Flanking the southern edge of the Green, Dartmouth’s pint-size version of New York City’s iconic Lincoln Center turns 50 this year. The Hop, named one of the nation’s exemplary performing arts centers by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988, attracts more than just performing artists. The Hop is not special because of its awards, big-name acts or even the sheer volume of its shows. The Hop invites everyone in—from athletes eating after practice to the premed major who saw his first musical at the Hop and 45 years later is a Tony Award-winning Broadway director. It’s a home for raw talents and the just raw: Students make costumes, build sets and slap together a lot of wobbly chairs in the woodshop. Much has changed in the last five decades, but the Hop remains the cultural heart of campus, beating with the nit and grit and grind of people trying to make something of their art—and of themselves.                   —Sarah Schewe ’12

New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg ’88 profiles six athletes as they pursue a life-defining goal—a 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bike ride and 26.2-mile run—in You Are an Ironman: How Six Weekend Warriors Chased Their Dream of Finishing the World’s Toughest Triathlon (Viking).

William M. Gould ’54, M.D., chronicles a friendship among three boys, a prank that deteriorates into a crime and its impact on the three as they meet 30 years later in Three Boys Like You (iUniverse).

Denny Emerson ’63, a former member of the U.S. Equestrian Team and a trainer and coach who earned the U.S. Eventing Association’s Wofford Cup for lifetime service to eventing, reviews seven broad “areas of choice” to help riders become better in How Good Riders Get Good: Daily Choices That Lead to Success in Any Equestrian Sport (Trafalgar Square Books).

Paul R. Pillar ’69, a former CIA analyst and director of studies in the security studies program at Georgetown, confronts America’s intelligence myths and offers an approach to better informing U.S. policy in Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (Columbia University Press).

Architectural historian William Morgan ’66 showcases the long history of a small town through descriptions and visuals of its buildings in  Monadnock Summer: The Architectural Legacy of Dublin, New Hampshire (Godine).

Julia Miner ’76 illustrated The Lighthouse Santa (Flying Dog/University Press of New England), a story by Sara Hoagland Hunter ’76 about a girl who refuses to let an approaching storm threaten her holiday.

After learning the clarinet and bass sax in junior high and playing in a neighborhood band, Shabazz turned to drums in high school and discovered a passion for his roots that took him to Ghana to study music and drumming in the early 1970s. He returned to Philadelphia to spend several years as a percussionist with the famed Arthur Hall Afro-American Dance Ensemble, followed by performances with jazz greats, further study in Brazil and Cuba and a 1984 master’s in education from Cambridge College.

It was in connection with Arthur Hall’s 1978 residency at Dartmouth that Shabazz first came to Hanover.That led to his appointment in 1984 as director of the College’s popular World Music Percussion Ensemble (WMPE), with which he also performs at its three yearly concerts. (On November 16 the ensemble will perform Brazilian music at the Hop.) Composed of about 20 students and local drummers, the group also showcases the talents of other musicians and vocalists needed for its international repertoire.

In the past three decades the WMPE has attracted more than 600 student members. Former geography major and football quarterback Steve Ferraris ’78, who now performs and teaches hand drums at the University of Vermont, came to music through the WMPE. “When [football] was over, I heard about an African drumming ensemble. At every level of the things I’m doing 30 years later, I got my first experience with Hafiz,” he says.

Christina Chen ’12 saw Shabazz play at her freshman orientation and was blown away. “I’d played classical piano for 16 years. This was less structured, more creative, more improvisational,” she says.

“There is a wow factor when he builds us up, and it works to the point where anyone can solo,” adds Si Jie Loo ’12, who grew up playing Chinese music in Malaysia. She says Shabazz impels students to understand what it means to play in sync.

Besides directing and performing with the WMPE and playing with a local band, Shabazz also teaches “Oral Tradition Musicianship,” a course he designed shortly after coming to Dartmouth to encourage students to dig into their ancestry. “Music is just a way in,” he says of the course, which requires students to keep journals. “Not only do most students not know much about their own histories, but they don’t see themselves as historical figures in their own right. I tell them, ‘If you don’t write about yourself, no one else will.’ I make them present their own histories to the class, so by the end of the term everyone in the class will know about the culture of everyone else, whether Chinese, German, Irish or African.”

Shabazz writes in his own journal at least three days a week. “I tell my students you will want to look back to see what happened when you were at Dartmouth,” he says. Being able to review his notations in the past year on the death of his beloved German shepherd and his heart attack and subsequent triple bypass gave him some perspective, he says. And returning to drumming “was a wonderful way to relax my body while stimulating my mind.”

His class draws music majors as well as those studying music for the first time. “I try to structure the course and spend enough time with the non-music-readers during office hours so they can understand the assignments designed for the readers,” he says.

For Shabazz, music, whether contemporary or ancient, will always be about people. “It speaks to how life evolves as one passes from adolescence into older age and on into another life,” he says. “It reflects festivals, births, hardships, interactions with friends and relatives. It tells you what a village thinks and how a person is remembered.”

Ben Moynihan, a former member of the WMPE, is director of operations at the Algebra Project in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

According to The Mapping of the World by Rodney Shirley (Early World Press, 2001), Blaeu’s maps were “lauded as the finest expression of Dutch cartography at the height of its development.” Printed on his father’s copper-plate printing press, they were colored in piecemeal by workers. “Maps, like books, were status symbols in that period,” says Lucinda Hall, a reference bibliographer who assists students whose assignments take them to the map room. “It’s important to remember that maps are not only historical but political. They often reflect work done to please a sponsor.”

The map room is a resource well beyond the world of geography and history, Hall notes. Courses that included map work last year ran the gamut from “Linguistics” to “Rhetoric and Writing.” In academic year 2010-11 the staff assisted 2,120 visitors, 550 of whom had cartography questions.

Click image above to view PDF.

It’s a routine Calhoun has perfected. In August Calhoun marks his 26th anniversary as piano tuner for the celebrated Rhode Island jazz festival, which since 1954 has hosted such luminaries as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie and Ray Charles. Calhoun generally has minimal interaction with the musicians, but his behind-the-scenes role is crucial to the festival’s success. When Dave Brubeck hits a note that rings just so, it’s a credit to his talent and a testament to Calhoun’s craftsmanship.

“The musician playing the piano has never played this piano before,” Calhoun says. “They’re going to walk on stage, introduce themselves to the audience and then sit down at a piano. In a sense my job is to make it so that they have total trust in what the piano can do for them and how the piano sounds.”

Newport performers take turns on the festival’s rented pianos rather than bring their own, creating the need for an on-site tuner sensitive to the instrument’s notoriously fickle nature: Humid weather, common during the annual festival, can knock the pitch out of whack. So can a pianist who pounds the keys especially hard.

“I’m insurance that the pianos will be in tune enough and in good enough repair,” explains Calhoun. Normally both he and the performers are too busy to greet each other, though sometimes they do. One time Chick Corea asked to meet Calhoun to feel him out and get a sense of the piano he’d be playing. The tuner has also met Dr. John—a pianist of a strikingly “gentle” style, Calhoun says, despite his “funny little meaty hands.”

One summer Calhoun found himself huddled beneath a piano with Herbie Hancock and his manager, investigating the source of a terrific BAM! that occurred after a structural piece at the instrument’s base fell during the Grammy winner’s performance.

“His manager looks at me and goes, ‘Are you the piano technician?’ I said ‘yes.’ He goes ‘good’ and looks at Herbie and says, ‘Herbie, get out of here!’ ” Calhoun recalls with a laugh.

As a boy, the Holbrook, Massachusetts, native was always more interested in trying to take apart his parents’ piano than in playing it, though he is a professional pianist. (He’s fond of bluesy jazz.) Coincidently, when Calhoun finally got his first piano in 1980 he had no choice but to dismantle it—he lived on the top floor of a triple-decker in Providence, Rhode Island, and it was impossible to get the instrument up the stairs in one piece. Months passed before he attempted reassembly.

Calhoun enrolled at Dartmouth to study physics and astronomy and, like other prospective students, he marveled at the beauty of the campus.

