Oberlin Alumni Magazine Winter 2000

	Drinkers, Drivers, and Bartenders: Balancing Private Choices and Public Responsibility By Frank Sloan '64, Emily M. Stout, Kathryn Whetten-Goldstein, and Lan Liang University of Chicago Press, 2000 More than 100,000 deaths a year are attributable to alcohol, including 20,000 highway fatalities. This study focuses on one of the regulations enacted to curb highway accidents: the liability imposed on alcohol servers and social hosts by tort law. Using a series of original sets of survey data, Frank Sloan and his colleagues explore the efficacy of a wide range of legal sanctions and policy mechanisms to reduce drunk driving. The book will serve as an important foundation for future research. Sloan is the J. Alexander McMahon Professor of Health Policy Management and Economics and director of the Center for Health Policy, Law, and Management at Duke University.
	Increase By Lia Purpura '86 Georgia University Press, 2000 An eloquent meditation of pregnancy and birth is only part of the sum of these gentle essays. We observe not only a child growing towards birth, but a self, growing toward self-definition. This is a love letter to an unborn child and a tracery of the joys and fears of having and holding a newborn, through the first year of raising Purpura's little son, Joseph. This is motherhood at an extraordinary pitch, recording, absorbing, and revisiting experiences from a multitude of angles. Purpura, author of four earlier books, won the 1999 Associated Writing Programs Award in Creative Non-Fiction and holds the 2000 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. She lives in Baltimore and teaches at Loyola College.
	Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing up with Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Parents By Noelle Howey '94 and Ellen Samuels '94, editors St. Martin's Press, 2000 This is a collection of 21 stories of now-grown children who grew up with an "out-of-the-ordinary" parent and who welcomed this opportunity to reminisce about how they dealt with the experience. Some recollections are poignant, some angry, and others describe a truly loving and unconflicted relationship. Each of the editors had reason to wish that such a book existed when she was growing up with a parent who was different. That they were able to create an accepting, nonjudgmental atmosphere for their storytellers is a mark of their own understanding. The book also includes a resource guide of organizations that offer support for the hundreds of thousands of gay, lesbian, and transgender parents and their children. Howey is a freelance writer who has contributed to numerous magazines. She is writing a memoir about life with her transgender father for Picador USA. Samuels is an award-winning poet and teacher who lives in Berkeley.
	Finding It: Selected Poems By Peter Money '86 Mille Grazia Press, 2000 This small collection of lyric poems takes the reader to Cape Cod and Vermont, where Money lived before making his way to Berkeley, California, with his wife and young son. Here are fog, mist, stars, and moonlight, an Adirondack chair at the family rental, and the ever-present wash of the sea. The spare, minimalist sketches allow the reader to fill in between his provocative lines with a flood of memory, and, occasionally, angst. This is Money's sixth collection. His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Talisman, The Sun, and The Writer's Almanac.
	*Defining New Yorker* Humor** By Judith Yaross Lee '71 University Press of Mississippi, 2000 Until its archives were opened in the mid-1900s, the history of The New Yorker was obscured in a not-quite-definable myth. Touted as the best magazine of all time, it has earned kudos as the source for short stories, sobering essays, and cartoons that created new relations between visual and verbal wit. Lee has carefully researched the early components of the magazine, tracing the editing patterns and personalities that tilted and pared the final product to a wry, sophisticated, informative publication. Anyone with a subscription to The New Yorker will find the book impossible to put down. Lee, a professor at Ohio University, is the author of Garrison Keillor, A Voice of America.
	Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race, Ethnicity, and Literature Edited by Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt '75 University Press of Mississippi, 2000 These studies, addressing issues of race, ethnicity, and empire in U.S. culture, have provided some of the most innovative and controversial contributions to recent scholarship. The book, with a collection of 19 probing essays written in the 1990s by outstanding contributors (including former Oberlin English professor Lawrence Buell, now at Harvard), examines the ever-expanding international cultural identity in the postcolonial era. Such a gathering of diverse, complementary, and often competing viewpoints provides a good introduction to the cultural differences and commonalities that comprise the United States today. Schmidt is professor of English at Swarthmore and is author of The Heart of the Story: Eudora Welty's Short Fiction.