alumni books – Page 7

Every year we review dozens of books and publish several author essays, and a book excerpt or two, by Wesleyan alumni in the pages of Wesleyan magazine. With the holidays upon us, 'tis the season to take another look at just a handful of the many selections made by Wesleyan magazine Arts and Culture Editor David Low this year. Happy reading! (more…)

Read more about the discussion in this Wesleyan Argus article and more about his book in this Q&A, below: Q: What motivated you to write the book? A: I wrote it to give voice to patients and families touched by severe brain injury and chose this genre because it was a complex interdisciplinary problem that needed a broader frame than that afforded by the typical truncated article in a medical journal. Rights Come to Mind is a story that straddles the sciences and the humanities and fundamentally is a question of how scientific advance compels us to change our views about ethics…

Award-winning film and television director, producer and writer Joss Whedon ’87 is the subject of the informative and entertaining Joss Whedon: The Biography (Chicago Review Press) by Amy Pascale, a director at MTV. The book begins by tracing Whedon’s growth from a creative child and teenager who spent years away from his family at an elite English boarding school (Winchester College in Hampshire), through his early successes—which often turned into frustration in television (Roseanne) and film (Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The biography then covers his breakout career turn as the creator, writer, and director of the highly successful Buffy television series, which…

In his new book, The Forensic Historian: Using Science to Reexamine the Past (M. E. Sharpe), Robert Williams ’60 demonstrates how seemingly cold cases from history have been solved or had new light shed on them by scientists and historians using new forensic evidence. He provides examples ranging in time from Oetzi the Iceman—who died 5,300 years ago in the Swiss Alps from an arrow wound, yet is known to have had brown eyes Lyme disease, type-O blood, an intolerance to lactose, cavities, and tattoos—to the process of identifying Osama Bin Laden’s body in 2011. “Since World War II, forensic…

Stuart Frank ’70, has been awarded the Historic New England Book Prize for 2013, for Ingenious Contrivances, Curiously Carved: Scrimshaw in the New Bedford Whaling Museum, published in Boston by David R. Godine. The award was formally presented on Nov. 3 at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. The book is also the recipient of the Boston Bookmakers Prize for the year’s best work in the pictorial category. Frank’s book brings his expert’s eye to the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s intriguing collection. By the middle of the 19th century, the New England port of New Bedford was among the ﬁve richest…

David Rabban '71 is the author of Law’s History: American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History (Cambridge University Press), concentrating on the central role of history in late 19th-century American legal thought. In the decades following the Civil War, the founding generation of professional legal scholars in the United States drew from the evolutionary social thought that pervaded Western intellectual life on both sides of the Atlantic. Their historical analysis of law as an inductive science rejected deductive theories and supported moderate legal reform, conclusions that challenge conventional accounts of legal formalism. The book is unprecedented in its…

John Whitmore ’62 has co-edited Sources of Vietnamese Tradition (Columbia University Press), a fascinating guide to 2,000 years of Vietnamese history and a comprehensive overview of the society and state of Vietnam. Well-chosen selections deal with key figures, issues, and events, and they create a thematic portrait of the country’s developing territory, politics, culture and relations with neighbors. The volume explores Vietnam’s remarkable independence in the face of Chinese and other external pressures while it recognizes the complexity of the Vietnamese experience over the years. The anthology begins with selections that cover more than a millennium of Chinese dominance over…

In Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindistani Music (Wesleyan University Press), Matthew Rahaim ’00 studies the role of the body in Indian vocal music. Indian vocalists have long traced intricate shapes with their hands while improvising melody. Although every vocalist has an idiosyncratic gestural style, students inherit ways of shaping melodic space from their teachers, and the motion of the hand and voice are always intimately connected. Musicking Bodies is among the first extended studies of the relationship between gesture and melody. Rahaim draws on years of vocal training, ethnography, and close analysis to examine the ways in which…

(Story contributed by Laignee Johnson ’13) Was Johnny Appleseed a real person? Author and professor Ray Silverman MAT ’67 addresses this question and and many others about the American folk figure in his new book, The Core of Johnny Appleseed: The Unknown Story of a Spiritual Trailblazer (Swedenborg Foundation Press). Silverman’s spiritual biography of Johnny Chapman, the man who came to be known as Johnny Appleseed, seeks to separate reality from legend and find the real man behind all the tall-tale misconceptions. The book depicts Chapman as a businessman full of Christian conviction. Silverman leaves behind portraits of Chapman as…

(Story contributed by Laignee Barron '13) Ellen Forney ’89 is the author of a new graphic novel Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo and Me (Gotham Books), which follows the artist’s diagnosis with bipolar disorder shortly before her 30th birthday. In this intimate confession, Forney delves into her struggles with being accepted into “Club van Gogh.” “This unflinchingly honest memoir” (Kirkus Reviews) details Forney’s fears that her disorder could curtail her creativity and livelihood. Beginning with the manic state that led to her diagnosis, Forney explores what it means to be a “crazy artist.” At first disbelieves her psychiatrist, Forney is filled…

(Story contributed by Gabe Rosenberg '16) Harvard University professor John Stauffer ’91 is the co-editor of The Tribunal: Responses to John Brown and the Harper’s Ferry Raid (Belnap Press of Harvard University Press). Co-edited with Zoe Trodd (professor of American literature at the University of Nottingham), the book assembles a collection of responses to John Brown’s 1859 attack on a federal arsenal in Virginia. The ill-fated raid of Brown and 21 other men--five free black and 16 white men--was intended to provoke an uprising of African Americans against the “scourge of slavery.” While three members formed a rearguard at a…

(Contributed by Gabe Rosenberg ’16) Two years after he passed away, Werner T. Angress ’49 is having his story told to the world – again. While Angress found himself as a prominent subject of another Wesleyan alum’s book – The Virginia Plan: William B. Thalhimer and a Rescue From Nazi Germany (The History Press, 2011), Robert Gillette ’59’s history of the successful rescue effort of 21 Jewish adolescents during World War II – he finished translating his own memoir from German to English. Angress died before either account of his life could be released, however, so his children took it upon themselves to publish…

Season’s Readings!

Fins ’82 Discusses the Treatment of Brain Injury Patients and His New Book

Whedon ’87 Is Subject of New Biography

Book by Williams ’60 Studies History and Forensic Analysis

Frank ’70 Receives New England Book Prize

Rabban ’71 Analyzes Late 19th-Century Legal Scholarship

Whitmore ’62 Co-Edits Essential Anthology About Vietnamese History

Rahaim ’00 Examines Gesture and Voice in Indian Vocal Music

Silverman MAT ’67 Takes Fresh Look at Johnny Appleseed Legend

Forney ’89 Writes Graphic Novel on Bipolar Disorder

Stauffer ’91 Co-Edits Book on Reponses to John Brown Raid

Angress ’49: Posthumous Memoir Revisits Holocaust Escape, Post-war Life