Woodstock: Three Days That Rocked the World
(2009, Sterling Publishing)
edited by Mike Evans and Paul Kingsbury, BA’80
Filled with photos from the event itself as well as visual exploration of the social context in which Woodstock happened, this well-researched coffee-table tome provides new information, including complete set lists by each artist, about the “three days of peace and music” that became a watershed moment in the ’60s.
Liberalism, Black Power, and the Making of American Politics, 1965–1980
(2009, University of Georgia Press)
by Devin Fergus, assistant professor of history
Focusing on North Carolina during the era of Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Helms, this book explores the relationship between black nationalism and liberalism, and takes a look at how liberal engagement helped to bring a radical civic ideology back from the brink of political violence and social nihilism.
The Millionaires: A Novel
(2009, W.W. Norton & Co.)
by Inman Majors, BA’86
In his third novel, Majors tells a story about new money, political ambition and greed played out across the backdrop of a swiftly changing Tennessee town. In his depiction of the Cole brothers, country boys who have made a windfall in the banking business, Majors leaves the reader with a palpable sense of
the swiftly changing American South.
Temper
(2009, University of Pittsburgh Press)
by Beth Bachmann, assistant professor of English
Winner of the 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, this slim volume moves with the shifting weight of grief in its re-envisioning of elegy. Bachmann describes it as “poems [that] turn and return to heat and the absence of heat, color and the absence of color, motioning between states of restlessness and composure, mimicking the way grief circles back to the site of the trauma”—in this case, the murder of a sister.
Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934
(2009, Duke University Press)
by Edward Wright-Rios, assistant professor of history
Looking specifically at Oaxaca from the late 19th to early 20th century, Wright-Rios shows that pastors, peasants and laywomen enlivened and shaped popular religion there, revealing a remarkable dynamic of interaction and negotiation in which priests and parishioners remained engaged with one another in the process of making their faith meaningful during tumultuous times.