David LowIn No Family History (Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), Sabrina McCormick ’96 offers convincing and compelling evidence of environmental links to breast cancer, ranging from everyday cosmetics to industrial waste. She writes lucidly about the a growing number of experts who argue that we should increase focus on prevention by reducing environmental exposures that have contributed to the sharp increase of breast cancer rates. McCormick also weaves the story of one breast cancer survivor with no family history of the disease into a powerful exploration of the big business of breast cancer—as drugs, pink products, and corporate sponsorships generate enormous revenue…
In his recent book Pandemonium and Parade: Japanese Monsters and the Culture of Yokai (University of California Press, 2009), Michael Dylan Foster ’87 focuses on Japanese water sprites, mountain goblins, shape-shifting animals, and the monsters known as yokai. He considers the role of these creatures in folklore, encyclopedias, literature, art, science, games, manga, magazines, and movies, and brings attention to an abundance of valuable and previously understudied material. Foster traces yokai over three centuries, from their appearance in 17th-century natural histories to their starring role in 20th-century popular media as he examines the monsters’ meanings within the Japanese cultural imagination.
Celina Su ’99 is the author of Streetwise for Book Smarts: Grassroots Organizing and Education and Reform in the Bronx (Cornell University Press, 2009) in which she explores the efforts of parents and students who sought to improve the quality of education in their local schools by working with grassroots organizations. In these organizations, everyday citizens pursued not only education reform but also democratic accountability and community empowerment. These groups had similar resources and operated in the same political context, yet their strategies and tactics were very different: while some focused on increasing state and city aid to their schools,…
Novelist Kaylie Jones ’81 has written a new memoir, Lies My Mother Never Told Me (William Morrow, 2009) in which she explores her life growing up with her well-known father, who was also a writer (From Here to Eternity) and her mother, who as an alcoholic who could be cruel and unloving. Jones also writes about her adulthood as she struggles to overcome her own drinking problem and to become a writer in the shadow of her father, and the difficulties of dealing with her mother as she declines physically and mentally. In her review of the book in The…
Olivia DrakeMore than 1,700 incoming University of Dayton (UD) students are required to read Melody Moezzi's ’01 book, War on Error: Real Stories of American Muslims, before they arrive on campus Aug. 22 for first-year orientation, according to a July 26 Dayton Daily News article. The book is an award-winning collection of essays about young American Muslims, Moezzi is an American Muslim of Iranian descent. UD is a Marianist Catholic university. Moezzi’s book will serve as the basis for a series of student dialogues on the issue of diversity and differences. “I hope that they’ll be able to see a human side…
Mark Schafer ’85 is the translator for Before Saying Any of the Great Words: Selected Poems of David Huerta (Copper Canyon Press, 2009), a bilingual anthology of one of Mexico's foremost living poets, David Huerta. The collection contains translations of 84 of Huerta's poems selected from 12 of his 19 collections along with the original Spanish-language poems. The book is a powerful antidote to recent news coverage of Mexico that depicts the country as often violent and drug-ridden. Huerta has been a central figure in two of the most influential poetic movements in late-20th-century Latin America—the neobaroque movement and that…
In her ethnographic account, Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley (Duke University Press), Shalini Shankar ’94 focuses on South Asian American teenagers (“Desis”) during the Silicon Valley dot-com boom. The diverse students whose stories are told are Muslims, Hindus, Christians and Sikhs, from South Asia and other locations, including first- to fourth-generation immigrants whose parents’ careers vary from assembly-line workers to engineers and CEOs. Shankar analyzes how Desi teens’ conceptions and realizations of success are influenced by community values, cultural practices, language use, and material culture, and she provides a compassionate portrait of a vibrant culture…
Paul Yoon ’02 makes his literary debut with a short story collection, Once the Shore (Sarabande Books), about residents of an imaginary island somewhere off the coast of South Korea. In his eight stories, Yoon introduces characters who live over a span of half a century, several of them working in modern tourism jobs or more traditional fields of fishing, farming, and diving. Yoon often writes about individuals who have suffered great losses in their lives. His imaginary world was inspired by a handful of sources he happened to read, and he did little research for the book. In the…
Rebecca N. Hill ’91 is the author of Men, Mobs, and Law: Anti Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Duke University Press) in which she compares two seemingly unrelated types of leftist protest campaigns: those intended to defend labor organizers from prosecution and those seeking to memorialize lynching victims and stop the practice of lynching. Her incisive new study suggests that these forms of protest are related and have considerably influenced one another. She recognizes that both campaigns worked to build alliances through appeals to public opinion in the media, by defining the American state as a force…
Susan Allison ’85 has just published a poetry collection, Down by the Riverside Ways (Antrim Books). Allison returned to Middletown a few years after graduating from Wesleyan and has lived here since. Most of the poems in this collection have been written in Middletown over the last 20 years. Allison comments: "I like the word concatenation, meaning: to link in a chain, to describe some of the poems. Many of the poems are concatenations of ideas based in experience. The book as a whole is a concatenation, and strives to make sense through random strings of devotion. I owe much…
Tracy Winn ’75 is the author of Mrs. Somebody Somebody (Southern Methodist University Press), a vibrant new collection of interwoven tales about the inhabitants of Lowell, Mass., a dying mill town. Her affecting and unsentimental stories, set from the 1940s to the present, cover a range of fascinating characters, including mill workers, a doctor, a hairdresser, a bookie, a restless wife, and several insightful children. In his review of the book in the Boston Globe, Steve Almond '88 praises Winn’s book as “a testament to the power of the short form.” He adds that her stories “carefully expose the universal…