Our roundup of noteworthy publications by Wesleyan alumni, faculty members, and parents.

DANA SACHS ’84

The House on Dream Street

(Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, 2000)

Journalist and teacher Dana Sachs first visited Vietnam in 1989 when tourist visas were again offered to Americans. Her initial glimpse of the country was so positive that in the early 1990s she returned for extended visits to live in Hanoi with a Vietnamese family. In this heartfelt and entertaining memoir, Sachs creates a vivid portrait of a contemporary Asian city in transition through her affectionate observations of the numerous, mostly working–class people she meets along the way. Among them are her ambitious landlord Tung, who listens to heavy metal music and keeps a bottle of Johnnie Walker handy; his wife Huong who remains loyal to Tung despite their differences; Tra, whose husband doesn’t understand her ambitions to pursue a business doctorate in America; and Phai, a sensitive motorcycle mechanic with whom Sachs falls in love. The author reveals that her life in Hanoi was not always ideal as she shares her problems learning Vietnamese, her difficulty navigating a bicycle through Hanoi’s crowded streets, her frustration dealing with the locals due to her “exotic” Western looks; and the monitoring of foreigners by secret police. Yet despite a few negative experiences, the author obviously cherishes much of the time she spent in Vietnam, and her sincere enthusiasm for her subject makes the book impossible to put down.

–David Low ’76

PROSE

STEPHEN ALTER ’78

Amritsar to Lahore: A Journey Across the India–Pakistan Border

(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999)

KAYLIE JONES ’81

Celeste Ascending

(HarperCollins, 2000)

ERIC S. CHARRY, Wesleyan associate professor of music

Mande Music: Traditional and Modern Music of the Maninka and Mandinka of Western Africa

(The University of Chicago Press, 2000)

JACK McDEVITT MALS ’72

Deepsix

(HarperCollins, 2001)

MARC ALAN ROSNER ’86, editor

Scientific American Great Science Fair Projects

(John Wiley and Sons, 2000)

MARK SLOBIN, Wesleyan professor of music

Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World

(Oxford University Press, 2000)

KRISHNA WINSTON, professor of German studies, translator

Too Far Afield by Gunter Grass

(Harcourt, Inc., 2000);

On A Dark Night I Left My Quiet House by Peter Handke

(Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2000)

ZIBA KASHEF ’92

Like a Natural Woman: The Black Woman’s Guide to Alternative Healing

(Kensington Books, 2001)

POETRY

Professor of East Asian Studies VERA SCHWARCZ, fresh word for a jaded world (Blue Feather Press, Co., 2000); a scoop of light (March Street Press, N.C. 2000)

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

RALPH LEMON

Geography: art/race/exile

New York choreographer Ralph Lemon traveled to Cote d’Ivoire in the mid–90s in search of dancers and a new relationship to the stage. Publisher’s Weekly calls this work a “searching, brutally frank travelogue, a cross–genre combination of journal entries, photographs, drawings and a variety of performance plans. . . The book is most powerful when Lemon hones in on the physical, spiritual and cultural contradictions inherent in his attempts at placing the rhythm–based sensibilities of the African dancers into formal Western structures, making this book an informally paradigmatic case study of cultural collision and collaboration.”