Submit your publication for consideration: books@swarthmore.edu
HOT TYPE: New releases by Swarthmoreans
Laura Ascenzi-Moreno ’94 (with Cecilia Espinosa)
Rooted in Strength: Using Translanguaging to Grow Readers and Writers
Scholastic
Ascenzi-Moreno and Espinosa demonstrate how students who speak two or more languages in their daily lives thrive when they are able to use “translanguaging” to tap the power of their entire linguistic and sociocultural repertoires. The authors present rich and thoughtful literacy practices that propel emergent bilinguals into reading and writing success. Knowing more than one language is, indeed, a gift to the classroom.
Deborah Bacharach ’88
Shake and Tremor
Grayson Books
Named runner-up in Grayson Books’ annual poetry contest, this contemporary book of poetry uses references to biblical stories to illuminate the relationships between men and women, their difficulties and complications. It’s a bold book of loss and survival, betrayal and love — a book about work and about humanity. Abraham and Sarah are here, as well as modern-day lovers, along with struggles and satisfactions that are universal.
Ann Lubin Buttenwieser ’57
The Floating Pool Lady: A Quest to Bring a Public Pool to New York City’s Waterfront
Cornell University Press
Why on earth would anyone want to float a pool up the Atlantic coastline to bring it to rest at a pier on the New York City waterfront? From dusty archives in the historic Battery Maritime Building to high-stakes community board meetings to tense negotiations in a Louisiana shipyard, Buttenwieser retells her improbable process that led to a pool tying up to a pier at Barretto Point Park in the Bronx, ready for summer swimmers.
Justin Deabler ’97
Lone Stars
St. Martin’s Press
Julian Warner, a father at last, wrestles with a question his husband posed: What will you tell our son about the people you came from, now that they’re gone? Finding the answers takes Julian back in time, from Eisenhower’s immigration border raids to the disorienting polarization of Obama’s second term. And in these answers lies a hope: that by uncloseting ourselves — as immigrants, smart women, gay people — we find power in empathy.
Paul Frishkoff ’60
Dr. Chuckle’s Original Cinema: 555 Puns
Wild Ginger Press
Movie addicts and pun devotees: Are you Oscar-mired? A red carpetbagger? Seeking more than run-of-DeMille? In this book you’ll find 555 totally original puns, each inspired by the title of a best-picture nominee, from Wings (1927) to Parasite (2019). The culmination of three years’ work, Frishkoff’s latest humor book is guaranteed to send readers “reeling.”
Diana Furchtgott-Roth ’79
United States Income, Consumption, Wealth, and Inequality
Oxford University Press
Over the past 75 years, household income in the United States has increased substantially. Still, by some measures, income inequality has increased as well. Within each chapter of this book, edited by economist Furchtgott-Roth, distinguished experts explain how income and wealth — and the way we measure them — have changed in the United States, which demographic groups have benefited from these changes, and how mobility has changed over time and over generations.
Michele Gamburd ’87
Linked Lives: Elder Care, Migration, and Kinship in Sri Lanka
Rutgers University Press
When youth shake off their rural roots and middle-aged people migrate for economic opportunities, what happens to the grandparents left at home? Linked Lives provides readers with intimate glimpses into homes in a Sri Lankan Buddhist village, where elders wisely use their moral authority and their control over valuable property to assure that they receive both physical and spiritual care when they need it.
Daniel Headrick ’62
Humans Versus Nature
Oxford University Press
Since the appearance of Homo sapiens on the planet, human beings have sought to exploit their environments, extracting as many resources as their technological ingenuity allowed. As technologies have advanced in recent centuries, that impulse has remained largely unchecked, exponentially accelerating the human impact on the environment. Headrick tells the story of the global environment from the Stone Age to the present, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between humans and the natural world.
Carl Levin ’56, H’80
Getting to the Heart of the Matter: My 36 Years in the Senate
Wayne State University Press
The longest-serving U.S. senator in Michigan history, Levin was known for his dogged pursuit of the truth, his commitment to holding government accountable, and his basic decency. Getting to the Heart of the Matter is his story — from his early days in Detroit as the son of a respected lawyer to the capstone of his career as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
Edward Melillo ’97
The Butterfly Effect: Insects and the Making of the Modern World
Knopf
Insects might make us shudder, but they are also responsible for many of the things we take for granted in our daily lives. Drawing on research in laboratory science, agriculture, fashion, and international cuisine, Melillo weaves a vibrant world history that illustrates the inextricable and fascinating bonds between humans and insects.
Linda Barrett Osborne ’71
Guardians of Liberty: Freedom of the Press and the Nature of News
Abrams Books for Young Readers
Named one of 2020’s best children’s books by the New York Public Library and Kirkus, Guardians of Liberty explores the essential and basic American ideal of a free press. Citing numerous examples from the country’s past, from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War to the Obama and Trump presidencies, Osborne shows how freedom of the press has played an essential role in the growth of this nation, allowing democracy to flourish.
Clyde Prestowitz ’63
The World Turned Upside Down: America, China, and the Struggle for Global Leadership
Yale University Press
When China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, most experts expected that WTO rules and procedures would make China “a responsible stakeholder in the liberal world order.” But Prestowitz contends the experts guessed wrong; if anything, China has become more authoritarian and mercantilist. Prestowitz, a labor economist and founder and president of the Economic Strategy Institute, describes the key challenges posed by China and the strategies America and the Free World must adopt to meet them.
Jed Rakoff ’64, H’03
Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
How can we be proud of a justice system that often pressures the innocent to plead guilty? How can we claim that justice is equal when we imprison thousands of poor Black men for relatively modest crimes but rarely prosecute rich white executives who commit crimes having far greater impact? Rakoff explores these and other puzzles in this account of the U.S. legal system, grounded in his 24 years as a federal trial judge in New York.
John Strauss ’54
To Understand a Person: An Autobiography (of Sorts)
Epigraph Publishing
How do you truly understand what it means to be a person — any person — struggling with mental illness? Strauss explores that question in this semi-autobiography, not only from his perspective as a psychiatrist, but also as the son of a mother afflicted with a longstanding severe mental illness, and as someone with dedicated interest in both the sciences and the humanities.
Anand Yang ’70
Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia
University of California Press
From the 17th century onward, penal transportation was a key strategy of British imperial rule, exemplified by deportations first to the Americas and later to Australia. A major contribution to histories of crime and punishment, prisons, law, labor, transportation, migration, colonialism, and the Indian Ocean world, Empire of Convicts examines the experiences of Indian bandwars (convicts) and shows how they exercised agency in difficult situations, fashioning their own worlds and even becoming “their own warders.”
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.