Recent Releases The Keeper Sarah Langan ’96 HarperTorch (2006) Langan’s first novel introduces Bedford, Maine, a cursed and moribund mill town where a wasted former local beauty, Susan Marley, haunts the dreary streets. Marley is a frequent star in the townspeople’s nightmares. For the unlucky, the horrifying dreams will come true. Langan, who received her M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia, has a second novel, Virus, already in the publishing pipeline. String Quartets 1, 2, 3 and Divertimento Peter R�c3;©, (music emeritus) composer; performed by The Portland String Quartet and Graybert Beacham, Cheryl Tschanz, and Susan Poliacik. Albany Records (2006) Colby is the common thread that runs through this new recording of four memorable classical works of Peter R�c3;©, who taught music at the College for 33 years. Performances are by the Portland String Quartet and by a trio that includes pianist Cheryl Tschanz, adjunct associate professor of music, and violinist Graybert Beacham, applied music associate. The CD is available on campus or online through the Colby bookstore. God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence Michael Cobb ’95 New York University Press (2006) The title is from the rhetoric of the Rev. Fred Phelps, the pastor who leads picketing of American soldiers’ funerals, saying the deaths are God’s retribution for toleration of homosexuals. Cobb, an assistant professor of English at the University of Toronto, examines the rhetoric of religious hate speech—and shows how similar religious language has been and can be an effective response to anti-gay violence. Gaijin Yokozuna: A Biography of Chad Rowan Mark Panek ’90 University of Hawai’i Press (2006) Chad Rowan arrived in Japan as an 18-year-old Hawaiian determined to become a sumo star. He had never been to Japan, never set foot in a Sumo ring, and spoke no Japanese. Five years later, Rowan (alias Akebono) became the first non-Japanese, or gaijin, to attain sumo’s top rank, yokozuna. Panek, an assistant professor of English at the University of Hawai’i—Hilo, painstakingly documents this amazing cultural and athletic journey. Thunder from the Mountains Edward Martin ’51, M.D. A physician in Rumford, Maine, Martin was also a lifelong student of Native American history. Upon his death in 2001, he left behind the manuscript for this historical novel. The book, told from the point of view of the Wabenakis, covers the period from their earliest interaction with Europeans, in 1650, to the historic massacre of tribal members by the English at what is now Norridgewock, in 1724. The book is available through www.dallashillantiques.com. Painter and Priest: Giovanni Canavesio’s Visual Rhetoric and the Passion Cycle at La Brigue V�c3;©ronique Plesch (art) The University of Notre Dame Press (2006) Giovanni Canavesio, an artist-priest active in the last decades of the 15th century in the Southern Alps, left behind a significant body of work, including pictorial cycles and altarpieces. Richly illustrated, Plesch’s book is an in-depth analysis of his cycle on the “Passion of Christ,” completed in 1492 on the walls of a pilgrimage sanctuary of Notre-Dame des Fontaines, outside the southern French town of La Brigue. Plesch provides a detailed analysis of Canavesio’s complex and powerful Passion. In addition to her assessment of possible uses for Canavesio’s Passion cycle, Plesch places it within the wider context of late medieval religious belief. The Election After Reform: Money, Politics, and the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act Anthony Corrado (government), contributor Rowman & Littlefield (2006) Filled with groundbreaking studies, including chapters on political parties, 527 committees and interest groups, television advertising, Congressional politics, and presidential campaigns, the book is a must-read for anyone looking for an insightful analysis of the effects of the latest effort to reform campaign financing. Edited by Michael J. Malbin, executive director of the Campaign Finance Institute, where Corrado is chair of the board of trustees. Blue Colonial David Roderick ’92 American Poetry Review (2006) Winner of this year’s American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Roderick’s first book of poems, selected by Robert Pinsky, already has garnered critical acclaim, including praise from James Tate, Eavan Boland, Litt.D. ’97, and Michael Collier. The poems—self-portraits, poems in the voice of Priscilla Alden and John Billington, a colonial who embraced the culture of Native Americans—are both about and of the past and present. Roderick in dappled, quietly powerful prose, explores the intersection of time and knowledge.

