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PAGE TURNERS
UCR Goes
Around the
World in Page
Turners: From
the Kibbutzim
of Israel to
Metaphors in
the Chinese
Language to
the Music of El
Salvador
These books are available for
purchase at the UCR Campus Store
and online at www.ucrcampusstore.
ucr.edu They have been discounted
up to 30 percent.
28 | UCR Spring 2013
The Renewal of the Kibbutz: From
Reform to Transformation
By Raymond Russell, Robert
Hanneman and Shlomo Getz
Rutgers University Press
May 2013, 192 pages
In Israel, a kibbutz is a
communally owned agricultural
settlement, governed under
collectivist principles by its
members. Starting in the late
1980s, many kibbutzim — whose
members work, reside, eat together
and share income — underwent
varying degrees of reform. Members
could work outside of the organization,
but wages went to the
collective. Apartments could be
expanded, but housing remained
kibbutz-owned. In 1995, change
accelerated. Kibbutzim began to
pay salaries based on the market
value of a member’s work. As a
result of such changes, the
“renewed” kibbutz emerged. By
2010, 75 percent of Israel’s 248
nonreligious kibbutzim fit into this
new category.
This book explores the waves
of reforms since 1990. Looking
through the lens of organizational
theories that predict how open or
closed a group will be to change,
the authors find that less successful
kibbutzim were most receptive to
reform, and reforms then spread
through imitation from the
economically weaker kibbutzim to
the strong.
Raymond Russell and Robert
Hanneman are professors of
sociology at UCR.
Term Limits and Their Conse-
quences: The Aftermath of Legis-
lative Reform
By Stanley Caress (’78) and Todd
Kunioka
State University of New York Press
September 2012, 205 pages
Legislative term limits remain
a controversial feature of the
American political landscape. This
book provides a clear, comprehensive
and nonpartisan look at all
aspects of this contentious subject.
Stanley M. Caress and Todd T.
Kunioka trace the emergence of the
grassroots movement that
supported term limits and explain
why the idea of term limits became
popular with voters. Utilizing a
blend of quantitative data and
interviews, Caress and Kunioka
thoughtfully discuss the impact of
term limits, focusing in particular
on the nation’s largest state,
California. They scrutinize voting
data to determine if term limits
have altered election outcomes or
the electoral chances of women and
minority candidates and reveal how
restricting a legislator’s time in
office has changed political careers
and ambitions.
Stanley Caress is professor of
political science at the
University of West Georgia.
The Myths of Happiness: What
Should Make You Happy, but
Doesn’t, What Shouldn’t Make You
Happy, but Does
By Sonja Lyubomirsky
Penguin Press
January 2013, 320 pages
In “The Myths of Happiness,”
Sonja Lyubomirsky isolates the
major turning points of adult life,
looking to both successes
(marriage, children, wealth) and
challenges (divorce, financial ruin,
illness) to reveal that our misconceptions
about the impact of such
events are perhaps the greatest
threats to our long-term well-being.
Lyubomirsky argues that we
have been given false promises —
myths that assure us that lifelong
happiness will be attained once we
hit the culturally confirmed markers
of adult success. Because we
expect the best (or the worst) from
life’s turning points, we shortsightedly
place too much weight on
our initial emotional responses.
“The Myths of Happiness”
empowers readers to look beyond
their first response, sharing
scientific evidence that often it is
our mindset — not our circumstances
— that matters.
A corrective course on
happiness and a call to regard life’s
twists and turns with a more open
mind, “The Myths of Happiness”
shares practical lessons with
life-changing potential.
Sonja Lyubomirsky is a professor
of psychology at UCR.