Stephen Tignor ’92, High Strung: Björn Borg, John McEnroe, and the Untold Story of Tennis’s Fiercest Rivalry, Harper, 2011
To reflect upon a work about untold tennis stories, I had only to turn to the weathered photographs on the cinder-block walls of my tennis office at Swarthmore, and there he is: All-American Stephen “Tigs” Tignor, on [...]
Mara Hvistendahl ’02, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men (Public Affairs, New York) 2011.
Population control. Masculinization. Communism. Fertility. Human trafficking. Sex selection. Technology. Tradition. Imperialism. Demography. Abortion. Economics. All of these—and more—are brilliantly woven together by Mara Hvistendahl in her compelling exposé about the seemingly disconnected [...]
In October 1945, in the ruins of Nuremberg, Germany, the victorious Allied nations convened the first in a series of groundbreaking legal proceedings. The trials marked a milestone for international law, setting a precedent for international criminal prosecution that we struggle to live up to even today.
The Nazi defendants, despite their horrific crimes and their [...]
BOOKS
Courtney Bender ’91 and Pamela E. Klassen (editors), After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement, Columbia University Press, 2010. This multidisciplinary, scholarly essay collection investigates the meaning of religious diversity in a variety of settings, examining its effect on legal decisions and political and social interactions.
Carolyn Burke ’61, No Regrets: The Life of Edith Piaf, Alfred A. [...]
Justin Kramon ’02, Finny, Random House, 2010
Justin Kramon ’02 was already an established fiction writer, with stories published in journals such as Glimmer Train and Story Quarterly, well before he began working on the novel Finny. Kramon attributes his early work on the novel to conversations with agents who urged him toward the longer form: [...]
Susan Inman ’71, After Her Brain Broke: Helping My Daughter Recover Her Sanity, Bridgeross Communications, 2010
A desperately ill child. A bewildering succession of symptoms, along with a shifting assortment of diagnoses. A seemingly endless series of trial-and-error treatments, which compound a degree of symptom relief with unwelcome and even dangerous side effects. This is the [...]
Keetje Kuipers ’02, Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA Press, 2010), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize
Keetje Kuipers’ Beautiful in the Mouth begins in sensuality. Its first line reads, “At night his long body works above me….” Some 30 pages later, a regretfully lover-less persona confides, “No one // was coming to give me [...]
Alzina Stone Dale ’52
When the Post War World Was New,
(Tate Publishing, 2009)
World War II had recently ended, and Maryal Stone (known also by the pen name Alzina Stone Dale) had her Swarthmore diploma in hand. Unsure of what her next step would be, the Chicago native volunteered to go overseas with the Quakers and [...]
Michael Fairbanks, Marcela Escobari-Rose ’96, and Elizabeth Hooper, In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty (Templeton Press, 2009)
What leads to economic development in countries and regions around the world? Marcela Escobari-Rose ’96 and three co-editors/co-authors offer a distinctly different approach to this question: They nominate entrepreneurship as [...]
Carolyn Moxely Rouse ’87 Uncertain Suffering: Racial Health Care Disparities and Sickle Cell Disease, University of California Press, 2009
With good reason, one should hesitate before describing an ethnography about those with an incurable disease—and the broken health care system that attempts to treat them—as “wonderful,” but such is the elegant scholarship of Carolyn Moxely Rouse [...]