Alum Authors 2020
The 2020 Alumnae/i Authors event will be virtual, on Saturday, May 30, at 4 pm (EST). Books by participating authors that are available through your BMC Bookshop are featured below.
In addition to titles listed below, these BMC alum will also be participating in the celebration:
Olya Samilenko ’75 - Snow Goose Chronicles
Aida Waserstein '70 - My Name is Aida (English and bilingual editions)
Seals and Sealing in the Ancient World
by Marta Ameri BMC '95 |
Studies of seals and sealing practices have traditionally investigated aspects of social, political, economic, and ideological systems in ancient societies throughout the Old World. Previously, scholarship has focused on description and documentation, chronology and dynastic histories, administrative function, iconography, and style. More recent studies have emphasized context, production and use, and increasingly, identity, gender, and the social lives of seals, their users, and the artisans who produced them. Using several methodological and theoretical perspectives, this volume presents up-to-date research on seals that is comparative in scope and focus. The cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach advances our understanding of the significance of an important class of material culture of the ancient world. The volume will serve as an essential resource for scholars, students, and others interested in glyptic studies, seal production and use, and sealing practices in the Ancient Near East, Egypt, Ancient South Asia and the Aegean during the 4th-2nd Millennia BCE.
Governance Revolution
by Deborah Hicks Midanek Bailey BMC '75
Boards of directors are sitting ducks. Shareholders complain and even attack, management manipulates, and individual board members have little power, able to act only as part of the board as a whole. Governance issues are front and center, yet there is often little understanding, even among board members, of the key role that they play.
Written in an accessible and human voice, The Governance Revolution: What Every Board Member Needs to Know, NOW! provides information and context essential to anyone seeking to understand how corporations and their stewards--the board of directors--can and should function in the volatile world we inhabit.
Deborah Hicks Midanek offers useful insight into what board members of corporations actually do, the current standards for board members and why they exist. She includes a timely discussion of how clarity of purpose can improve board and director effectiveness. Informed by her long experience serving public, private, and family owned corporate boards as well as those of charitable, and government organizations, she provides essential context regarding the evolution of board practice as well as candid discussion of the issues involved in the relentless effort to improve corporate governance processes. Focused mainly on the dominant public corporation, she also explores the special challenges of serving private and family owned as well as nonprofit and public agency boards.
Written by a seasoned board member, and liberally laced with stories and cases illustrating the tricky issues directors wrestle with, this book is the essential common-sense companion for anyone working with a board, serving on a board, or wanting to do so. Directors, aspiring directors, investors, and students of corporate behavior will benefit from this highly readable description of the cloistered boardroom.
For Roger Trapp's article in Forbes featuring a discussion of this title click here
https: //www.forbes.com/sites/rogertrapp/2018/10/22/independent-directors-nehttps: //www.forbes.com/sites/rogertrapp/2018/10/22/independent-directors-need-to-stand-up-to-activists/#7060008826b0ed-to-stand-up-to-activists/#7060008826b0
For a Roundtable discussion in Financier Worldwide Magazine featuring Deborah Hicks Midanek please click here
https: //www.financierworldwide.com/roundtable-risks-facing-directors-officers-aug18#.W1BqQdVKiUk
Click here for a review in Financial Analysts Journal
https: //www.cfapubs.org/doi/abs/10.2469/br.v13.n1.10
Click here for an excerpt on Corporate Board Member:
https: //boardmember.com/what-is-the-governance-revolution/
Speaking Out on Governance
by Deborah Hicks Midanek Bailey BMC '75
Speaking Out on Governance presents a range of viewpoints concerning the role of today's corporation and its board of directors. The author engages in candid discussion with subject matter experts including boardmembers, corporate attorneys, academics, institutional investors, regulators, and activists. These interviews of leading authorities in the corporate governance arena provide the reader with unique insight into the vitally important but often misunderstood role played by the board.
Deborah Hicks Midanek discusses perspectives regarding what directors of businesses actually do and should do; the true motivations and concerns of the various parties seeking to influence corporate behavior; legal issues surrounding the board; and the key similarities and differences of opinion that may help improve effectiveness of all parties and increase board and director effectiveness. This book is essential reading for corporate directors and would-be directors, senior managers, attorneys, consultants and anyone interested in what drives organizational behavior.
