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HOT TYPE: New releases by Swarthmoreans
Emily K. Abel ’64 and Margaret K. Nelson ’66
The Farm & Wilderness Summer Camps: Progressive Ideals in the Twentieth Century
Rutgers University Press
The Farm & Wilderness Camps, founded in 1939 by Quakers, had some distinctive features: a rugged environment and rigorous hiking. Abel and Nelson explore how ideals considered progressive in the 1940s and 1950s had to be reconfigured to respond to shifts in culture and society, like new understandings of race, social class, gender, and sexual identity. They draw on over 40 interviews with former campers, archival materials, and their own memories.
Jan Chozen Burgess Bays ’66
Mindful Medicine: 40 Simple Practices to Help Healthcare Professionals Heal Burnout and Reconnect to Purpose
Shambhala Publications
Mindful Medicine shares simple mindfulness practices and brief meditations that fit easily into the demanding schedule of a health-care worker’s day. These short practices are an invitation to replenish the passion of health care work and douse the flickering flames of burnout.
Jan Chozen Burgess Bays ’66
The Vow-Powered Life: A Simple Method for Living Life on Purpose
Shambhala Publications
When taken on mindfully, vows can be a source of surprising wisdom and powerful energy, enabling you to accomplish things you never dreamed possible. Bays provides a wealth of practical exercises to use for formulating and implementing vows of your own, and for using them to navigate your life with honesty and compassion.
Linda Ambrus Broenniman ’77
The Politzer Saga
Bethesda Communications Group
Broenniman pieces together the astonishing story of her Jewish ancestors, whose remarkable lives were hidden by her father’s secrets. From the Austro-Hungarian empire in the 1700s to modern-day Hungary and the U.S., she finds her family and learns of their resilience in surviving religious persecution, wars, epidemics, and economic upheavals. Finding her roots brings her a new sense of who she is, and relief that now she can honor the memory of her ancestors.
Jamie Stiehm ’82
The War Within: What I Witnessed From Inside the Capitol on Jan. 6
Creators Publishing
On Jan. 6, 2021, politicians and members of the press huddled in Capitol nooks, confronting their own mortality as sounds of shattering glass and gunshots drew closer. In columns written directly before, immediately after, and over the years since that dark day, Stiehm foreshadows, reacts to, and reflects upon the deep scars on our nation from tensions that boiled over on that date, leaving searing burns behind.
Jacqueline Haskins ’83
Kickass Healthy LADA: How to Thrive with Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults
Hachette
After visiting five doctors without getting helpful guidance, and realizing there wasn’t a friendly how-to book meant for the general public about latent autoimmune diabetes in adults, Haskins decided to write one. She offers an essential toolkit for anyone diagnosed with LADA.
Kirsten Silva Gruesz ’86
Cotton Mather’s Spanish Lessons: A Story of Language, Race, and Belonging in the Early Americas
Harvard University Press
La Fe del Christiano (The Faith of the Christian), a Protestant tract by Boston minister Cotton Mather, intended to evangelize readers across the Spanish Americas. Gruesz explores the conditions that produced the tract: the intimate story of the “Spanish Indian” servants in Mather’s household, the fragile business of printing and bookselling, and the fraught overlaps of race, ethnicity, and language that remain foundational to ideas of Latina/o/x belonging in the U.S. today.
Laura U. Marks ’87
The Fold: From Your Body to the Cosmos
Duke University Press
Through analyses of fiction, documentary and experimental movies, interactive media, and everyday situations, Marks outlines embodied methods for detecting and augmenting the connections between each living entity and the cosmos. With this guide, Marks teaches readers to richly apprehend the world and to trace the processes of becoming that are immanent within the fold.
Mary Rechner ’90
Marrying Friends
Propeller Books
When her troubled husband dies unexpectedly, Therese gets tangled in competing desires and demands — her own and those of her friends and family on Long Island. Marrying Friends deftly illuminates multiple characters as grief forces them to reimagine their lives and relationships. A frank and often wry look at the bewildering bonds between people, this novel-in-stories confirms Rechner’s talent for capturing how we find meaning not only in our dreams, but also in our desperations.
Laura Snyder Brown ’95 & William Fleet Lankford
Cultivating a Revolutionary Spirit: Stories of Solidarity, Solar Cooking, and Women’s Leadership in Central America
PM Press
Brown and Lankford describe how Central American women used the tools of carpentry to build solar ovens and the tools of feminism to gain more control over their own lives. Lankford facilitated the work of local women who started by building ovens and went on to create an array of projects to meet basic needs, improve health, and increase access to educational and leadership opportunities for women.
Jessica Fisher ’98
Daywork: Poems
Milkweed Editions
Fisher brings “the faraway close” through ruthless yet tender interrogations of possibility and permanence. Set against the backdrop of the fallen empire of Rome, Daywork takes its title from the giornata — the word in fresco painting for the section of wet plaster that can be painted in a single day, where each day is marked by the hidden seams in a finished work.
McKenzie W. Funk ’99
The Hank Show: How a House-Painting, Drug-Running DEA Informant Built the Machine That Rules Our Lives
St. Martin’s Press
Funk relates the meteoric rise and fall of Hank Asher, known as the father of data fusion. Your every move online is tracked by police departments, intelligence agencies, and political parties because of his creations. This made him a multimillionaire, but he was eventually forced out of companies he founded and blamed for data breaches resulting in major lawsuits and market chaos.
Sasha Issenberg ’02
The Lie Detectives: In Search of a Playbook for Winning Elections in the Disinformation Age
Columbia Global Reports
The Lie Detectives is a secret history of Democratic politics in the Trump years. A decade after The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns, Issenberg returns to the cutting edge of political innovation to reveal how campaigns are navigating the era’s most pressing challenge: how to win in a world awash in lies.
Jack Kim (writing as Jack Gimm) ’07
The Curious Case of the Vanishing Veggies: A Detective Rabbit Story
Sterr & Hemel
Detective Rabbit discovers a puzzling mystery: The garden’s vibrant veggies are vanishing! With the help of his trusty friends Squirrel, Mole, and Robin, Detective Rabbit embarks on a wild chase to catch the culprit. But the clues lead him to an unexpected twist — a tiny team of bugs with a big idea. Dive into this delightful tale of teamwork and discovery as Detective Rabbit and his pals unearth a secret underground world where dreams grow bigger than the tallest carrot!
Sean Nesselrode Moncada ’09
Refined Material: Petroculture and Modernity in Venezuela
University of California Press
Moncada explores the relationship between the global oil industry and the celebrated rise of geometric abstraction, kinetic art, and modern architecture in midcentury Venezuela. Oil provided the crucible for national reinvention, ushering in a period of dizzying optimism and bitter disillusion. Refined Material reveals how the logic of refinement redefined our relationship to nature, matter, and one another.
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.