Sasha Ambramsky (University Writing Center)

The House of Twenty Thousand Books is the story of Chimen Abramsky, Sasha Ambramsky's grandfather, an extraordinary polymath and bibliophile who amassed a vast collection of socialist literature and Jewish history. For more than 50 years Chimen and his wife, Miriam, hosted epic gatherings in their house of books that brought together many of the age’s greatest thinkers. Ambramsky recreates a lost world, bringing to life the people, books and ideas that filled his grandparent's home.

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (Department of Anthropology)

When evolutionary anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy became a grandmother, she witnessed a phenomenon she never expected to see, her son-in-law was deeply immersed in the nurturing process. Comprehensive and wide-ranging, Hrdy’s book Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies traces her personal investigation into the deep history of male care, beginning with the very first caretakers through eons of mammalian and primate evolution, and including several thousand years of historical changes across cultures through time leading to this novel 21st century situation. Hrdy proposes that 21st-century trends in fatherhood are biologically ancient proclivities. 

Young Suh (Department of Art and Art History)

Art Professor Young Suh's book of photos and writing, Dear Mother, brings together images and thoughts about his young daughter, being a first-time father, his mother and his late father. It is written in both English and Korean with color and black and white images.

Margaret Ronda (Department of English)

In her second poetry collection, For Hunger, Associate Professor of English Margaret Ronda offers a fierce look at the interiors of motherhood, examining what it means to become a mother and lose a mother.

Frances E. Dolan (Department of English)

Looking back at images of violence in the popular culture of early modern England, we find that the specter of the murderer loomed most vividly not in the stranger but in the familiar. Frances E. Dolan examines stories ranging from the profoundly disturbing to the comically macabre: of husband murder, wife murder, infanticide and witchcraft. She surveys trial transcripts, confessions and scaffold speeches, as well as pamphlets, ballads, popular plays based on notorious crimes, and such well-known works as The Tempest, Othello, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale. Citing contemporary analogies between the politics of household and commonwealth, she shows how both legal and literary narratives attempt to restore the order threatened by insubordinate dependents.

Stefano Varese (Department of Native American Studies)

Professor Emeritus of Native American Studies Stefano Varese combines personal and family recollections with incisive accounts of academic, political and institutional experiences in his book The Art of Memory. The memoir offers a remarkable account of his life as a foremost Latin American ethnographer and a leading expert in Indigenous cultures, peoples and cosmologies.

Bruce D. Haynes (Department of Sociology) and Syma Solovitch

In Down the Up Staircase: Three Generations of a Harlem Family, Bruce D. Haynes, professor of sociology, tells his family story — beginning with his grandparents, National Urban League co-founder George Edmund Haynes and children’s book author Elizabeth Ross Haynes.

Halifu Osuamare (Department of African and African American Studies)

Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir by Halifu Osuamare, professor emeritus of African and African American Studies, is a professional dancer’s personal journey over four decades, across three continents, through defining moments in the story of Black dance in America, and how dance has been a vital tool in the Black struggle for recognition, justice and self-empowerment. 

Zinzi Clemmons (Department of English)

In arresting and unsettling prose, the novel What We Lose follows the main character Thandi’s life unfold, from losing her mother and learning to live without the person who has most profoundly shaped her existence, to her own encounters with romance and unexpected motherhood. Through exquisite and emotional vignettes, Associate Professor of English Zinzi Clemmons creates a stunning portrayal of what it means to choose to live, after loss.

Pam Houston (Department of English)

The novel Sight Hound is the story of a woman, Rae, and her dog, Dante, a wolfhound who teaches "his human" that love is stronger than fear. With the wit and dead-on candor we've come to expect from Pam Houston, Sight Hound unfolds a story that illuminates the intangible covenant between loved ones.

Egocentrism is a way we go about understanding what others know, think and feel. As can be the case with holiday gifts, our assumptions might be completely wrong. Research from psychology provides insights on how we can put our own mind aside and know each other better.

Philosopher Hannah Tierney studies the idea of blameworthiness and what it means to successfully make amends. Her research focuses on the reparative process that unfolds after someone causes harm. It also offers insight into how to ease burdens of national guilt that might affect people across a society.