BUFFALO SOLDIERS’ NORTHERN OUTPOST
Summer celebration, exhibit remember all-black regiments
Though many people have heard the term “Buffalo Soldier”—maybe from a certain Bob Marley song of the same name or from a mention in a high school history class—few know the depth of the Buffalo Soldiers’ role in American history and even fewer know about their assignment from 1909–1913 in Vermont. Rosemary Graveline and Sharon McCollum ’74, both descendants of Buffalo Soldiers sent to Fort Ethan Allen in Colchester, are attempting to change that.
Graveline, a staff member in UVM’s Graduate Counseling Program and parent of two UVM alumnae, and McCollum were co-chairs of this August’s 100th anniversary celebration of the arrival in Vermont of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, one of four all-black regiments in the U.S. Army collectively referred to as Buffalo Soldiers. Graveline was also instrumental in pulling together a Fleming Museum summer exhibition focused on their time in Vermont.
McCollum’s grandfather, Willis Hatcher, came to Vermont with the 750-member Tenth Cavalry on July 28, 1909, after his unit served in the Philippines from 1907–1909. For McCollum, the knowledge that her grandfather was a Buffalo Soldier was an integral part of her family history learned in childhood.
“It was part of my preschool training. I learned 1-2-3, A-B-C, ‘Jesus loves me,’ your grandfather was a Buffalo Soldier,” she says.
Though McCollum never met her grandfather because he died before she was born, she grew up in Winooski surrounded by a tight-knit community of Buffalo Soldiers, their descendants, and families, including George Osborne, a Buffalo Soldier who was a close friend of Willis Hatcher and whom McCollum considers an uncle.
“We knew all about my grandfather; that he was wounded in Cuba and had malaria in the Philippines. The Vermont Buffalo Soldier community is like a family, even though many of us aren’t biological relatives. You can’t pull us apart.”
Though Graveline and McCollum share a common passion for Buffalo Soldier history and connection to the Tenth Cavalry, their paths to that passion could not have been more different.
Graveline, who grew up in rural North Carolina, learned about her African-American ancestry for the first time as an adult when visiting family in Vermont. An eccentric uncle told her that her maternal grandfather, John Lyons, had been black.
“I can’t even remember the exact words, but it was a blow to me, especially since I grew up in the segregated South in an immediate family that was white.”
She immediately asked other family members about her uncle’s disclosure, and everyone denied it was true. “I couldn’t get anyone to tell me anything,” she says. “I asked questions but it was like he didn’t exist. There were a million pictures of my grandmother but none of him.”
Her grandfather’s veiled identity put Graveline on an intense quest for more information, which eventually led to the discovery that her African-American grandfather, who often “passed” as white, was a Buffalo Soldier. That revelation led to a lifelong search for more details about him.
It also opened up to Graveline an entire community of descendants (several of whom are UVM alumni), both in and beyond Vermont, who are eager to meet one another and share information and memorabilia. “The connections that have been made through my research and involvement in the Buffalo Soldier community are unbelievable,” she says.
More about Vermont Buffalo Soldiers: uvm.edu/~vtbufalo.
[POLITICAL SCIENCE]
TACKLING HEALTH CARE’S BIG QUESTIONS
When professor emeritus Alan Wertheimer retired in spring 2005 after thirty-seven years in the political science department, the plan was basically to relax and travel a bit. Co-writing research papers with one of President Obama’s top health care advisors, a venture that would place him in the middle of a heated national health care reform debate, wasn’t part of the retirement picture.
Wertheimer’s plans changed almost immediately when he accepted a one-year visiting scholar position at the National Institutes of Health. One year later he joined the faculty as a senior research scholar in the department of bioethics in the Clinical Center of the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland. He was soon penning research papers with Obama’s special health care advisor, Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a prominent bioethicist at Harvard and the NIH, who also happens to be the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.
An article written by Werth- eimer, Emanuel, and NIH pre-doc Govind Persad in the January 2009 edition of The Lancet, a leading worldwide medical journal, titled “Principles for Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions” has come under scrutiny for its advocacy of an alternative allocation plan called the Complete Lives System. Critics of Obama’s health care plan seized on specific aspects of the system, including a sentence stating that the system “prioritizes younger people who have not yet lived a complete life, and also incorporates prognosis, save the most lives, lottery, and instrumental value principles.”
