Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity by Sarah F. Derbew.  If you think that scholarship, particularly scholarship of ancient relics and literary works, is dry and tedious, think again.  Sarah Derbew’s journey back and forth through time will acquaint you with, among many other things, clay artifa

Flower Diary, In which Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries, and Opens a Door by Molly Peacock ff. The beauty of Flower Diary is not confined to its poetic prose; the tactile and visual elegance of the book itself is a complementary pleasure. The exquisite paintings reproduced in each chapter

How to Kill a Dragon, Aspects of Indo-European Poetics by Calvert Watkins ’52?. The erudition which went into this book is mind-boggling. Consider that to reconstruct proto Indo-European, the unwritten language from which almost all languages from India to Ireland descend, requires knowledge of num

The Accidental Masterpiece, On the Art of Life and Vice Versa by Michael Kimmelman ’76. If Montaigne could see this book, he would be very proud that he invented the essay. Michael’s essays on art and life and life and art circle around the issue giving us a welter of images, experiences, and desc

How to Read a Poem. . .and Start a Poetry Circle by Molly Peacock ff. This is a book of stunning generosity, which conveys the interplay of life, teaching, and poetry; it gives the readers the go-ahead to seek personal meaning in poetry and to trust the connections and insights they can tease out t

· Touching Liberty, Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body by Karen Sánchez-Eppler (’77) I found this book when I googled Karen’s name. I remembered a beautiful poem she wrote over forty years ago when she was in high school. So I thought she might have written a book. She has written

· Portraits, Talking with Artists at the Met, the Modern, the Louvre, and Elsewhere by Michael Kimmelman (‘76). I remember Michael as a classical pianist, and he still is – you can hear him play Debussey’s L’Isle Joyeuse on YouTube. Later, I began to read his art criticism in the Times. In this b

There’s a Mystery There, The Primal Vision of Maurice Sendak by Jonathan Cott ’62.  Maurice Sendak was a great admirer of Melville, so it is fitting that Jonathan Cott takes the title of this work, which is mostly about Sendak’s Outside Over There, from Melville’s Redburn. There is enough mystery in

Dance! Images of the Bates Dance Festival by Arthur Fink ’64. The cover photo with the dancer’s skirt puffed out like a pumpkin gives an idea of what catches Arthur Fink’s eye when he photographs dancers. He captures body parts when the dancer is either in motion, full of energy, or still, at tim

Music Direction for the Stage, A View from the Podium by Joseph Church ’74. Joe Church, who directed the music of such Broadway shows as The Lion King and The Who’s Tommy, lays out everything music directors might need to know, whether they are putting on entertainment at a banquet, with one singer

Outrider by Anne Waldman ’62 Through poems, essays, and interviews, Anne Waldman defines the poetics of the outrider movement, where poets travel alongside the mainstream, just far enough out to be able to reflect on it in two senses of the word: first, this poetic stance favors thinking as a spec

Pipers at the Gates of Dawn by Jonathan Cott, ’60?. Jonathan takes the evocative notion of children’s writers as pipers from Wind in the Willows and a poem by Blake. The beloved pipers who are the subject of the essays in this book are Dr. Seuss (Theodore Geisel), Maurice Sendak, William Steig, Ast

· J.-K. Huysmans, Novelist, Poet, and Art Critic by Annette Kahn (te). Through close textual analysis of the work of this late nineteenth-century Decadent writer, Annette shows us a brilliant but depressed soul who drew on art rather than nature or reality for his fictional universe and for his o

Domina Virgin Mater Trix: The Kaleidoscopic Identity of Women by Christel Johnson f. Christel’s book is a copiously researched scholarly study, that shows how stereotypes rearrange themselves like DNA (her metaphor) generating unique literary and real-life heroines. The title refers to four femal

The World of Bruegel c. 1525-1569 by Timothy Foote’45? and the Editors of Time-Life Books. I had always thought of Bruegel as an acolyte of Bosch, and in part he was; but I learned from this book that he was so much more. Timothy Foote says that Bruegel was not a revolutionary but rather a pioneer

Jamaican Folk Tales and Oral Histories by Laura Tanna ’65. This book merges popular culture and traditions with an academic appreciation for scholarship concerning myth and legend. The heart of the book is a comprehensive picture of the stock characters and varieties of oral story telling. But the

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight/ Patience/ Pearl: Verse Translation by Marie Borroff 40’s?. These three works are all by an anonymous fourteenth century poet referred to as Gawain/poet, a contemporary of Chaucer. Marie Borroff has taken on the Herculean task of translating these works into modern En

Metaphor and Shakespearean Drama, Unchaste Signification by Maria Fahey Maria’s first chapter, an examination of the literature on metaphor from Aristotle on down, impresses with its thorough scholarship as she explores the nature of metaphor and the cross-contamination that occurs between the two e

· The Life of Schubert by Christopher Gibbs (’76). Christopher takes a close look at what we know about Schubert, his family, friendships, the evolution of his work, and the various myths that have grown up around this intriguing composer. Because of his enormous outpouring of songs, symphonies,