Oberlin Alumni Magazine
Summer 2009 Vol. 103 No. 4
Bookshelf
Your Faith, Your Life: An Invitation to the Episcopal Church
This book serves as a guide for newcomers to the Episcopal church. It touches on the Episcopal church’s language of worship, theology, structure, and sacraments, so that newcomers will have the vocabulary and framework to share their beliefs and practices, explore the Bible, understand prayer, and discern their own ministry within the church. Jenifer Gamber also published My Faith, My Life: A Teen’s Guide to the Episcopal Church in 2006.
Television and American Culture
Mittell uses numerous sidebars and case studies to demonstrate the past, immediate, and far-reaching effects of American culture on television, and television’s influence on American culture. The book provides a broad historical overview of television—such topics as television for children, television’s transforming technologies, and televised citizenship included—while also honing in on such finer points as the formal attributes of its various genres and its role in gender and racial identity formation.
Raymond Oliver His Book of Hours: A Collection of Triads
The poetry of Raymond Oliver exemplifies the art of the short poem. Composed in a newly invented form Oliver calls triads, Raymond Oliver His Book of Hours explores moments of the past through the craft of the short poem.
What Would Keith Richards Do?
Daily Affirmations from a Rock ’n’ Roll Survivor
Diehard Stones fan, Jessica Pallington West records and sets forth the wisdom of legendary singer Keith Richards. With quotations sorted by subject, a brief biography of Richard’s life, and a list of his 26 commandments for success, What Would Keith Richards Do? is a complete and devoted spiritual self-help guide based on Richards’ teachings.
Bridging the Diversity Divide: Globalization and Reciprocal Empowerment in Higher Education
This book is for campus leaders and educators as they assist students and others in the difficult process of cultural transformation in support of diversity and inclusion. The book explores the model of reciprocal empowerment as a moral framework linking the institution’s values, culture, and workplace practices to the outside world through the prism of diversity.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life
In this biography, historian Lori Ginzberg narrates the life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a woman of great charm, enormous appetite, and extraordinary intellectual gifts who turned the limitations placed on women into a universal philosophy of equal rights.
MP3: Volume II
This slip-cased, three-book hardcover set contains 25 four-color images in each volume. The Midwest Photographers Publication Project (MP3) and the Museum of Contemporary Photography (MoCP) in Chicago produced this collection.
Devil’s Trill
In this mystery novel, Daniel Jacobus is a blind, reclusive, crotchety violin teacher living in self-imposed exile in rural New England. He spends his time chain-smoking, listening to old LPs, and occasionally taking on new students, whom he berates in the hope that they will flee. However, Jacobus is drawn back into the world he left behind when he decides to attend the Grimsley Competition at Carnegie Hall. The young winner of this competition has the honor of playing the Piccolino Stradivarius, a uniquely dazzling three-quarter-size violin that has brought misfortune to all who possessed it over the centuries. But someone steals the violin before the winner of the competition has a chance to play it, and Jacobus is the primary suspect.
A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge
A.D. follows six survivors from the hours before hurricane Katrina struck to its horrific aftermath. Those chronicled include Denise, a sixth-generation New Orleanian who experiences the chaos of the Superdome; the Doctor, whose unscathed French Quarter home becomes a refuge for those not so lucky; and Abbas and his friend Mansell, who face the storm from the roof of Abbas’s family market.
Picasso and the Allure of Language
Throughout his life, Pablo Picasso had close friendships with writers and an abiding interest in the written word. This book traces the relationship that Picasso had with literature and writing in his life and work.
Smallpox: The Death of a Disease
Smallpox is D. A. Henderson’s personal story of how he led the World Health Organization’s campaign to eradicate smallpox—the only disease in history to have been eliminated.
Homeland Siege: Tactics for Police and Military
Homeland Siege provides current enemy intelligence to promote better tactical techniques for United States troops and police officers. But this intelligence doesn't come from some foreign shore; it comes from the borders, highways, and cities of America—and the enemy is international organized crime.
Dear James:
Letters to a Young Illustrator
R. O. Blechman has compiled all the wisdom he has accumulated during his esteemed career as an illustrator and writer into a series of poignant yet instructive letters written to an imagined young illustrator named James. Flush with wit and candor, Blechman’s correspondence delves into his own trashcan of false starts and failed beginnings, in addition to his artistic triumphs, to offer James both encouragement and criticism.
Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy
"Guns don’t kill people; people kill people." "When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns." "An armed society is a polite society." Henigan contends that the gun lobby's remarkable success in blocking passage of lifesaving gun laws is the result, in large part, of its relentless and effective use of these simple and resonant messages. He discusses the profound and deadly impact of the gun lobby’s bumper-sticker logic on the gun control debate and systematically exposes the misguided thinking at the core of the pro-gun slogans.