“I went, ‘Oh my God, it’s gorgeous,’ and Dartmouth seemed to be pretty impressed with me,” he says. Calhoun lived in the Wigwam dorms (known today as the River Cluster) and joined Sigma Phi Epsilon while busying himself with physics. “Something about the remoteness from the rest of the school, I think, tended to foster close associations with the rest of the kids down at the Wigs,” he recalls. Calhoun spent a semester with other physics students at the Kitts Peak National Observatory in Arizona, an experience he remembers as “wicked cool” since it gave him and his peers the chance to spend nights in a mountaintop observatory. While contemplating his future during senior year, he taught physics to students at Hanover High School.

After graduation Calhoun continued teaching high school science before finally deciding to blend his interest in music and physics. Driven in part by the enjoyment he had taking apart and putting together his first piano, in 1985 Calhoun entered the New England Conservatory to study piano technology. After completing the yearlong program, which required tuning and repair classes in the morning and hands-on practice in the afternoon, Calhoun was hired at the three-day jazz festival in 1986 after making what he calls a “ridiculously low” offer for his services. He’s been there ever since.

Calhoun shows up at 7 a.m.—hours before show time—and hangs with the sound engineers near the stage. He does full tunings and checks octaves at the start of the day, but between acts is when he really hustles—moving between performances on the festival’s three stages with a tuning wrench and pair of rubber mutes. Calhoun typically has a narrow window to test the strings that correspond to each note, check the octaves and finger the keys to make sure the sound is pitch-perfect.

“He’s very good and very fast, which you have to be,” says Bob Jones, a senior producer with New Festival Productions, the festival’s production company. “Sometimes there’s only 15 minutes between two piano players. He’s got to pipe right up on stage and make sure the piano’s in tune.”

“Calhoun is one of the festival’s many unsung contributors who return each year and are vital to behind-the-scene operations,” says festival manager Tim Tobin. “They feel as if it is a privilege to work for us because it is in fact the granddaddy of all jazz festivals.” In addition to the prestige, the festival’s intimate atmosphere is a magnet for the workforce. “When you’re working with your family, you tend to stick around,” says Tobin.

Calhoun echoes that sentiment. He’s been part of the festival family for so long that “they never call me anymore. They just assume I’m coming and wait for me to contact them.”

Even so, working a prestigious festival alone doesn’t pay the bills. Calhoun, a resident of Woonsocket, Rhode Island, juggles several jobs. His main gig is tuning and repairing pianos for performance halls and individuals. He also teaches high school physics part-time, runs workshops on the physics of music and tunes the pianos at the weekend-long Newport Folk Festival in July.

Calhoun says he’s tuned the piano of virtually every Newport performer in the last quarter-century, though one notable exception stands out. One summer Bruce Hornsby swung by Newport while on tour but enlisted his own keyboard player to tune his 9-foot Baldwin piano. It was, Calhoun politely suggests, perhaps not the best decision.

“Let’s just say had I tuned the piano it would have sounded better, but you know, Bruce Hornsby didn’t seem to care one bit what it sounded like.”

Eric Tucker is a reporter for the Associated Press in Providence, Rhode Island.

—Sean Plottner

To read captions, click “share info” while viewing slideshow in full size.

Journalist Bob Sullivan ’75 gathers documentation from respected scientists, historians and Arctic explorers to prove once and for all that Santa is not just a myth in the 15th-anniversary edition of Flight of the Reindeer: The True Story of Santa Claus and His Christmas Mission (Skyhorse Publishing).

Roger H. Hull ’64 draws on his experiences as a former president of Union and Beloit colleges in the guidebook Lead or Leave: A Primer for College Presidents and Board Members (Hamilton Books).

Journalist Lisa Densmore ’83 distills her mountaineering experience to share the best trails and weather-preparation techniques for backpacking in three guides, Hiking the Adirondacks, Hiking the White Mountains and Predicting Weather: Forecasting, Planning & Preparing (FalconGuides).

George Jacobs ’65 uses his career as a Medicare employee and subsequent counseling of beneficiaries to inform the guide Managing Your Medicare: An Insider’s Guide to Maximizing Benefits and Lowering Costs (Self-Counsel Press).

Carl Little ’76 showcases the art of nationally renowned collage painter and children’s illustrator Dahlov Ipcar in The Art of Dahlov Ipcar (Down East).

Developing the argument of his Atlantic Monthly article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” writer Nicholas Carr ’81 discusses the ramifications of Internet use on the way humans think in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (Norton).

In this age of Photoshop and instant digital imaging, it may seem futile to spend hours in the darkroom printing test strips and adjusting settings to find the right exposure, contrast and color balance for a single photograph. But Beahan says it’s time well spent. She argues that the darkroom is still very relevant because a familiarity with the principles of analog photography gives students a solid base to approach more complex, automated digital technologies.

Although some students grumble that they prefer the instant results of digital photography, most seem to be enthralled with the magic of the darkroom. They are excited to be shooting film with an old-fashioned single-lens reflex camera and learning how to make chromogenic color prints. “When you make a mistake, the results can sometimes be wonderful,” says Sydney Thomashow ’11, a studio art major with a concentration in photography.

All 13 students in “Photography II/III” work on personal photography projects. Some are interested in still-life photography, some explore the human form, some photograph nature and one student decided to work on a series of close-up portraits of dogs. But in today’s meeting the students are not showing their own photographs. The assignment—“Sources, Influences and Kinships”—is for students to show a selection of images that have affected them.

The first student to take a turn at the projector, Emily Duke ’11, shows a selection of mostly fashion photographers, ranging from Richard Avedon to Corinne Day, the photographer who introduced Kate Moss to the fashion world. Duke also includes a painting by Edward Degas, a film poster of Rita Hayworth in Gilda, an image of Rosie the Riveter and a collage of Disney princesses.

“When I was younger I used to cut out fashion shoots and hang them on my wall,” Duke laughs in response to a classmate who says she’s impressed by Duke’s knowledge of fashion photographers. Duke says she is now intrigued by fashion photography because of its power to influence people’s perception of how women should look and behave. Duke’s class project is an intimate visual personal diary in the style of the photographer Nan Goldin, chronicling her life and her relationships with others.

One motivation for the “sources” assignment, says Beahan, is to encourage students to become more aware of how they have been influenced by images throughout their lives.

“Students often don’t realize that the first pictures they take tend to be internalizations of images they have already seen,” says Beahan. She explains she wants students to consider whether they are making conscious visual decisions or if they are just mimicking models they’re taking for granted.

“Visual literacy—the deconstructing of images and learning the language of images—is central to everything we do in the visual arts,” says Beahan. She argues that everyone should be aware of the power of images: “We should be aware of how they’re used, by whom, what they mean and what they purport to mean,” Beahan says.

With the advent of digital photography, audiences have become more suspicious of photographs. Everyone knows that with a few mouse clicks objects can be moved, shapes can be distorted, colors can be changed and heads can be spliced onto bodies. What people often don’t realize is that even the earliest photographs cannot be trusted. As an example, Beahan mentions Civil War pictures in which the bodies of slain soldiers were posed for dramatic effect.

Photographs are never “truth,” Beahan says. “Even the act of cropping the world and putting it in a frame is a manipulation,” she explains.

Photography’s capacity to create the illusion of truth is what interests Thomashow. “A photograph is a kind of truth—even if it’s manipulated or distorted—because the photographic exposure records real things in the real world,” she says. Thomashow starts her “sources” presentation with some Polaroid pictures she took as a child: snapshots of her dog, her brother and her nanny. She describes how she decorated the walls of her room with these pictures so she would be constantly surrounded by those she loved. She explains that her family moved from New York City to Vermont one year before 9/11 and that she used photography to find stability in a changing world. For her class project Thomashow photographed her 12-year-old sister, trying to capture her sister’s transition from childhood into puberty. She says her project is inspired by Alice in Wonderland and the work of Sally Mann, a photographer who has chronicled the development of her children, portraying both the beauty and the darker sides of childhood.

Thomashow projects Mann’s black-and-white images. This triggers a class discussion about who gets to interpret photographs: the photographer or the viewer? David Hilliard, an artist-in-residence who visits class meetings, remarks: “It can be both wonderful and frustrating when a stranger comes in and projects his own experience in your work.”

