Alumni Authors: Recently Published Works
Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel
Race France to France: Leave Antarctica to Starboard
by Jonathan H. Grossman ’85 Oxford University Press, March 2012
by Rich Wilson ’68 sitesALIVE!, August 2012
The same week in February 1836 that Charles Dickens was hired to write his first novel, The Pickwick Papers, the first railway line in London opened. Charles Dickens’s Networks explores the rise of the global, high-speed passenger transport network in the 19th century and the indelible impact it made on Dickens’s work. The advent first of stagecoaches, then of railways and transoceanic steamships made round-trip journeys across once seemingly far distances seem ordinary and systematic. Time itself was changed. The Victorians overran the separate, local times kept in each town, establishing instead the synchronized, “standard” time that now ticks on our clocks.
intimate geographies: poems by Bo Thorne Niles ’62 Finishing Line Press, 2012 “Although its title may call to mind Elizabeth Bishop, the poems in intimate geographies conjure the alert, lucid spirit of May Swenson as they shape their way toward emotional heights and depths. In this collection, which is also recollection, the poet’s formal and verbal inventiveness is deftly balanced with a tender attention to sensory details. The resulting poems map, and honor really, lives that are dear, vivid, all-too-swiftly passing, and therefore, in the truest sense, sacred.” —Jeanne Marie Beaumont Bo Niles is a former magazine editor and writer who specialized in home design and decoration; she has written a number of books on these subjects, as well as a travel memoir. Her poems have been published in Ekphrasis, Avocet, Mobius, The Lyric and Podium, among other journals.
Jonathan H. Grossman examines the history of public transport’s systematic networking of people and how this revolutionized perceptions of time, space and community, and how the art form of the novel played a special role in synthesizing and understanding it. Focusing on the trio of road novels by Dickens, he looks first at key historical moments in the networked community’s coming together, then at subsequent recognition of its tragic limits, and, finally, at the construction of a revised view that expressed the precarious, limited omniscient perspective by which passengers came to imagine their journeying in the network.
In 2008–2009, Rich Wilson became only the second American to finish the Vendée Globe, deemed the “most grueling and dangerous prolonged competition on the planet.” (Garry Emmons, HBS Bulletin, 2009) The senior skipper at age 58, and a severe asthmatic, Rich finished ninth of 11 finishers, out of 30 starters, racing 29,000 miles over 121 days in his 60' boat, Great American III.
The Pocket Guide to Woodstock: An Insider’s Guide by Michael Perkins and Will Nixon ’75 Bushwhack Books, 2012 Join Michael Perkins and Will Nixon, authors of the best-selling Walking Woodstock, for a personal tour of places they’ve explored on foot for years. Learn about the early Dutch settlers and witches; the bluestone quarries and tanneries; the bohemian arts colony; the historic hotels on Overlook Mountain; the concert that didn’t happen here; the sixties rock ’n’ rollers, including Bob Dylan and Levon Helm; the promoters and the eccentrics; the legends and the history that have made Woodstock world famous. Will Nixon grew up in the Connecticut suburbs, spent his young adulthood in Hoboken and Manhattan, then moved to a Catskills log cabin in 1996— complete with a wood stove and mice. For years he wrote environmental journalism, then turned to poetry and personal essays. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed in Best American Essays 2004. He now lives in Woodstock, New York, with a wall thermostat for heat, but he still can’t get rid of the mice.
Rich Wilson’s book brings you onto his boat in the heat and doldrums of the tropics, in the gales and cold of the south, to see the beauty of the albatross and southern stars, and to feel his fear, fatigue and emotions in the unending stress of a global ocean race. A lifelong educator, Rich fulfi lled a primary goal of his race: to excite and engage students about science, geography and math in the real world, by a program produced by sitesALIVE!—an online educational series that links remote field sites with classrooms around the world. Reaching seven million readers weekly, and 200,000 students, Wilson and a team of experts—doctors, professors, merchant mariners, artists and authors—answer students’ questions, connecting them with real-world situations and exciting new discoveries.
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