Bryn Mawr Alum
Primary Politics
by Elaine Kamarck BMC '72
The 2020 presidential primaries are on the horizon and this third edition of Elaine Kamarck's Primary Politics will be there to help make sense of them. Updated to include the 2016 election, it will once again be the guide to understanding the modern nominating system that gave the American electorate a choice between Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton.
In Primary Politics, political insider Elaine Kamarck explains how the presidential nomination process became the often baffling system we have today, including the "robot rule." Her focus is the largely untold story of how presidential candidates since the early 1970s have sought to alter the rules in their favor and how their failures and successes have led to even more change. She describes how candidates have sought to manipulate the sequencing of primaries to their advantage and how Iowa and New Hampshire came to dominate the system. She analyzes the rules that are used to translate votes into delegates, paying special attention to the Democrats' twenty-year fight over proportional representation and some of its arcana.
Drawing on meticulous research, interviews with key figures in both parties, and years of experience, this book explores one of the most important questions in American politics-how we narrow the list of presidential candidates every four years.
Snape: The definitive analysis of Hogwarts's mysterious potions master
by Lorrie Kim BMC '89
This fully revised and expanded edition of Lorrie Kim's classic work digs deep into the life and legend of Severus Snape, fan-favorite of the Harry Potter series
While the Harry Potter series may follow the journey of the Boy Who Lived, if you want to know the whole story, keep your eyes fixed on Severus Snape. This greasy-haired, grumpy genius, one of J.K. Rowling's most enduring gifts to English literature, is the archetypal ill-tempered teacher: demanding, acerbic, and impossible to ignore. Over the span of seven novels, Snape's remarkable role in the series can be hard to parse: Where do his true allegiances lie? Can a former Death Eater change his spots? Why does he seem to loathe the boy he's pledged to protect?
House on Fire
by Bonnie Kistler BMC '75
Russian Syntax for Advanced Students
by Marina Rojavin - Visting Assistant Professor of Russian
Russian Syntax for Advanced Students is a textbook which illuminates relationships between words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.
Using this book, students will acquire conscious knowledge of how words function in various syntactical constructions as applied to discourse, such as specific verbal situations, based not only on the underlying linguistic phenomena, but also on the content of sociolinguistic situations. The book helps develop communicative skills for advanced mastery and constantly emphasizes the importance of accuracy in the use of syntactic structures.
Russian Syntax is designed primarily as a textbook for classroom use for intermediate-high and advanced-level students. The text is also suitable for independent study by graduate students in linguistics or pedagogy, as well as being a valuable reference for instructors.
Shell Games
by Bonnie Kistler '75
"A truly spectacular psychological thriller with a dazzling mystery at its core. Shell Games is the ultimate one-sitting read that has everything--incredible family dynamics, characters that burst off the page and a premise so deliciously enticing and surprising that the pages quite simply turn themselves. Bonnie Kistler is a genius!"--Matthew Blake, author of Anna O
A brilliant page-turning thriller about a young woman whose fabulously wealthy mother might be the victim of an elaborate con or might be losing her mind--and the daughter can't tell where the truth lies.
Julie's mother Kate is a force of nature--a glamorous woman of seventy, a self-made real estate developer, a grande dame in Florida society, and a power broker in Florida politics. It wasn't easy for Julie to grow up in the shadow of such a dynamo, but she loves her mother, and she and her husband Eric are thrilled when Kate marries her long-lost high school sweetheart, a salt-of-the-earth man named Charlie.
But their storybook romance ends abruptly. On their wedding night, Kate calls the police in hysterics to report that Charlie just confessed to a notorious unsolved crime from decades before.
Charlie says she imagined it. Eric says that Kate has dementia. And the FBI says that Charlie couldn't possibly have committed that crime.
Julie doesn't know what to believe. Is her brilliant mother losing her mind? Or is sweet, lovable Charlie gaslighting Kate to gain control of her fortune?
As Julie tries to navigate through this maze of paranoia and mind games, cracks start to develop in her own marriage as it seems that Eric is keeping secrets . . .
Set against a backdrop of rampant development and devastating climate change, Shell Games is a psychological thriller that will make your head spin and the pages turn as you wonder exactly who is doing what to whom.
River Town Girl: A Memoir
by Lynn Litterine BMC '96
River Town Girl: A Memoir is about growing up in a small, working-class town on the Hudson River in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s. One mile away across the river is New York City, but it might just as well be a thousand miles away. The town, Edgewater, has 4,000 people. Cut off by the river, which runs along it on the east, and the Palisades cliffs, which run along it on the west, it is rich in eccentric characters, and its life is shaped by the rhythms of the Hudson. The town is fertile ground for the delights and the powers of story telling. Today that version of the town is gone, buried under New Jersey's high-rise Gold Coast.
This story is about how a child of the 1950s becomes an adolescent of the 1960s and gradually but finally finds the strength to finish growing up. A bookish only child, the power of words to make sense of the world is life saving for her. In her books as a child and in her mother's stories and her father's journals, she comes to know a self both damaged and resilient. Later stories told in psychotherapy make sense of the overwhelming anxiety that threatens her.
The author treats memory as more episodic and fluctuating than traditional narratives do. Written in prose, poetry, lists, fragments, and dialogue and in both facts and imaginings, this patchwork creates a complex, coming-of-age story about a girl, a family, a town, a river, and a time now gone.
Alchemical Harry Potter: Essays on Transfiguration in J.K. Rowling's Novels
Edited by Anne Mamary BMC '86
When Harry Potter first boards the Hogwarts Express, he journeys to a world which Rowling says has alchemy as its "internal logic." The Philosopher's Stone, known for its power to transform base metals into gold and to give immortality to its maker, is the subject of the conflict between Harry and Voldemort in the first book of the series. But alchemy is not about money or eternal life, it is much more about the transformations of desire, of power and of people--through love.
Harry's equally remarkable and ordinary power to love leads to his desire to find but not use the Philosopher's Stone at the start of the series and his wish to end the destructive power of the Elder Wand at the end. This collection of essays on alchemical symbolism and transformations in Rowling's series demonstrates how Harry's work with magical objects, people, and creatures transfigure desire, power, and identity. As Harry's leaden existence on Privet Drive is transformed in the company of his friends and teachers, the Harry Potter novels have transformed millions of readers, inspiring us to find the gold in our ordinary lives.
Amelia Finds Her Voice
Artist and the Orchard
Artist Linda Hoffman saved an orchard and reshaped her life at Old Frog Pond Farm in Harvard, Massachusetts. When she moved to the farm she didn't know anything about apple-growing. More than twenty years later, the farm is one of the few organic pick-your-own orchards in New England, as well as a hub for a thriving community of visual artists, writers, and spiritual seekers. Hoffman, the mother of three children, a Zen practitioner, and a breast cancer survivor, has now written about her extraordinary journey in The Artist and the Orchard: A Memoir.
Civil Rights Warrior
