Media

ALAN ROSNER ’65

An Instructional Chapbook for Translating Horizontal to Vertical Text Independently published

This second Instructional Chapbook transforms the earlier version’s vertical lettering using new texts to demonstrate a functional, directly legible, semi-cursive script. Each booklet provides models of letter forms that lend themselves to efficient visual scanning when controlled according to E. Asian aesthetic principles. The merging of these writing practices, where letter forms join together and line weights vary continuously, allows for a more pictorial and expressive script. In this chapbook, the short texts come from various times and places, illustrating how any Western language can be manipulated to facilitate objectives often associated with visual poetry. The back page, acting as a coda for the opening, middle and closing texts, is a French quote, attributed to Atget, the photographer of empty Paris streets, saying his images were just documents and nothing otherwise: “C’est du documents et rein d’autre.”

MICHAEL WESCOTT LODER ’67

Forbidden Games Hemlock Lodge Press/Blurb

Sexual abuse and volleyball form the backdrop for a novel about parental greed and lies as a boy and a girl with a shared past fight for their own independence and truth. Five years earlier, a beloved volleyball coach abused Peter Bain. When Peter reported the abuse, the coach accused him of lying, then killed himself. A pariah in his school and a condemned liar to his parents, Peter, now an 11th grader, speaks only to those who believe him. Then he meets Marty, a friendly girl who has survived herself by lying and hiding for years. Encouraged, Peter goes out for volleyball. His playing skills are enough to carry the team through the district playoffs. Finding Peter in turn gives Marty the courage to free herself from her own sexual abuser, setting in motion deadly events and a climax in a district justice’s courtroom.

SAMUEL K. COHN JR. ’71

Popular Protest and Ideals of Democracy in Late Renaissance Italy Oxford University Press

Based on contemporary chronicles and archival records, this is the first book to go beyond an episodic view of individual revolts in Italy during the 16th century. From 751 revolts and collective acts of popular protest during the “Italian Wars,” 1494 to 1559, it analyzes patterns of protest, organization, leaders, the role of women, religion, and ideology, and compares these patterns with those of the much better-explored revolts of late-medieval Italy and ones north of the Alps during the 16th century. It argues that the unstudied revolts of 16thcentury Italy and its colonies during a period of galloping growth in authoritarian regimes, could, nonetheless, advance collective practices of defiance that extended beyond the most sophisticated revolts of the late Middle Ages. It concludes that democracies do not just die. Samuel Cohn Jr. has been professor of medieval history at the University of Glasgow since 1995.

SAMUEL K. COHN JR. ’71

Epidemics: Hate and Compassion from the Plague of Athens to AIDS Oxford University Press

This book is the equivalent of three monographs. Its origins derived from the author’s essay, “The Black Death and the Burning of the Jews” (2007); the so-called Mexican swine flu of 2009; and preparation for a plenary address to the 80th AngloAmerican Conference in 2011. From an Egyptian plague of c.2920 BCE to Ebola in West Africa in 2014, the book analyzes ancient literature, chronicles, histories, diaries, archival records, and hundreds of contemporary newspapers across the globe from the 18th century to 2014. It challenges a dominant hypothesis in the study of epidemics: that these catastrophes almost universally provoked hatred, blame and violence against the “other.” Instead, epidemics historically have more often united societies and inspired individuals and communities to extraordinary feats of compassion and abnegation. Oxford University Press recently celebrated its books to have received the most “academics reads” over the past decade. Epidemics won the prize for the “History of Science.”

SEENA KAREN RASMUSSEN DRAPALA ’84

Billy Flint’s Hobby Hill Self-published

Billy Flint’s Hobby Hill portrays an overview of Hobby Hill girls’ camp life, operated from 1935 to 1955, by sharing almost 100 photographs of camp girls and activities. Billy’s extraordinary life has also been captured from her early years in Erie, Pennsylvania; her ballroom dance instructor activities in Schenectady, N.Y.; and with personal accounts from class students. Hobby Hill scrapbook pictures dominate, though the book also includes her entrepreneurial endeavor “Gifts from the Heart,” stories and photos from her photographic period, as well as details of her later life. Providing a fuller view of this amazing woman, readers are also treated to stories of her legacy—the Flint House, given to the Village of Scotia.

TERESA MEADE, Florence B. Sherwood Professor of History and Culture Emerita We Don't Become Refugees by Choice: Mia Truskier, Survival, and Activism from Occupied Poland to California, 1920-2014

Maria Mia Truskier, who fled the Nazis as a young Polish Jew in early 1940 and once safely resettled in the United States, became an activist for other refugees fleeing war, violence and hardship. The oral history was based on extensive interviews with Truskier before she passed away as well as memorabilia from her own lifetime including coded letters, newspaper clippings and photographs. The research was supported by Union College Faculty Development grants and a grant from the HadassahBrandeis Institute. A student, Emilia Strazalkowska ’11, worked with Meade on the Polish to English translations. She used a Union student research grant to meet with Truskier in California to translate coded letters from work camps in the USSR and from Truskier’s mother, who was hiding in Warsaw. “I wanted to record Mia’s story because it is fascinating,” said Meade, “but also because she turned her own tragic past of running from the Nazi invasion of Poland to a dedication to helping all refugees.”

