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EDITED BY ROBIN TOVEY ’97

Email reed.magazine@reed.edu

An American Singing

Heritage: Songs from the British-Irish-American Oral Tradition as Recorded in the Early Twentieth Century

Norm Cohen ’58 brings together transcriptions of folk songs and ballads in the British-Irish-American oral tradition, including folk songs that frequently occurred in Roud’s Folk Song Index and catalogues of commercial early country (or “hillbilly”) recordings. Selections by Cohen and his two coeditors attempt to avoid the biases of previous collections and provide a fresh group of examples sourced from recordings of traditional musicians from the 1920s through the early 1940s. (A-R Editions, 2021)

Trapped in the Present Tense:

Meditations on American Memory

Colette Brooks ’74 has written her third book of creative nonfiction, described as a “poetic and inventive blend of history, memoir, and visual essay.” Through meticulously researched retellings of individual stories of violence, misfortune, chaos, and persistence—from the first mass shooting in America to assasinations and nuclear bombs—she explores how some of the more forgotten aspects of recent American experiences explain our challenging and often puzzling present. (Counterpoint Press, 2022)

American Afterlives:

Reinventing Death in the Twenty-First Century

A new book by Shannon Lee Dawdy ’88, professor of anthropology and social sciences at the University of Chicago, has been called “a mesmerizing trip across America to investigate the changing face of death in contemporary life.” Her research has long focused on death, disaster, sensuality, and histories of colonialism and capitalism. “Also, pirates,” according to her academic bio. This project takes the form of both a documentary film and a book, featuring images by cinematographer Daniel Zox that provide their own testament to the ways that Americans are reworking their ideas about personhood, ritual, and connection across generations. (Princeton University Press, 2021) In a chilling new book, Peter Clark ’63 highlights everyday Germans who resisted Nazi rule. He provides gripping descriptions of their resistance to the Nazi regime and shows that such opposition extended far beyond the well-known examples of Hans and Sophie Scholl and Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg. Particular attention is given to the opposition to Hitler by working-class Social Democrats and Communists. (Independently published, 2022)

Names as Metaphors in Shakespeare’s Comedies

In his latest book, Grant W. Smith ’64, professor emeritus at Eastern Washington University, presents a comprehensive study of names in Shakespeare’s fourteen comedies. He describes the literary use of names as creative choices that show the indebtedness of authors to previous literature, as well as their imaginative descriptions (etymologically and phonologically) of memorable character types and their references to cultural phenomena. “With extensive experience in literary onomastics, onomastic theory, and semiotics, Smith crowns with this volume his longstanding interest in anthroponymic analysis and Shakespeare’s plays.” (Vernon Press, 2021)

Storm Rising

Author and screenwriter Chris Hauty ’78 has his name on a new hardcover title, Storm Rising, that made landfall last month. This speculative political thriller, the third in a series, probes a terrifying subculture of white supremacy within the U.S. military and uncovers an expansive conspiracy to bring about the secession of several states. Also, he recently completed a novella, Insurrection Day, in which the protagonist in the same franchise series, Hayley Chill, is caught up in a riot at the U.S. Capitol. This series includes Deep State, his debut novel, which was selected as an editor’s choice by the New York Times Book Review, and Savage Road, published last year. Hauty promises that each of the Hayley Chill thrillers can be read as part of the series or as a standalone. (Simon & Schuster, 2022) Jill Kuhnheim ’79, visiting professor in Hispanic studies at Brown University, recently developed an open-educational resource with a colleague for people interested in teaching literature and film in Spanish with a health humanities focus. Considered the first textbook to introduce literary and textual analysis of Hispanic literature through the lens of health, illness, and medicine, it presents voices and experiences, including European, Creole, Indigenous, mestizo, Afro-Hispanic, Latinx, and Jewish perspectives. This book aims to meet the needs of the fast-growing numbers of Spanish majors and minors who are preparing for careers in health care with a focus on engaging Hispanic communities. (Pressbooks)

Old Music for New People

Since retiring after 30 years of environmental planning and activism, David Biddle ’80 has published a number of short stories and essays in literary journals and online. His first novel, Old Music for New People, is a coming-of-age story that considers gender identity, baseball, and mysteries of the cosmos. He purports that “it is hilarious that a 1976 freshman would publish their first novel 45 years later.” On the contrary, we think that an anthropology major would know best how human behavior (and talent) evolves over time! (The Story Plant, 2021)

