Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories

Christina Gómez, AB’85, MBA’87 Editor

What is it like to grow up identifying as multiracial in a “postracial” world that often isn’t? Mixed shares the perspectives of 12 Dartmouth students who know how it feels. Whether searching for middle ground between black and white or navigating a rainbow of roots around the world, the student essayists reveal how their experiences, families, and surroundings have shaped their identities and worldviews.

Song One

Kate Barker-Froyland, AB’04 Writer and director

Song One chronicles Franny’s (Anne Hathaway) return to her estranged family after a car accident leaves her brother in a coma. Prompted by regret to explore her brother’s passion for Brooklyn’s live music scene, Franny befriends a guitarist her brother idolized. The daughter of Sony Pictures Classics copresident and cofounder Michael Barker, writer-director Kate Barker-Froyland is no stranger to film, but it was music that inspired her tale of love, loss, and human connection.

Precarious Japan

Anne Allison, AM’80, PhD’86 Author

Until the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble in 1991, most Japanese men were able to secure lifelong employment and a middle-class lifestyle. Today fewer and fewer people are able to find full-time work and buy the homes that afford a comfortable family lifestyle. As the country’s birth rate has declined, so has morale, but Anne Allison chronicles how some modern Japanese are finding fulfillment in unconventional work and reconceived notions of home, family, and togetherness.

The Habsburgs: The History of a Dynasty

Benjamin Curtis, AM’97, PhD’02 Author

Ruling Europe for nearly a thousand years is no small feat, especially while juggling territories in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Considered one of the most dominant dynasties in history, the Habsburgs endured enough drama to rival Game of Thrones. In his study of the Spanish and Austrian branches of the dynasty, Benjamin Curtis documents the family’s journey from rise to fall.

Over the River and Through the Wood: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century American Children’s Poetry

Angela Sorby, AM’89, PhD’96 Coeditor

In their new anthology Karen L. Kilcup and Angela Sorby resurrect hundreds of 19th-century American children’s poems—many of which have languished in obscure periodicals and primers for more than a century—with themes ranging from creepy crawlies to politics and social reform. Including kid-friendly period illustrations, Over the River and through the Wood features well-known names such as Ralph Waldo Emerson as well as less familiar figures like Christina Moody, an African American author who published her first book at 16.

A Guide to Wider Horizons

Kevin Krisciunas, AM’76 Author

In A Guide to Wider Horizons, Kevin Krisciunas assembles a potpourri of facts and stories about physics, biology, math, ethics, history, linguistics, and literature. An astronomer at Texas A&M University whose other books focus more strictly on astronomy, Krisciunas intended this one as an omnivorous read. Chapter titles include “Astronomical Measurements without a Telescope” and “Books with a Moral Angle.”

Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance

Julia Angwin, AB’92 Author

With the seemingly endless stream of revelations about how governments and corporations keep tabs on citizens around the world, sometimes 2014 feels more like 1984. In Dragnet Nation, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin describes the extreme measures she took to protect her privacy over one year—using a “burner” phone, among other tactics—and shows us just how difficult it is to elude the gaze of Google and the NSA. Her account holds far-reaching implications for balancing safety and freedom in the information age.