Baghdad Barcarolle: How Beatrice Ohanessian Became Iraq’s Foremost Classical Pianist
Drawing on anecdotes collected during numerous personal conversations, Holly Windle retells the story of Beatrice Ohanessian’s childhood in cosmopolitan, multicultural Baghdad and her glamorous (and sometimes dangerous) career as a concert pianist in the Middle East. After a long performing career, Ohanessian and her sister move to Minnesota in 1994, and develop connections at the Schubert Club which led to the writing of this book.
Wendy Leebov's Essentials for
Great Patient Experiences:
No-Nonsense with Gratifying Results
This book contains exercises, checklists, meeting plans, question guides, scripts, and coaching techniques, plus an appendix of additional resources that can quickly reverse the common conflicts, miscommunications, and bad performances that stifle happiness and achievement at work. Wendy Leebov is also the author of Essentials for Great Personal Leadership: No-Nonsense Solutions with Gratifying Results (Health Forum, 2008) and Physician Entrepreneurs: The Quality Patient Experience (HCPro, 2008).
Exploring Natural Connections:
A Book and CD Featuring Unique Games and Activities for Educators
Developed over seven years of teaching ecology and outdoor skills, Exploring Natural Connections is a collection of tools for teaching and connecting children to the natural world around them. Activities are designed to bring out innate creativity and curiosity. The book has more than 60 games and activities for children in grades K-10, covering such topics as energy cycling, adaptations, vernal pools, and animal tracking.
Riven by Lust: Incest and Schism in Buddhist Legend and Historiography
Riven by Lust is the tale of a man accused of causing the fundamental schism in early Indian Buddhism, but not before he has sex with his mother and kills his father. In tracing this Indian Buddhist Oedipal tale, Jonathan Silk follows it through texts in all of the major canonical languages of Buddhism, Sanskrit, Pali, Tibetan, Chinese, and Japanese, along the way noting parallels and contrasts with classical and medieval European stories such as the legend of the Oedipal Judas. Silk is also the author of Managing Monks: Administrators and Administrative Roles in Indian Buddhist Monasticism.
remanence
The poems in remanence are attentive to the world—or rather to the traces it leaves in our brains. They [poems?]also make a study of misperception and error. Much of the book is composed of five-line poems, each long line a semi-separate thought.
Remembering the Walker and the Wheelchair: Poems of Grief and Healing
Eva Schlesinger’s poems explore personal pain and triumph after suffering severe burns due to a propane factory explosion. Schlesinger endured a monthlong hospital stay, followed by rigorous physical therapy that resulted in her learning how to walk again.
Little House, Long Shadow: Laura Ingalls Wilder's Impact on American Culture
Anita Fellman argues that the Little House books’ popularity helped lay the groundwork for a negative response to big government and a positive view of political individualism, contributing to the acceptance of contemporary conservatism while perpetuating a mythic West. Fellman also explores the continuing presence of the books—and their message—in modern cultural institutions from classrooms to tourism, newspaper editorials to Internet message boards.
Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialism,
1898-1976
By examining “big stick” diplomacy, WWII, and the Vietnam War in light of regional domestic concerns, Harilaos Stecopoulos urges a reassessment of the American Century. Providing new interpretations of literary works both well known (Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding) and marginal (Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots, Du Bois's Dark Princess), Stecopoulos argues that the South played a crucial role in mediating between the national and imperial concerns of the United States. That intersection of region and empire, he contends, profoundly influenced how Americans understood not only cultural and political geographies but also issues of race and ethnicity.
Health Disparities in the United States: Social Class, Race, Ethnicity, and Health
David Barr explores how socioeconomic status, race, and ethnic makeup affect health disparities; what the wide gulf in care and health outcomes means for the medical community, cultural subsets, and society at large; and how to address the issue effectively.
French and Jewish: Culture and the Politics of Identity in Early Twentieth Century France
This study of Jewish cultural innovation in early 20th-century France highlights the complexity and ambivalence of Jewish identity and self-definition in the modern world.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Smoking Cessation: A Practical Guide to the Most Effective Treatments
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Smoking Cessation offers the fundamental counseling strategies and interventions that have been established, researched, and refined over the past decade. This program outlines essential components that should be included in the treatment of any smoker, as well as steps to take when faced with smokers likely to have particular difficulty quitting.
Music Box
Mother Banjo
Poetic and raw indie-folk with a dash of Americana roots and gospel, featuring commanding vocals and a stripped down banjo sound.
Fragments For The End Of Time
Performed by Sequentia—Bagby’s ensemble for medieval music—works include Fortis atque amara, Unsar trohtin hat farsalt, and Adducentur regi virgines.