Wertheimer points out that the controversial article in The Lancet focuses on pandemic-related issues like flu vaccines, ventilators, and in some cases, vital organs. “We’re not interested in the general allocation of medical resources, yet this is where a lot of criticism came up,” says Wertheimer. “So we get hit there for arguing for our Complete Lives System view that tilts toward the young, rather than those who have already lived a relatively complete life, which to some extent is where the death panel crap came up. They say, ‘Ya know, Emanuel and Wertheimer don’t want to give resources to old people.’ Well, we’re not talking about Medicare to the elderly.”
“As the current health care controversy shows, it’s difficult to explain in a sound bite the philosophical and ethical issues presented in a lengthy research paper and how they relate to certain principles,” Emanuel says. “One of the papers was two years in the making and another took a year, so we’re pretty careful before we put one out. We may not have it perfect, but I think we have it better than anyone had it before. Our current level of academic rigor wouldn’t have happened without Alan. We’ve pushed each other harder in that area. He’s been a fantastic addition to our department and is a big hit in the bioethics community.”
“I had no idea that this is what I’d be doing after I retired,” says Wertheimer. “But I really love the work. I have great colleagues who are very smart and very lively. The departments are very congenial and interactive. Plus, there’s no grading.”
[READERS WRITE]
ALL THE YOUNG PUNKS
Were you there? Do you have the ticket stub to prove it? The obligatory concert T-shirt? The students at SA Concerts let us dig through their trove of old seventies/eighties tickets, a rich era that brought performers like The Clash, Bruce Spring-steen, R.E.M., The Ramones, Jefferson Starship, Van Morrison, UB40, Elvis Costello, Jimmy Cliff, Bonnie Raitt, and The Talking Heads, among others, to campus.
Drop the editor an e-mail (tweaver@uvm.edu) with your UVM concert memories. We’d love to share them in the on-line edition of VQ.
[ANTHROPOLOGY]
photo by Jonah Steinberg
REALITY FOR KIDS ON INDIA’S STREETS
As a viewer, Jonah Steinberg, assistant professor in anthropology, enjoyed the 2008 Academy Award-winning movie Slumdog Millionaire. But as a scholar whose research focuses on the cultural and social aspects of India’s street children, he took issue with the romanticization of the children’s lives and the possible misperception of their daily existence.
Though Indian street children leapt onto the world’s pop-culture radar via Slumdog, there has been surprisingly little academic study of their lives. Steinberg is among the scholars who have been focused on this area, and recent funding from the National Science Foundation will help advance his research. The grant will help the UVM faculty member study street children who have run away from their rural village homes to New Delhi, exploring why leaving home is considered an accepted cultural practice in some villages in North India, but not other areas. He will also produce demographic surveys by district showing why runaways are more acute in some areas than others, as well as record conversations with street children.
Steinberg says the reasons children run away varies by region and individual case, but that abuse, poverty, and a desire to escape rural life are among them. He also hopes to get a better feel for the actual number of runaways, which ranges in estimates from 30,000 to 100,000 a year. One of the reasons for the discrepancy is that many children who beg and appear poor to tourists in India aren’t actually runaways, but might be begging on behalf of their families.
Steinberg’s grant proposal stressed the importance of a broader dissemination of stories told by street children in their own words. By sharing these stories and research results with non-profit organizations and policy-making institutions, Steinberg is hoping practical applications for activists, social workers, and advocates working with runaways and street children will result.
[ENGLISH]
LAKE POET
Over the past year, Daniel Lusk has cultivated a new favorite way to spend a bit of spare time: “I go down to ECHO and stare at the big fish.” Gazing in the tanks at the lake aquarium on Burlington’s waterfront, the poet and senior lecturer in English ponders species such as the long-nosed gar and the sturgeon, ungainly creatures suggestive of another epoch.
Then there’s the slimy sculpin.
“They sound like they’d be awful,” Lusk concedes. “But when they get off the bottom and start moving, they’re colorful—a combination of harem fish and old blues singers, like butterflies with scales… these strange, winged fish.”
Staring into the depths and working to put words to the mysteries, both natural and man-made, that lie below the water’s surface is the focus of Lusk’s current literary project, “Lake Studies: Meditations on Lake Champlain.” The work-in-progress syncs with this year’s quadricentennial events celebrating explorer Samuel de Champlain’s first journey into the region.
Lusk is a native of Iowa, a place of brown rivers prone to flooding cornfields, not vast blue lakes. And though he’s lived in Vermont for more than fifteen years, Lusk has never been a sailor of the broad lake, a fisherman, a diver, or even a guy likely to wade in at North Beach on a hot day.
