Nonfiction

Castaways of the Image Planet by Geoffrey O’Brien “67. This collection of essays each first published in The New York Review of Books, the Village Voice and other periodicals over a roughly 20-year period explores a wide range of movie lore. You will come away from this book knowing Orson Welles, Brando, Hitchcock, and Bing a little better and putting random movies seen decades ago into their cultural context. Your memory will be triggered. When Geoffrey mentioned The Thief of Bagdad. a terror of my childhood came back to me. Back in the 1940’s, the enormous genie exploded out of the magic lantern and filled the entire screen. I had nightmares for weeks. (Many years later I saw the film again when I was a camp counselor and was shocked again but this time it was to find how benign the big fellow actually was.)

Here is an example of…

Silence by Janet Gibbs (over the years Janet had many roles in the school: sewing teacher, chair of the arts department, and head of guidance) Silence is a collection of devotional texts which extol the value of silence, “silence with the self, silence with others, and silence with God.” The quiet, reflective tone of the readings makes us take a pause in the hectic pace of our lives. The book is grounded in the Bible and the Christian faith. I am sure that silent meetings at the school also played a part.

Glitch Feminism, A Manifesto by Legacy Russell. The world is set up with social constructs that seem to work for some but for others just don’t apply. Legacy posits the glitch as a way to make space, to assert visibility, and to break through to liberation. She does this with erudition, authority and a style that can erupt into poetry.

We all have experienced glitches with our tech gear. They are mistakes. But sometimes a mistake can be a beneficial opening, a break in the machinery that permits a new configuration. Here is how Legacy puts it, “Black people invent ways to create space through rupture. Here, in that disruption, with our collective congregation at that trippy and trip-wired crossroad of gender, race, and sexuality, one finds the power of the glitch.”

The ideas in this manifesto supersede the idea of inclusion, with its implication of letting the other through…

Children of Light, Friends Seminary 1786-1986 by Nancy Gibbs ’77. This invaluable history of the school sprang from a happy coincidence: Joyce McCray’s tenure as principal at the time of the bicentennial of the school and the availability of such a promising young writer and alum as Nancy Gibbs. I doubt that any one of her all male predecessors had Joyce’s keen sense of occasion. The celebration was marked by a cantata, a book of faculty essays, a magnificent quilt, and of course a commissioned history of the institution. When I mentioned at Joyce’s retirement party that the school’s bicentennial had more regalia that the bicentennial of the French Revolution, I got a laugh. But I think everyone knew I was just telling the truth.

I cannot imagine that many institutions have a written history of this quality. It is the story of a school but rooted in the conte…