“A photograph can function even without context,” says Beahan. “Meaning is very slippery and ephemeral. In a way, I’ve come to like that about the medium.” In her own photography Beahan is interested in the shaping of the natural landscape and the tension between humans and the landscape they inhabit. Beahan says she has been influenced by photographers Frederick Sommer, Timothy O’Sullivan, Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Stephen Shore, Joel Sternfeld ’65, Robert Adams and Emmet Gowin. She uses a large Deardorff view-camera that makes 8-by-10 negatives and has taken it to places such as Iceland, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Hawaii, Cuba and Mexico.

In her 2009 book, Cuba: Singing with Bright Tears, Beahan documents how images are used in part to impose ideology on the landscape. She photographed fields overshadowed by enormous billboards of revolutionary heroes, roads lined with political posters and statues of martyrs in courtyards and parks.

Beahan seems to be playing with a viewer’s perception of what’s real and what’s image. In one photograph a painting of a lush river valley is enclosed in a frame on a concrete wall in a hotel lobby; a few pages later a photograph of a river view is enclosed in a window frame that almost looks like a picture on a wall. It’s as if reality has been turned inside-out, which is exactly the quality of photography that Thomashow says she likes best. Talking about Man Ray, a surreal artist who turned to photography, Thomashow explains: “The power of photography is that people believe in photos and think they are accurate interpretations of reality. Artists can play with that.”

Suggested Reading
Professor Beahan recommends the following:

Landscape and Memory, by Simon Schama (Vintage, 1996). “This illustrated history presents an evolving Western vision of nature, especially in the visual arts.”

The Bride and the Bachelors: Five Masters of the Avant-Garde, by Calvin Tomkins (Penguin, 1976). “This description of art-making from a particular period includes chapters about Marcel Duchamp, Jean Tinguely, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Merce Cunningham. Students can learn a lot from the attitudes and philosophies of these artists.”

The Photographer’s Eye, by John Szarkowski (The Museum of Modern Art, 2007). “This classic illustrated essay investigates how ‘this mechanical and mindless process’ could be made to produce pictures with clarity, coherence and a point of view.”

Judith Hertog, who lives in Norwich, Vermont, is a regular contributor to DAM.

Favorite book to teach:
The Discovery of Insulin, by Michael Bliss

Must-read books in your field:
Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
The Child Who Never Grew, by Pearl Buck

Favorite pleasure read:
The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science, by Richard Holmes

Currently reading:
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American, by Robin Kelley

Bliss tells the historical tale of one of the most important discoveries in 20th-century medicine that opened the door to molecular medicine and literally transformed the lives of diabetics. As he writes: “With the discovery of insulin, the stone was rolled away and diabetes became a matter of life and not death.”

Middlesex, a Pulitzer-winning novel, details the life of an individual with a common enzymatic deficiency that causes anatomic gender confusion. It explores the fundamental question of what is a man and what is a woman. It’s not an easy answer.

Buck’s book tells the poignant tale of her daughter, who had an intellectual disability due to phenylketonuria, a disease unknown at the time of her birth. Written after Buck had for years hidden her daughter from public view, this book helped to lift a veil of secrecy around a disability that was not spoken of.

CAT NORRIS
Psychological and Brain Sciences

Favorite book to teach:
Descartes’ Error, by Antonio Damasio

Must-read book in your field:
Philosophical Foundations of Social Neuroscience, by M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker

Favorite pleasure reads:
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
Choke, by Chuck Palahniuk
Lullaby, by Chuck Palahniuk

Currently reading:
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall, by Kazuo Ishiguro

Descartes’ Error is an example of a really good popular-press book about the brain and emotion. I tend to not use textbooks to teach in our field. I believe that students learn more from reading and thinking critically about original research articles.

The field of social neuroscience is relatively new but has roots in many other research areas. When students come to me and ask how they can learn more about this relatively new field, I always recommend Foundations, a volume of previously published articles.

JOHN PFISTER
Psychological and Brain Sciences

Favorite book to teach:
50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology: Shattering Widespread Misconceptions about Human Behavior, by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn, John Ruscio and Barry L. Beyerstein

Must-read books in your field:
Why People Believe Weird Things, by Michael Shermer
The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century, by David Salsburg

Favorite pleasure read:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Currently reading:
In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, by Nathaniel Philbrick

I love 50 Great Myths and used it in my winter seminar. This should be on every psychologist’s shelf.

Shermer delivers a great discussion and a terrific analysis of the things that make us believe in alien abduction or ESP. There is humanity in a science like statistics. Any field is filled with intrigue, scoundrels, scandals, cads, bounders and geniuses alike.

Salsburg’s book is a reminder that statistics is not a dull subject.

My oldest son and I read Haddon’s book together several years ago and still talk about it. It is one autistic boy’s journey of discovery about himself and how others respond to him. My son and I still greet one another with the main character’s distinctive handclasp.

CHARLES WHEELAN ’88
Economics

Favorite book to teach:
Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies? by James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger

Must-read book in your field:
The Economist, the magazine

Favorite pleasure read:
The Razor’s Edge, by W. Somerset Maugham

Currently reading:
Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Peace Diplomacy in the Middle East, by Martin Indyk

Inequality is an in-depth look at an important public policy issue. The authors come to the conclusion that education—and preschool education in particular—plays a crucial role in determining life success. That’s a pretty intuitive finding, but the authors substantiate that view with a lot of interesting empirical data. The result is a book that is both highly relevant and academically rigorous. I also enjoy teaching the book because both Heckman and Krueger were professors of mine in graduate school, so I feel there is some kind of continuity from my former professors to my current students. I always invite my Dartmouth students to my home once during the term for dinner because Krueger did the same when I was in his class, and I like to be able to pass that tradition along.

The Razor’s Edge is about a guy who forgoes a conventional career in finance to travel the world seeking enlightenment. I first read the book in high school and it was one of the things that motivated me to travel around the world after I graduated from Dartmouth. I read the book again 20 years later when I was taking my children around the world, and it still spoke to me. There are pressures at any stage in life to do the conventional thing. I think it’s always healthy to challenge those choices, or at least reflect on them.

MELANIE BENSON
Native-American Studies

Favorite book to teach:
Bleed Into Me, by Stephen Graham Jones

Must-read book in your field:
Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko

Favorite pleasure read:
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner

Currently reading:
Flight, by Sherman Alexie

Bleed Into Me is a collection of stories that offers a diverse, dynamic and painful panorama of Native life in America today, one that looks nothing like the befeathered and moccasined tableau that many expect; indeed, Jones often denies us any explicit markers of “indigenous” identity at all. But he also writes like a poet, and the more we excavate his transcendently beautiful prose, we find a stunning collection of tropes and ideas that uncover how deeply and often irreversibly a Native past haunts even the most contemporary urban or suburban scenes.

Published in 1977, Ceremony was one of the first novels to be taken seriously as a Native-American text. It is considered canonical, and for good reason. It presents a bleak, evocative portrait of postwar reservation anomie and despair, of mixed-blood angst and dissipating tradition, of addiction and desperation, and of the ineluctable ways that American Indians were absorbed by mainstream American culture with all the violence and loss that process entailed. In the end, Silko provides a message of cultural survival through ceremony, of which storytelling is an integral part. It’s very difficult to begin a conversation about Native-American literature without starting here and assessing both the strides and the limitations that Silko’s work represents.

Alexie keeps us all talking—and that is the most important thing we can be doing.

JULIE KALISH
Institute for Writing and Rhetoric

Favorite book to teach:
Griswold v. Connecticut, a Supreme Court case

Must-read book in your field:
The United States Constitution, by We, the People of the United States and a handful of other guys

Favorite pleasure reads:
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Call it Sleep, by Henry Roth
The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling

Currently reading:
The Audacity of Hope, by Barack Obama
The Complete Works of Isaac Babel Democracy in America, by Alexis De Tocqueville

I love teaching Griswold for all of its concurring opinions, and Roe v. Wade for its highly unusual historical portion and systematic constitutional analysis. I like that students have heard of Roe v. Wade, but almost none has actually read it; they are often surprised by what’s really said in the opinion. Supreme Court cases are the most fun to teach because they tend to be about really interesting questions that are societally and personally important to students, and they are pure argument—there’s no right and wrong answer; there’s merely argument, every piece of which is up for rhetorical analysis and debate. You can teach absolutely everything using these cases: writing, logic, argumentation, rhetoric, social issues, substantive law, ethics, government responsibility, and theory of law and government and on and on.

