When did movie-making reach its peak? Stephen Farber ’65 and Michael McClellan make the case that it happened in the Kennedy era. Cinema ’62: The Greatest Year at the Movies (Rutgers University Press) celebrates and contextualizes the classic films of 1962, from The Music Man to The Manchurian Candidate to Lawrence of Arabia, as well as directors such as Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa. Like the year itself, the pages of the book are studded with stars including Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck and Robert Redford.
In Poetry of Belonging: Muslim Imaginings of India 1860–1950 (Oxford University Press), Ali Khan Mahmudabad ’06 examines ways in which North Indian Muslims used poetry and literature to negotiate and express their identities and their relationships to faith and country. In addition to being an assistant professor of political science and history at Ashoka University and a writer for Urdu- and English-language periodicals, Mahmudabad is an extensive traveler and “an occasional poet” himself.
Neil H. Suneson ’72 is your guide to the Roadside Geology of Oklahoma (Mountain Press). Part of a popular and award-winning Roadside Geology series, his book crisscrosses the Sooner State, revealing the history behind features of the landscape. Did you know, for instance, that there was “a rush for nonexistent gold in the Wichita Mountains”? Or that there’s a fault in the state that could generate a 7.0-magnitude earthquake? Suneson was a geology major at Amherst and went on to earn a master’s degree in the subject at Arizona State University and a Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara. This book is the capstone of his 31-year career with the Oklahoma Geological Survey.
Illustration by Aya Kakeda