Bryn Mawr Authors
Project Performance Review
by Alexia Nalewaik BMC '90
Project Performance Review focuses on evaluating projects efficiently and in context, identifying important improvement opportunities and leading project and organizational management practices. It advises how these can be put in place to give stakeholders confidence in the control and delivery of their projects without waste.
The authors explain not just the mechanism and objective of project performance reviews but also the ideal environment in which they are intended to be implemented. The shaping of this environment, by the stakeholders and technical team, is key to achieving your intended outcomes. Without the professional cooperation of all interested and informed parties, the effectiveness of any review may be compromised. Topics addressed include: introducing the project review method, engaging project stakeholders, ensuring project governance, conducting project risk assessments, improving accountability, providing project assurance, organizing and managing projects, optimizing review scope and approach, avoiding review pitfalls, meeting existing audit standards, and proposing alternate approaches to project evaluation.
Herodotus in the Anthropocene
by Joel Alden Schlosser
House on Fire
by Bonnie Kistler BMC '75
"A masterfully written saga of family drama in the vein of Celeste Ng, Liane Moriarty, and Sally Hepworth" (Book Reporter) about a blended family in crisis after a drunk driving accident leaves one parent's daughter dead--and the other's son charged with manslaughter.
Divorce lawyer Leigh Huyett knows all too well that most second marriages are doomed to fail. Yet five years in, she and Pete Conley couldn't be happier with their blended family.
But one rainy Friday night, on the way back from celebrating their anniversary, Peter and Leigh receive horrific news. Peter's son Kip, a high school senior, has crashed his truck and been arrested for drunk driving. And Leigh's fourteen-year-old daughter, Chrissy, was with him.
Twelve hours later, Chrissy is dead and Kip is charged with manslaughter.
Reeling with grief, Leigh nonetheless does her best to rally behind Peter and Kip. That is, until Kip changes his story and claims that he wasn't driving after all--Chrissy was, and he swears there is a witness.
As they hurtle toward Kip's trial date, husband and wife are torn between loyalty to their children and to each other, while the mystery of what really happened that night looms large.
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.
Bodies Unbound
by Piper Sledge
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.
American Fire
The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate--there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning.
The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson. But as Charlie's confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn't lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each other's inspiration and escape...until they weren't.
Though it's hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it's been drained of its industry--agriculture--as well as its wealth and population. In an already remote region, limited employment options offer little in the way of opportunity. A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result evokes the soul of rural America--a land half gutted before the fires even began.
Bride of the Sea
And when Hanadi comes of age, she finds herself at the center of this conflict, torn between the world she grew up in and a family across the ocean. How can she exist between parents, between countries?
Eman Quotah's Bride of the Sea is a spellbinding debut of colliding cultures, immigration, religion, and family; an intimate portrait of loss and healing; and, ultimately, a testament to the ways we find ourselves inside love, distance, and heartbreak.
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