ADRIAN W.B. RANDOLPH
Art History

Favorite book to teach:
Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style, by Michael Baxandall

Must-read book in your field:
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien), by Jacob Burckhardt

Favorite pleasure read:
Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters

Currently reading:
2666, by Roberto Bolaño

Written in the early 1970s, Baxandall’s creative interpretations of Italian Renaissance painting have never been surpassed. Baxandall’s limpid prose reveals complex analyses of how individuals may have understood their visual culture. Students are always fascinated by his emphasis on the materials of paint and gold, the cultural foundations of linear perspective and his easy command of a variety of sources.

One can still learn much from Burckhardt’s study and see how the Renaissance was framed by modern concerns.

LESLIE BUTLER
History

Favorite book to teach:
Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin

Must-read book in your field:
Foul Bodies: Cleanliness in Early America, by Kathleen Brown

Favorite pleasure reads:
Harry Potter, by J.K. Rowling
The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis

Currently reading:
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert Richardson

Baldwin’s collection of essays is one of the most probing and beautifully written meditations on identity in 20th-century America. He wrote most of these essays while living as an expatriate in France and Switzerland, thus continuing a long tradition of American writers and intellectuals who found that being abroad gave them fresh perspective on the problems of home.

Brown’s new, prize-winning book examines ideas of cleanliness in early America and how they have changed over time. Through imaginative and exhaustive research, Brown, a Penn professor, demonstrates how “body care” has been bound up with religious ideals, the rise of a market economy, the formation of a middle class and changes in gender roles.

MICHAEL BRONSKI
Film, Women’s and Gender Studies

Favorite book to teach:
Anti-Semite and Jew, by Jean-Paul Sartre

Must-read book in your field:
The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture, by Terry Castle

Favorite pleasure read:
Any collection of film criticism by Pauline Kael

Currently reading:
When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and her Circle of Female Spectators, by Lisa Merrill

Although written in 1948, Sartre’s analysis of anti-Semitism is an amazing work that really gets to the heart of how we create outside social groups and demonize them. Sartre gets into the psychology and the sexual fantasies of others and even today the book is highly instructive. I use it in “Jews and Hollywood: The Making of American Dreams” to discuss what Jewish immigrants faced when they came to this country. It is also useful in “Introduction to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies.”

Kael’s film criticism, which she began writing in the early 1960s and continued until her death a few years ago, is some of the best writing in American journalism and art criticism. She is funny, insightful, combative, highly knowledgeable and always entertaining. I go back to these reviews again and again, not just for the pleasure of reading them but to learn or remember how to write clearly and concisely and to make a point with vigor and wit.

Along with Edwin Booth, Cushman was perhaps the most famous Shakespearean actor of the 19th century. She was also, for the time, completely open about her romantic affairs with women. Her relationship with Matilda Hayes was so renowned that no less an expert on romantic love than Elizabeth Barrett Browning called their relationship a “female marriage” and found it more perfect than that between a man and a woman. The title of the book refers to the fact that one of her most famous roles was Romeo, which she played against her sister’s Juliet.

ANNELISE ORLECK
History, Jewish Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies

Favorite books to teach:
Coming of Age in Mississippi, by Anne Moody
Sisterhood is Powerful, a 1970 anthology edited by Robin Morgan

Must-read books in your field:
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, by Charles Payne
Voices of Protest, by Alan Brinkley

Favorite pleasure read:
History, by Elsa Morante

Currently reading:
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon

I particularly enjoy teaching primary sources that vividly evoke the consciousness of a particular group at a particular time. Coming of Age and Sisterhood are books that spark engaged and emotional discussions, forcing students to reckon with the passions of two very different political moments.

There are far too many truly great books in U.S. history to narrow down the field to one. I have taught often and greatly admire Charles Payne’s civil rights movement study and Brinkley’s 1930s study of Huey Long and Father Coughlin.

RUSSELL RICKFORD
History

Favorite books to teach:
I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, by Charles Payne
Revolutionaries to Race Leaders, by Cedric Johnson
Up South, by Matthew Countryman

Must-read books in your field:
Race Rebels, by Robin Kelley
Race Against Empire, by Penny Von Eschen
Ella Baker & the Black Freedom Movement, by Barbara Ransby
American Babylon, by Robert Self
Local People, by John Dittmer
Black Marxism, by Cedric Robinson

Favorite pleasure reads:
Cane, by Jean Toomer
Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown

Currently reading:
Defying Dixie, by Glenda Gilmore
Bloody Lownde, by Hasan Kwame Jeffries

My favorite books to teach compel us to think carefully and critically about the process of self-liberation, about structural racism, about the practice of freedom. They tend to deal with the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and 1970s. They emphasize elements of black self-determination and institution building within that struggle. They emphasize the politics and ethics of democratic pedagogy within social movements, and they affirm the dignity of struggle.

My must-read books all help us to rethink the black freedom struggle in some fundamental way. They help to re-center and historicize black radicalism as a logical, effective force for progressive social change in the United States and beyond.

YORKE BROWN
Physics and Astronomy

Favorite book to teach:
The Cosmic Perspective, by Jeffrey Bennett, Megan Donahue, Nicholas Schneider, Mark Voit

Favorite pleasure reads:
Endurance, by Alfred Lansing
The Conquest of Everest, by John Hunt

Currently reading:
The Trouble With Physics, by Lee Smolin

Teaching astronomy is a great way for me to help students who are not specializing in science to gain a greater appreciation for how science works and why scientists experience as much beauty in the exploration of the natural world as, say, artists do in expressing the essentials of humanity. Over the course of history our scientific understanding of astronomy has profoundly affected culture and our basic understanding of ourselves; studying astronomy today brings a student face to face with the basis of his or her own values, beliefs and outlooks. The Cosmic Perspective does a great job of leading students through this process. The authors provide an elegantly unified and cogent account of our current state of understanding of the universe, reveling in our accomplishments, the remaining deep mysteries and the sheer physical beauty of the cosmos itself. The book forms a solid foundation for my approach to teaching astronomy.

BRUCE SACERDOTE ’90
Economics

Favorite book to teach:
The Big Short, by Michael Lewis

Must-read book in your field:
Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan

Favorite pleasure reads:
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by J.K. Rowling
Blue at the Mizzen, by Patrick O’Brian

Currently reading:
John Adams, by David McCullough

Lewis tells a great story about the mortgage meltdown. Wheelan’s book is a great illustration of economic principles, and Potter is a classic tale of good versus evil and Blue at the Mizzen is a compelling tale of a person’s triumphs and challenges throughout a career. In John Adams you get a great understanding of the founders and our history and of New England’s history.

DONALD PEASE
English

Favorite book to teach:
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

Must-read book in your field:
Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman

Favorite pleasure read:
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Currently reading:
The Case of Peter Pan, by Jacqueline Rose

I have taught and re-read Moby Dick from the year I began teaching at Dartmouth in 1973. No matter the angle of vision I bring to Melville’s rendering of his characters and events, I do not feel I have begun to do them justice. Passages like the following begin to explain the challenge Melville poses: “There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness. And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.” But the gratification that arises from our shared need to respond to Melville’s novel has continued to inspire me and two generations of Dartmouth students.

I return to Whitman’s poetry whenever I need to renew my faith in the imagination’s power to restore hope to the world. Whitman gratifies that need in lines such as: “I cannot be awake for nothing looks to me as it did before, Or else I am awake for the first time, and all before has been a mean sleep.”

This past year I wrote a book on Dr. Seuss that spurred my desire to design a course in children’s literature. In The Case of Peter Pan Rose spells out the problems attending such a project—with unparalleled wit and insight.

SIENNA CRAIG
Anthropology

Favorite book to teach:
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman

Must-read book in your field:
No Aging in India, by Lawrence Cohen

Favorite pleasure read:
Poetry by various authors—Pablo Neruda, Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver

Currently reading:
Goat Song, by Brad Kessler

Fadiman’s book is a beautifully written and very well researched story about encounters of healing and medicine across cultures. In a nutshell, it is the story of a Hmong girl from Merced, California, who has what her biomedical doctors call epilepsy and what her Hmong family understands as the blessing and curse of someone who can become a great shaman. It is also a story about migration, social change and the culture of biomedicine. Since I’m a medical anthropologist the theme works well in a lot of my classes—from first-year seminars to large intro courses in cultural anthropology.

