Ink
The latest in alumni and faculty books.
Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions
By Danielle Canter ’10
Enigmatic and haunting, the work of the French Symbolist Odilon Redon (1840–1916) intrigues and entrances all who encounter it. During the first half of his career, Redon created dramatically monochromatic charcoal drawings and lithographs, dreamily dark images that plumbed the depths of his wild imagination. Eventually, he also turned to pastels, adopting a bold, colorful palette in fantastical explorations of the natural world. Published to accompany an exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, this volume features more than 70 illustrations and essays examining Redon’s disparate influences and demonstrating why his mysterious work is an important precursor to Surrealism.
Designer’s Pocket Book for Basic Research
By Ann Sloan Devlin, May Buckley Sadowski ’19 Professor Emerita of Psychology
Designers of the built environment too often complete projects and swiftly shift their attention to the next undertaking, without formally assessing the strengths and shortcomings of their just-completed design through research. This book provides basic principles of social science research for design and simple tools to execute research projects. Readers will come away from the book familiar with research approaches, simple statistical tests, standard surveys, simple software tools, and what ethical principles should be followed in using human participants.
She’s Taking a Break: A Cannabis Romance
By Joyce Gerber ’87
When Annie McGrath decides to stay in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to help her mother and sister care for her dying stepfather, she is forced to confront what happened between her and the boy across the street, now a priest at the local parish. While in Cambridge, Annie also finds purpose through her baking skills, allowing her to reflect on how she ended up fleeing a life she loved with her rock-star husband, Jean-Pierre. She’s Taking a Break is a contemporary romance about what happens when two sisters, one priest and a rock star smoke a joint.
How Could These Lovely People Let It Happen? A Psychologist’s Intimate Journal
By Mona Gustafson Affinito ’51
This unabashedly intimate, increasingly challenging, often fun, always homespun jaunt through some eight decades of personal and professional growth is told through what Gustafson Affinito calls her “coming of age” stories. From her first question—“What are we allowing to happen?”—to her last—“Are we there yet?”—the seasoned professor draws on personal tales of the science of psychology, illustrating its essence and applying it to real life without the dreaded demands of academia. Her writing is threaded with clues to the potentially cruel shadow side of human nature—one that can be provoked and exposed in all of us.
Second Street: Harbor View Cozy Fantasy
By James McGoldrick ’77 and Nikoo McGoldrick
When Skye Randall stumbles into Harbor View’s most dangerous secret—stolen art, hidden tunnels and a decades-old trail of missing persons—she discovers that some mysteries run deeper than anyone imagined. Good thing she has backup: three opinionated ghosts, a daughter who refuses to back down and a town that remembers everything.
Tremors of the Past: A Caleb Marlowe Series Western
By James McGoldrick ’77 and Nikoo McGoldrick
It’s 1882 in Denver when Henry Jordan tracks down the reporter who nearly ruined his name. But then an earthquake traps him in the newspaper cellar archive with Josie Sinclair, a stranger guarding old files at all costs. As the city burns above, her family’s buried story of the Acjachemen people shifts everything Henry thought he knew.
Genres Without Borders: The Circulation of Iranian Literary Forms
By Marie Ostby, Associate Professor of English
Despite censorship and political isolation, Iranian literature has thrived across borders through strategic transformations in genre and form. Drawing on travelogues, graphic narrative and social media alongside more traditional literary forms, Ostby traces the cross-border circulation that makes Persianate culture legible to global audiences while maintaining a distinctive voice. For the globally oriented Iranian writing she examines, the crossing of cultural boundaries is both mirrored and embodied in the crossing of genre boundaries, connecting these texts to a world literary culture despite accelerating political attempts to isolate them.
Growth Machines
By Mark Joseph Stelzner, Associate Professor of Economics
Growth Machines provides a provocative look at America’s compulsion to consume and our obsession’s surprising—and strange—origins. Revealing the gaps between economic thinking and economic reality, Stelzner argues that American consumption is no longer just a reflection of needs, but rather, it reflects a need for transaction—in many cases, a treat we seek out because it feels good. Yet such consumption doesn’t make us happier. Stelzner traces this strange nature to an environmental source: an economy that demands growth. To keep its economy pumping, the U.S. must keep Americans consuming.
Remembered and Living Text: Black Women Living with Endometriosis
By Shakita Thomas Kpetay, Assistant Professor of Education and Africana Studies; and Tamien Elder
Part memoir and part call to action, this book is a powerful testimony to the strength and wisdom of Black women navigating reproductive health. Shedding light on the historical and present-day injustices that shape Black women’s experiences with endometriosis, Thomas Kpetay and Elder reclaim the narrative around Black women’s bodies—centering them as sites of knowledge, transformation and healing.
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