But several years ago he was intrigued by a newspaper article on the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum’s project mapping the lake’s bottom. There’s a rich nautical past in the dark depths of Champlain, designated a national historic preserve for its 300-some sunken 19th-century boats.
It’s a museum, though, that most people will never see. At the greatest depths, Lusk says, a diver can scarcely see his own hand in front of his mask. But the “Lake Meditations” project promises to bring some of this richness to the surface.
Lusk has immersed himself in the study of Lake Champlain through the Maritime Museum’s archives, videos of dives, trips to various sites on the lake, interviews with those who know the lake and its stories well, and staring down those fish at ECHO, among other sources. But his goal as a writer is to create something more evocative than a historical survey of what lies beneath.
“I feel like the lake is a great metaphor—and I’m certainly not the first to say this —for the human conscious, the things that we keep as secrets and, in many ways, fear,” Lusk says. “The lake, on a grand scale, is the unconscious of the great long-term history of this place. People come and go, people are almost irrelevant to the lake, but we all have some sort of relationship with it, even if it’s not an overt one.”
[STUDENT PROFILE]
photo by Rajan Chawla
IN THE HOSPITAL, IN THE LAB
Alice Ford ’10 isn’t so much learning by doing as learning by watching.
What the Honors College math major/biology minor is watching at the moment is Dr. Maj Eisinger, an emergency room physician at Fletcher Allen Health Care, the teaching hospital affiliated with UVM’s College of Medicine, handle anything and everything that comes her way—which is a great deal—with skill and sensitivity.
The experiential learning is coming courtesy of UVM’s Pre-medical Enhancement Program (PEP), in which undergraduates interested in medical school are paired with a different physician each semester, whom they meet with and shadow.
Ford’s takeaway? “I’ve learned how important the physician–patient relationship is” the best way possible, “by actually seeing it happen.”
Ford’s UVM experience has been a rich one. In addition to PEP and her challenging math coursework, she’s also spent the last three years working in biology professor Joseph Schall’s malaria lab, isolating different strains of the malaria parasite in lizards to better understand its dynamics, which is the focus of her senior honors thesis.
As she works through her final year as an undergrad, Ford is readying herself for the next challenge: applying to medical school. “I’ve had so many different opportunities to do research and so much hospital time, it’s been excellent,” she says. “I feel so prepared to apply.”
[IN MEMORIAM]
REMEMBERING SOME OF UVM’S FINEST
In recent months, the university community has mourned the loss of some of its most revered emeriti faculty.
H. Lawrence McCrorey, professor emeritus of molecular physiology and biophysics, held a number of key positions during his nearly three decades at UVM, including acting vice president, associate vice president for academic affairs, and dean of the School of Allied Health Sciences. McCrorey was a pioneering and indefatigable voice in bringing multicultural issues to the forefront at the university and in the local community.
Abbas Alnasrawi, professor emeritus of economics, was a world-renowned economist and a member of the UVM faculty from 1963 to 2002. Known for his integrity, voice of reason, honesty, and relentless pursuit of knowledge, Alnasrawi served as associate dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He was honored as University Scholar in the Social Sciences and Humanities for the 1992–93 academic year.
Richard H. Janson, professor emeritus of art, served as director of the Fleming Museum for two decades and as director of the art department from 1967 to 1977. Janson first moved to Vermont in 1958 to become director of the Fleming. Under his leadership, the museum increased its collections, and the art department grew in faculty and stature during the decade he served as chair.
John O. Outwater, professor emeritus of mechanical engineering, received numerous honors during his distinguished career, including two notable awards in 1970 as Vermont Engineer of the Year and Outstanding Educator of America. On the UVM faculty from 1956 to 1993, Outwater’s research pursuits focused on ski safety and mechanisms of injury, among many other interests.
Jean-Guy Béliveau ’68, professor emeritus of civil engineering, returned to his alma mater to teach in 1985, the beginning of a twenty-four-year career on the faculty. In addition to his college-level teaching, Béliveau inspired younger students though his years of work as Vermont state coordinator for MATHCOUNTS—a nationwide middle school math competition. Among his professional honors, Béliveau was named a fellow by the American Society of Civil Engineers.
[GLOBAL STUDIES]
WORLD WITHOUT WALLS
Preparing for life in a world of interwoven and ever-shifting divides between countries and cultures requires an education built upon many perspectives, a passport to cross academic borders freely. That spirit drives the structure and name of the “new” Global and Regional Studies Program, which debuted with the fall semester. The program, directed by Luis Vivanco, associate professor of anthropology, is the latest evolution of the program formerly known as Area and International Studies, part of UVM for nearly five decades.