There are lots of must-read books in cultural anthropology. I picked Cohen because it is one of those ethnographies that is so dense and well researched on the one hand, but on the other reads like a good New Yorker article in places, fiction in others. The book is about conceptions of madness, senility and old age in India and the United States. The book also has a lot to say about the relationship between individuals and society, about the cultural construction of social norms and about the place of the ethnographer in the research and writing we do.

Poetry condenses meaning, touch, thought, human emotion in such amazing ways. I love the precision of poems, as well as their capacity for humility, grace, even sharp social criticism. The economy of words in poems moves me deeply and makes me think about how I use language.

JENNIFER LIND
Government

Favorite book to teach:
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, by John Mearsheimer

Must-read books in your field:
“E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century,” a study by Robert Putnam

Favorite pleasure read:
Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Currently reading:
Country Driving, by Peter Hessler

I assign Mearsheimer’s book to students in my “Introduction to International Politics” class. I love it because it is crisp, clear and powerful. One can make many criticisms of it and in class we certainly do, but it is a book to be reckoned with. Many times the students in my class are fresh out of high school and have the view that “if countries just talked about their problems, then they’d figure out how to get along.” Mearsheimer sledgehammers this idea. To see its effect on the students is an amazing experience: They begin questioning, wrestling, learning. Some students leave the class committed Mearsheimer-ites, with a dog-eared copy of his book next to their beds. Others reject his pessimistic view. However, thanks to the clarity that this book imposes, all students leave the class armed with far more intelligent arguments about conflict and cooperation in international politics.

I read Hessler’s writing in The New Yorker and am always entranced by it. This book details the author’s experience with a road trip around China and tells of his life in a small rural village. The book, like Hessler’s articles, shows China’s recent evolution from a poor backward society into a modern developed country. It puts names and faces and anecdotes to all of those statistics that we read about. I have students read his work in my East Asian international relations class.

REIKO OHNUMA
Religion

Favorite book to teach:
Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller

Must-read book in your field:
Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature, by Liz Wilson

Favorite pleasure read:
Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey

Currently reading:
Motley Crue: The Dirt—Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band, by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx

The Gitagovinda is a hauntingly beautiful verse-text that lingers obsessively over every single emotion—joy, anxiety, ecstasy, doubt, jealousy, and fear—experienced over the course of a single night by a teenage couple in love. I love teaching this text because even though it’s a Hindu religious treatise that was composed in Sanskrit in twelfth-century northern India, it’s also a torrid love story that college-age students can immediately relate to and be swept up in.

Wilson’s Charming Cadavers fundamentally changed the way I think about such issues as gender and the role of women in South Asian Buddhism and has had a huge influence on my work. Its subject matter is gruesome, but it is written with wit, verve, and a wonderful sense of humor.

As for my current reading, what can I say? It’s a good beach book that is surprisingly thoughtful and well written. It manages to convince you that, in spite of all that excess and debauchery, Motley Crue was just four lost little boys searching for happiness and love.

Business researcher Robert Morison ’72 advises businesses how to use data analysis for impressive outcomes in Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results (Harvard Business Press).

Sally Harris ’80, a pediatric and adolescent sports medicine specialist at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, edited Care of the Young Athlete (American Academy of Pediatrics), a physician’s guide to diagnosing, treating and preventing sports injuries.

Father-son college consulting team Howard ’59 and Matthew Greene ’90 help new grads find their best career in College Grad Seeks Future: Turning Your Talents, Strengths, and Passions into the Perfect Career (St. Martin’s Griffin).

Andrew Field ’91, a scholar of Chinese history and culture, traces the origin, pinnacle and demise of a commercial dance industry in Shanghai between WW I and the early years of the People’s Republic of China in Shanghai’s Dancing World: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919-1954 (Chinese University Press).

Journalist Peter Heller ’82 offers a memoir about finding the value of life while shooting a curl in Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave (Free Press).

Teacher-librarian Sara Leach ’93 follows 11-year-old Jake as he goes into the woods in search of adventure in Jake Reynolds: Chicken or Eagle? (Orca Young Readers).

Jeff Deck ’02 and Benjamin Herson ’02 chronicle their journey across America correcting punctuation and spelling in The Great Typo Hunt: Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time (Harmony Books).

In the antiques business, where Snellenburg has made his name as one of the foremost international experts on timepieces and scientific instruments, the top antiquarians are often those who have seen the most antiques. Like geologists, antiquarians use their experience and observational skills to deduce the basic details of an item’s creation story: How, where and when was it made? “It’s a business where you learn by seeing and doing,” says Snellenburg. And where the ability to maintain one’s reserve is an asset. Antiquarians recognize beauty and rarity, but they don’t let emotion overwhelm their judgment.

Snellenburg, married with three children, is based in Manhattan. There he heads the clocks and watches department at the stateside branch of Bonhams, the world’s third-largest auction house. After a recent hiatus he returns this summer to his gig as an appraiser for Antiques Roadshow, the popular PBS series.

Snellenburg pursued a geochemistry Ph.D. at Stony Brook University hoping to land a professorship (he also holds a master’s in geology from Dartmouth). But academic jobs were scarce, and he ended up taking a postdoctoral assignment in the American Museum of Natural History’s gems and minerals department. He went on to grade diamonds for the Gemological Institute of America, and in 1979 Christie’s hired him to head the silver and jewelry department for its new offshoot salesroom, Christie’s East. “When they hired me they said, ‘We realize you don’t know anything about jewelry, but at least when they bring you the fake sapphire you’ll be able to tell us it’s a fake sapphire,’ ” Snellenburg recalls. Soon watches began appearing on his desk—his colleagues figured his doctorate in science must indicate some technical proficiency. After that came clocks, then scientific and nautical instruments, followed by scientific books. Snellenburg established a dedicated clocks and watches department at Christie’s before leaving in 1993 to work independently as a dealer, consultant and appraiser of antiques. He took his position with the British-owned Bonhams in New York last year.

Having worked for two of the world’s most prestigious auction houses, Snellenburg is well aware that astronomical sales at auctions capture headlines and people’s attention. But he derives satisfaction from more than an item’s dollar value. “It’s about finding those wonderful things from the past, or the near past, and bringing them to light,” Snellenburg says. “You have to like what you’re looking at. You really do.”

In particular he has developed a deep appreciation for the creations of the 18th century, a great period of clock building that in many ways marks the dawn of the modern era. “I am constantly amazed at the science, technology, art and literature of the 18th century and how it still colors what we do today,” Snellenburg says, though he notes he’s “not one of those people who wishes I could be part of a Masterpiece Theater costume drama.” He is, he says, more than happy to take advantage of his BlackBerry, iPod and various other accoutrements of modern life.

Because of eBay, Bonhams—which has been around since 1793—must convince potential buyers of the value of “experience and expertise.” The essence of the pitch, as Snellenburg puts it, is “I know what it is that you’re bringing me. I know what it is, I know whether it’s genuine and I know approximately what it’s worth.”

To know all that requires a good deal of old-fashioned legwork. Snellenburg is discreet about exactly how he sources his goods but says he has built long-term, trusting relationships with dealers, collectors and estates around the country. He spends a third of his time on the road. A top-quality digital photo can indicate whether an item has potential for a Bonhams auction, but it’s not sufficient. To assess value and salability a dealer such as Snellenburg needs to examine a watch or clock up-close from all angles to see the tiny, often-hidden details that are marks of superior craftsmanship, such as the metalwork on clocks from the German Renaissance, in which the decoration on the interior mechanism is as intricate and exquisite as that on the outside.

Snellenburg likes to stress that antiques, for all their beauty, are not just pretty things that happen to be old. “They are the useful objects of daily life in the past,” he says. Those beautifully decorated German Renaissance clocks are also “superior calculating devices.” An 18th-century Georgian teapot is shaped to pour in a steady stream and insulated to prevent burning your hand. The best-designed chairs are those on which one can sit comfortably. The pieces Snellenburg most admires are those “that blend utility and design so seamlessly that you’re unaware a great work of art is also functional.”

