Honors & Awards
On the Air
Reviews
 Anatomy of an Execution: The Life and Death of Douglas Christopher Thomas
Todd C. Peppers, Laura Trevvett Anderson
“A major addition to death-penalty literature.”
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Washington Post Book World
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 Art Museums PLUS: Cultural Excursions in New England
Traute M. Marshall
“When Traute M. Marshall and her husband retired, they set out to explore the art museums, artists’ homes, and other cultural repositories of the region. Then she wrote about them in an engagingly personal and opinionated way in “Art Museums Plus: Cultural Excursions in New England’’ (University Press of New England, $24.95). Behemoths like the Museum of Fine Arts and the Yale University Art Gallery get their due, but so do small gems such as the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art and the Freylinghausen Morris House & Studio. Marshall’s “Plus’’ sections offer bonus sites near the originals. Going to the Cornish Colony Museum in Windsor, Vt.? Don’t miss the Cornish-Windsor covered bridge, which Traute calls the longest in the United States.”
—Boston Globe
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 Cadaverland: Inventing a Pathology of Catastrophe for Holocaust Survival [The Limits of Medical Knowledge and Historical Memory in France]
Michael Dorland
“[A] groundbreaking work . . . Dorland’s thesis is that the collective French consciousness, which included the medical practitioners who treated concentration camp survivors, was and still is pervasively tainted by anti-Semitism and an inability to come to terms with the collaboration of so many of their countrymen under the Vichy regime.”
—Jerusalem Post
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 Suddenly Jewish: Jews Raised as Gentiles Discover Their Jewish Roots
Barbara Kessel
“Overall, Kessel’s interviewees, with their disparate experiences, shared something deeper than Jewish genes. “The most prominent finding I encountered was the human need for authentic identity,” she says. “People profoundly wanted to know who they really are, even if they ultimately rejected their identity. They all wanted to know what it was they were rejecting. I don’t think you can build a relationship with anyone -- including yourself -- on the foundation of an identity that is false.”
—London Jewish Chronicle
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 Practical Water
by Brenda Hillman
“If history is the public and collective, Hillman is historically engaged She is herself a ‘resister.’ ... Section titles^-’Of International Waters,’ ‘Of Communal Authority,’ ‘Of the Months When you Work & the Months When you Can’t,’ and ‘Of Local Creeks & Aqueducts’-identify her work as respectively internationalist, socially-committed, conscientious, and eco-poetic. She writes out of and to the society in which she’s located.”
—Poetry
“...Brenda’s open acceptance of change is what makes this book so appealing. Underneath the poet’s nonstandard forms lies the opposite of an unquestioning belief. There are questions, and those beget more questions, and when you circle around to the initial question it has often changed. Practical Water delineates a lack of simple order both inside us and the universe. But all is not lost in this world she describes; through well-crafted leaps, the poet highlights the enormous possibility for each of us to work through to our own creative combinations.”
—Caesura
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 Finding Pete: Rediscovering the Brother I Lost in Vietnam
by Jill Hunting
“...an engaging first-person tale about Pete Hunting’s life and work and the author’s quest to come to terms with this death.”
—The VVA Veteran
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 The Place Where You Go To Listen
by John Luther Adams
“The music of the spheres was first hypothesized by Pythagoras as a harmonic or mathematical way of understanding the relationship of the movement of heavenly bodies. Musician John Luther Adams’ wondrous book, The Place Where You Go To Listen: In Search of an Ecology of Music, chronicles, much like an expedition diary, the discovery, exploration, and creation of a unique fusion of music and the natural world. Adams’ goal was to transform the ever-changing sound waves created by natural phenomenon-the Aurora borealis, a phenomenon others have reported as having a sound component; the motion of the Earth’s plates; the cycles of the Moon; and the movement of the sun-into color and music. What motivated him was his desire to reinstate the bond he believes humans once had with their natural surroundings, and to try to instill harmony again. ...Adams’ Place Where You Go to Listen gives us back this profound sense of place.”
—The Explorers Journal
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Reviews
 Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet
Nili Scharf Gold
“Nili Scharf Gold’s book is important because it contains a report on the life of the poet and his writing until 1948. The report is supported by the author’s visits to Wurzburg, Germany, Amichai’s childhood town, and is based on the author’s interviews with Amichai’s friends and contemporaries, on letters that Amichai wrote during the months between September 1947 and April 1948 to Ruth Z., a lover who moved to the U.S. and there married someone else, and on documents from Amichai’s literary estate in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.”
—Shofar
“Any reader for whom Yehuda Amichai is a cherished poet will find much to value in Nili Scharf Gold’s expertly researched and rigorous biography. Far more than a conventional biographical study, Yehuda Amichai in fact constitutes a profoundly important scholarly corrective to which the future corpus of Amichai criticism will likely be heavily indebted. Gold proves an able archeologist of the deepest layers of Amichai’s life, offering truly fascinating evidence of the poet’s strategic suppression of his German birthplace and childhood in Wuerzburg, and, through meticulously close readings, vividly presents Amichai’s lyrical aesthetics of camouflage and subterfuge in presenting an “Israeli” identity at pivotal moments in his career. “
—Journal of Jewish Identities
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 Meat, Modernity, and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse
Paula Young Lee, ed.
“This is an original and timely collection, certain to be of value to students of urban, environmental, labor, architectural, and food history. The breadth of its interdisciplinary reach testifies to the profound cultural impact of its topic; and the individual essays inform and complement one another richly.”
