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HOT TYPE: New releases by Swarthmoreans
Emily Klein Abel ’64
Sick and Tired: An Intimate History
of Fatigue
UNC Press
Recent articles about various diseases conclude that fatigue has been underrecognized, underdiagnosed, and undertreated. As a result, we know little about what it means to live with this condition, especially given its diverse symptoms and causes. Informed by her own experiences as a cancer survivor, Abel offers the first history of fatigue, elucidating how it has been ignored or misunderstood, not only by medical professionals but also by American society as a whole.
Jennie Boyd Bull ’67
Learning to Weave: A Woman-Loving Life
Mountain River Press
Bull’s memoir weaves a life from her Southern roots into liberating movements of the past century: the lesbian feminist activism of the 1970s in Baltimore, the growth of the LGBTQ-centered Metropolitan Community Churches at the height of AIDS deaths in the 1980s, life in the ashram of an Indian yogic spiritual tradition, and flowing in tai chi, which she teaches today. Her writing paints a vivid picture of each of these communities and her return to the mountains of western North Carolina.
Vytenis Babrauskas ’68
Electrical Fires and Explosions
Fire Science Publishers
Electrical explosions have been researched much less than electrical fires. Nonetheless, they are an important failure mode and can result in death, injury, or property damage. The first author to comprehensively survey the entire field of electrical explosions, Babrauskas reviews the research and the resulting standards, but also focuses on shortcomings and science misinterpretations of the current generation of industrial standards.
Wayne Patterson ’68
William Franklin Sands in Late Choson Korea: At the Deathbed
of Empire, 1896–1904
Rowman and Littlefield
As chief adviser to the Korean government in the early 1900s, William Franklin Sands attempted to persuade Emperor Kojong to undertake reforms and promote neutrality to keep the country independent. In this book, Patterson argues that Sands was hampered by corrupt officials who had the ear of the emperor, by the Japanese and the Russians who competed for influence and who tried to replace Sands with their own advisers, and, ironically, by U.S. Minister Horace Allen, his former superior.
Lewis Pyenson ’69
The Shock of Recognition: Motifs
of Modern Art and Science
Brill
Using a method called historical complementarity, Pyenson identifies the motif of non-figurative abstraction in modern art and science, including in Picasso’s and Einstein’s educational environments. An emeritus history professor, Pyenson also applies his method to intellectual life in Argentina, addressing its adoption of non-figurative art and nuclear physics in the mid-20th century, and its attention to landscape painting and the wonder of nature in the century’s later years.
Darwin Stapleton ’69, ed.
Crossing Cultural Boundaries in East Asia and Beyond
Brill
This volume, edited by Stapleton with Reiko Maekawa and Roberta Wollons, explores the personal complexities and ambiguities — and the successes and failures — of crossing borders and boundaries. Focusing primarily on East Asia, the book attends to the intimate experiences of border crossers, whether they are traveling to an unfamiliar cultural location or encountering the “other” in local settings such as the classroom or the coffee shop.
Richard Wolfson ’69
Nuclear Choices for the Twenty-First Century: A Citizen’s Guide
MIT Press
Are you for nuclear power or against it? What’s the basis of your opinion? Did you know a CT scan gives you some 2 millisieverts of radiation? Do you know how much a millisievert is? What is the point of a bilateral Russia-U.S. nuclear weapons treaty in a multipolar world? This book, co-written by Wolfson and Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, equips citizens to develop informed nuclear opinions, explaining the basics of nuclear technology and the controversies surrounding its use.
Joseph Horowitz ’70
Dvorák’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music
Norton
In 1893, the composer Antonin Dvorák prophesied a school of American classical music based on the searing melodies of Black music he had discovered since arriving in the U.S. But while Black music would be foundational for popular genres known the world over, it never gained a foothold in the concert hall. Challenging the standard narrative for American classical music, Horowitz looks back to literary figures to ponder how American music can connect with a “usable past.”
Rebecca Bushnell ’74, ed.
The Marvels of the World: An Anthology of Nature Writing Before 1700
University of Pennsylvania Press
Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of 98 original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind’s place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.
Carolyn Lesjak ’85
The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons
Stanford University Press
The enclosure of the commons, space once available for communal use, was not a singular event but an act of “slow violence” that transformed lands, labor, and basic concepts of public life leading into the 19th century. The Afterlife of Enclosure examines three canonical British writers — Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy — as narrators of this history, the long duration and diffuse effects of which required new literary forms to capture the lived experience of enclosure and its aftermath.
Matthew FitzSimmons ’93
Constance
Thomas & Mercer
In this thriller set in the near future, human cloning is a reality. After a routine upload of her consciousness goes terribly wrong, young Constance D’Arcy wakes up 18 months later, her recent memories missing. Her “Original,” she’s told, is dead. If that’s true, then what does that make her? The secrets of Con’s disorienting new life are buried deep, and so are those of why she died. Only one thing is certain: Con is being marked for murder. All over again.
Jeremy Weinstein ’97
System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot
Harper
naive optimism about technology’s liberating potential has given way to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. Armed with an understanding of how technologists think and exercise their power, Weinstein and fellow Stanford professors Rob Reich and Mehran Sahami share their insights and solutions to help clarify what is happening, what is at stake, and what we can do to control technology instead of letting it control us.
Susan Roth ’04 (writing as Rose Lerner)
The Wife in the Attic
Audible Originals
This Gothic thriller reinvents one of literature’s most twisted love triangles. With devious sophistication, Lerner weaves a haunting tale full of secrets and sharp edges. Will the governess’s loyalties ultimately lie with the master of the house — or with the wife in the attic? Romantic and suspenseful, Lerner’s latest novel is perfect for fans of Jane Eyre, Rebecca, and Portrait of a Lady on Fire.
Roman Shemakov ’20
The Digital Transformation of Property in Greater China
World Scientific
The global trade war is not just a reordering of technology; it’s a reordering of cities. One way for the U.S. to catch up, this book argues, is through public-private partnerships between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. — or to “copy” China. Co-written by Shemakov, Paul Schulte, and Dean Sun, Digital Transformation explores the people and companies blazing trails in China’s “Internet of Everything” to transform the way we live, buy, and move.
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.