No matter how beautiful the form and how practical the function, though, an antique has no intrinsic value unless there’s a market for it. Vintage watches present an interesting case study. American watch companies Waltham and Elgin mass-produced more than 100 million watches during the first half of the 20th century and, as a result, Snellenburg estimates that 90 to 95 percent of watches from this period have no secondary value. “A watch is an heirloom. No one ever threw one away. They all survived.” The average person at Antiques Roadshow or at appraisal events such as those Bonhams holds monthly in San Francisco and Los Angeles tends not to realize this. “It was my grandmother’s watch,” they’ll say, and produce a picture of the grandmother in question wearing the watch. Unfortunately, as Snellenburg points out, the grandmother was probably one of tens of thousands of women who wore the same, mass-produced watch. Collectors have more than enough to go around.

In his stints on Antiques Roadshow Snellenburg has to deliver such pronouncements frequently—and as gently as possible. On the upside, “Every object has a story, and what you find after you do the show for a while is very often people just want to know what it is, where it was made, whether there are others like it,” he says. “And if you can give them that knowledge they’ll go away feeling they’ve had a rewarding experience, even if the item is worth very little.”

Still, it’s the hope of a rare, undiscovered find that keeps collectors, dealers and auctioneers antique-hunting. During the first season of Roadshow a woman brought in an extraordinarily rare English astronomical watch from the 17th century, when the British Empire was rapidly expanding its reach around the globe. For the next eight seasons of the show Snellenburg kept up hope he’d find another—not because of its approximately $15,000 value but just for the thrill of discovery. A dozen years later he finally came across a strikingly similar watch, one of perhaps a dozen such pieces in existence. He appraised it similarly; it sold at auction at Bonhams last year for $30,500.

He’s had plenty of other surprises. Twenty-five years ago a client walked into Christie’s with a French Renaissance-era clock wrapped in a paper grocery bag. “One of the greatest clocks ever made,” according to Snellenburg, the piece had previously been valued at a paltry $50. The educational institution that owned the clock was cleaning house and wondered if the piece still had value. It subsequently sold in the high five figures. Other people have brought him fantastically valuable items wrapped up in baby diapers or, conversely, “the most elegantly boxed rubbish,” Snellenburg says.

Through the years he has amassed a research library, but no clock or watch collection of his own. With his own timepiece hidden by his sleeve, Snellenburg refrains from flashing it when asked what kind he wears. “A practical one,” he says, then coughs. “It’s my profession…and if I had a very valuable watch I’d be afraid to wear it, because I’m very hard on them. I would break it.”

Kaitlin Bell is a freelance writer who lives in New York City. She profiled Josh Marcuse ’04 in the September/October 2009 issue.

2. X-Delta (1970)
Mark di Suvero’s sculpture, found behind the Hood Museum, features beams in the shape of an X and an upside down triangle and includes a swing—allowing viewers to climb or rest upon it. The sculpture was located in front of Sanborn until July 1984, when students and faculty complained it was ugly.

3. Two Plate Prop (1976)
Richard Serra’s aptly named work in the Darling Courtyard of the Hopkins Center includes two 4-by-4-feet steel plates resting on each other perpendicularly. As the time of day and season changes, new geometrical relationships can be viewed in the shadows created by the plates.

4. Fountain Figure (1963)
At the center of a fountain in the Hopkins Center’s Zahm Courtyard stands Thomas Bayliss Huxley-Jones’ tribute to Dartmouth students who fought and died in World War II. Huxley-Jones is also the sculptor of the Hop’s Warner Bentley bust, whose nose continues to be rubbed by many for good luck.

5. Inukshuk (2007)
Peter Irniq’s composition, perched in front of McNutt Hall, is built from New Hampshire slate and granite rocks and is meant to mirror the human form. In Inuit culture, Inukshuks are used as navigational aids, marking the best routes for travelers to follow.

6. Peaceful Serenity (1992)
Outside Sherman House, home to the College’s Native American studies program, stand three steel figures representing a mother, daughter and newborn infant. The abstract forms constructed by Allan Houser from bronze-plated steel stand on a bronze island surrounded by gravel.

7. Thel (1977)
Stretching across 135 feet of Wheeler lawn, Beverly Pepper’s work consists of five white, steel pyramidal forms of varying height. Former director of galleries Jan van der Marck compared Thel to a whale rising from the ocean’s depths. Joan Mondale, wife of the U.S. vice president, dedicated the sculpture in 1978.

8. D2D (1975)
Charles O. Perry’s 10-foot bronze version of a Möbius strip—a figure on which one can trace a path touching every side without crossing over an edge—adorns the entrance to Fairchild Physical Sciences Center. Rowdy Brown alumni visiting campus inflicted nearly $20,000 in damages to the sculpture after a Dartmouth-Brown football game in November 1981.

9. Robert Frost (1996)
Nestled in the woods on the eastern edge of campus, a pensive depiction of the writer by George Lundeen sits on a boulder near the Lone Pine stump, pondering the beauty of the natural world.

CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Karen Iorio is a DAM intern. The student researchers are Zinnia Amaya ’09, Worthy Dye ’11, Stephenie Lee ’11, Nadine Moezinia ’11, Cynthia Morales Bejarano ’11, Kyle Nicholas ’11, Otega Ogban ’11, Tosin Ogunbamise ’11 and Henry I. Stewart ’12.

Charlie Chaplin, Paul Revere and Jack London share a common Dartmouth connection—their bookplates reside among the thousands housed in Rauner Library. The collection started when Josiah Minot Fowler, class of 1900, donated his private bounty of bookplates—including one of only two known copies of Revere’s decorative label—in 1928. During the ensuing decades other alumni made similar donations, and the collection now numbers 27,000. Although interest in private bookplate collecting declined in the late 1940s, bookplates remain an essential mark of ownership and recognition in academic libraries. Even today the College commissions new bookplates to recognize donors of books.

To view a larger version of the bookmarks shown above, click here.

Charlie Chaplin, Paul Revere and Jack London share a common Dartmouth connection—their bookplates reside among the thousands housed in Rauner Library. The collection started when Josiah Minot Fowler, class of 1900, donated his private bounty of bookplates—including one of only two known copies of Revere’s decorative label—in 1928. During the ensuing decades other alumni made similar donations, and the collection now numbers 27,000. Although interest in private bookplate collecting declined in the late 1940s, bookplates remain an essential mark of ownership and recognition in academic libraries. Even today the College commissions new bookplates to recognize donors of books.

Click art to enlarge

John A. McNeill ’83, an associate professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, explains fundamental sources of uncertainty in applications such as microprocessor clocks and communication system time references for engineers as coauthor of The Designer’s Guide to Jitter in Ring Oscillators (Springer).

John Rich ’80, M.D., chair of the health management and policy department at Drexel University School of Public Health and director of its Center for Nonviolence and Social Justice, relates the stories of young black men whose lives were violently disrupted—and their efforts to recover and remain safe in Wrong Place, Wrong Time: Trauma and Violence in the Lives of Young Black Men (Johns Hopkins University Press).

Anna Deeny, Adv’00, a doctoral candidate in Latin American literature at the University of California, Berkeley, translates the poetry of Raúl Zurita in Purgatory: The Bilingual Edition (University of California Press), a record of the physical, cultural and spiritual violence perpetrated against the Chilean people under Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973-90).

Father-and-son authors John Sr. and John Paterson Jr. ’86 weave together lively illustrations and some Spanish words to tell the story of a boy’s cable car trip to the top of the mountain overlooking his village in the children’s book, Roberto’s Trip to the Top (Candlewick).

Former newspaper editor Herman Obermayer ’46 draws on his 19-year friendship with the nation’s 16th chief justice in a personal memoir, Rehnquist: A Personal Portrait of the Distinguished Chief Justice of the United States (Threshold Editions).

Environmental health journalist Alexandra Zissu ’96 walks readers through every kitchen decision with three criteria in mind: what’s good for personal health, what’s good for the planet and what tastes great in The Conscious Kitchen: The New Way to Buy and Cook Food—to Protect the Earth, Improve Your Health and Eat Deliciously (Clarkson Potter).

In Birthright: The True Story that Inspired Kidnapped (W.W. Norton), Virginia Tech history professor A. Roger Ekirch ’72 explores the story of a 12-year-old boy kidnapped from Dublin in 1728 and shipped to the colonies as an indentured servant, which inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped.

