Victoria Redel ’80
Mother of Darkness
Poet and writer Redel moves through a murky world of desire and destruction. The 11 short stories in her new collection, Make Me Do Things (Four Way Books), prove Redel is “one of the most talented scary writers to come out of musty old Manhattan in the last few decades,” according to the Los Angeles Times. “She’s a writer with her fists clenched so tightly that her palms must bleed, and when she opens her fists, suddenly, in front of the reader, powerful, hurtful truths come flying out.” The author says she doesn’t actually live the dark life of her characters. “In fact, I’m lucky to live a quite light-filled life—with family, friends, work,” Redel says. “And I start my work from this most ordinary of worlds: The difficulties, the emotional or situational tectonics, the infidelities of mind and heart that occur in my fictions arise from looking all around me, looking at the lives of rather ordinary people.”

Redel, who majored in visual arts at Dartmouth before studying poetry at Columbia, lives in Manhattan and teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College. Both her poetry and her fiction—she has three anthologies of poetry and four works of fiction, which she tends to publish in alternating volumes every couple of years—draw on her roles as daughter and mother, writer and academic. She says she likes the “lavish restraint” of the short story: “Every word counts. Every sentence counts. Every gesture by a character and leaf on a tree better matter.”

It all counts in her new collection, where children struggle to make sense of the adult world’s uncertainties as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers find themselves pressed up against their own limits. In “Stuff” a grieving son is reluctant to pick through his dead mother’s things; in “On Earth” a young mother has an affair while her doting husband and daughter remain clueless; in “Ahoy” a substance-abusing father-to-be emotionally abandons his wife. Make Me Do Things opens a small window into her characters’ “underbelly of wants and desires and honest opinions,” according to Publishers Weekly. But “for all their hapless villainy, Redel’s characters betray her own nuanced understanding of how we, as people, really are.”

D. William Subin ’63
Closing the Gap: The Trial of Trooper Robert Higbee (ComteQ)
An attorney with 40 years of experience representing law enforcement officers, Subin recounts the two-and-a-half-year battle to prove the innocence of a New Jersey state trooper charged with vehicular homicide.

William Seidman ’71
The Star Factor (AMACOM)
Cerebyte CEO Seidman shares his expertise in executive decision-making as coauthor of The Star Factor: Discover What Your Top Performers Do Differently—And Inspire a New Level of Greatness in All. He combines real-world examples with new developments in neuroscience to help organizations optimize their performance.

Giano Cromley ’95
The Last Good Halloween (Tortoise Books)
Cromley, who teaches English at Kennedy-King College, tells the story of a complex teen struggling to understand the world around him. “The novel’s strength lies in its evocation of how it feels to live in a sometimes-disappointing world,” according to Kirkus Reviews. “A well-structured, enjoyable tale about growing up and letting go.”

Christena Cleveland ’03
Disunity in Christ (IVP Books)
Social psychologist Cleveland argues that, despite Jesus’ prayer that all Christians “be one,” divisions have been epidemic in the body of Christ from the beginning to the present. She considers the latest research on the often-unseen dynamics that cause us to separate from others.

Michael Amico ’07
You Can Tell Just By Looking (Beacon Press)
Amico joins two other authors, including Dartmouth women’s and gender studies senior lecturer Michael Bronski, in examining the ways research, language and media are contorted to suit pro- or anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender agendas. “This powerful book…asks vital questions that will steer the culture toward justice and equality,” according to Publishers Weekly.

Additional books that were not listed in our print version:

Gerald Phillips ’45, Tu’47, of counsel with Phillips Lerner in Los Angeles and an adjunct professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, makes a case for more transparent billing practices in the law profession with Fair Deal for All Clients: How to Rekindle Pride in the Legal Profession (Carolina Academic Press).

Arthur W. Bloom ’61, a former dean of visual and performing arts at the Kutztown University of Pennsylvania, details the life and work of a 19th-century American tragedian in the scholarly biography Edwin Booth: A Biography and Performance History (McFarland & Co.).

A collection of more than 50 accounts from members of the class of 1964, edited by Phillip Schaefer ’64, offers a range of military experience inDartmouth Veterans: Vietnam Perspectives (University Press of New England).

Albert C. Hine ’67, a geological oceanographer based in University of South Florida, demonstrates how Florida has been intimately connected to earth’s global natural systems throughout its 700 million-year history in The Geologic History of Florida: The Major Events of the Past That Shaped the Sunshine State(University Press of Florida).

J. Boyce Gleason ’77, who majored in history, chronicles the chaotic legacy of a medieval ruler Frankish ruler in the first installment of a historical-fiction trilogy set in medieval times, Anvil of God: Book One of the Carolingian Chronicles (iUniverse).

Stephen Farnsworth ’83, a professor of political science and international affairs at the University of Mary Washington, has coauthored a new book on the dynamic and expansive role of the U.S. presidency and foreign policy in the increasingly interconnected political world in The Global President: International Media and the U.S. Government (Rowman & Littlefield).

Sarah Wagner ’94, an anthropology professor at George Washington University, examines the local, national and international efforts toward post-war social repair in Bosnia as coauthor of Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide(Cambridge University Press).