Information is provided by publishers, authors, and artists.
Arts Integration and Special Education
Alida Anderson ’87, editor (Routledge)
This is the first book to posit explanations for how and why arts integration facilitates learning in students with language and sensory processing disorders and those at risk for failure due to low socioeconomic conditions. It connects developmental and educational psychology, special education, and speech/language pathology research and practice with primary action research by special educators trained in arts integration. Conducted with middle school–age students from a diverse range of abilities and needs in an inclusive urban charter school, this work contributes to the relatively understudied field of upper elementary to middle-grade–level student learning.
Lessons of Labor: One Woman’s Self-Discovery Through Birth & Motherhood
Julia S. Aziz ’96 (MSI Press)
In telling the intimate birth stories of her three children and miscarriage, Julia Aziz shows readers how giving birth can be one of motherhood’s — and life’s — greatest teachers. Instead of advice on how to proceed with labor or how to parent, she offers the message that a woman can grow through the challenges that life presents her and learn to trust herself. For women who share an inclination for “getting it right,” her memoir is a reminder that the pretense of control is no match for the freedom of letting go.
Fantastical: Tales of Bears, Beer, and Hemophilia
Marija Bulatovic ’98 (SOL)
Marija Bulatovic’s debut takes readers on an adventurous tour through her childhood in Yugoslavia — a country that has vanished from the map but lives on in this collection of stories set in the 1980s. Bulatovic weaves a colorful tapestry of bears, gypsies, quirky family members, foiled plans, and unusual and unorthodox neighbors in this book that captures the Slavic spirit. Part memoir, part love letter to a place and a people, Fantastical is resplendent with humor, magic, and whimsy.
The Good Life and other Philosophical Essays on Human Nature
Robert Craig ’63 (Tate Publishing)
Robert Craig’s long essay and its companion essays contain insights into the difficulties in setting specific prescriptions and proscriptions for normative behavior, for understanding our nature and what is meant by virtuous behavior, and for leading “the good life.” He develops his discussion along five human life modes: health, work to satisfy our basic and secondary needs, morality and the quest for equality or fairness, political implementation, and aesthetic and religious experience — couched in the understanding that our good life must be consistent with our nature, in the classical Greek sense. Craig shows confounding conflicts among the five categories, such as that between the ethical dictum not to kill and our need to protect ourselves from harm, and seeks to elucidate how they ought to be resolved.
Waiting for Today
Steven A. Craig ’83 (Self-published)
Waiting for Today is the story of Jacob Hartman, a man who loses what he loves most and must somehow rediscover his faith in life and the joys it has to offer. Author Steven Craig asks universal questions about the meaning of human suffering and replies with answers that he hopes will truly make the reader believe in life again.
The History of Classical Music for Beginners
R. Ryan Endris (For Beginners)
Music history is not as complicated as it seems, and anyone can learn the origins of Western classical music, according to author R. Ryan Endris, an assistant professor of music and director of choral activities at Colgate. In addition to learning how to better understand (and enjoy) classical music, readers can learn some of the more interesting stories behind the music and composers. For example, only a small portion of “classical music” is even technically classical.
The Political Roots of Racial Tracking in American Criminal Justice
Nina M. Moore (Cambridge University Press)
The race problem in the American criminal justice system persists because we enable it, asserts Nina Moore, a Colgate associate professor of political science. The Political Roots of Racial Tracking in American Criminal Justice is the story of how the national crime policy process continually enables the race problem in criminal justice, and why. Moore offers a behind-the-scenes look at how America’s much-criticized drug laws and incarceration policies came to be. She illustrates a cross-racial public consensus that is more concerned about a non-existent crime problem than a real race problem confronting the criminal justice system. Finally, she debunks the conventional wisdom concerning the pivotal role of the War on Drugs, and paints a much more complex picture.
City of Liars and Thieves
Eve (Weiss) Karlin ’88 (Alibi)
A crime that rocked a city. A case that stunned a nation. Based on the United States’ first recorded murder trial, Eve Karlin’s debut novel recreates early 19th-century New York City, where a love affair ends in a brutal murder, and a conspiracy involving Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr erupts in shattering violence. It begins on the bustling docks of the Hudson River, where Catherine Ring waits with her family for the ship carrying her cousin, Elma Sands. Their boardinghouse becomes a haven for Elma, who has escaped the confines of her hometown and the shameful circumstances of her birth. But in the summer of 1799, Manhattan remains a cesspool of stagnant swamps and polluted rivers. The city is desperate for clean water as fires wreak devastation and the death toll from yellow fever surges. Political tensions are rising, too. It’s an election year, and Alexander Hamilton is hungry for power. So is his rival, Aaron Burr, who has announced the formation of the Manhattan Water Company. Their private struggle becomes public when Elma Sands’s body is found at the bottom of a city well built by Burr’s company. Resolved to see justice done, Catherine becomes both witness and avenger. She soon finds, however, that the shocking truth behind this trial has nothing to do with guilt or innocence.
Also of note:
Patrick Bobst ’84 and his band Mask Factory (Bobst on vox, guitars, Andy Meltzer on bass, and Pat Fitzgerald on drums, percussion) have released a self-titled EP after spending time at the storied Inner Ear Studio in Arlington, Va. Mask Factory is an unabashed throwback to a punk-rock past, still roaring at the future.
Small Dreams of a Tarantula: The Musings of a Brazilian Lost in the American Midwest (Mpress Media) by Bruce Healey ’84 is a compilation of his published columns, in which he’s written about life’s lessons and issues ranging from immigration to world politics. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1961, Healey lived all over the globe before finally settling in Cincinnati, Ohio.
In her recent memoir, Leaning into Love: A Spiritual Journey through Grief (Larson Publications, 2014), Elaine Mansfield shares stories of her late husband, Vic Mansfield, a physics and astronomy professor at Colgate for 35 years. The book talks about her husband’s experience with fatal cancer, how she dealt with her grief, and the poignant moment Vic shared with the Dalai Lama during his 2008 visit to Colgate. Elaine also worked at the university, teaching fitness classes from 2003 to 2006.
While working and vacationing in Liberia, Philip S. Salisbury ’65 kept a diary, which he’s turned into A Time That Was… A Peace Corps Volunteer’s Experiences of Pre-revolutionary Liberia, West Africa, 1962–1964 (Xlibris). The book chronicles his day-to-day experiences and offers insights into Liberia.
Footnotes:
Jasmine Bailey ’05 received a 2014 Central New York Book Award in poetry for Alexandria (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2014) last December. At Colgate, Bailey is a lecturer in university studies and was previously an O’Connor Creative Writing Fellow.
For his book The Calls of Islam: Sufis, Islamists, and Mass Mediation in Urban Morocco (Indiana University Press, 2014), Colgate professor Emilio Spadola won honorable mention in the Society for Anthropology of Religion’s 2014 Clifford Geertz Prize for the best book in anthropology and religious studies.
