How to Make Books and
Magic Books & Paper Toys
By Esther K. Smith’76
Potter Craft
New York, N.Y. 2007, 2008
With colorful, meticulous diagrams, photos, and step-by-step instructions, How to Make Books gives readers the know-how—and the inspiration—to make their own one-of-a-kind books. Although Smith designs limited edition and artist books and has taught artist-books courses for years, these projects suppose no prior knowledge and are accessible to people of all levels of artistic ability.
Magic Books & Paper Toys is actually two books in one, offering ideas for colorful paper crafts and instructions on how to make them. Colorful pictures, drawings, and diagrams help the reader follow Smith’s careful instructions.
Smith and her husband, Dikko Faust’75, a letterpress printer and hand typographer, have been working with paper and handcrafting books since their undergraduate days. Together, the two operate Purgatory Pie Press in New York.
In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby
By Mark Morrison-Reed’72
Skinner House Books
Boston, Mass., 2009
Mark Morrison-Reed’s mixed-race ancestry, as well as his upbringing on the South Side of Chicago during the tumultuous 1950s and 60s, gives him a unique perspective on racial, economic, and cultural issues. In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby gives special focus to his work as one of the first African American ministers in the Unitarian Universalist church, as well as his personal experiences raising two multiracial children with his Anglo-Canadian wife.
In the prologue, Morrison-Reed describes himself and his family as being in a “twilight zone between the races.” Much of the beginning of the book deals with his family history, from his ancestor’s roots as Afro-Americans and slave owners to his birth in 1949 in segregated Chicago.
“Morrison-Reed’s account is nothing less than a spiritual clearing in the forest of race and ethnicity,” says Lee Barker, president of Meadville Lombard Theological School.
Myth, Immorality, and American Imperialism
By Henry F. Zacchini’92
Shires Press
Manchester Center, Vt., 2008
Myth, Immorality, and American Imperialism explores contemporary America in the context of American militarism and neo-colonialism, and considers the power of myth and propaganda in shaping worldviews.
The author explores the “communal stupor” that he sees as a common condition among the people of the United States over the past few decades. He argues that this stupor was prevalent despite blatant excesses on the part of the government, such as the bombing of Iraqi and Serbian civilians.
Following the election of George W. Bush, however, Zacchini writes in his introduction, that the “old ideas surrounding the United States’ benign foreign interventions and entanglements started to fall by the wayside in the harsh light of Bush’s version of American fascism.”