Film writer and director Norman Weissman ’46 recounts his experiences during 50 years of filming around the world in his memoir, My Exuberant Journey (Hammonasset House).

Caren Diefenderfer ’73, a professor of mathematics at Hollins University and the chief reader for the College Board’s AP Calculus program from 2004 to 2007, offers a useful resource for teachers as coauthor of The Calculus Collection: A Resource for AP and Beyond (Mathematical Association of America).

James Bildner ’75, a lifelong sailor and avid pilot, has shot the photos that run alongside chart segments in his new cruising guide, A Visual Cruising Guide to the Southern New England Coast: Portsmouth, NH, to New London, CT (International Marine/Ragged Mountain Press).

Joanne Herman ’75, who transitioned in 2002 to live as a female after almost half a century living as a male, shares a guide to transgender for families and friends in Transgender Explained for Those Who Are Not (AuthorHouse).

One deeply religious man talked about his prison guards sodomizing him with a broom handle for being “unruly”—a devout Muslim, he broke the prison rules and insisted on praying five times a day. Another man said he was kept in a 6-by-2-by-2-foot box for 16 days straight, allowed out only once a day, and the guards took pleasure in drumming on his box at half-hour intervals. One detainee’s account was of being arrested minutes after a bomb killed his two sons, ages 8 and 11: He had been holding one dead son in the air, crying unintelligibly, when the Americans arrived to arrest every adult male in the area on suspicion of setting off the explosion. He was being handcuffed on the ground when he saw that his other son had been decapitated. He was held for 148 days at Abu Ghraib before being released without being charged.

There is a lesson to be learned here, says Heyman.

Since 2006 he has traveled to the Middle East seven times, visiting first Amman, Jordan, and more recently Istanbul, where he has sat in on interviews with former Iraqi detainees. He accompanies human rights lawyer Susan Burke, who is working on behalf of the former detainees in a class-action lawsuit against various interrogators. All detainees involved in the lawsuit were held at Abu Ghraib and ultimately released without charges. Semantics of torture aside, their time at the prison was traumatic and violent, and in spite of formal military apologies, the wounds are still raw. Burke’s role is to help the victims receive legal recompense; Heyman’s objective is to provide some level of emotional justice. He sits in on the interviews and paints or etches each subject’s portrait. In the background he transcribes the detainee’s stories in a swirl of words that shock and awe. He receives no compensation from Burke for creating the artwork. It is his own project, for his own reasons.

“My aim is to bring their voices back, to give these people their humanity, to allow them to say, ‘This is what happened to me,’ ” says Heyman, who lives in Philadelphia and supplements his artistic career with teaching gigs at Swarthmore and the Rhode Island School of Design. “We have so many reports from the military one way or the other, telling us what happened. The people it happened to should be allowed to speak for themselves.”

Heyman’s interest in the effects of war began in 1986, when Dartmouth granted the visual arts major a Reynolds scholarship to travel to France and interview people about their experiences during World War II. He found that even though the people he interviewed were in their 60s and 70s, it was clear the war had had a profound effect on their lives. “What happens in a war or a violent episode in someone’s life remains in that life,” Heyman says.

His goal is to portray this understanding in his art. He believes art should not be made for the purpose of making people happy, but rather to make people think. His work appears at a variety of museums across the country and can be viewed at www.
danielheyman.com. Eight of his portraits from Amman, including the one shown on the preceding page, have been acquired by the Hood Museum.

“Artists have very little power in the world, and I can’t thank my lucky stars enough to have this opportunity,” Heyman says. “These people want some kind of justice, and part of that justice is just having their stories told.”

Carolyn Kylstra is a former DAM intern. She works at Men’s Health.

Paul Griffin ’88, who works with schoolchildren across New York City, follows three kids through the pressure cooker of inner-city teenage life in The Orange Houses (Penguin), a 2009 pick of the Junior Library Guild.

Matt Royer ’93 illustrates Nightbear & Lambie (Yellow Cottage Press), a children’s picture book written by his wife, Kerry McGuinness Royer, based on stories they told their children about their plush toys.

Bruce A. Kimball ’73, director of the School of Educational Policy and Leadership at the Ohio State University, profiles the Harvard Law School dean who designed the educational model that most leading professional schools have emulated in The Inception of Modern Professional Education: C.C. Langdell, 1826-1906 (University of North Carolina Press).

Psychiatrist Kathryn Fraser ’79, DMS’85, follows the stories of a 17-year-old Rapture believer on a pilgrimage, a wounded Iraq War veteran as she recovers her identity and a former leader who acknowledges his mistakes in her novel, A Journey, a Reckoning, and a Miracle (O Books).

Poet Heid E. Erdrich ’86 explores the depths of national identities in her latest collection, National Monuments (Michigan State University Press), which earned a 2009 Minnesota Book Award.

Leonard Chang ’91, whose previous noir trilogy (Over the Shoulder, Underkill and Fade to Clear) was a USA Today Summer Reading Pick and a finalist for the Shamus Award, takes an unflinching look at the lives of Korean immigrants in California in Crossings (Black Heron Press).

Brothers Thomas O’Connell ’50, the founding and emeritus president of Berkshire (Massachusetts) Community College, and Jeffrey O’Connell ’51, a law professor at the University of Virginia, profile 16 lawyers and others intertwined with law, public policy and politics in Political and Legal Adventurers: From Marx to Moynihan (Carolina Academic Press).

Lynmar Brock Jr. ’55, Tu’56, tells the story of a Jewish family finding unlikely refuge from the Holocaust in In This Hospitable Land (BookSurge).

Boston attorney David Hosp ’90 blends fact and fiction with a tale that answers some of the questions surrounding the still-unsolved 1990 art theft from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in his fourth novel, Among Thieves (Grand Central Publishing).

William Morgan ’66, an architectural historian and photographer, profiles 10 houses by Rhode Island-based architects James Estes and Peter Twombly and situates their work in regional and historical contexts in Yankee Modern: The Houses of Estes/Twombly (Princeton Architectural Press).

Sara Leach ’93, a teacher-librarian in Whistler, Canada, offers a playful look at the machines that manage a ski hill in her book for young children, Mountain Machines (Poppy Productions).

Sarina Schrager ’88, M.D., an associate professor in family medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, offers physicians a concise resource of essential information on all major diseases and disorders for female patients from adolescence through adulthood as coauthor of The ACP Handbook of Women’s Health (American College of Physicians).

Jonathan Good ’94, an assistant professor of history at Reinhardt College, traces the origins and growth of the cult of the patron saint of England in The Cult of St. George in Medieval England (Boydell Press).

Brigid Pasulka ’94, a descendant of Polish immigrants and an English teacher at a Chicago magnet school, braids together tales of old and new Poland in  A Long, Long Time Ago & Essentially True (Houghton Mifflin).

The journal kept by James Gordon Hindes ’32 as he walked the first long-distance hiking trail in the United States with John Eames ’32 offers an entertaining look at the early days of long-distance hiking in So Clear, So Cool, So Grand: A 1931 Hike on the Long Trail (The Green Mountain Club).

Michael Jubien ’65, professor of philosophy at the University of Florida, discusses metaphysical ideas of necessity and the doctrine of essentialism in his third book, Possibility (Oxford University Press).

Gina Barreca ’79, a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, uses humor to raise serious questions about the pressures women face in It’s Not That I’m Bitter…or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Visible Panty Lines and Conquered the World (St. Martin’s Press).

Dani Klein Modisett ’84, producer and director of Afterbirth, a live storytelling show in which well-known actors and writers perform funny stories about how becoming a parent changed their lives unexpectedly, has gathered 37 of these stories in Afterbirth: Stories You Won’t Read in a Parenting Magazine (St. Martin’s Press).

Roy S. Andersen, Adv’48, recounts his experiences aboard the USS Mannert L. Abele, sunk by enemy forces in World War II, in Three Minutes Off Okinawa (Jana Press).

Charlie Coe ’65 and his wife, Marty, draw on their more than 20 years experience counseling engaged and married couples through the Catholic Marriage Encounter program in Love Is a Decision: A Marriage Enrichment Handbook (White Oak Communications).

