organization is unlikely to fit existing course outlines, making it difficult for those offering courses in American immigration or ethnic history to adopt it easily to their curriculum. Roger L. Nichols University of Arizona TRANSFORMED: HOW OREGON’S PUBLIC HEALTH UNIVERSITY WON INDEPENDENCE AND HEALED ITSELF by William Graves Pacific University Press, Forest Grove, OR, 2017. Illustrations, tables, notes, index. 479 pages. $36.95, cloth. $24.95, paper. William Graves, an experienced journalist, has brought a reporter’s skills to document the evolution of Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU) from a struggling and nationally marginal institution in the 1970s to a major healthcare provider and research powerhouse in the twenty-first century. Although Graves draws on numerous internal documents and newspaper reports for this well-documented account, the core of his information comes from extensive interviews with key actors. As he writes, “Peter Kohler . . . contacted me in the winter of 2014 to see if I might be interested in helping him and the five members of his former administrative team write a book. . . . He and his team initially set out to write this story themselves as a kind of collective memoir. When I joined them, it became clear I would need to write this remarkable story with them as the key players and primary sources” (p. xiii). The resulting book falls neatly into two parts. The first half is a hero-team story that follows a plotline similar to The Avengers or Guardians of the Galaxy: In the face of an existential threat (a medical school and hospital in dire financial straits) a strong leader appears (university president Peter Kohler) who assembles a team of co-workers (Leslie Hallick, Janet Billups, Lois Davis, Timothy Goldfarb, James Walker) to join battle with the forces of inertia (the Oregon higher-education bureaucracy). They overcome jealousy of other universities, build alliances in the legislature, and win independence as a 432 OHQ vol. 118, no. 3 freestanding public corporation that unleashes entrepreneurial energy to transform their institution. Although committee hearings and speeches to civic groups...