The market, long-divorced from requirements for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, targets girls with a voraciousness that has to be experienced to be believed. Flip the pages of any parenting magazine and you will find girls dressed in finery that locks them out of the games just as completely as if their little American feet were being bound into lotus shapes. Every activity, from ballet to basketball, is reinterpreted to encourage girls to become pod people who accessorize well, mind their sex appeal, and snag boyfriends.

Enter Packaging Girlhood (St. Martin’s Press, August 2006), written by Colby’s Lyn Mikel Brown (education) and Sharon Lamb, professor of psychology at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. Brown and Lamb, both mothers, educators, and authors, pack a powerful punch when it comes to expertise on the subject. A renowned expert on the status of girls in America, Brown’s credits include Girlfighting and Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development (written with Carol Gilligan). Among four books by Lamb is The Secret Lives of Girls: What Good Girls Really Do—Sex, Aggression and their Guilt.

Using extensive market research that included surveys with more than 600 girls, Brown exposes a culture where girlhood arrives prepackaged. A world that, far from empowering them, is designed “. . . (to) channel girls’ desires into predictable types.” Bratz dolls are no different from Barbies, Brown points out, they just sell the idea that the girl who buys Bratz is powerful because she is choosing her role model (girls in string bikinis mixing drinks in hot tubs, for example).

After 20 years of studying girls, Brown says she and her coauthor were “fed up with the ‘you’ve come a long way, baby’ perspective that is so at odds with reality,” and they wanted to show parents how to avoid the pitfalls of a just-say-no approach by “becoming familiar with their daughters’ world, learning from her perspective, and parenting from a place of thoughtfulness, not fear.”

The adversary is both formidable and omnipresent. Between the Disney princess who waits for her carpet ride and the bootie-jigglers on MTV, there’s a lot of selling going on. It was, Brown says, “like dealing with aliens from old science fiction movies: chop one head off and five more pop out.”

Packaging Girls is replete with examples of girls being bombarded with the message that they should live their lives on the sidelines, preferably as sex symbols in fierce competition with each other for the favor of boys. At Halloween, boys are Superman while girls titter as pink fairies, sexy devils, or fluffy animals; girls’ bicycles range from “sweetie” to “glitter express,” while the boys “thrust” forward on “barebones” and “spitfire.”

Girls in the movies (with long eyelashes and big chests) routinely need rescuing, and never by their girl friends or mothers. The one inner-beauty heroine allowed us by DreamWorks, Princess Fiona in Shrek, is erased from all the post-movie commercial fare: packages of M&Ms, Burger King, Go-Gurt, and even the USPS stamps.

From magazines that channel a girl’s self-exploration into questions about body shape and hair color to books about rich, bulimic girls who have sexual escapades without consequences in the dressing rooms of expensive department stores, there are two types of pre-packaged girls: “pink and girly” or “red and feisty,” both defined by their appeal to boys.

With girls being encouraged from dawn to dusk to choose a shallow lifestyle over the conduct of independent life, we should be glad that Lamb and Brown stepped up to the plate on their behalf. If the first five chapters (what girls wear, watch, hear, read, and do), frighten us, then the final chapter, “Rebel, Resist, Refuse: Sample Conversations With Our Daughters,” should make us cheer. It takes us from ways to introduce the “S-word” (stereotype) to our youngest girls to discussing negative identity (cutting, vomiting) with our teenagers.

Yes, we have been introduced—disconcertingly—to the enemy, but we have also been handed the tool that will help our daughters face it head on and come out unscathed. As Brown and Lamb put it, “You can’t turn off the world—so teach your daughter to read it.”

For more information about Packaging Girlhood, go to www.packaginggirlhood.com, and read the following articles by Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown:

• "How to get to Stereotype Street" from the August 10 edition of the Boston Globe
• "Isn't she special? Packaging girlhood." from the August 10 edition of the Christian Science Monitor