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.

Bread and Circus

Bread and Circus
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$26.00
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by Airea D Matthews

Author's website: www.aireadee.com


Drawing upon economics, theology, and psychology, Bread and Circus explores the lived experiences of those impacted by poverty and racial injustice. This poetry collection is innovative not only in its dissection of established ideals but also in its experimentation with poetic form, with a highlight being blackout poems made by subverting key words in economic texts. The final section of the collection is an especially moving series on collective grief and hope. 

-Alyssa S., GSSWSR '24


 
A powerful collection of autobiographical poems from Yale Young Poets Award Winner and Philadelphia's Poet Laureate Airea D. Matthews about the economics of class and its failures for those rendered invisible by it.

As a former student of economics, Airea D. Matthews was fascinated and disturbed by 18th-century Scottish economist Adam Smith, and his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations. Bread and Circus is a direct challenge to Smith's theory of the invisible hand, which claims self-interest is the key to optimal economic outcomes. By juxtaposing redacted texts by Smith and the French Marxist Guy Debord with autobiographical prose and poems, Bread and Circus demonstrates that self-interest fails when people become commodities themselves, and shows how the most vulnerable--including the author and her family--have been impacted by that failure. A layered collection to be read and reread, with poems that range from tragic to humorous, in forms as varied and nuanced as the ideas the book considers, Bread and Circus explores the area where theory and reality meet.

Timely, ambitious, and relevant, Bread and Circus is a brilliant intellectual and artistic contribution to an ongoing conversation about American inequality, for fans of Elizabeth Alexander, Natalie Diaz, Eve Ewing, and Gregory Pardlo.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781668011454
Publication Date: 
May 30, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: 

Good Life

Good Life
$28.99

by Marc Schulz

New York Times Bestseller

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 Life shows 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 Life has 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.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781982166694
Publication Date: 
January 10, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: 

Five Brain Leadership

Five Brain Leadership
$17.95

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.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781774582732
Publication Date: 
January 24, 2023

Forgotten Girls

Forgotten Girls
$28.00
Talented and ambitious, Monica Potts and her best friend, Darci, were both determined to make something of themselves. How did their lives turn out so different?

"The Forgotten Girls is much more than a memoir; it's the unflinching story of rural women trying to live in the most rugged, ultra-religious, and left-behind places in America."--Beth Macy, author of Dopesick

Growing up gifted and working-class poor in the foothills of the Ozarks, Monica and Darci became fast friends. The girls bonded over a shared love of reading and learning, even as they navigated the challenges of their tumultuous family lives and declining town--broken marriages, alcohol abuse, and shuttered stores and factories. They pored over the giant map in their middle-school classroom, tracing their fingers over the world that awaited them, vowing to escape. In the end, Monica left Clinton for college and fulfilled her dreams, but Darci, along with many in their circle of friends, did not.

Years later, working as a journalist covering poverty, Potts discovered what she already intuitively knew about the women in Arkansas: Their life expectancy had dropped steeply--the sharpest such fall in a century. This decline has been attributed to "deaths of despair"--suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses--but Potts knew their causes were too complex to identify in a sociological study. She had grown up with these women, and when she saw Darci again, she found that her childhood friend--addicted to drugs, often homeless, a single mother--was now on track to becoming a statistic.

In this gripping narrative, Potts deftly pinpoints the choices that sent her and Darci on such different paths and then widens the lens to explain why those choices are so limited. The Forgotten Girls is a profound, compassionate look at a population in trouble, and a uniquely personal account of the way larger forces, such as inheritance, education, religion, and politics, shape individual lives.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780593730898
Publication Date: 
May 30, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: 

