David LowThe prolific Paul Dickson ’61 is the author of the book Bill Veeck: Baseball Maverick (Walker Books), the first major biography of one of the most influential and smartest figures in baseball history. Dickson used primary sources, including more than 100 interviews to tell the story of Veeck (1914-1986) who was a baseball impresario, an innovator, and a staunch advocate of racial equality. Admired by baseball fans, Veeck was known for his promotional genius for the sport, while his feel for the game led him to propose innovations way ahead of their time. His deep sense of fairness helped usher…
Lawrence P. Jackson ’90 is the author of My Father’s Name: A Black Virginia Family after the Civil War (University of Chicago Press). Part detective story and part wrenching family history, the book delves into the history of Jackson’s family in slavery and emancipation in Virginia’s Pittsylvania County. Johnson's publication was recently featured on NPR's All Things Considered. This summer, n+ magazine,a publication of literature, culture and politics, will include a long essay with sections from the book. Jackson’s research led him to the house of distant relations. He then became absorbed by the search for his ancestors and aware…
David Rynick ‘74 is the author of This Truth Never Fails: A Zen Memoir in Four Seasons (Wisdom Publications). This intimate collection of short observations and reflections is a personal record of ongoing practice and study of the extraordinary experience we call ordinary life. Although the volume was written over a period of several years, the brief sections are arranged into the cycle of the seasons of a single year. Each piece stands alone but is also part of an overall narrative that involves leaving a home of 18 years and creating a Zen temple in a lovely old Victorian…
An artist who plans to effectively draw clothing and drapery must learn to recognize the basic shapes of clothing and how the principles of physics act upon those shapes. In The Artist’s Guide to Drawing the Clothed Figure(Watson-Guptill), Michael Massen ’84 presents his thorough and novel approach to drapery by first describing clothing and drapery as basic shapes, and then illustrating how the mechanics of physics cause these shapes to bend, fold, or wrinkle in predictable ways. Massen shares how to use these concepts to depict all types of clothing in a variety of mediums. This guide focuses on the…
A fascinating study by theater critic and scholar Jonathan Kalb '81, Great Lengths: Seven Works of Marathon Theater (University of Michigan Press), considers large-scale theater productions that often run five hours or more and present special challenges to the artists involved as well as the audience. He takes a close look at seven internationally prominent theater productions, including Tony Kushner's Angels in America, Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach, the Royal Shakespeare Company's Nicholas Nickleby, Peter Brooks’s The Mahabharata, and the "durational works" of the British experimental company Forced Entertainment. Diverse and savvy viewers who may otherwise be distracted by film,…
Cati Coe ’92 is a co-editor (with Rachel Reynolds, Deborah Boehm, Julia Meredith Hess, and Heather Rae-Espinosa) of Everyday Ruptures: Children, Youth, and Migration in Global Perspective (Vanderbilt University Press), which illuminates the wide-ranging continuities and disruptions in the experiences of children around the world, those who participate in and those who are affected by migration. When children, youth, and adults migrate, that migration is often perceived as a rupture, with people separated by great distances and for extended periods of time. But for migrants and those affected by migration, the everyday persists, and migration itself may be critical to…
Cynthia RockwellThe Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960, by Lawrence Jackson ’90, received two notable awards. In December the Modern Language Association awarded it the 2011 William Sanders Scarborough Prize, calling it a “magisterial narrative history of African American literature,” as well as “[b]eautifully written and rich in historical detail.” The citation noted that it “should quickly become a standard work in 20th-century African American studies and United States publishing history.” In January, Jackson received news that The Indignant Generation won the Black Caucus of the American Library Association literary award in the nonfiction category.…
Two Wesleyan alumni, separated by a decade, crossed paths recently in a most unusual way. Robert Gillette ’59 was riveted by the snippet of conversation his daughter-in-law overheard and recounted. It had been between a guest at the Hyde Farmlands Bed and Breakfast in Burkeville, Va., and a young waitress: “What are those log buildings all in a row in the back yard?” asked the guest. “Those are the Jew huts. There were these people called Jews who lived there,” the waitress replied. As Gillette writes in the introduction to The Virginia Plan: William B. Thalhimer and a Rescue From…
Eve Abrams ’93 has written the text of a new book (with photographs by Shannon Brinkman) about Preservation Hall (Louisiana State University), a legendary music venue in New Orleans. Since the early 1960s, this building in the French Quarter has served as a sanctuary for the Crescent City’s rich and illustrious jazz heritage, a haven for players, and an incubator for successive generations of jazz musicians. Each night the venue fills to the rafters with devoted fans and curious tourists eager to hear live traditional jazz performed by both veteran musicians and up-and-coming players. The performance space is simple, and…
In The Dance Claimed Me (Yale University Press), Peggy MALS ’77 and Murray Schwartz provide an intimate perspective on the life of Pearl Primus (1919–1994) who made her mark on the dance scene in 1943 with impressive works incorporating social and racial protest into their dance aesthetic. Friends and colleagues of the dancer, the authors explore her influences on American culture, dance, and education. The Schwartzes trace Primus’s journey from her childhood in Port of Spain, Trinidad, through her rise as an influential international dancer, an early member of the New Dance Group (whose motto was “Dance is a weapon"),…
Black teenage girls are often negatively represented in national and global popular studies, either as being “at risk” for teenage pregnancy, obesity, or sexually transmitted diseases, or as helpless victims of inner city poverty and violence. These pervasive popular representations often portray Black adolescents’ consumer and leisure culture as corrupt, uncivilized, and pathological. In her insightful new study She’s Mad Real (New York University Press), Oneka LaBennett '94 draws on more than a decade of researching teenage West Indian girls in the Flatbush and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn to argue that Black youth are, in fact, strategic consumers of…
In her first novel, Among the Wonderful (Steerforth Press), Stacy Carlson ’96 brings to life 1840s New York City, a time when Phineas T. Barnum is a young man, freshly arrived to the area and still unknown to the world. Barnum transforms a dusty natural history museum into a place of human wonders and an extraordinary live animal menagerie, which will become not only the nation's most popular attraction, but also a catalyst that ushers America out of a culture of glassed-in exhibits and into the modern age of entertainment. In this kaleidoscopic setting, Carlson focuses on two compelling characters.…