Popovers and Candlelight
by Marcia Biederman BMC '70
What would you do with your last sixty dollars? If you were Patricia Murphy you'd turn it into a fortune by buying a rundown Brooklyn diner. On the cusp of the Great Depression, the diner became an overnight sensation, the first of nine popular Patricia Murphy's Candlelight Restaurants that opened over the course of four decades in New York and Florida. Popovers and Candlelight recounts how Murphy bucked Mad Men-era sexism in a male-dominated field and created remarkable dining experiences with solid American fare, a talented staff, and eye-popping décor. Dripping in diamonds, she transcended ethnic prejudices to become a socialite and built a brand that sold fragrance as well as food. Mutinous siblings, a desperate manager, and a typhoid outbreak brought it all to an operatic end, but Marcia Biederman restores Murphy and her contributions to their proper place in women's and culinary history. This book will delight readers with its rags-to-riches story and fascinating view of class, gender, ethnicity, and food culture during much of the twentieth century.
Scan Artist: How Evelyn Wood Convinced the World That Speed-Reading Worked
by Marcia Biederman BMC '70
The best-known educator of the twentieth century was a scammer in cashmere. "The most famous reading teacher in the world," as television hosts introduced her, Evelyn Wood had little classroom experience, no degrees in reading instruction, and a background that included work at the Mormon mission in Germany at the time when the church was cooperating with the Third Reich. Nevertheless, a nation spooked by Sputnik and panicked by paperwork eagerly embraced her promises of a speed-reading revolution. Journalists, lawmakers and two US presidents lent credibility to Wood's claims of turbocharging reading speeds through a method once compared to the miracle at Lourdes. Time magazine reported Woods grads could polish off Dr. Zhivagoin one hour; a senator swore that Wood's method had boosted his reading speed to more than ten thousand words per minute.
But science showed that her method taught only skimming, with disastrous effects on comprehension--a fact Wood was aware of from early in her career. Fudging test results, and squelching critics, she founded a company that enrolled half a million. The course's popularity endured even as evidence of its shortcomings continued to accumulate. Today, as apps and online courses attempt to spark a speed-reading revival, this engaging look at Wood's rise from mission worker to marketer exposes the pitfalls of embracing a con artist's worthless solution to imaginary problems.
Murder With a Cherry on Top
by Cynthia Blair BMC '75 - published under the pseudonym Cynthia Baxer
Kate McKay had doubts about swapping her high-powered life in Manhattan for Wolfert's Roost, the quaint Hudson Valley village where she grew up. But her ailing grandmother needs her, so Kate decides to start fresh and indulge her dream of running an ice cream shop. All goes smoothly--until she's reunited with old acquaintances nuttier than a vat of rocky road . . .
Kate should be thrilled about opening Lickety Splits Ice Cream Shoppe. Instead her spirits melt like soft serve in the summer when she learns that her childhood frenemy, Ashley Winthrop, has started selling frozen treats in the bakery across the street. Turns out, Ashley hasn't sweetened since high school. And, once again, she's game for some very unfriendly competition . . .
But before Ashley can kill Kate's new business, someone kills Ashley--stabbing her inside the bakery. Worse, the murder occurs right after the two rivals drew crowds with a heated argument, leaving half of Wolfert's Roost speculating that Kate was finally pushed over the edge. With her reputation in serious trouble, Kate is determined to get the real scoop--even if it means joining forces with a former flame. But she'll need far more than a sprinkle of wit if she wants to expose the killer and live to see another sundae . . .
"Decadent, deadly, and delightful! Murder with a Cherry on Top is a charmer of a cozy mystery. A delicious read that left me hungry for more."
--Jenn McKinlay, New York Times bestselling author
Includes mouthwatering ice cream recipes from the Lickety Splits Ice Cream Shoppe!