Farview

Phyllis Gerstenfeld

’88 is a university professor who enjoys a side gig as an author that consists largely but not entirely of gay romance, under the pen name Kim Fielding. Farview, her most recent book, won the BookLife 2021 Prize for Fiction. Her work has been described as “eclectic, spanning genres such as contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, and historical,” and her tales are set in alternate worlds ranging from 15th-century Bosnia to modern-day Oregon. In Farview, the main character flees the smog-bound city for a quiet village where he makes new friends and discovers surprising secrets about his family history thanks to some seaside magic. (Tin Box Press, 2021)

The Quiet Before:

On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas

Gal Beckerman ’98, senior editor at the Atlantic, has written a new book on the power of historically effective approaches to activism. His unique combination of scholarship and reporting offers a provocative, incisive look at the formation of social movements— from the 1600s to the present day—and how current technology is undermining them. Or, as he says himself, “A bullhorn is a wonderful tool for a movement to use, but it can’t build a movement.” His previous book, When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, was highly regarded, and Beckerman was interviewed about it by this magazine in 2011. (Crown, 2022).

The Day I Die:

The Untold Story of Assisted Dying in America

Cultural anthropologist

Anita Hannig ’04

examines assisted dying in the U.S. with an intimate, on-theground perspective of what it means to go through an assisted death medically, legally, culturally, and emotionally. Drawing on five years of research on the front lines of assisted dying, including attending some assisted deaths herself, Hannig unearths the uniquely personal narratives and illuminates the complexities of a single issue through a range of vivid characters. She is associate professor of anthropology at Brandeis University, where she teaches classes on medicine, religion, and death and dying. In recent years, she has emerged as a leading voice on death literacy in America, giving interviews to the Washington Post, USA Today, and the Boston Globe. (Sourcebooks, Inc., 2022) Britta Lundin ’07 has written a young adult novel that Kirkus Reviews called “fiercely charming and achingly relatable.” Fear not, readers need not like (or understand) football to cheer wholeheartedly for the Elkhorn Five, a group of small-town girls who join the gridiron, each for her own reasons. NPR listed it among end-of-year “Books We Love.” (Disney Books, 2021)

The Effect:

An Introduction to Research Design and Causality

Nick Huntington-Klein

’09, assistant professor of economics at Seattle University, has published an introductory textbook intended to introduce the concepts of research design and causality in the context of observational data. He assures readers that the book, which spent some time in Amazon’s #1 spot for statistics, “is written in an intuitive and approachable way and doesn’t overload on technical detail.” The volume can also be read for free on theeffectbook.net. (Chapman & Hall/ CRC Press, 2021)

Comeuppance Served Cold

Emily Goldman ’13, assistant editor at Tor. com Publishing, acquired and edited Comeuppance Served Cold, a historical fantasy novella by Marion Deeds. The book received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Booklist, and it has been called “a fierce magical heist tale.” (Tor. com Publishing, 2022)

Orcs in Space

Illustrator, designer, and cartoonist François Vigneault ’13 drew the images in volume two of Justin Roiland’s series Orcs in Space, a wildly funny and absurd fantasy-adventure set in deep space. The book chronicles the exploits of orcs as they “face off with an eccentric scrapper bot, a cantankerous cat mechanic, and incur the wwwwrath of a biker gang called the Fuzzballs.” Readers may recall his own sci-fi graphic novel, Titan, which landed in 2020 and imagines a future beset with new forms of oppression on the moons of Saturn. (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

Breaking Ranks:

How the Rankings Industry Rules Higher Education and What to Do about It

“Choosing a college should be approached as an exercise of self-discovery.” —Colin S. Diver in a Los Angeles Times opinion piece

In a new book, President Emeritus Colin Diver lays out his provocative argument that the college rankings industry misleads its consumers, undermines academic values, and perpetuates social inequality. “For all those disappointed college applicants whose hopes were pinned on getting into a school highly ranked by U.S. News & World Report or some similar publication,” he says in a recent op-ed, “this is your chance to be liberated from the tyranny of college rankings.”

Former dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, Diver came to Reed during a challenging time for small colleges. During his tenure (2002–12), the country experienced the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and a national focus on enhancing vocational training and technology -based learning was contesting the very foundations of a liberal arts education. Diver’s insistence that Reed stay true to its educational mission strengthened the college on many fronts.

In Breaking Ranks, he decries the methodologies that serve to impose a single formulaic template on hundreds of diverse institutions. He even proposed a warning label for the process: “Caution: These rankings are based on unaudited, unverified data, selfreported by the schools being ranked. Their use may be hazardous to your academic health.” And then Diver proposes an antidote to the standardized hierarchies that threaten the institutional diversity, intellectual rigor, and access to American higher education: explaining what is most useful and important in evaluating colleges, he offers both applicants and educators a guide to pursuing their highest academic goals, freed from the siren song of the “best-college” illusion. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022)

—ROBIN TOVEY ’97