Amherst Reads All Books

When I was 24, I took a year off (discharged from U.S. Army 10/56).   Interested in birds, I called up the Museum of Natural History to volunteer as an expedition assistant.  NO.  But a month later they called--an assistant had dropped out.  YES.  So 2 months in the Museum creating labels and the like, and 3 months on a schooner collecting marine life and island fauna & fossil specimens off Baja California and in the Sea of Cortez!  Having learned how to type in the Army, I transcribed my Journal and added photographs.  Index has listing of scientific papers written from the expedition collections.
Than, I was invited to be an assistant on a trip to Huautla and other native-American towns in Mexico with Gordon Wasson to seek the sacred mushroom!  Again I kept a Journal and saved the photographs I took.  The Index lists selected articles and books by R. Gordon Wasson, and also Richard Evans Schultes, such as the Golden Guide to Hallucinogenic Plants, and with Albert Hoffman "Plants of the Gods: Origins of Hallucinogenic Use".

1972 Farm Journal is a transcription of a journal the writer kept that summer living on a communal organic farm in central New York State. Every day's entry is about the ins and outs of the farming venture - machinery operation and break down, success and failure in planting vegetables and marketing them, relations between the people, particularly relations between the sexes, relations with the local people who came with beer to offer advice, and to see what's up! Added is the other partners memories and present situations. We had a 36th year reunion in 2008, for one of the communal partners still owns the farm. Photographs then and now.

Grossinger explores metaphysical concepts in the context of 21st-century life.

Set against the backdrop of the Ptolemaic Kingdom in an alternative history linking the power of the pharaohs to magic, this first installment of a trilogy details the beginnings of a war pitting brother against brother.

As the debut novel opens, King Ptolemy III, Macedonian ruler of Egypt, is distraught over the apparent murder of his
friend, Qibo (“Multiple gashes covered his body. His eyes stared at the ceiling, as if he could still see
whatever had killed him”). The ancient Taoist master had worked at the Museum of Alexandria for years. This act seems to be the dark culmination to a number of days in which Ptolemy has been plagued with nightmares laced with what appear to be strange signs. He dreams he is the Pharaoh Amenhotep III, worrying over his kingdom and suffering from dental pain, the latter of which seems to affect Ptolemy’s waking hours as well. After exhuming the dead pharaoh’s body, experts discover that he did indeed have advanced abscesses in his teeth, which leads head librarian Eratosthenes to posit that someone might be working magic against the king, perhaps to re-create history. The theory is that Qibo was murdered to prevent him from translating ancient tablets that might help Ptolemy unlock the magical powers of a set of 12 amulets that have been in the possession of the pharaohs for untold years, each associated with a different element. Using the artifacts, someone might be able to wrest control of the kingdom. As the story proceeds, Price and Vosika paint a vivid, intricate portrait of war, juggling a wide array of famous characters, including the notorious Hannibal, and using meticulous research to flesh out this universe, rooted in historical facts and details. The prose is rich and involving, and the twists are carefully designed and executed.

From the publisher:

By prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education, the 1972 legislation popularly known as Title IX profoundly changed the lives of women and girls in the United States, accelerating a movement for equal education in classrooms, on sports fields, and in all of campus life.

37 Words is the story of Title IX. Filled with rich characters—from Bernice Resnick Sandler, an early organizer for the law, to her trans grandchild—the story of Title IX is a legislative and legal drama with conflicts over regulations and challenges to the law. It’s also a human story about women denied opportunities, students struggling for an education free from sexual harassment, and activists defying sexist discrimination. These intersecting narratives of women seeking an education, playing sports, and wanting protection from sexual harassment and assault map gains and setbacks for feminism in the last fifty years and show how some women benefit more than others. Award-winning journalist Sherry Boschert beautifully explores the gripping history of Title IX through the gutsy people behind it.

In the tradition of the acclaimed documentary She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, 37 Words offers a crucial playbook for anyone who wants to understand how we got here and who is horrified by current attacks on women’s rights.

Wabash College in Indiana sent more soldiers to the Civil War proportional to its size than any other college in America. This book, the result of twenty-five years of history students' research projects at modern-day Wabash, details the 500 students' lives in pioneer Indiana, in the war (over 100 battles) and after the war. Famous generals like Edward Canby and James J. Reynolds are covered, but also many average Hoosier boys who went, suffered in the war in the battles and from illness in camp and in Andersonville and Libby prisons but stayed to help save the nation.

Offering a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of the field, A Companion to Modernist Poetry provides readers with detailed discussions of individual poets, ‘schools’ and ‘movements’ within modernist poetry, and the cultural and historical context of the modernist period.

• Provides an in-depth and accessible summary of the latest trends in the study of modernist poetry
• Balances discussion of individual poets, ‘schools’, and ‘movements’ with in-depth literary and historical context
• Brings recent scholarship to bear on the subject of modernist poetry while also providing guidance on poets who are historically important
• Edited by highly respected and notable critics in the field who have a broad knowledge of current debates and of rising and senior scholars in the field