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HOT TYPE: New releases by Swarthmoreans

John C. Pollock ’64 and Douglas A. Vakoch

COVID-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Perspectives
Routledge

Text on a pink and blue background that looks vaguely globe-like.
Pollock and Vakoch gather an international team of scholars to examine how governments, citizens, and the media addressed the COVID-19 outbreak. They evaluate the unique civic challenges, responsibilities, and opportunities for media worldwide during a pandemic that amplified social inequality. Specific focus is given to the roles that journalists should play, which communications strategies worked effectively, and which made the pandemic even worse globally.

John C. Pollock ’64 and Morton Winston

Making Human Rights News: Balancing Participation and Professionalism
Routledge

Making Human Rights News explores the impact of new digital information technologies on the gathering and dissemination of human rights news. Pollock and Winston delve into questions on journalistic ethics, and how internet activists interact with press freedom and government censorship worldwide.

Richard A. Young ’67

Critical Analysis of Prototype Autonomous Vehicle Crash Rates: Six Scientific Studies from 2015–2018
SAE International

How safe are the autonomous vehicles that travel the roads with us? Are they safer than conventional vehicles? Young explores how to test and evaluate the safety of highly automated driving systems by reviewing and critically analyzing the first six scientific studies of autonomous vehicle crash rates.

Gerard Helferich ’76 (pen name W.H. Flint)

Hot Time: A Mystery
Simon & Schuster

A silhouette of a man crossing a bridge.
During the summer of 1896, a “hot wave” had settled on Manhattan with no end in sight, leaving tempers short and the streets littered with dead horses. It was a presidential election year: Tensions between rich and poor had political passions flaring, anti-immigrant sentiment had turned virulent, and the press sold papers by touting lurid stories about the city’s social elite. At the center, ambitious commissioner Theodore Roosevelt struggled to reform the notoriously corrupt department. When the body of publisher William d’Alton Mann is found at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge, an investigation unfolds, including many historical figures that come alive in the pages of this deeply researched historical murder mystery.

Teresa Nicholas ’76

The Mama Chronicles: A Memoir
University Press of Mississippi

A black and white photo of a woman standing in front of a fenced-in house. The title text has a background and border of sea foam green.
Growing up in a small Mississippi Delta town, Teresa Nicholas believed that she didn’t have much in common with her mother, who was born and bred in the country. She knew little of her mother’s early life as a sharecropper during the Great Depression. Nicholas left to attend college, and later settled in New York. Years later, as her mother’s health deteriorated, Nicholas found herself spending more time in the small town she thought she had left behind. Awarded the 2022 Life Writing Award (for memoir) from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, this exploration of a mother-daughter relationship is ultimately a meditation on acceptance and what it means to call a place home.

Shawn McHale ’82

The First Vietnam War: Violence, Sovereignty, and the Fracture of the South, 1945-56
Cambridge University Press

McHale explores why the communist-led resistance in Vietnam won the anticolonial war against France (1945–54), except in the south. Broad swaths of Vietnamese people were uneasily united in 1945, all opposing the French attempt to reclaim control of the country. But by 1947, resistance unity had shattered and ethnic violence had divided them, turning the war in the south into an overt civil war wrapped up in a war against France.

David L. Pike ’85

Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades
Oxford University Press

Graphic Sketch of a mosquito and other bugs with rulers in the background.
During two periods in history, Americans were encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over built fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. Pike’s book is illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies. He explores the meanings of modern undergrounds, and finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts. Pike plumbs the bunker’s stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized throughlines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present.

Julie Phillips ’86

The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

A painting of a seated woman in a green dress holding a baby.
What does a great artist who is also a mother look like? With The Baby on the Fire Escape, Phillips evokes the intimate and varied struggles of brilliant artists and writers of the 20th century who traversed the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, and Alice Neel — whose in-laws falsely claimed that she once, to finish a painting, left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. This volume is a thoughtful, well-researched meditation on our enduring cultural conversation about maternal identity and artistic greatness.

Curtis R. Trimble ’96

Touch’s Usual
Archway Publishing

A man with "sheriff" written on the back of his uniform stands facing away from camera, towards a diner.
David Barnett’s 1977 shooting death outside Cooper, Ky., has haunted the small town’s former star athlete, Sheriff Tanner “Touch” Thomas, for decades. When Touch accidentally knocks the case file off his desk, handwritten notes spill out that propel him to revisit the cold case. As Touch begins to unravel the tangled web of details around Barnett’s shooting, his discoveries place him in extreme danger.

Maiah Jaskoski ’99

The Politics of Extraction: Territorial Rights, Participatory Institutions, and Conflict in Latin America
Oxford University Press

The Politics of Extraction demonstrates how communities employ participatory institutions creatively to hold up, alter, or benefit from extractive projects, though the institutions formally do not grant them such powers. Drawing on her field research, Jaskoski analyzes 30 major hydrocarbon and mining conflicts in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru during the 2000–2010, a period of dramatic expansion in resource extraction and associated social conflict.

Kaysha Corinealdi ’02

Panama in Black: Afro-Caribbean World Making in the Twentieth Century
Duke University Press

Panama in Black tells the story of Afro-Caribbean Panamanian claims of belonging that challenged dominant notions of citizenship as well as U.S. empire. Kaysha Corinealdi offers a conceptually rich and finely researched study that demonstrates how activists, intellectuals, politicians, and workers confronted the Panamanian state as well as the U.S. racial regime in the Canal Zone and Jim Crow-era Brooklyn as they pursued a project of African diasporic world-making.

Jeremy Schifeling ’03 and Omar Garriott

Linked: Conquer LinkedIn. Get Your Dream Job. Own Your Future.
Workman Publishing

Linked is the LinkedIn insider’s guide to how the new job search really works — and how to make it work for you. Written by two former employees, this definitive guide demystifies the website, giving readers strategies to win the modern job-search game.

Peter Wirzbicki ’04

Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists Against Slavery
University of Pennsylvania Press

Painting of a king sitting on a throne holding a whip and servants holding him up.
This historical dissection centers on how the radical struggle against American slavery was fueled by a political philosophy created by the intersection of antislavery activists, such as William C. Nell, Thomas Sidney, and Charlotte Forten, with Transcendentalist intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. This new political philosophy — marked by moral enthusiasms, democratic idealism, and a vision of the self that could judge political questions from “higher” standards of morality and reason — would later influence labor, feminist, civil rights, and environmental activism.
The Bulletin receives numerous submissions of new publications from the talented Swarthmore community and can feature only a fraction of those submissions here. Please note that work represented in Hot Type does not necessarily reflect the views of the College.