Beloit College Magazine

Veiled Men, Red Tents, and Black Mountains: The Lost Tomb of Queen Tin Hinan

By Alonzo W. Pond’20

Edited by Michael A. Tarabulski’81
The Narrative Press
Santa Barbara, Calif., 2003

In 1925, George Collie, legendary Beloit professor of geology and anthropology (1892-1931), sent recent graduate Alonzo Pond’20 on a collection expedition to the Algerian Sahara. His trip, on behalf of the nascent Logan Museum, became the first automobile expedition of its kind across the Sahara.

Pond was the only trained anthropologist on the expedition. He documented the six-week trek through photographs and writings, which provide this beautiful narrative of the landscape and people, including the Tuaregs, a mysterious, matriarchal society, in which men wear veils.

Editor Tarabulski has done extensive research on Pond and produced a short documentary film about the expedition in 2001 for the American Anthropological Association. He is an archivist for the University of Idaho.

By Stephen S. Hall’73

Houghton Mifflin Company
Boston and New York, 2003

Award-winning science writer Stephen S. Hall explores the bold frontiers of contemporary science with top researchers and entrepreneurs who are racing to create ways to make longer, healthier lives possible.

What he finds, according to the New York Times Book Review, is “our arrival in a place of tremendous medical opportunity and also baffling political idiocy.”

“The long-term promise of stem cell therapy is everything it has been cracked up to be: the potential clinical impact is staggering, on a par with the therapeutic importance of antibiotics,” Hall writes.

“But solving all the biological problems is a staggering task, too, and it is a task that has been largely assigned, by politics and happenstance, to a handful of underfinanced, understaffed, and scientifically overwhelmed boutique biotech companies.”

Hall is a journalist and the author of three critically acclaimed books about contemporary science. He has been a contributing writer and editor for The New York Times Magazine and his pieces have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, and many other publications.

By Graham Foust’92

Flood Editions
Chicago, Ill., 2003

In his first published collection of poems, Graham Foust sounds the depths of need and loss through narcotics and the bleak interiors of winter.

“Graham Foust has an unerring sense of the exact contours of a particular thought and is able to express them with mathematical precision and emotional delicacy; yet pushing against lyric constraint is wildness, uneasiness, sometimes terror,” writes poet and critic Susan Howe. “Though As In Every Deafness recalls the wintry meditative intensity of William Bronk, it’s a new millennium: ‘Our economy proceeds / as if life were an unlearning.’

Foust is an assistant professor of English at Drake University.

By Jean Trounstine’69

Pecan Grove Press
San Antonio, Texas, 2003

Jean Trounstine, author of Shakespeare Behind Bars: The Power of Drama in a Women’s Prison, and a professor of humanities at Middlesex (Mass.) Community College, has written a book of poetry that came out of her battle with breast cancer.

The collection chronicles the daily uncertainty of living with cancer and takes readers on a journey through treatment, recovery, and re-entering the world of the well.

“In this journey, we are blessed by the language of healing—triumphant, translucently honest,” author Marjorie Agosin writes of the book. “Almost Home Free is a tale of fortitude.”

Political Frontiers, Ethnic Boundaries, and Human Geographies in Chinese History

Edited by Nicola Di Cosmo and Don J. Wyatt’75

RoutledgeCurzon
London, 2003

This book is concerned with boundaries—demarcating physical spaces, enclosing political entities, and distinguishing social or ethnic groups—and what they bring to an analysis of Chinese history and society.

Composed of papers by scholars from many disciplines (history, anthropology, religion, art history, and literary studies), the book is unique in the wide span of history it covers. Each author focuses on a distinct period that results in a chronological sweep of nearly three millennia.

Don J. Wyatt is professor of history at Middlebury College in Vermont. He specializes in Chinese intellectual history and philosophy, with particular emphasis on the many intersections between cosmological and political thought that prevailed among premodern scholars during various periods.

By Curtis Runnels and Priscilla M. Murray’67

Stanford University Press
Stanford, Calif. 2001

Greece Before History is a comprehensive handbook for Europe’s most archaeologically rich landscape. It traces the prehistory of the region, from its earliest inhabitants in the Stone Age to the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. Detailed illustrations accompany the text, offering a unique glimpse into early Greek cultures.

Written for students, travelers, and all general readers interested in archaeology, this book unites solid scientific research with accessibility, allowing anyone curious about the history of Greece to become engrossed by its artifacts, architecture, customs, and art.

Murray is programs administrator of the Archaeological Institute of America and a research fellow at Boston University; Runnels is professor of archaeology at Boston University.

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