Off the Shelf-spring 2009
Words Worth a Second Look
Non-Fiction
Sex and Power: Defining History, Shaping Societies
By Rita Banerji (Penguin Books)
In this sociological and historical study, Banerji examines changes in the dynamics of sexual morality and customs in India and argues that the social power hierarchy determines the moral overview of society, not a set of preexisting or enduring ethics. Overpopulation, AIDS, and female genocide are the result of collective sexual malfunctioning, she argues, and must be addressed in the context of the social and economic power hierarchy.
Rita Banerji ’90 is a freelance writer and photographer based in Calcutta. She is the founder of the online campaign, The 50 Million Missing, www.50millionmissing.in featured in the summer 2008 Quarterly.
Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema
By Negar Mottahedeh (Duke University Press)
Throughout the 1970s, feminist scholars bemoaned the fact that the desiring or malegaze approach to camera angles dominated almost all movies and objectified women. Mottahedeh argues that after the revolution in Iran, convention was unintentionally turned upside down when modesty laws required women be veiled at all times, transforming the desiring gaze into an averted one, and national cinema into women’s cinema.
Negar Mottahedeh ’90 is assistant professor of literature and women’s studies at Duke University. She was born in Iran.
On the Line: Inside the World of Le Bernardin
By Eric Ripert and Christine Muhlke (Artisan Books)
On the Line is a fascinating look at the inner workings of the world-class restaurant Le Bernardin in New York. Told from the point of view of the principal players— chefs, maître d’, sommelier—the story lets you feel the creativity and accomplishment as 150,000 plates of culinary perfection are sent out from the kitchen every year.
Christine Muhlke ’92 is an editor at The New York Times. She has written for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Food & Wine, and other publications.
The Language of Work: Technical Communication at Lukens Steel 1810 to 1925
By Carol Siri Johnson (Baywood)
Johnson traces the evolution of communication at an extraordinary American business spanning two centuries. As industry steel and iron standards and processes were formalized and became more complex, writing and literacy, and what came to be known as technical writing, emerged as an essential part of the industrial process and drove changing relationships among workers, managers, and customers.
Carol Siri Johnson ’80 is an assistant professor in the humanities department at New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Fruits of Victory: The Woman’s Land Army in the Great War
By Elaine F. Weiss (Potomac Books)
Four hundred MHC students took up hoes in 1917 to work on the college farm during the first summer of World War I. Spurred on by MHC President Mary Woolley, students, faculty, and alumnae served in the Woman’s Land Army in 1918 to help feed a nation at war. Weiss rescues this largely untold story of an amazing mobilization of “farmerettes” who harvested everything from cherries in Michigan to cotton in Georgia with determination and patriotism.
Elaine F. Weiss is a journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and the Christian Science Monitor.
A Shoemaker’s Story
By Anthony Lee (Princeton University)
In 1870, seventy-five Chinese immigrants stepped off a train in North Adams, Massachusetts. Imported by the local shoe manufacturer as strikebreakers, they were lined up along the factory wall and photographed. Lee examines the social forces that brought the photo into being and the events and images it spawned.
Anthony Lee is associate professor of art at MHC.
Young Readers
Always in Trouble
By Corinne Demas and Noah Z. Jones (Scholastic Press)
No matter what day of the week it is, Emma’s dog Toby is up to no good. Monday he gets into the garbage. Wednesday he eats a loaf of bread. Thursday he barks in the middle of the night. But Emma loves her dog and is determined to make him household friendly. Her diligent efforts to train him are almost perfect.
Corinne Demas is the author of numerous children’s books, including Saying Goodbye to Lulu. She is an English professor at MHC.
Guide to Hiking China’s Old Road to Shu
By Hope Justman (iUniverse)
This self-published guidebook describes nineteen hikes along remote and
mountainous stretches of one of China’s most famous imperial roads.
Included is information on food, lodging, transportation, and local
guides, as well as thirteen pages of English-Chinese phrases and menu
selections.
Hope Justman ’64 has spent nearly three years of the last thirteen hiking China’s famous old roads. She is currently at work on a guidebook to the southwestern Silk Road.
The Creative Discipline: Mastering the Art and Science of Innovation
By Nancy K. Napier and Mikael Nilsson (Praeger)
Combining research on creative organizations in several sectors, this book argues that innovative organizations known for doing things differently approach creativity and innovation in similar, disciplined ways, regardless of industry or field. The authors also point to the importance of teams, office space, and the business culture in supporting creative endeavors.
Nancy K. Napier ’74 is professor of international business and executive director of the Centre for Creativity and Innovation at Boise State University.
Women. Period.
Edited by Julia Watts, Parneshia Jones, Jo Ruby and Elizabeth Slade (Spinsters Ink)
This collection of stories, poetry, and essays explores menstruation in all its various permutations including the embarrassment of it starting when you’re wearing white pants, the relief of its arrival when you fear you might be pregnant, and the privilege of being able to make life—and even take it away, that Adrienne Anifant ’00 talks about in her story, “Strange Woman Before Me.”
Adrienne Anifant ’00 has had her fiction, essays, and book reviews published at home and abroad. She lives in New York City.
Picture of Me: Who I Am in 221 Questions
By Kate Marshall and David Marshall (Broadway Books)
A fill-in book with prompts, checklists, and places for photos and doodles, this book helps reveal a clearer portrait of who you are and what makes you tick. You’ll consider what you love about your closest friends, what your three best physical features are, and who would star in a movie version of your love life. Picture of Me is a fun and helpful tool to inspire a vision of where you’re been and where you’re headed.
Kate Lacy Marshall ’81 and her husband have written numerous other journal-type books including The Book of Us: A Journal of Your Love Story in 150 Questions. Visit their Web site.
Why Did You Come Here? Adventures of an American in Finland
By C. Liebenow (Caroline Liebenow)
Caroline Liebenow moved to Finland to fulfill a dream of living abroad in a place considered an unlikely host country. In this memoir, she chronicles a “nothing-to-lose” attitude that took her through refreshing periods of growth, a victory learning Finnish, and learning to make hay at a farm in Lapland.
Caroline Liebenow ’97 is an artisan and writer now living in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Have We Lost Our Children or Have They Lost Us?
By Catherine A. Hosmer (iUniverse)
Hosmer, a mother of four, fears the bond between parents and children is rupturing and she wants to know why. After interviewing hundreds of parents, psychologists, and educators, she points to a wide array of factors challenging children and their parents—schools, pop culture, sex, drugs—and offers suggestions for dealing more effectively with each one.
Catherine Farmer Hosmer ’49 is the author of six novels and three-non-fiction books including Flashover and A Wonderful Place to Live.
Writing for Understanding: Using Backward Design to Help All Students Write Effectively
By The Vermont Writing Collaborative (Authentic Education)
Writing for Understanding gives teachers the theoretical and research base of “backward design” principles, based on the idea that teachers plan best when they focus on the end goal, a solid piece of writing by students, and plan backward for specific instruction to reach the goal. The book takes teachers through the planning stages and offers examples of student work at each stage from public-school classrooms in Vermont.
Joey Lornell Hawkins ’69 has been a teacher for more than thirty years. She is a writing specialist for the state of Vermont and a member of the Vermont Writing Collaborative.
Men and Angels: The Art of James Christensen
Paintings by James Christiansen, with Kate Horowitz (Greenwich Workshop Press)
Labeled a fantasy painter in his early career, the artist James Christensen has come to defy categorization as he casts a perceptive eye on the evolution of the human spirit through art. The text conveys the former Brigham Young University professor’s infectious enthusiasm for art history and includes more than 300 paintings.
Kathryn Horowitz ’05 is a writer and poet living in Connecticut.
Green Matters: The Residential Builders, Visionaries, Communities, & Lifestyles Shaping Atlanta’s Landscape
By Michael J. Eastman and Jill Elizabeth Westfall (iUniverse)
This book offers an inside look at one of the country’s emerging “organically green” regions, and features interviews with business leaders and lifestyle experts. Read it to see where the Atlanta housing market is going, how to optimize your investment as a home owner or buyer, and how to adopt a greener lifestyle.
Jill Elizabeth Westfall ’93 is a frequent contributor to Money and People magazines and has been published in newspapers nationwide.
A Closer Look at: Mary Lyon: Documents and Writings, edited by James E. Hartley
A new collection of Mary Lyon’s writings holds some revelations—for example, her top priority was not women’s education. Read even one page of Mary Lyon: Documents and Writings, edited by MHC economist James E. Hartley, and you’ll realize that religious zeal was what motivated Mount Holyoke’s founder.
Hartley’s book collects Lyon’s personal letters; records of Mount Holyoke’s founding; her only book manuscript; and a collection of Lyon’s sayings quoted by devotees.
The object of her school was to “render female education a handmaid to the gospel and an efficient auxiliary in the great work of renovating the world,” Lyon wrote. Hartley says that “religion was central to her own life … everything else was secondary.” Influenced by a nationwide religious revival, Mary Lyon was a woman of her times.
Yet she was also ahead of her time. “We don’t give her enough credit for realizing that women could play this huge role [as missionaries and teachers] and that they deserve every bit of education they can get so they can go do it we
ll,” Hartley says. “At the time, no one else was thinking women needed the same education as men.”
However, viewing Lyon as a protofeminist does her a disservice, he argues. “She is a feminist if we use a broad enough definition, but it’s a very different kind of feminism. She was saying that women’s roles of teacher, missionary, and mother are at least as important as men’s work. That was a novel idea. But she had a very distinct sense of the roles she saw women playing.”
While Lyon is justly celebrated for offering women an academic curriculum equal to that at men’s schools, her ability to create a permanent college was just as crucial. “There were other schools for women, but every one was tied to a person. And when that person would leave, retire, or die, the school would vanish,” he explains. “That’s why she was so adamant about [Mount Holyoke] not being ‘Miss Lyon’s School.’”
He believes that Lyon “would be appalled by today’s college. “At whatever point MHC lost its intense religious feeling is the point at which I think she’d have said, ‘This isn’t what I designed.’” She would, he allows, be pleased at the education women receive here. “But if you gave her the choice of maintaining academic standards or the centrality of religion, she’d pick religion.”
Her book, A Missionary Offering, has a religious theme and doesn’t even mention women’s education. “Part of the reason Mary Lyon gets dow
nplayed in history is that she just doesn’t fit what we want her to be,” Hartley says. “She was really important, but we have to take her on her own terms.”—E.H.W.
Listen to an audio interview* with Professor James E. Hartley about Mary Lyon: Documents and Writings.
To learn more about Mary Lyon:
• Mount Holyoke’s Mary Lyon pages
• Some Mary Lyon quotations
• National Women’s Hall of Fame
*If you don't see the Flash audio player above, click here to listen to the audio interview.
