Nonfiction
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
By Elizabeth Young
(New York University Press)
In this book, Young interprets the figure of a black American Frankenstein as it appears throughout nineteenth-and twentieth-century U.S. culture. She argues that the Frankenstein monster has served as a powerful metaphor in U.S. culture over the last two centuries for both reinforcing racial hierarchy and shaping anti-racist critique.
Elizabeth Young is professor of English and gender studies at MHC, and author of Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War.
China: Fragile Superpower
By Susan L. Shirk
(Oxford University Press)
Since the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, Chinese leaders have been haunted by the fear that their days in power are numbered. Unless we understand China’s brittle politics, Shirk argues, the United States faces the possibility of unavoidable conflict with this fragile communist regime.
Susan L. Shirk ’67 is the former deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for U.S. relations with China, and is director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California–San Diego.
Christian Sisterhood, Race Relations, and the YWCA, 1906–46
By Nancy Marie Robertson
(University of Illinois Press)
Robertson has written a “thorough history that while focused on the YWCA, tells the larger story of interracial work,” says a reviewer in the American Historical Review. Robertson finds that even in one of the most progressive organizations of the time—the YWCA ended its own policy of segregation in 1946—the history of civil rights was not one of inevitable progress but of continuing tension and negotiation.
Nancy Marie Robertson ’78 is associate professor of history and philanthropic studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, where she also directs the women’s studies program.
A Time of Our Own: In Celebration of Women Over 60
By Elinor Miller Greenberg and Fay W. Whitney
(Fulcrum Publishing)
This book speaks to a generation of women who were the pacesetters in creating new ways to balance family, work, and community activities as they encounter the third chapter of their lives. Through extensive interviews and experience, Greenberg and Whitney address new roles, responsibilities, and relationships after age sixty.
Elinor Miller Greenberg ’53 designs and administers higher-education programs for adults. She is the author of nine books.
Universal Design for the Home: Great-Looking, Great-Living Design for All Ages, Abilities, and Circumstances
By Wendy A. Jordan
(Quarry Books)
Universal design emerged some years ago as a template for home safety for elderly, handicapped, and very young people. Those early designs often seemed institutional, and Jordan’s book shows how this design niche has entered the mainstream. Highly visual, the book features fresh ideas, good-sense solutions, and how-to tips.
Wendy Adler Jordan ’68 is the author of ten books, senior contributing editor of Professional Remodeler magazine and a contributor to HGTVPro.com.
Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution
By Lois Brown
(University of North Carolina Press)
Born into an educated, free black family in Portland, Maine, in 1859, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins was a pioneering playwright, journalist, novelist, feminist, and public intellectual. This biography looks at her early family life, ancestral connections to New England, the African slave trade, and twentieth-century race activism in the North.
Lois Brown is associate professor of English at MHC and director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts.
Outsmarting the SAT: An Expert Tutor Reveals Her Proven Techniques, Strategies, and Confidence-Building Exercises That Will Maximize Your Score
By Elizabeth King
(Ten Speed Press)
Test-prep consultant King offers a down-to-earth coaching approach and proven strategies for doing your best on the college entrance exam. The book features a broad range of practice problems and clear explanations to help teach students all they need to know to “best the test.”
Elizabeth Syben King ’01 is a private SAT coach who takes the test annually, and consistently gets an aggregate score in the ninety-ninth percentile.
Side Effects: A Prosecutor, a Whistleblower, and a Bestselling Antidepressant on Trial
By Alison Bass
(Algonquin Books)
Going behind the scenes of a landmark court case that exposed increased suicide rates among adolescents taking the popular antidepressants Paxil and Prozac, Bass chronicles how and why drug companies were finally made to publish negative results from research studies. She outlines how a subsequent congressional investigation prompted the FDA to mandate strict warnings for all antidepressants and laid bare the greed, corruption, and negligence of many players in the drug industry.
Alison Bass has covered medicine, science, and technology for the Boston Globe and many other publications. She currently teaches multimedia and health and science journalism at MHC. (See “Brainstorms” in this issue for a profile of Bass.)
Transplantings: Essays on Great German Poets with Translations
By Peter Viereck
(Transaction Publishers)
Transplantings provides new insight into Viereck as a poet and a public intellectual. In this look at German poetical history, he reviews Rilke, Goethe, and Novalis and probes the work of Sefan George and Georg Heym. A sixty-five-year project, the manuscript was completed shortly before the author’s death in 2008.
Peter Viereck, professor emeritus of history at MHC, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a seminal figure in the birth of American conservatism.
Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic
By Mary Kelley
(University of North Carolina Press)
In post-Revolutionary and antebellum America, women shaped their lives anew through education in female academies and seminaries, including the early MHC. Mary Kelley argues that liberal learning enabled a profound change in gender relations: the movement of women into public life.
Mary Bremer Kelley ’65 is professor of history, American culture, and women’s studies at the University of Michigan.
Fires in the Middle School Bathroom: Advice for Teachers From Middle Schoolers
By Kathleen Cushman and Laura Rogers
(The New Press)
Diverse student voices offer teachers insights into how their instructional practices actually play out in the middle-school classroom. Talking to forty students in five cities, the authors offer new teachers, especially, insights into how to forge better relationships with adolescents. Hint: be nice and be strict.