Frederick Schauer ’67 presents an original exposition of legal concepts emphasizing the formality and rule-dependence of law in Thinking Like a Lawyer: A New Introduction to Legal Reasoning (Harvard University Press).

Director Jon Fauer ’72, who interviewed 55 cinematographers from around the world for Volume 1 of Cinematographer Style (Cinematographer Style), follows with 55 more discussions on how and why movies look the way they do for Volume 2.

Warren D. Allmon ’82, a Cornell paleontology professor and director of the Paleontological Research Institute in Ithaca, New York, coedits a range of essays from earth scientists arguing against creationism in For the Rock Record: Geologists on Intelligent Design (University of California Press).

Matthew Biberman ’88 follows an impulsive son who promises his dying father to build a hybrid motorcycle never assembled in the United States in his memoir, Big Sid’s Vincati: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Motorcycle of a Lifetime (Hudson Street Press).

Danielle Brune Sigler ’96, a curator of academic affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, has coedited a collection of essays on African American religion in The New Black Gods (Indiana University Press).

Christina Katz ’88, who also wrote Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids, offers a how-to guide to developing your platform as a writer with Get Known Before the Book Deal (F+W Publications).

Michael Dorr ’90, a visiting assistant law professor at Amherst College, blends social, legal, medical and cultural history in his examination of eugenic theory in Segregation and Science: Eugenics & Society in Virginia (University of Virginia Press).

News and documentary producer Jason Maloney ’91 investigates hometown gallantry in Your America: Democracy’s Local Heroes (Palgrave Macmillan).

Coeditor Melissa Crane Draper ’99, assistant director of the Democracy Center in San Francisco, weaves together essays about the Bolivian struggle against global integration as coeditor of Dignity and Defiance: Stories from Bolivia’s Challenge to Globalization (University of California Press).

Luis Zalamea ’42, after a 70-year career as a bilingual reporter, novelist and poet, offers his long-awaited memoir, in Spanish, Memories of Dilettante (Taller de Edicion).

Scott Lasser ’84 tells the story of a woman who goes in search of her brother’s lost child after the brother disappears on 9/11 in his third novel, The Year That Follows (Knopf).

Gregory Michael Dorr ’90, a visiting assistant professor in law, jurisprudence and social thought at Amherst College, blends social, legal, medical and cultural history in his examination of eugenic theory in Segregation’s Science: Eugenics & Society in Virginia (University of Virginia Press).

Brad Parks ’96 draws on his experiences as a staff writer at The Washington Post and the Newark, New Jersey, Star-Ledger to create investigative reporter Carter Ross in his debut novel, Faces of the Gone: A Carter Ross Mystery (St. Martin’s Press).

Photographer Eli Burakian ’00 (formerly Burak), with contributions from his wife, Julia Burakian ’01 (formerly Martiesian), combines images, essays and anecdotes in his gorgeous tribute, Moosilauke: Portrait of a Mountain (Fresh Tracks).

Tom Campbell ’65, a partner in the Chicago law office of Baker & McKenzie, focuses on the role Illinois and its abolitionists played in the fight against slavery in Fighting Slavery in Chicago (Ampersand).

Janet Mitchell ’86 has won the Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction with The Creepy Girl and Other Stories (Starcherone Books), her debut collection of 15 stories about families and childhood, small towns and prophets, boys and girls, life and death.

Eve Kushner ’90, a student of Japanese, offers a guide to the history, construction and cultural contexts of written Japanese characters in Crazy for Kanji: A Student’s Guide to the Wonderful World of Japanese Characters (Stone Bridge Press).

Aside from courses in chemistry and German, which I needed to fulfill the language requirement, there was the pesky matter of the also-required English 1A.

When I stepped into that class as a somewhat naive 17-year-old from the industrial heartland of Ohio, I never expected for a moment to encounter a professor whose passion for literature, particularly American literature and the writers who made it, would stay with me—and literally change my life.

James Cox always entered the classroom in Dartmouth Hall toting a tattered brown leather bag the size of a small suitcase. From it he pulled out only the book to be discussed in class—never any accompanying notes, just the book itself. This was unnerving; I’d expected to see him scatter across his desktop reams of yellow legal paper, lots of supporting documents and critical reference material. Wasn’t that what being a scholar was all about? But his style was interrogative. He quickly engaged the students in my class with sharp, probing questions about issues of race in Faulkner’s Light in August and existential choices in Hemingway’s Collected Stories. Hunched over his desk, elbows forward, with an occasional finger crooked in the air, Cox commanded our attention—and respect—with his booming Southern drawl, but he made it known that he wanted to hear what we had to say. He wanted us to react, at some gut level, to the assigned reading, drawing—if we dared—from the booty of our own limited experiences.

In class I noticed how Professor Cox liked to flip through the pages of a book, thumbing them casually as if somehow to feel the words kaleidoscopically on paper. A book, especially one written by a great American writer—Hawthorne, Melville, Twain among his favorites—was, to his eyes, a totemic object, a sacred work of historical and cultural importance that demanded involvement and response on the part of the reader. Yet such sacred works were not always to be taken with complete seriousness. In fact, what I remember most from those classes with Professor Cox was the humor that he employed with such dexterity in talking about literature. His was not a sardonic or wry kind of wit, but a humor that came right up from the gut. He got us to laugh about something we all knew yet had suppressed—for example, the true symbolism of Melville’s Moby Dick and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the sexual connotations and unspoken truths of the American experience.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that as freshmen most of us in his class were terrible writers, yet the man never ripped up our essays with heavy marginal comments or even assigned us didactically a specific literary topic. We were to read a book and simply write something about it, anything really, whatever we wanted. Our class papers could take any form we desired: a cogent essay, an autobiographical riff, a critical review. It was that freedom to react to a work of literature in any way we wanted—to trust our own instincts and observations about the world around us—that sealed the deal for me to become, eventually, a writer and not a doctor.

By the time I had taken my second Cox course he had vaulted to superstar status. His English 78 course, “American Literature of the 20th Century,” was overflowing with hundreds of students, not just English majors. It had become a lecture course, not the seminar I’d taken as a freshman, and it rocked the house. When he got up on the podium, still without notes or with simply a few bulleted items on a yellow sheet of paper, Cox roared with anecdotes, observations and a bevy of insights into the works of Dreiser, Lardner, Anderson, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Salinger and Nabokov. As before, he had the students in class rolling on the floor with laughter. Others joined me in attending these lectures just for the entertainment they provided.

Black humor reached its artful climax when Cox read aloud from the last page of Lolita in which Humbert Humbert offers his version of profound advice to Dolores Haze (Lolita) and her new husband, Richard: “While the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy….” As with Melville, we were in the belly of the whale, exploring its innards, deep in the guts of the American experience.

On receiving the Hubbell Award given by the American literature section of the Modern Language Association in 1997, Cox told the audience his “luck began early,” when he was born in 1925, “the year that saw publication of In Our Time, The Great Gatsby and An American Tragedy.” He went on to express his gratitude for the financial independence afforded him by the G.I. Bill after his service in the Navy.

He had “drifted into an English major,” he said, which is probably what happened to many of us at Dartmouth during the 1960s as late bloomers in search of enlightenment. Cox recalled that in the summer of 1952 he landed in Leslie Fiedler’s “Myth in American Fiction and Verse” course at the University of Indiana and chose American literature as his field. Cox earned his Ph.D. from Indiana in 1955. His career at Dartmouth continued until his retirement in 1990.

Living now on the Virginia farm where he was raised, Cox reads more voraciously than ever, inspiring me to carry on, in my own small way, the tradition of American literature that he introduced me to so effortlessly. Cox also continues to write. His work on Mark Twain, including a new edition of Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (University of Missouri Press, 2002), emphasizes how and why Twain remains an important writer in the American canon of fiction.

As is clear from the long neglect suffered by Melville (until the Harvard scholar F.O. Matthiessen issued The American Renaissance in 1941, a book deemed by Cox to be the most influential of his academic life) and the fact that all of Faulkner’s novels had fallen perilously out of print before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949, to write fiction is to cast your fate to the wind. To read fiction, however, as we learned in Cox’s freshman English class, is a choice that returns a rich harvest of pleasure and excitement for a lifetime.

Tom Maremaa is a software engineer in Cupertino, California. His most recent novel is Metal Heads (Kunati Books, 2009).