Bryn Mawr Authors
Caped Countess
by Judith Tabron BMC '90
By day, Lady Donnatella is a duke's silly daughter.
So she can save London lives by night.
When she stumbles into something larger than a street fight, everything she's balancing may come crashing down...
It's another lonely season for Tella, dancing and gaming madly while keeping marriage away. She cannot tell her family or friends that her true self is the one battling danger in the city's dark streets. Nor will anyone guess; she's perfected her disguise. Then her night-time alter ego is seen - just when she can no longer count on her best friend, or her beloved great-uncle. And the resulting fuss in the newspapers isn't making any of this easier. Nor is the reporter who saw her.
Henry Fitzwilliam, third son of a marquess, left London society to serve in the wars, and won't go back. He's devoted his life to telling the stories Britain needs to hear, and perhaps this Caped Count falls into that category. He can't be sure until he gets much, much closer.
Tella can handle a fight, but tracking a murderer is higher stakes. She might need someone at her back. Fitz might be the worst choice - or he might be more perfect than either of them suspects.
A new kind of Regency romance, full of action, adventure, and forever love
Choosing Life
by Leslie Sussar '73
In 1946, with the war over and Japan occupied, 2nd Lt. Herbert Sussan received a plum assignment. He would get to use his training as a cinematographer and join a Strategic Bombing Survey crew to record the results of the atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. From his first arrival in Nagasaki, he knew that something completely novel and appalling had happened and that he had to preserve a record of the results, especially the ongoing suffering of those affected by the bomb (known as hibakusha) even months later.
When the U.S. government decided that the gruesome footage would not be of interest to the American public and therefore classified it top secret, he spent decades arguing for its release. His last wish was that his ashes be scattered at ground zero in Hiroshima.
The author, his daughter, followed his footsteps in 1987, met survivors he had filmed more than 40 years before. And found that she met there a father she never really knew in life.
This book recounts Herbert Sussan's experiences (drawn directly from an oral history he left behind), his daughter's quest to understand what he saw in Japan, and the stories of some of the survivors with whose lives both father and daughter intersected. This nuclear legacy captures the ripples of the atomic bombing down through decades and generations.
The braided tale brings human scale and understanding to the horrors of nuclear war and the ongoing need for healing and peacemaking.
Fire, Ice, and Physics: The Science of Game of Thrones
by Rebecca Thompson BMC '01
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.
Irish Bride
by Sarah Woodbury BMC '90
August 1148. The wedding of Godfrid and Cait promises to be the event of the year, and even Gwen has made the journey across the Irish Sea to celebrate. Weddings can be moments around which tensions and resentments pivot, however, so when a monk turns up dead within moments of Gareth and Gwen's arrival in Ireland, the pair put on their sleuthing hats and get to work, racing to solve the mystery before it ruins Godfrid's big day.
Join Gareth & Gwen and their friends and companions for murder and mayhem in medieval Dublin in The Irish Bride, the 12th Gareth & Gwen Medieval Mystery.
Detroit Opera House
by Marianne Weldon, Collections Manager, Department of Special Collections
Utilizing remarkable images from the Manning Brothers Historical Collection, the Michigan Opera Theatre Archives, and several additional collections, Michael Hauser and Marianne Weldon have captured the excitement of the shared entertainment experience in Detroit Opera House.
The theater known today as the Detroit Opera House has been an integral part of the city's culture and history as well as the live entertainment industry. Its existence has been threatened in the past, but it has survived wars, the Great Depression, civil unrest, economic meltdowns, the abandonment of downtown, and, most recently, a pandemic. Generations of patrons have fond, vivid memories of attending films, stage presentations, or events with family and friends as it transitioned from the Broadway Capitol to the Paramount to the Grand Circus to the Detroit Opera House. The reason for building these temples of amusement was to literally transport a guest into another world, and the Detroit Opera House has valiantly fulfilled that task. What began as an idea by David DiChiera, founder of Michigan Opera Theatre, the owner and operator of today's Detroit Opera House, blossomed into a magnificent performing arts center with its formal opening in 1996.
Hauser is marketing manager for the Detroit Opera House, and Weldon is the collections manager for art and artifacts at Bryn Mawr College.
Railroads of the Eastern Shore
by Treese, Loretta '73
The history of the Delmarva Peninsula is inextricably entwined with the story of its railroads. The earliest railroads 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 & 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. For more than a century, though, railroads played a critical role in the development of the Eastern Shore. Regional historian Lorett Treese tells this story.
Price of Pride: A Pride and Prejudice Variation
by Asja Young BMC '81 - published under the psuedonym Abigail Reynolds
In Love with His Brother's Betrothed...
As far as Fitzwilliam Darcy is concerned, the only good thing to come of Elizabeth Bennet's bitter refusal of his heart and his hand was his new resolve to prove himself a better man. He'd done it, too, by closing the painful distance between himself and his estranged younger brother, Drew. And now Drew is newly engaged to be married...to Elizabeth Bennet.
Family duty forces Darcy to support the engagement, especially since even the smallest hint of disapproval could ruin the brothers' hard-won reconciliation. But how can he bear to watch his brother marry the woman he loves? To see her in Drew's arms, bearing Drew's children, and forever out of his reach?
An Accidental Compromise
Elizabeth has no choice but to accept an engagement to handsome Drew Darcy. He's amiable, educated, and respectable, and if it weren't for his last name, she wouldn't even mind the idea. But to marry the brother of the gentleman she'd so coldly rejected only months before? Especially now that she realizes her feelings for him are far from sisterly. How can she marry Drew while longing for his brother? But the cost of breaking her engagement would be ruination, and with it, the loss of any hope of a life with Darcy.
Trapped by loyalty, love, and propriety, there is no way out. But old family secrets haunt the Darcy brothers. Could those secrets, when brought out in the open, change everything?
This intensely emotional variation on Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice will make you fall in love with Elizabeth and Darcy all over again.
Unbroken in Time
by Sarah Woodbury BMC '90
In 1282, David and his sister Anna crashed through time to save the life of their father, the last Prince of Wales. Thirteen years later, David is a grown man--husband, father, and High King of Britain. He is also the Duke of Aquitaine, a fact which King Philip of France appears to resent.
So when Philip summons David to Paris to bend the knee for the right to remain Aquitaine's duke, David is the first to suspect treachery. And when he learns Philip is taking advice from Guillaume de Nogaret, mastermind behind the annihilation of the Templars, the expulsion of the Jewish community from France, and the assassination of the pope, he's sure of it.
With not only Aquitaine on the line but all of Europe as well, David must call upon eight hundred years of history only he knows to ensure Avalon's past doesn't become Earth Two's future ...
Unbroken in Time will be followed by Outcasts in Time.
Complete Series reading order Daughter of Time, Footsteps in Time, Winds of Time, Prince of Time, Crossroads in Time, Children of Time, Exiles in Time, Castaways in Time, Ashes of Time, Warden of Time, Guardians of Time, Masters of Time, Outpost in Time, Shades of Time, Champions of Time, Refuge in Time, Unbroken in Time, Outcasts in Time. Also, This Small Corner of Time: The After Cilmeri Series Companion.
Beleaguered Oases
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
Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly
Judith Butler was the 2011 holder of the Flexner Lectureship.
Judith Butler elucidates the dynamics of public assembly under prevailing economic and political conditions, analyzing what they signify and how. Understanding assemblies as plural forms of performative action, Butler extends her theory of performativity to argue that precarity--the destruction of the conditions of livability--has been a galvanizing force and theme in today's highly visible protests.
Butler broadens the theory of performativity beyond speech acts to include the concerted actions of the body. Assemblies of physical bodies have an expressive dimension that cannot be reduced to speech, for the very fact of people gathering "says" something without always relying on speech. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's view of action, yet revising her claims about the role of the body in politics, Butler asserts that embodied ways of coming together, including forms of long-distance solidarity, imply a new understanding of the public space of appearance essential to politics.
Butler links assembly with precarity by pointing out that a body suffering under conditions of precarity still persists and resists, and that mobilization brings out this dual dimension of corporeal life. Just as assemblies make visible and audible the bodies that require basic freedoms of movement and association, so do they expose coercive practices in prison, the dismantling of social democracy, and the continuing demand for establishing subjugated lives as mattering, as equally worthy of life. By enacting a form of radical solidarity in opposition to political and economic forces, a new sense of "the people" emerges, interdependent, grievable, precarious, and persistent.