The new Global and Regional Studies Program (uvm.edu/~global) features a brand new major in Global Studies, which has quickly drawn forty-three undergraduates.
Julia Michel ’11, an Honors College student who carries a double major in global studies and political science with a minor in community development and applied economics, says “I decided to declare my major after getting a sense that Global Studies actually means a trans-disciplinary look at the world I’m going to inherit. Global Studies is for students who don’t want to see the world through the confines of one lens—be it political science, economics, anthropology or history.”
For an academic focus that is all about a world drawn closer, Global Studies’ origins are, ironically, in the Cold War years.
On the heels of Sputnik, the American government moved quickly to enact the National Defense Act of 1958, providing support to educate specialists in foreign languages, politics, and culture. The goal was to create experts with the ability to inform and advise on strategically important parts of the globe in the Cold War years.
“With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there’s the notion that the world is no longer bipolar—not the United States and the Soviet Union. It’s a different global reality,” says Kevin McKenna. A professor of Russian, Mc-Kenna was director of Area and International Studies at UVM for eighteen years, helping to lay the groundwork for the latest change before handing the reins to Vivanco two-and-a-half years ago.
“Suddenly we start talking about globalization in the 1990s,” Vivanco says. “Many of the younger faculty who were trained during the 1990s came of age during an era when we were doing research in Latin America, but didn’t really think of ourselves as Latin Americanists in service to the United States’ strategic interests. We were interested in how regions connect to other regions of the world through dynamics like migration—how a small village in Costa Rica, or Mexico, or El Salvador was connected to Santa Monica, California. We were starting to melt those boundaries that the old area studies had.”
From the strong student response, the Global Studies change has been a wise move for meeting undergraduates’ interests and building enrollments. More importantly, the program is well-geared to produce a class of graduates ready and able to make a difference in the world.
“Many of the problems we have today—be it global warming, human trafficking, or terrorism—transcend national borders,” Amanda Fox ’11, a junior majoring in Global Studies, writes in an e-mail from Chile, where she is doing study abroad.
“The first step in solving these problems (which is, of course, an extremely difficult task and will take lots of time and patience) is to foster communication, understanding, and cooperation across the globe. The trans-disciplinary structure of the major allows us to have a more comprehensive look at the problems we face.”
[JUST FOUR QUESTIONS]
photo by Sally McCay
PROFESSOR MICHAEL ZVOLENSKY
An expert on anxiety disorders, Michael Zvolensky has focused much of his time untangling the interrelated relationship between anxiety and addiction. A prolific author whose research is supported with extensive funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, Zvolensky was appointed Richard and Pamela Ader Green and Gold professor of psychology this fall. VQ talked with Zvolensky about his research and why smoking in particular remains so vexing.
Q. You started in academia as an anxiety specialist, but, working with addicts, you noticed a link that seemed to be overlooked. What has your research shown?
A. There’s evidence that anxiety and tobacco use, especially in certain types of anxiety like panic and post–traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) co-occur at a higher rate than would have been expected, higher than would typically be found for mood and other emotional disorders.
Q. You’ve found that smoking can actually cause anxiety disorders?
A. Yes, cigarette use seems to increase the risk for developing certain anxiety disorders. While tobacco use is related to a more anxiety-sensitive personality type compared to nonsmokers, the more you smoke the worse it gets. It’s also an important predictor of who will go on to develop problems like panic attacks and agoraphobia. What’s really striking is that mental health clinicians focus on things like genetics, learning style, personality, familial factors—all of which are very important—but they haven’t focused on the role of addictive behavior in explaining mental health outcome. Our work has shown that cigarette smoking is as important as any other risk factor. So it’s bi-directional. We have a large-scale prevention trial now that takes young, high anxiety–sensitive daily smokers and tries to modify their smoking behavior by changing anxiety sensitivity to prevent not just physical disease that occurs decades later, but also panic disorder, which can arise in three to four years.
Q. Standard smoking cessation techniques don’t work for this population?
A. People with emotional risk factors for anxiety disorders tend to use tobacco for different reasons than your typical tobacco user, and that seems to impair their ability to quit successfully. In one study we compared people with PTSD to those with other anxiety disorders and also with people who had no history of mental illness. We found that people with PTSD lapsed fastest, but even the other anxiety disorder group had a lot of problems compared to people without mental illness. What’s really sad, to be honest, is that when we’re running these trials we see that the current treatments don’t work for these folks. Today’s tobacco users are different than they were twenty years ago even. The people who could quit have quit.