—Environmental History
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 Memoirs: Hans Jonas
Hans Jonas; Christian Wiese, ed.; Krishna Winston, trs.
“Full, fascinating, rich, and textured details of Jonas’s life.”
—Review of Politics
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 The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic
Timothy Kenslea
“The Sedgwicks in Love will be of interest to scholars, not least for its interdisciplinary approach, and as a case study of a transitional period of American history. As eighteenth-century attitudes of manhood and womanhood gradually gave way to an emerging cult of domesticity, the author depicts the trials of one family as they made decisions about their futures. Kenslea treats the Sedgwicks as actors, emphasizing the degree to which individual family members were agents involved in such changes.”
—The Historian
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 Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Communities and Child Sex Scandals
Amy Neustein, ed.
While this book offers little in reading pleasure, it provides much in resources should a situation of sexual abuse by a leader in the Jewish community arise. It’s the kind of book that belongs on a communal library shelf, to be consulted as needed. Statistically, incidence of child abuse is likely to occur in the Jewish community at no less a rate than in the general community.
—San Diego Jewish World
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 Simko, Daniel. The Arrival
“A powerful sense of loss echoes through Czech-born poet/translator Simko’s first American collection. Some poems center on Holocaust survivors, others serve as memorials, but all resonate with the power of the said and unsaid. Like HD’s poems, they resemble palimpsests in which what is written nearly conceals work about other places, other times, an almost mythical past. Simko, who left Czechoslovakia at age ten, shortly after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion, writes poems about the rupture of the past but makes them universal. He emphasizes the music of the line (“The crows roving overhead are too silent to be crows”) and incorporates lists that dwell upon the unusual and ethereal (“moth-wing, bat-light, a journey home”), creating poems so exquisitely crafted that the occasional flat line stands out. Throughout, the lines and poems build upon one another, enveloping readers until they sense how “The mortality of things/ is so abrupt.” The result is searing, lingering long after reading “like a fingerprint in the mind’s shadow.” VERDICT Beautiful, intense poetry for those who prefer lyric verse with a passionate interiority and sense of mystery as in the work of Jane Hirshfield and Linda Gregg.”
—Library Journal
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 Martha Hill and the Making of American Dance
By Janet Mansfield Soares
“One of the finest dance biographies I have ever read, Soares’ work represents the perfect blend of colorful and pertinent factual details and larger contextualizing ideas. I was amazed at how quickly I whizzed through the lengthy volume and how much I learned about a topic with which I was already very familiar. If you know little about Hill and modern dance, this book will introduce you to fascinating information. If you know quite a bit about the subject, it will captivate you even more.”
—Back Stage Magazine
“In a nutshell: A lively portrait of Martha Hill’s formative role in modern dance in the United States. Martha Hill’s story as a catalyst in the development of American contemporary dance is often overshadowed by the likes of Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey. But author Janet Mansfield Soares does justice to the often unsung heroine by shedding light on her struggles and dedication to turning the artform into a serious area of study.”
—Dance Teacher
“...Janet Soare’s biography of Martha Hill could be required reading for Juilliard dancers and Performing Arts High Schools nation wide (like LaGuardia High School which she had a hand in its beginning in 1948). Most of us need the wake up call on how our dance community is a living web of relationships among enthusiastic folks with visionary goals, dreams, challenges and elbow grease.”
—Attitude
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 Picturing Victorian America
Edited by Nancy Finlay
“The library of American nineteenth-century lithography is blessed with several shelves of important publications. ... Nancy Finlay’s Picturing Victorian America: Prints by the Kellogg Brothers of Hartford, Connecticut, 1830^-1880, the first scholarly study of Kellogg prints unquestionably joins the ranks of these publications as a work of essential reading.”
—Imprint
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 The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel
by Nicholas Ruddick
“However pf (prehistoric fiction) studies might develop in the future, it has a solid, readable, and excellent foundation in this book.”
—Foundation
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 Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928–1959
by Kristin A. McGee
“In her engaging book, Some Liked It Hot: Jazz Women in Film and Television, 1928^^-1959, McGee is concerned with representations of jazz women in an American (white) male-dominated jazz world. ... In her engaged style, McGee has provided a clear examination and analysis of recordings, early film and television, and other source material, producing a convincing and compelling addition to musicology, jazz and feminist performance scholarship.”
—Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology
“...McGee’s book covers a lot of ground. Each chapter focuses on a different all-girl band or orchestra as case study and details the growing technological developments in the entertainment industry as new mediums evolved to reproduce the sounds and images of all-girl bands. ... McGee’s book takes its place among the other scholarship related to female jazz performers, but with a unique focus on the musical recordings produced by all-girl bands and female jazz musicians on film and television during the twentieth century. Not only do readers learn about female musicians and bandleaders who performed over a three-decade period, but they also glean information about the mass media culture industry and the power of aural and visual images on the American public imagination.”
—Journal of Folklore Research
“McGee’s tracing of the path girl bands took from the big screen into television is masterful, and she has written excellent studies of the Harlem Playgirls, Ina Ray Hutton and her Melodears, the brilliant pianist Hazel Scott, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, and such stars as Peggy Lee and Lena Horne, among others.”
—The New Mexican/Pasatiempo
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Versed
Making Freedom: The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith
Materializing New Media: Embodiment in Information Aesthetics