Bryn Mawr Authors

"The Brightwood Code has everything I love in a book." --Stacey Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Reese's Book Club pick The Downstairs Girl

Seven months ago, Edda was on the World War I front lines as one of two hundred "Hello Girls," female switchboard operators employed by the US Army. She spent her nights memorizing secret connection codes to stay ahead of spying enemies, and her days connecting vital calls between platoons and bases and generals, all trying to survive--and win--a brutal war. Their lives were in Edda's hands, and one day, in fateful seconds, everything went wrong.

Now, Edda is back in Washington, DC, working as an American Bell Telephone operator, the picture of respectability. But when her shift ends, Edda is barely hanging on, desperate to forget the circumstances that cut her time overseas short. When she receives a panicked phone call from someone who utters the fateful code word "Brightwood," Edda has no choice but to confront her past. With precious few clues and help only from Theo, a young man bearing his own WWI scars, Edda races to uncover what secrets may have followed her across the ocean.

New York Times bestselling author Monica Hesse delivers a gripping thriller that will leave you guessing until the last page.

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
Starred reviews from ★ Publishers Weekly ★ SLJ ★ The Horn Book ★ BCCB

"Page-turning." ―The Washington Post

From the working-class streets of Depression-era Philadelphia to the front lines of America's most pivotal civil rights battles, Evie Rich's extraordinary journey is a testament to courage, conviction, and the relentless pursuit of justice. In Civil Rights Warrior, Rich chronicles her rise from humble beginnings to becoming a trailblazer in the fight for equality-breaking barriers as an African-American woman at Bryn Mawr College, debating Malcolm X on the airwaves, and shaping the course of history through her leadership in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and Americans for Democratic Action.

With unflinching honesty, Rich shares the triumphs and setbacks of a lifetime spent challenging discrimination in education, employment, and public life-from holding institutions accountable in Washington, D.C. to advocating for the rights of New York City's most vulnerable citizens. Alongside luminaries like James Baldwin, she raised funds for sit-ins and mentored new generations of activists, all while rising to Associate Dean within the City University of New York.

Now in her nineties, Evie Rich remains a powerful voice--spearheading the fight to protect retirees' health care and inspiring those who refuse to accept injustice. Civil Rights Warrior is a vital legacy for activists past, present, and future, and a stirring reminder that the struggle for equality is far from over.

The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued politicians and filmmakers alike.

Movies seemed to speak directly to the masses, via a form of crowd psychology that bypassed individual personality. Many political commentators believed that movies were inherently aligned with the new forms of collectivist mass politics--indeed, government control of the movie industry became a cornerstone of Communist and Fascist regimes, new political movements that embraced the crowd as the basis of social order.

Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses--the crowd scenes--in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions. In Hollywood films, this is depicted as molding private loves, while collectivist movies present it as turning into organized mass movements. Crowd scenes do more than provide backgrounds for stories, that is: they also function as models for the crowd in the theater.

The book concludes with an examination of the films of Fritz Lang, who first in pre-Nazi Germany, then in Hollywood, created movies that can be seen as meditations on both these ways of using the crowd.

A young adult novel of loss, travel, healing and adventure

Twelve year-old Dot is spunky and full of zest for life, but after her mother's sudden and senseless death, she finds herself dancing on the edge...of everything. With all familiar anchors swept away, Dot is propelled with her offbeat aunt on an international voyage of curiosity...and maybe even time travel.

With a little help from Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, and other trailblazing ladies of literature, Dot's trip to England becomes anything but predictable. Pack your bags for a memorable, powerful journey into life in the wake of profound loss, as our young heroine discovers the meaning of her past, and of her mother's greatest gift to her.

"A wonderful and endearing story about the power of books and travel to heal us. ...A perfect mother-daughter book."

--Jim Lynch, author of national bestseller The Highest Tide