Habit Forming: Drug Addiction in America

$35.00
Habitual drug use in the United States is at least as old as the nation itself. Habit Forming traces the history of unregulated drug use and dependency before 1914, when the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act limited sales of opiates and cocaine under US law. Many Americans used opiates and other drugs medically and became addicted. Some tried Hasheesh Candy, injected morphine, or visited opium dens, but neither use nor addiction was linked to crime, due to the dearth of restrictive laws. After the Civil War, American presses published extensively about domestic addiction. Later in the nineteenth century, many used cocaine and heroin as medicine. As addiction became a major public health issue, commentators typically sympathized with white, middle-class drug users, while criticizing such use by poor or working-class people and people of color. When habituation was associated with middle-class morphine users, few advocated for restricted drug access. By the 1910s, as use was increasingly
associated with poor young men, support for regulations increased. In outlawing users' access to habit-forming drugs at the national level, a public health problem became a larger legal and social problem, one with an enduring influence on American drug laws and their enforcement.
ISBN/SKU: 
9780197646694
Publication Date: 
December 16, 2022

Indigo and Ida

Indigo and Ida
$19.99

When eighth grader and aspiring journalist Indigo breaks an important story, exposing an unfair school policy, she's suddenly popular for the first time.

The friends who've recently drifted away from her want to hang out again. Then Indigo notices that the school's disciplinary policies seem to be enforced especially harshly with students of color, like her. She wants to keep investigating, but her friends insist she's imagining things.

Meanwhile, Indigo stumbles upon a book by Black journalist and activist Ida B. Wells--with private letters written by Ida tucked inside. As she reads about Ida's lifelong battle against racism, Indigo realizes she must choose between keeping quiet and fighting for justice.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781728467689
Publication Date: 
April 4, 2023

Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel

Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel
$30.00

by Pardis Dabashi

An examination of the relationship between literature and classical Hollywood cinema reveals a profound longing for plot in modernist fiction.

The modernist novel sought to escape what Virginia Woolf called the "tyranny" of plot. Yet even as twentieth-century writers pushed against the constraints of plot-driven Victorian novels, plot kept its hold on them through the influence of another medium: the cinema. Focusing on the novels of Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, and William Faulkner--writers known for their affinities and connections to classical Hollywood--Pardis Dabashi links the moviegoing practices of these writers to the tensions between the formal properties of their novels and the characters in them. Even when they did not feature outright happy endings, classical Hollywood films often provided satisfying formal resolutions and promoted normative social and political values. Watching these films, modernist authors were reminded of what they were leaving behind--both formally and in the name of aesthetic experimentalism--by losing the plot.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780226829258
Publication Date: 
November 6, 2023

Necessary Trouble

Necessary Trouble
$24.00
$30.00
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A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.

To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactions--not only in global affairs but in American society and Americans' lives.

A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become "well adjusted" and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil rights, student, and antiwar movements, Drew forged a path of her own--one that would eventually lead her to become a historian of the very conflicts that were instrumental in shaping the world she grew up in.

Culminating in the upheavals of 1968, Necessary Trouble captures a time of rapid change and fierce reaction in one young woman's life, tracing the transformations and aftershocks that we continue to grapple with today.

Includes black-and-white images

ISBN/SKU: 
9780374601805
Publication Date: 
August 22, 2023

New Religions and the Mediation of Non-Monogamy

New Religions and the Mediation of Non-Monogamy
$52.95

The book is the first full-length study informed by fieldwork with Mormon polygamists and fieldwork with LGBTQ Neo-Pagan/Neo-Tantric polyamorists and examines the relationship between alternative American religions and the media representation of non-monogamies on reality-TV shows.

ISBN/SKU: 
9781032051673
Publication Date: 
May 31, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: 

Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue
$18.99
In this touching story, a girl and an octopus unexpectedly connect over feeling small in a big world.

Coral has big dreams about grand adventures--but it's hard to go after these big dreams when you're the smallest in the class and feel completely invisible. During a school trip to the aquarium, Coral finds a kindred spirit in Kraken, a small octopus who knows that being invisible isn't always a bad thing.

When Coral finds herself in the aquarium after everyone else goes home, she learns that being seen isn't always about how big you are.

ISBN/SKU: 
9780593353875
Publication Date: 
July 25, 2023
Author: 
Publisher: