Elizabeth Finch (Museum of Art), Donna M. Cassidy, and Randall R. Griffey Marsden Hartley’s Maine The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017) This handsome and informative edition represents the first in-depth discussion of artist Marsden Hartley’s complex relationship with Maine, his home state. It was published to coincide with Marsden Hartley’s Maine, the exhibition organized by […]
Ben Lisle (American Studies) Modern Coliseum: Stadiums and American Culture University of Pennsylvania Press (2017) Lisle guides readers through the changes in stadium design since World War II, from urban ballparks like Ebbets Field and Fenway Park to the later iterations that turned from cities to the suburbs. In tracing this cultural change, Lisle examines […]
Tilar Mazzeo (English) Irena’s Children: A True Story of Courage Gallery Books (2016) Best-selling author Mazzeo turns her attention to the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who risked her life to smuggle some 2,500 Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Known as the “female Oskar Schindler,” Sendler used her credentials to enter the […]
Debra Spark (English) Unknown Caller LSU Press, Yellow Shoe Fiction (2016) The phone calls come at all hours of the night—Liesel, Joel’s first wife, who left the marriage suddenly and mysteriously years before, making her presence known in an unsettling and even chilling way. Spark’s new novel begins with one of the 2 a.m. calls […]
James R. Fleming (Science, Technology, and Society) Inventing Atmospheric Science: Bjerknes, Rossby, Wexler, and the Foundations of Modern Meteorology The MIT Press (2016) Fleming, a renowned scholar of atmospheric science and history, fixes his gaze on the period from 1900 to 1960, a time of rapid-fire breakthroughs that saw the field advance rapidly, year by […]
Winifred Tate (Anthropology) Drugs, Thugs,and Diplomats: U.S.Policymaking in Colombia Stanford University Press (2015) The aid package called Plan Colombia, passed by Congress in 2000, was intended to help Colombia fight drug trafficking,vanquish leftist guerrillas, and support peace and democracy. Most of the money went to the military, tied to paramilitaries that terrorized the population […]
Kate Bolick ’95 Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own Crown (2015) There is no better person to engage in an exploration of marriage mores than Bolick who, in this memoir/cultural study, proves to be both delightful company and a probing inquisitor who questions our societal assumptions and the pressures they create. Spinster, which earned rave […]
Elizabeth Finch (Colby College Museum of Art) and Michael Semff Terry Winters: Prints: 1999-2014 Staatliche Graphische Sammlung (2014) Terry Winters made his first print in 1982, the same year he debuted a closely related group of paintings composed of imagery suggestive of elemental biological forms at the brink of emergence. Since that year, printmaking has been integral to his […]
Arts Talk Lynne Conner (Theater and Dance) Palgrave-Macmillan (2013) At the heart of Arts Talk is the belief that audience pleasure is tied to the opportunity to interpret the meaning and value of art, and that this pleasure is enhanced when interpretation is made social. “In Arts Talk Conner says the collective vision of these constituencies should […]
A Wolf Called Romeo Nick Jans ’77 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2014) Even in Alaska, most people go a lifetime without ever catching a glimpse of a wolf—so when writer, photographer, and wolf aficionado Nick Jans ’77 encounters a lone black wolf near his home on the outskirts of the state capital, he knows it’s big […]
