Bryn Mawr Alum
Fire, Ice, and Physics: The Science of Game of Thrones
$17.95
by Rebecca Thompson BMC '01
Exploring the science in George R. R. Martin's fantastical world, from the physics of an ice wall to the genetics of the Targaryens and Lannisters Game of Thrones is a fantasy that features a lot of made-up science--fabricated climatology (when is winter coming?), astronomy, metallurgy, chemistry, and biology. Most fans of George R. R. Martin's fantastical world accept it all as part of the magic. A trained scientist, watching the fake science in Game of Thrones, might think, "But how would it work?" In Fire, Ice, and Physics, Rebecca Thompson turns a scientist's eye on Game of Thrones, exploring, among other things, the science of an ice wall, the genetics of the Targaryen and Lannister families, and the biology of beheading. Thompson, a PhD in physics and an enthusiastic Game of Thrones fan, uses the fantasy science of the show as a gateway to some interesting real science, introducing GOT fandom to a new dimension of appreciation. Thompson starts at the beginning, with winter, explaining seasons and the very elliptical orbit of the Earth that might cause winter to come (or not come). She tells us that ice can behave like ketchup, compares regular steel to Valyrian steel, explains that dragons are "bats, but with fire," and considers Targaryen inbreeding. Finally she offers scientific explanations of the various types of fatal justice meted out, including beheading, hanging, poisoning (reporting that the effects of "the Strangler," administered to Joffrey at the Purple Wedding, resemble the effects of strychnine), skull crushing, and burning at the stake. Even the most faithful Game of Thrones fans will learn new and interesting things about the show from Thompson's entertaining and engaging account. Fire, Ice, and Physics is an essential companion for all future bingeing.
ISBN/SKU:
9780262539616
Publication Date:
November 10, 2020
Publisher:
Antifan Girlfriend
$20.00
by Paula Weiss BMC '84
The Antifan Girlfriend is a dystopian social satire and spy thriller. It's now 2089, several decades after civil war has divided America into a Blue socialist dictatorship on the coasts, and the still-free Red flyover country. The woke "Diversity Justice Republic," a vassal state of China, uses a social credit system that doles out preferential access to food, housing, vacations, and transportation. High credit elites live in luxury, while low credit types live in dormitories, and scramble for crumbs. "Plores," or the Deplorables who fought against the Republic during the war, are segregated from Crediteers and are forced to do menial work to survive. Gun ownership and Christian preaching are now capital crimes.
Malia is illegally reading the dangerous old books she safeguards from the public as a librarian. She stumbles into a relationship with David, a powerful Antifan Defense Forces commander, whose own Deplorable background distances him from the woke culture. David vows to help Malia recover the daughter who was stolen from her by the government years earlier.
The search for Malia's daughter brings Malia into the orbit of sinister bureaucrats conducting lethal truth serum experiments on low Social Crediteers under direction from Beijing. The Antifans turn Malia to spy on the bureaucrats, even as they seek to separate her from David because of her low-credit status. Malia is both repelled by and drawn to Adam, the ringleader, who pursues her without knowing her Antifan ties. Meanwhile, Malia and David are planning their dangerous escape over the militarized border into the United States.
The Antifan Girlfriend will frighten you, keep you in suspense until the very end, and yet reassure you that human beings will always strive for love and freedom.
"Do not defy, you must conform! The mask, the chip, are now the norm!"- chant at the 2089 Coronavirus Liberation Day parade.
ISBN/SKU:
9780578808154
Publication Date:
April 27, 2021
Publisher:
Railroads of the Eastern Shore
$21.99
by Treese, Loretta '73
Railroads played a critical role in the development of the Eastern Shore for over a century.
The history of the Delmarva Peninsula is inextricably entwined with the story of its railroads, the earliest of which were short, locally-funded lines. The dream to connect Norfolk directly to eastern seaboard cities farther north was first realized by the New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk Railroad in the 1880s. The line ran north-south along the peninsula to Cape Charles City, Virginia, where freight cars were loaded onto barges for the trip across the Chesapeake Bay. This line was eventually absorbed by the giant Pennsylvania Railroad, and the ferry service was eclipsed when the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel was completed in 1964.
Regional historian Lorett Treese tells the story of these railroads and the development they brought to the Eastern Shore.
ISBN/SKU:
9781467147026
Publication Date:
March 15, 2021
Publisher:
Beleaguered Oases
$9.00
by Ann Tweedy
In Beleaguered Oases, a surprising bestiary—fox, hummingbird, moth, newt—gathers to impart its wisdom on the most displaced member among them—the human animal. Ann Tweedy’s poetry is a lyrical celebration of the emotional truths and hard-won lessons that speak to us through the natural world. For those who feel disoriented by the “ecstatic cacophony” of our harried lives, never fear, the still-water clarity of these poems is healing. Listen: “home is the structure you build when nowhere else will have you.”
– Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of Other Fugitives and Other Strangers and Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa
Ann Tweedy’s poems are finely tuned soul-breaking songs of empathy and engagements with longing. These poems always look to the transformative, as bodies, natural affinities and words seeking spirit and wholeness. With Tweedy’s work we enter into in a natural quiet observation, into ironies of contemporary life. In these oases, beleaguered by time, hope, futility and humor, readers will find real poetry, considerate and direct, lyrical and mystifying, with an eye, ear and heart, for image, speech, rhythm and situation, in poems cast with sensual immersion in ways of the world and people. I look forward to reading more of Tweedy’s work in days to come.
– Gordon Henry Jr., author of The Light People and The Failure of Certain Charms and Other Disparate Signs of Life
ISBN/SKU:
9781949333640
Publication Date:
April 27, 2020
How to Be a Woman Online
$17.95
by Nina Jankowicz - BMC '11
Finalist: PROSE Awards 2023 - Media and Cultural Studies
"Blisteringly witty." Kirkus
"An essential guide." Publisher's Weekly
"Timely." Booklist
When Nina Jankowicz's first book on online disinformation was profiled in The New Yorker, she expected attention but not an avalanche of abuse and harassment, predominantly from men, online.
ISBN/SKU:
9781350267572
Publication Date:
April 21, 2022
Publisher:
How to Lose the Information War
$20.95
| by Nina Jankowicz - BMC '11 |
Since the start of the Trump era, the United States and the Western world has finally begun to wake up to the threat of online warfare and the attacks from Russia, who flood social media with disinformation, and circulate false and misleading information to fuel fake narratives and make the case for illegal warfare. The question no one seems to be able to answer is: what can the West do about it?
Central and Eastern European states, including Ukraine and Poland, however, have been aware of the threat for years. Nina Jankowicz has advised these governments on the front lines of the information war. The lessons she learnt from that fight, and from her attempts to get US congress to act, make for essential reading. How to Lose the Information War takes the reader on a journey through five Western governments' responses to Russian information warfare tactics - all of which have failed. She journeys into the campaigns the Russian operatives run, and shows how we can better understand the motivations behind these attacks and how to beat them. Above all, this book shows what is at stake: the future of civil discourse and democracy, and the value of truth itself.ISBN/SKU:
9780755642083
Publication Date:
September 23, 2021
Publisher:
Marguerite de Navarre's Shifting Gaze
$49.95
by Elizabeth Zegura BMC '71
Marguerite de Navarre's Heptaméron, composed in the 1540s and first published posthumously in 1558 and 1559, has long been an interpretive puzzle. De Navarre (1492-1549), sister of King Francis I of France, was a controversial figure in her lifetime. Her evangelical activities and proximity to the Crown placed her at the epicenter of her country's internecine strife and societal unrest. Yet her short stories appear to offer few traces of the sociopolitical turbulence that surrounded her.In Marguerite de Navarre's Shifting Gaze, however, Elizabeth Zegura argues that the Heptaméron's innocuous appearance camouflages its serious insights into patriarchy and gender, social class, and early modern French politics, which emerge from an analysis of the text's shifting perspectives. Zegura's approach, which focuses on visual cues and alternative standpoints and viewing positions within the text, hinges upon foregrounding "les choses basses" (lowly things) to which the devisante (storyteller) Oisille draws our attention in nouvelle (novella) 2 of the Heptaméron, using this downward, archaeological gaze to excavate layers of the text that merit more extensive critical attention.While her conclusions cast a new light on the literature, life, and times of Marguerite de Navarre, they are nevertheless closely aligned with recent scholarship on this important historical and literary figure.
ISBN/SKU:
9780367346720
Publication Date:
May 21, 2019
Publisher:
Registry of Survival
$10.00
by Ann Tweedy '93
Ann Tweedy’s A Registry of Survival is a deeply moving portrait of her fraught relationship with her mother. Tweedy’s story-poems explore the minutiae of her mother’s struggles with mental health, and Tweedy’s own attempts to find some safe balance in her relationship with her mother. In this short, but richly woven collection, Tweedy gives voice to the bitter struggles many fight quietly every day, offering a bit of solace to society's stigma of mental illness.
It’s like the words of A Registry of Survival were extracted from the heart, like clean sharp needles pulling out, but true and hard and needing to be said. The child, Ann Tweedy, might have survived her mother’s mental illness and homelessness, but the adult daughter has to live with the legacy ever after. This book is about the living with what comes after.
ISBN/SKU:
9781944234416