Laura C. Rogers ’72 is a school psychologist and lecturer in the education department at Tufts University.
The Outdoor Athlete
By Courtenay Schurman and Doug Schurman
(Human Kinetics)
Whether increasing your upper-body strength for an upcoming climb or building endurance for a multiday hike, The Outdoor Athlete prepares you with detailed conditioning programs for sixteen activities, including kayaking, rock climbing, cross-country skiing, and mountain biking. It also covers nutritional requirements and environmental demands.
Courtenay Wilkerson Schurman ’88 has more than ten years’ experience training wilderness athletes. She and her husband, Doug, own Body Results, which specializes in outdoor strength and conditioning.
Fiction
Beyond the Blossoming Fields
By Jun’ichi Watanabe; translated by Anna Husson Isozaki and Deborah Iwabuchi (Alma Books)
Beyond the Blossoming Fields is the story of Japan’s first female physician and the obstacles she faced in becoming a doctor. A bestseller in Japan, the book chronicles Ginko Ogino’s quest to cure the gonorrhea she contracted from her husband, subsequent divorce and ostracism from her family, and her personal victory over nineteenth-century male domination.
The last translation by Anna Husson Isozaki ’90 was Crossfire, by Miyuki Miyabe. She teaches translation and communication at a women’s college in central Japan.
Poetry
Naming Rights
By Melinda Thomsen
(Finishing Line Press)
This moving, energetic book of poems reveals wit and spirit as Melinda Thomsen explores all the metaphors of baseball. Her book shows us that for an obsessive fan, baseball is life’s central motif, right up there with family, literature, food, and sex—what more is there?
Melinda R. Thomsen ’83 teaches vocational ESL at La Guardia Community College in Queens, New York. Her poetry has been published in Heliotrope and Poetry East.
Young Readers
All About Vee
By C. Leigh Purtill
(Razorbill)
Veronica May, “Big Vee,” is a bubbly and confident eighteen-year-old with a weight problem and big dreams. After caring for her widowed father, who is about to remarry, she heads to Hollywood to seek her day in the sun. Between shifts at a coffee bar, she deals with love and loss, and finally finds a place in the spotlight.
C. Leigh Purtill ’88 lives in Los Angeles and is also the author of Love, Meg.
A Child’s Book of Blessings and Prayers
By Eliza Blanchard and Rocco Baviera
(Skinner House Books)
This selection of poems, prayers, and blessings is drawn from around the world and meant to address the spiritual needs of children. Prayers to encourage service and gratitude from Hindu, Sioux, Islamic, Jewish, and Unitarian Universalist traditions highlight common threads among all faiths and are accompanied by full-color illustrations.
A former English teacher, Eliza Shelton Blanchard ’72 was ordained in 2004 as a minister of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Grafton and Upton, Massachusetts.
Finding the First T. Rex
By Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld
(Random House)
Following hand-drawn directions to the badlands of Montana, paleontologist Barnum Brown in 1902 dug up a jawbone edged with six-inch-long teeth. No one had ever seen such a monstrous creature before, and soon Brown was on a quest to discover the skeleton of the mystery carnivore.
Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld ’76 is the author of numerous science books for young people, including Fossil Fever and The Curse of King Tut’s Mummy.
Closer Look
Spiral Jetta Author Explores “Land Art”
Erin E. Hogan ’88 was determined to do something out of the ordinary with her vacation time. Ultra-urban, mostly confined in her travels to the area apartments of friends, and quite possibly staring at an early midlife crisis, she set out from Chicago in her Volkswagen Jetta to see the poles, rocks, tubes, and gashes that make up the American land-art movement.
Director of public affairs at the Art Institute of Chicago and with a PhD in art history, Hogan had long been interested in seeing these massive earthworks that were created in the 1970s and 1980s and situated in the desert West. From Robert Smithson’s coil of rocks, Spiral Jetty, in Utah, to Michael Heizer’s half-mile-long notches set into a mesa, Double Negative, in Nevada, she traveled miles of dusty, dry roads to get to Walter De Maria’s 400 stainless steel poles, Lightning Field, in New Mexico and finally to Donald Judd’s 100 untitled works in milled aluminum in Texas.
The monumental creations were made in response to traditional gallery spaces the artists considered confining and over-commercialized. Consequently, the works both taunt and beg visitors to find them, and then to embrace their shifting composition. Hogan wrote Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip Through the Land Art of the American West to share criticism of the art written by others, as well as her own understanding; her personal awakening is a narrative bonus.
“I was really interested in the way that land art transforms your sense of space,” says Hogan on the phone from Missoula, Montana, where she is attending a university conference on art and place. She has long been a fan of minimalism for its reorganization of space, and thought land art would also offer a different understanding of the body in relationship to the landscape.
What she found was something altogether different. “It didn’t have as much to do with space but [instead] with time,” she says of her experience with Lightning Field in particular. “You have to spend twenty-four hours there [in a cabin with strangers] and you have to live through all the cycles of light on this particular work. It was being attentive to that over twenty-four hours that finally had that sort of transformative effect on me.”
Artistic insight often edged over into personal understanding. When she toured Marfa, the multistructure art mecca in Texas where Donald Judd’s work is displayed, she once again realized that the work was not about objects in space but “time and change and having a fixed place that the universe revolves around. I had always thought [the fixed place] was me; but these works were that fixed place.”—M.H.B.