Fashioning Celebrity
by Laura Engel BMC '90
This volume takes a new approach to the study of late eighteenth-century British actresses by examining the significance of leading actresses' autobiographical memoirs, portraits, and theatrical roles together as significant strategies for shaping their careers. In an era when acting was considered a suspicious profession for women, eighteenth-century actresses were "celebrities" in a society obsessed with fashion, gossip, and intrigue. Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making, by Laura Engel, considers the lives and careers of four actresses: Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, Mary Wells, and Fanny Kemble. Using conventions of the era's portraiture, fashion, literature, and the theater in order to create their personas on and off stage, these actresses provided a series of techniques for fashioning celebrity that still survive today. By emphasizing the importance of reading narratives through visual and theatrical frameworks and visual and theatrical representations through narrative models, Engel demonstrates the ways in which actresses' identities were imagined through a variety of discourses that worked dialectically to construct their complex self-representations. Fashioning Celebrity suggests that eighteenth-century practices of self-promotion mirror contemporary ideas about marketing, framing, and selling the elusive self, providing a way to begin to chart a history of our contemporary obsession with fame and our preoccupation with the rise and fall of famous women.
Women, Performance and the Material of Memory
by Laura Engel BMC '90
This book proposes that the performance of archival research is related to the experience of tourism, where an individual immerses herself in a foreign environment, relating to and analyzing visual and sensory materials through embodiment and enactment. Each chapter highlights a particular set of tangible objects including: pocket diaries, portraits, drawings, magic lanterns, silhouettes, waxworks, and photographs in relation to actresses, authors, and artists such as: Elizabeth Inchbald, Sally Siddons, Marguerite Gardiner the Countess of Blessington, Isabella Beetham, Jane Read, Madame Tussaud, and Amelia M. Watson. Ultimately, operating as an archival tourist in my analyses, I offer strategies for thinking about the presence of women artists in the archives through methodologies that seek to connect materials from the past with our representations of them in the present.
Profound and Perfect Things
| by Maribel Garcia BMC '95 |
Some truths can do more harm than good. This is what Isa comes to believe at the tender age of nine when she first has a dream about kissing a girl--an act that would never be acceptable to her family. By her late twenties, Isa has left her hometown in South Texas, so her conservative family won't discover that she's gay, and immersed herself in the workaholic routine of law school. One fateful night, she experiments with a man, and subsequently ended up with an unwanted pregnancy. Meanwhile, Isa's only sister, Cristina, loses the infant she spent years trying to conceive. Moving forward with her own pregnancy and giving the baby to Cristina seems like the perfect solution--until Isa bonds with the newborn. Still, the sisters move forward with the family adoption. Now everyone in the family has a secret. Twelve years later, after much deceit and loss has passed between the sisters, Isa decides to reveal both her sexuality and her niece's true parentage to their family, against Cristina's wishes--but before all can be exposed, tragedy strikes. Timely and gripping, Profound and Perfect Things is a story of two first-generation Mexican-American sisters striving to build a meaningful existence outside their traditional parent's approval and ways of life--and an exploration of the boundaries of our responsibilities to those we love.
House on Fire
by Bonnie Kistler BMC '75
"A masterfully written saga of family drama in the vein of Celeste Ng, Liane Moriarty, and Sally Hepworth" (Book Reporter) about a blended family in crisis after a drunk driving accident leaves one parent's daughter dead--and the other's son charged with manslaughter.
Divorce lawyer Leigh Huyett knows all too well that most second marriages are doomed to fail. Yet five years in, she and Pete Conley couldn't be happier with their blended family.
But one rainy Friday night, on the way back from celebrating their anniversary, Peter and Leigh receive horrific news. Peter's son Kip, a high school senior, has crashed his truck and been arrested for drunk driving. And Leigh's fourteen-year-old daughter, Chrissy, was with him.
Twelve hours later, Chrissy is dead and Kip is charged with manslaughter.
Reeling with grief, Leigh nonetheless does her best to rally behind Peter and Kip. That is, until Kip changes his story and claims that he wasn't driving after all--Chrissy was, and he swears there is a witness.
As they hurtle toward Kip's trial date, husband and wife are torn between loyalty to their children and to each other, while the mystery of what really happened that night looms large.