Carolyn Moxely Rouse ’87 Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease, University of California Press, 2009
With good reason, one should hesitate before describing an ethnography about those with an incurable disease—and the broken health care system that attempts to treat them—as “wonderful,” but such is the elegant scholarship of Carolyn Moxely Rouse [...]

Kristin Levine ’97, The Best Bad Luck I Ever Had (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2009)
Emily Chenoweth ’94, Hello Goodbye (Random House, 2009)
Two first novels by Swarthmore women are a joy to read. One is set in rural Moundville, Ala., in summer 1917, and the other at an historic resort in New Hampshire’s White Mountains. In The [...]

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot ’66, The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009
The Third Chapter reminds me of conversations I have savored at Swarthmore. Like those, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot’s book invites new thinking about complex human issues, shares deep reflections about personal experience, invokes the findings of scholarly [...]

Peter Andreas ’87, Blue Helmets and Black Markets, The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo, Cornell University Press, 2008.
Peter Andreas is a master at uncovering the secrets behind the official stories. Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo looks beyond the popular tale of the siege—local [...]

Martha Sielman ’82, author and curator, Masters: Art Quilts—Major Works by Leading Artists (Lark Books, 2008)
When people ask me how I got involved with art quilts,” writes Martha Sielman in her introduction to this sumptuous volume, “I tell them that it all began when I was very little and my mother let me play with [...]

Covert: My Years Infiltrating the Mob
(Union Square Press, 2008)
In the New Jersey suburbs where I grew up, guessing which of your neighbors might be a mafioso was something of a parlor game. But it wasn’t a game to Bob Delaney, whose just-published book Covert, written with Dave Scheiber ’76, recounts his tension-filled years as an [...]