New & Noteworthy
Your BMC Bookshop uses this page to highlight new books published within the past few months by BMC alums, faculty and staff. Please email us at bookshop@brynmawr.edu if you have a new release.
Carrying All Before Her
by Chelsea Phillips BMC '05
The rise of celebrity stage actresses in the long eighteenth century created a class of women who worked in the public sphere while facing considerable scrutiny about their offstage lives. Such powerful celebrity women used the cultural and affective significance of their reproductive bodies to leverage audience support and interest to advance their careers, and eighteenth-century London patent theatres even capitalized on their pregnancies. Carrying All Before Her uses the reproductive histories of six celebrity women (Susanna Mountfort Verbruggen, Anne Oldfield, Susannah Cibber, George Anne Bellamy, Sarah Siddons, and Dorothy Jordan) to demonstrate that pregnancy affected celebrity identity, impacted audience reception and interpretation of performance, changed company repertory and altered company hierarchy, influenced the development and performance of new plays, and had substantial economic consequences for both women and the companies for which they worked. Deepening the fields of celebrity, theatre, and women's studies, as well as social and medical histories, Phillips reveals an untapped history whose relevance and impact persists today.
Patch of Sky
by Nic Yulo
How to Be a Woman Online
by Nina Jankowicz - BMC '11
An essential guide for women interested in standing up for a fairer, safer online world. 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.
New William Faulkner Studies
Edited by Pardis Dabashi
William Faulkner remains one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, and Faulkner Studies offers up seemingly endless ways to engage anew questions and problems that continue to occupy literary studies into the twenty-first century, and beyond the compass of Faulkner himself. His corpus has proved particularly accommodating of a range of perspectives and methodologies that include Black studies, visual culture studies, world literatures, modernist studies, print culture studies, gender and sexuality studies, sound studies, the energy humanities, and much else. The fifteen essays collected in The New William Faulkner Studies charts these developments in Faulkner scholarship over the course of this new century and offers prospects for further interrogation of his oeuvre.
Perfect Copies
by Shiamin Kwa
Analyzing the way that recent works of graphic narrative use the comics form to engage with the "problem" of reproduction, Shiamin Kwa's Perfect Copies reminds us that the mode of production and the manner in which we perceive comics are often quite similar to the stories they tell. Perfect Copies considers the dual notions of reproduction, mechanical as well as biological, andexplores how comics are works of reproduction that embed questions about the nature of reproduction itself. Through close readings of the comics My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, The Black Project by Gareth Brookes, The Generous Bosom series by Conor Stechschulte, Sabrina by Nick Drnaso, and Panther by Brecht Evens, Perfect Copies shows how these comics makers push the limits of different ideas of "reproduction" in strikingly different ways. Kwa suggests that reading and thinking about books like these, that push us to engage with these complicated questions teaches us how to become better readers.
Good Life
by Marc Schulz
What makes for a happy life, a fulfilling life? A good life? According to the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, the longest scientific study of happiness ever conducted, the answer to these questions may be closer than you realize.
What makes a life fulfilling and meaningful? The simple but surprising answer is: relationships. The stronger our relationships, the more likely we are to live happy, satisfying, and overall healthier lives. In fact, the Harvard Study of Adult Development reveals that the strength of our connections with others can predict the health of both our bodies and our brains as we go through life.
The invaluable insights in this book emerge from the revealing personal stories of hundreds of participants in the Harvard Study as they were followed year after year for their entire adult lives, and this wisdom is bolstered by research findings from this and many other studies. Relationships in all their forms--friendships, romantic partnerships, families, coworkers, tennis partners, book club members, Bible study groups--all contribute to a happier, healthier life. And as The Good Lifeshows us, it's never too late to strengthen the relationships you have, and never too late to build new ones.
Dr. Waldinger's TED Talk about the Harvard Study, "What Makes a Good Life," has been viewed more than 42 million times and is one of the ten most-watched TED talks ever. The Good Lifehas been praised by bestselling authors Jay Shetty ("Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz lead us on an empowering quest towards our greatest need: meaningful human connection"), Angela Duckworth ("In a crowded field of life advice and even life advice based on scientific research, Schulz and Waldinger stand apart"), and happiness expert Laurie Santos ("Waldinger and Schulz are world experts on the counterintuitive things that make life meaningful").
With warmth, wisdom, and compelling life stories, The Good Life shows us how we can make our lives happier and more meaningful through our connections to others.
12th Commandment
by Daniel Torday
Swirling with secrets and their consequences, exploring how revelation and redemption might be accessed through sin, and driven through twists and turns toward a startling conclusion, The 12th Commandment is a brilliant novel by award-winning author Daniel Torday.
The Dönme sect--a group of Jewish-Islamic adherents with ancient roots--lives in an isolated community on rural land outside of smalltown Mt. Izmir, Ohio. Self-sustaining, deeply-religious, and heavily-armed, they have followed their self-proclaimed prophet, Natan of Flatbush, from Brooklyn to this new land.
But the brutal murder of Natan's teenage son throws their tight community into turmoil.
When Zeke Leger, a thirty-year-old writer at a national magazine, arrives from New York for the funeral of a friend, he becomes intrigued by the case, and begins to report on the murder. His college girlfriend Johanna Franklin prosecuted the case, and believes it is closed. Before he knows it, Zeke becomes entangled in the conflict between the Dönme, suspicious local citizens, Johanna, and the law--with dangerous implications for his body and his soul.
Artist and the Orchard
Five Brain Leadership
Lead smarter. A handbook for your brain at work.
High pressure. High conflict. High stress. Today, too many leaders believe that these states are not just natural, but inevitable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Using his skills as a medical doctor and his knowledge from many years in executive positions in the biotech pharmaceutical industry, in Five Brain Leadership, executive coach Carlos Davidovich walks you through the latest breakthroughs in the burgeoning fields of neuroscience, epigenetics, and cognitive behavior to help you better understand your multilayered, magical mind, and how to work with it instead of against it in leading your team and building relationships.
Neuromanagement is at the intersection of neuroscience and daily life in the business world. It is leadership that is based on a full understanding of all five of our interlocking brains-our reptilian, emotional, rational, and, yes, even our heart and gut "brains." Through practical tools and exercises, you'll learn how to build your capacity in each of these control centers, and to recognize all the ways they are at play in how humans operate, interrelate, and react to change.
Five-Brain Leadership is your pathway toward turning good leadership into great leadership, and reaching new levels of success in all of life's domains.
Perhaps the Stars (Terra Ignota #4)
From the 2017 John W. Campbell Award Winner for Best Writer, Ada Palmer's Perhaps the Stars is the final book of the Hugo Award-shortlisted Terra Ignota series.
World Peace turns into global civil war. In the future, the leaders of Hive nations--nations without fixed location--clandestinely committed nefarious deeds in order to maintain an outward semblance of utopian stability. But the facade could only last so long. The comforts of effortless global travel and worldwide abundance may have tempered humanity's darkest inclinations, but conflict remains deeply rooted in the human psyche. All it needed was a catalyst, in form of special little boy to ignite half a millennium of repressed chaos. Now, war spreads throughout the globe, splintering old alliances and awakening sleeping enmities. All transportation systems are in ruins, causing the tyranny of distance to fracture a long-united Earth and threaten to obliterate everything the Hive system built. With the arch-criminal Mycroft nowhere to be found, his successor, Ninth Anonymous, must not only chronicle the discord of war, but attempt to restore order in a world spiraling closer to irreparable ruin. The fate of a broken society hangs in the balance. Is the key to salvation to remain Earth-bound or, perhaps, to start anew throughout the far reaches of the stars?