PETER ARONSON ’78

Mandalay Hawk’s Dilemma: The United States of Anthropocene Double M Press, Inc.

This is a middle-grade novel for our troubled and overheated times, about a young teen who, in 2030, has to save the world from global warming that is worse than scientists predicted, truly threatening the world as we know it. Adults screwed up and didn’t do nearly enough to stop it. Mandalay Hawk is a cool, calm, sometimes unhinged juvenile delinquent who’s a cross between a race car driver and a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. striving to overcome. Mandalay and her pals start KRAAP—Kids Revolt Against Adult Power. They battle their parents, a principal and a government (and president) that wants to silence and stop them. They do things the old fashioned way: they study their brains out and ditch social media. There’s a march on Washington unlike any other and then there’s rapping in the Oval Office to a captive president.

ROBIN G. ISSERLES ’90

The Costs of Completion: Student Success in Community College Johns Hopkins University Press

To improve community college success, we need to consider the lived realities of students. Our nation’s community colleges are facing a completion crisis. The college-going experience of too many students is interrupted, lengthening their time to completing a degree—or worse, causing many to drop out altogether. In The Costs of Completion, Robin G. Isserles contextualizes this crisis by placing blame on the neoliberal policies that have shaped public community colleges over the past 30 years. The disinvestment of state funding, she explains, has created austerity conditions, leading to an overreliance on contingent labor, excessive investments in advisement technologies, and a push to performance outcomes like retention and graduation rates for measuring student and institutional success.

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DANIEL BULLEN ’94

Daniel Shays’s Honorable Rebellion: An American Story Westholme Press

You may have heard of “Shays’ Rebellion” as the “unrest that led to the Constitution,” but this narrative history tells the story of a sustained, nonviolent and ultimately successful protest campaign in which thousands of farmers defied repressive government threats, and won reforms to unjust economic policies in Massachusetts in 1786. Far from the “drunken rabble-rousers” histories have described, these protestors were proud Revolutionary War veterans who refused to let Governor James Bowdoin’s crushing taxes push them off their farms—all to pay windfall profits to financiers. After five months of peaceful protests, they won reforms in an electoral landslide. This story rekindles an essential moment from America’s proud legacy of nonviolent protest, and illustrates the danger of powerful interests who use the media and propaganda to turn Americans against each other.

KERRIE DROBAN ’87 (CO-AUTHOR WITH DR. LYNNE FENTON)

Aurora: The Psychiatrist Who Treated the Movie Theater Killer Tells Her Story Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

A chilling and controversial look at evil from the psychiatrist who treated mass murderer James Holmes prior to the 2012 shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo. As a national expert and speaker on mass shootings and gun violence, Dr. Lynn Fenton knew it was impossible to spot a killer. But when she embarked on treating troubled grad student James Holmes, the hair on her arms stood up. She knew she was dealing with evil. Yet she could find no legal means of locking him up. A decade ago, on July 20, 2012, Holmes struck: he entered a packed movie theater and opened fire, killing 12 people and wounding 70. Dr. Fenton’s inability to thwart Holmes’s mass murder made her a scapegoat and put her own life in danger. Her chilling account provides an intimate look at her life before, during and after the Aurora massacre, as well as alarming insight into the sinister patient who described himself as “fear incarnate.”

CONSIDERATION

Media, formerly Bookshelf, features new titles by or about alumni and other members of the Union community. To be included, send a copy of the work (book, DVD, CD) and synopsis to: Office of Communications Union College Schenectady, NY 12308 Or send synopsis and high-resolution image to: magazine@union.edu

Parents Circle

The Parents Circle is a philanthropic group that works in concert with school leaders to enhance the Union experience for students and their families by supporting faculty, staff and the broader campus community. Members become College insiders and investors in its success, ultimately developing stronger ties to their student’s Union experience.

We invite you to join with us in supporting the educational programs and activities that will make your child’s Union experience extraordinary.

Ann and David Kurtz P’22 with son Nick Kurtz ’22

How often in life can we look back and know we made the right “ decision at a critical moment? That is how we feel about sending our son to Union in the fall of 2018. For him, the Union experience has been everything we had hoped. He had a strong faculty of committed professors who provided him support while challenging him to grow academically. The student body was inclusive, diverse and intellectually curious, and our son has developed a network of deep friendships that we know will last a lifetime. Although our years as Union parents draw to a close we will always consider ourselves part of the Union family. We look forward to remaining connected to Union in future years.“

– Ann and David Kurtz P’22

To learn more about the Parents Circle, please contact:

Noelle Beach Marchaj '05

Director of Parent and Family Philanthropy Cell: 860-655-2875 marchajn@union.edu union.edu/parents-families