Q. Is it that hopeless?
A. Not necessarily. We developed a specialized treatment for smokers with anxiety disorders and ran a randomized trial comparing that to the standard of care (nicotine replacement therapy and cognitive behavior therapy). Preliminary indications are promising in its first generation, that is, people seem to be able to quit more successfully and experience less distress than compared with standard treatment. The idea is that if people are afraid of the internal stress and withdrawal, we expose them to it before they try to quit, get them used to it, more tolerant of it, and we practice changing their thoughts in response to it before they undergo it.
But unless you offer a fundamentally different lifestyle strategy, people are vulnerable to relapse. We have a new grant for sedentary smokers with anxiety disorders to utilize aerobic exercise as a tactic to reduce panic-induced bodily sensations. Part of the logic is to introduce another behavior to prevent tobacco use, so we’re trying to find things that are healthy that can also serve the function of reversing the internal experience.
Interview by Lee Ann Cox
[QUOTE UNQUOTE]
"It seems to be always the fourth floor, every time the fourth floor…”
—Pete Lavay ’11
Lavay and fellow Alpha Gamma Rho brothers were among six-hundred student, staff, and faculty volunteers who helped new students move into the residence halls on August 28.
[ONLINE EXTRA]
See a video on the UVM Welcome Crew.
[MATHEMATICS]
IF YOU’RE HAPPY, THEN THEY KNOW IT
In 1881, the optimistic Irish economist Francis Edgeworth imagined a strange device called a “hedonimeter” that would be capable of “continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual.” In other words, a happiness sensor.
His was just a daydream. In practice, for decades, social scientists have had a devilish headache in trying to measure happiness. Surveys have revealed some useful information, but these are plagued by the unpleasant fact that people misreport and misremember their feelings when confronted by the guy with the clipboard. Ditto for studies where volunteers call in their feelings via PDA or cell phone. People get squirrely when they know they’re being studied.
But what if you had a remote-sensing mechanism that could record how millions of people around the world were feeling on any particular day—without their knowing?
That’s exactly what Peter Dodds and Chris Danforth, mathematics faculty members working in UVM’s Advanced Computing Center, have created.
Their results were reported this summer in the Journal of Happiness Studies, an article that drew extensive national media attention.
“The proliferation of personal online writing such as blogs gives us the opportunity to measure emotional levels in real time,” they write in their study titled “Measuring the Happiness of Large-Scale Written Expression: Songs, Blogs, and Presidents.”
Their answer to Edgeworth’s daydream begins with a website, www.wefeelfine.org, that mines through some 2.3 million blogs, looking for sentences beginning with “I feel” or “I am feeling.”
“We gathered nearly ten million sentences from their site,” Dodds says. Then, drawing on a standardized “psychological valence” of words established by the Affective Norms for English Words study, each sentence receives a happiness score. In the ANEW study, a large pool of participants graded their reaction to 1,034 words, forming a kind of “happy–unhappy” scale from 1 to 9. For example, “triumphant” averaged 8.87, “paradise” 8.72, “pancakes” 6.08, “vanity” 4.30, “hostage” 2.20, and “suicide” 1.25.
“Our method is only reasonable for large-scale texts, like what’s available on the Web,” Dodds says. “Any one sentence might not show much. There’s too much variability in individual expression.” But that’s the beauty of big data sets and statistics.
Though blog writers do tend to be somewhat younger and more educated than average, they are broadly representative of the U.S. population.
Since many blogs are connected to demographic data, Dodds’s and Danforth’s approach can let them measure the rise and fall of happiness of, say, people under thirty-five in California on Wednesdays, and compare to other places, age groups, and days.
Interestingly, their results run contrary to recent social science data that suggest that people basically feel the same at all ages of life. Instead, Dodds’s and Danforth’s method shows a more commonsensical result: young teenagers are unhappiest, with a disproportionate use of “sick,” “hate,” “stupid,” “sad,” “depressed,” “bored,” “lonely,” “mad,” and, not surprisingly, “fat.” Then people get happier until they are old, when happiness drops off.
[NUMEROLOGY]
8
UVM’s rank among national universities on U.S. News & World Report’s list of Top Up-and-Coming Schools, institutions that have “recently made striking improvements or innovations—schools everyone should be watching.”
