Faith Barrett ’87, To Fight Aloud is Very Brave: American Poetry and the Civil War, University of Massachusetts Press, 2012, 328 pp.
In the 1920s, novelist Virginia Woolf wrote that war stirs the poet in us—most likely with the Great War (aka World War I) in mind. Rupert Brooke, the brilliant soldier-poet, died young but left prophetic [...]
Fletcher Wortmann ’09, Triggered: A Memoir of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin’s Press, NYC, 2012.
To carry the burden of a chronic illness or learning disability during the college years is what I call The Fifth Course. The Fifth Course is more than a burden: It is both an imposed and possible learning opportunity. [...]
David Kennedy ’80, H ’11, Don’t Shoot: One Man, A Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America, Bloomsbury USA, 2011.
David Kennedy ’80 describes his extra-ordinary book as a work of “experimental nonfiction.” Some people refer to it as a memoir. I call it an “autobiography of public policy.” Kennedy, a well-known and [...]
Mark Whitaker ’78, My Long Trip Home: A Family Memoir, Simon and Schuster, 2011.
Mark Whitaker ’78 found that he had first to forgive, and then came understanding. It struck me that each reader of this arresting memoir would react differently to the Whitaker family history, but a common realization would be that for each examined [...]
James C. Hormel and Erin Martin, Fit To Serve: Reflections on a Secret Life, Private Struggle, and Public Battle to Become the First Openly Gay U.S. Ambassador, New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2011.
Reading this book, I often noticed how well its beautifully designed dust jacket conveys the book’s central message: that a proud gay man ably [...]
Stephen Tignor ’92, High Strung: Björn Borg, John McEnroe, and the Untold Story of Tennis’s Fiercest Rivalry, Harper, 2011
To reflect upon a work about untold tennis stories, I had only to turn to the weathered photographs on the cinder-block walls of my tennis office at Swarthmore, and there he is: All-American Stephen “Tigs” Tignor, on [...]
Mara Hvistendahl ’02, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs, New York) 2011.
Population control. Masculinization. Communism. Fertility. Human trafficking. Sex selection. Technology. Tradition. Imperialism. Demography. Abortion. Economics. All of these—and more—are brilliantly woven together by Mara Hvistendahl in her compelling exposé about the seemingly disconnected [...]
In October 1945, in the ruins of Nuremberg, Germany, the victorious Allied nations convened the first in a series of groundbreaking legal proceedings. The trials marked a milestone for international law, setting a precedent for international criminal prosecution that we struggle to live up to even today.
The Nazi defendants, despite their horrific crimes and their [...]
BOOKS
Courtney Bender ’91 and Pamela E. Klassen (editors), After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2010. This multidisciplinary, scholarly essay collection investigates the meaning of religious diversity in a variety of settings, examining its effect on legal decisions and political and social interactions.
Carolyn Burke ’61, No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, Alfred A. [...]
Justin Kramon ’02, Finny, Random House, 2010
Justin Kramon ’02 was already an established fiction writer, with stories published in journals such as Glimmer Train and Story Quarterly, well before he began working on the novel Finny. Kramon attributes his early work on the novel to conversations with agents who urged him toward the longer form: [...]