Alum Authors 2021
The 2021 Alum Authors Celebration took place during Reunion Weekend, Saturday, August 7, 2021. Books by participating authors are featured below.
Poignant Song: The Life and Music of Lakshmi Shankar
by Kavita Das BMC '96
Dancer, film actor, Hindustani classical singer – Lakshmi Shankar was all this and more. Starting her journey as a teenager in Uday Shankar’s breakthrough troupe, she ventured into playback singing after a tragic illness cut short her dance career, going on to be the voice behind films such as Richard Attenborough’s critically acclaimed Gandhi. But her ultimate artistry lay in Hindustani classical music. In this book, Kavita Das, who has known her since childhood, traces Lakshmi’s fascinating story that culminated in a Grammy nomination in 2009. Poignant Song explores the Dancer, film actor, Hindustani classical singer – Lakshmi Shankar was all this and more. Starting her journey as a teenager in Uday Shankar’s breakthrough troupe, she ventured into playback singing after a tragic illness cut short her dance career, going on to be the voice behind films such as Richard Attenborough’s critically acclaimed Gandhi. But her ultimate artistry lay in Hindustani classical music. In this book, Kavita Das, who has known her since childhood, traces Lakshmi’s fascinating story that culminated in a Grammy nomination in 2009. Poignant Song explores the journey of Indian music to the West through the remarkable life of a great artisteof Indian music to the West through the remarkable life of a great artiste. Mothering While Black: Boundaries and Burdens of Middle-Class Parenthood
by Dawn Dow BMC ' 96
From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence
Mindy Fullilove is the 2023 holder of the Flexner Lectureship.
by Mindy Fullilove BMC '71
A public health approach to understanding and eliminating excessive police violence.
Excessive police violence and its disproportionate targeting of minority communities has existed in the United States since police forces first formed in the colonial period. A personal tragedy for its victims, for the people who love them, and for their broader communities, excessive police violence is also a profound violation of human and civil rights.
Most public discourse about excessive police violence focuses, understandably, on the horrors of civilian deaths. In From Enforcers to Guardians, Hannah L. F. Cooper and Mindy Thompson Fullilove approach the issue from a radically different angle: as a public health problem. By using a public health framing, this book challenges readers to recognize that the suffering created by excessive police violence extends far outside of death to include sexual, psychological, neglectful, and nonfatal physical violence as well.
Arguing that excessive police violence has been deliberately used to marginalize working-class and minority communities, Cooper and Fullilove describe what we know about the history, distribution, and health impacts of police violence, from slave patrols in colonial times to war on drugs policing in the present-day United States. Finally, the book surveys efforts, including Barack Obama's 2015 creation of the Task Force on 21st Century Policing, to eliminate police violence, and proposes a multisystem, multilevel strategy to end marginality and police violence and to achieve guardian policing.
Aimed at anyone seeking to understand the causes and distributions of excessive police violence--and to develop interventions to end it--From Enforcers to Guardians frames excessive police violence so that it can be understood, researched, and taught about through a public health lens.
News of the Earth
by Betty Ferber BMC '61
"Homero is one of the planet's great environmental heroes."--Jacob Scherr, Director of Global Strategy & Advocacy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, DC
News of the Earth chronicles Homero Aridjis's relationship with the natural world through his writings and his activism as president of the Grupo de los Cien [Group of 100], Mexico's influential environmental group composed of one hundred prominent personalities in the arts, culture, and science, which Aridjis founded in 1985. Under his leadership, the group's efforts led to a ban on the capture and commercialization of sea turtles, legislation reducing the amount of lead in gasoline, daily monitoring of air quality in Mexico City, and official designation of sanctuaries for the monarch butterfly. Aridjis waged a lifelong battle against threats to endangered ecosystems and wildlife in his country, many with global implications, including campaigns to save the gray whale, bottle-nosed dolphin, bee population, giant saguaro cactus, endangered coral reefs, and rainforests of Mexico. This book highlights these crucial battles, with detailed documentation of critical environmental victories.
Homero Aridjis, one of Latin America's foremost literary figures, is the author of forty-eight books of poetry and prose. He served as Mexico's Ambassador to Switzerland, The Netherlands, and UNESCO, and as president of PEN International. He received awards from the United Nations (Global 500 Award), the Orion Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, Global Green USA, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Betty Ferber Aridjis was born in New York and graduated from Bryn Mawr College. She served as the International Coordinator of the Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100) since its founding in 1985. Her lifelong commitment to the environment was also honored by Mikhail Gorbachev and by Global Green USA with the Green Cross Millennium Award for International Environmental Leadership. She is the translator of several books by Homero Aridjis into English.