[BOOKS & MEDIA]
photo by Sally McCay
LIFE OF BOSWELL
History meets fiction in eighteenth-century London
With two loaded pistols in his pocket, John Boswell stalks the streets of eighteenth-century London in pursuit of two men: his brother James and author Samuel Johnson. That hunt drives The Brothers Boswell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), a new novel from English professor Philip Baruth. The literary thriller explores a specter in the otherwise well-documented life of writer James Boswell: his insane brother, John.
Research for the story began when Baruth was just an undergrad, reading James Boswell’s London Journal. Boswell was twenty-two when he wrote the journal, which chronicled his time in the English capital—the same age as Baruth when he began reading it. “His father wanted him to be a lawyer, and my father wanted me to be a lawyer. And Boswell didn’t want to do it, and I didn’t want to do it,” Baruth says with a grin. “So I felt this immediate kinship with him, and that has persisted throughout the years.”
Their similarities end short of Boswell’s womanizing and heavy drinking, Baruth is careful to note. But even the writer’s many character flaws cannot strip him of his literary genius, Baruth adds, or as a primary source of knowledge we have today about eighteenth-century life—details derived both from Boswell’s autobiography and his celebrated biography of Samuel Johnson.
While those details allowed Baruth to forge a connection with a writer some three hundred years his predecessor, they also posed a problem. “When I went to write a novel about him, I really knew too much because he lays his life out that year in methodical grid-like detail,” Baruth notes. “You can literally chart his progress around London using his diary. And that doesn’t leave a lot of room for imagination.”
A narrative opportunity presented itself in the form of Boswell’s brother John, who showed up in London unexpectedly after leaving the mad house, just as James was ascending the literary and social ladder. “The more I read (the journal), the more it seemed that Boswell was horrified, in a certain way, that he had shown up at a time when Boswell was just breaking through all these social barriers,” Baruth says. “So here’s the crazy younger brother who has the ability, unless things are managed, to ruin it all.”
That tension is the heart of Baruth’s novel. By casting John as narrator, Baruth carves out a space to tell a story about brotherhood, madness, revenge, and legacy—all within the framework of the unlikely and socially ambitious friendship Boswell formed with Johnson, a literary giant thirty-one years his senior.
His use of the source material is a point of pride for Baruth, who was recently called to task on the book’s historical accuracy at a conference in Oxford celebrating what would be Johnson’s three-hundredth birthday. While no characters in the book do anything that contradicts what has been recorded of their lives, there is a good deal of improvising in the gaps, including insinuations about Johnson’s sexuality. “One man actually started stamping his cane after I was done,” Baruth recalls of an angry conference attendee who considered the novel “dangerous.”
Baruth’s response? “Good fiction is dangerous; it has the ability to make you reconsider all of your most cherished ideas of the world.”
Amanda Waite ’02 G’04
[BRIEFS]
The Unknown Rockwell: A Portrait of Two American Families
Bud Edgerton ’52, Battenkill River Press
Last fall, VQ reported on Bud Edgerton’s in-progress memoir of growing up next door to beloved American artist Norman Rockwell. The Edgerton and Rockwell farmhouses in southern Vermont were just steps apart and the families developed a close bond through the years. Bud Edgerton was also a favorite model, Rockwell’s go-to Boy Scout.
Learn more: theunknownrockwell.com
The Little Sleep
Paul Tremblay G’95, Holt Paperbacks
Fedora-wearing detective Mark Genevich sits in his dark Boston office on a rainy afternoon; a leggy brunette sits across from him. This quintessentially noir imagery opens The Little Sleep, a detective story inspired in part by the classic 1939 Raymond Chandler book, The Big Sleep. In this version, though, sleep is not a euphemism for death; the detective is narcoleptic. Paul Tremblay’s novel breaks open the genre as readers watch the drowsy Genevich work his case.
Flourishing with Food Allergies: Social, Emotional and Practical Guidance for Families with Young Children
Anne Anderson ’90, Papoose Publishing
When Anne Anderson learned her two sons had food allergies, she did what any parent would do: she learned as much as she could about her boys’ diagnoses. Then she went a step further—and published her research. The resulting book shares her family’s story and presents interviews with more than twenty parents, teachers, and doctors about how best to cope with what is in all cases a life-altering—and in some cases, a life-threatening—condition. Hailed as a “must-read” for parents of food-allergic children, the book also presents current research on food allergies.