Main Street: How a City's Heart Connects Us All
by Mindy Fullilove BMC '71
Traverses the central thoroughfares of our cities to uncover the ways they bring together our communities
How do Main Streets contribute to our mental health? This intriguing question took social psychiatrist Mindy Thompson Fullilove on an 11-year search through 178 cities in 14 countries. As Andy Merrifield notes in the foreword, "Mindy has drifted through a lot of Main Streets, walked them, observed, talked to people, ordinary people as well as professional practitioners. While she got to pace many miles of New York's Broadway, eat French patisseries as a flâneuse in Gay Paree, sip çay in Istanbul, and chill in Kyoto's dazzling Zen temples, her real concern is Main Street, USA, the more modest main stems of provincial America." From these visits Fullilove has discerned the larger architecture of Main Streets. She observes the ways that Main Streets are shaped for a vast array of social gatherings and processes, how they are a marker forthe integrity of civilization-and the marks aren't always good. She also looks at Main Streets as "an allée, a way that is part drama and part quotidian. While passing through, we get to look at one another, to sing, to recognize what we are, have been, might be." Her conclusion, that Main Streets are essential for gathering people and sharing information, emphasizes that tending our oft-neglected civic and commercial centers is a task worthy of us all.
Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty
Ghostwritten by Catherine Fredman BMC '80
In his much-anticipated memoir, The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty, Chairman Emeritus and former CEO of The Estée Lauder Companies Leonard A. Lauder shares the business and life lessons he learned as well as the adventures he had while helping transform the mom-and-pop business his mother founded in 1946 in the family kitchen into the beloved brand and ultimately into the iconic global prestige beauty company it is today.
In its infancy in the 1940s and 50s, the company comprised a handful of products, sold under a single brand in just a few prestigious department stores across the United States. Today, The Estée Lauder Companies constitutes one of the world's leading manufacturers and marketers of prestige skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products. It comprises more than 25 brands, whose products are sold in over 150 countries and territories. This growth and success was led by Leonard A. Lauder, Estée Lauder's oldest son, who envisioned and effected this expansion during a remarkable 60-year tenure, including leading the company as CEO and Chairman.
In this captivating personal account complete with great stories as only he can tell them, Mr. Lauder, now known as The Estée Lauder Companies' "Chief Teaching Officer," reflects on his childhood, growing up during the Great Depression, the vibrant decades of the post-World War II boom, and his work growing the company into the beauty powerhouse it is today. Mr. Lauder pays loving tribute to his mother Estée Lauder, its eponymous founder, and to the employees of the company, both past and present, while sharing inside stories about the company, including tales of cutthroat rivalry with Charles Revson of Revlon and others. The book offers keen insights on honing ambition, leveraging success, learning from mistakes, and growing an international company in an age of economic turbulence, uncertainty, and fierce competition.
Transforming Nokia
Ghostwritten by Catherine Fredman BMC '80
The great Nokia turnaround--universal business lessons for leaders in any industry
Nokia once dominated the smartphone industry. It was to mobile phones was Kleenex is to facial tissues. Then iPhones and Androids appeared out of nowhere and pushed Nokia off the cliff. In just four years, the company lost over 90 percent of its value. Revenues were in freefall; massive layoffs became common. Pundits predicted that bankruptcy wasn't a matter of if, it was a matter of when.
Then something equally shocking occurred. In record time, Nokia bounced back. With a vengeance. Nokia reinvented itself and is now the second-biggest player in the $100 billion-dollar global wireless market.
In Transforming Nokia, the man who orchestrated and led Nokia's comeback--Chairman of the Board Risto Siilasmaa--reveals the story of Nokia's fall and resurrection. He reveals the inside story of the collapse and provides survival strategies and change-management methods any business leader can take to the bank. You'll learn how to harness the power of what Siilasmaa calls "paranoid optimism" and apply his winning entrepreneurial leadership model to rise above any challenge and drive sustainable success.
Whether you lead a team or a corporate division, head a start-up or a massive organization, and whether your business is on the rocks or running smoothly, Transforming Nokia provides everything you need to sharpen your foresight, expand your options, seize opportunities, and thrive, no matter what changes tomorrow brings.
Girl Who Was No Kin to the Marshalls and Other Stories
by Anne Freeman BMC '56
With ten seemingly light, though occasionally shocking short stories, Anne Hobson Freeman carries the reader back to the joys and the fears, the yearnings and cockeyed values of assorted Virginians in the mid-twentieth-century South.
--Anne Hobson FreemanPostcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire
by Amy Friedman BMC '86
This book unseats magic realism as the dominant articulation of postcolonial resistance, by analyzing well-known postcolonial Indian authors of satire. Through the framework of Menippean satire, Postcolonial Satire argues that postcolonial literature can not only resist cultural and political influence, but establish new independent ideologies.
House on Fire
by Bonnie Kistler BMC '75