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

TYLER ANBINDER ’84

Five Points

(Free Press, 2001)

Tyler Anbinder’s new book is the first comprehensive history of Five Points, a district in lower Manhattan— now Chinatown—that was once the most notorious neighborhood in 19th–century America, chronicled by journalists, religious magazines, and popular novelists. Beginning around 1820, Five Points attracted overlapping waves of Irish, Italian, and Chinese settlers, and its history embraces a multitude of classic immigrant tales. Anbinder draws upon a variety of sources, including diaries, court records, newspapers, and more, to create a vivid portrait of a densely populated area, famous for overcrowded tenements, crime, prostitution, gambling, drunkenness, and abject poverty. While some Americans were horrified by Five Points, others found it alluring. The neighborhood was a stop for tourists, enticing such visitors as Charles Dickens, Davy Crockett, Abraham Lincoln, and Jacob Riis. Anbinder recounts fascinating stories involving the genesis of tap dancing; the colorful street culture of the Bowery B’hoys, the roughand– tumble political intrigue of the times; the bare–knuckle prizefights; and the orphans forced by their guardians to beg in the streets.

—David Low ’76

Nonfiction

STEPHEN ALTER ’77

Sacred Waters: A Pilgrimage Up the Ganges River to the Source of Hindu Culture

(Harcourt, 2001)

LINDA AMSTER AND DYLAN LOEB MCCLAIN ’88, editors

Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times: A Collection of the Newspaper’s Most Interesting, Embarrassing, and Instructive Corrections

(St. Martin’s Press, 2001)

NEIL BOCKIAN ’83 AND ARTTHUR E. JONGSMA JR.

The Personality Disorders Treatment Planner

(John Wiley and Sons, 2001)

PAUL DICKSON ’61

Sputnik: The Shock of the Century

(Walker and Company, 2001)

DAVID IGLER ’88

Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850?1920

(University of California Press, 2001)

SEBASTIAN JUNGER ’84

Fire

(W.W. Norton and Company, 2001)

CORINNE A. KRATZ ’77

The Ones That Are Wanted: Communication and the Politics of Representation in a Photographic Exhibition

(University of California Press, 2001)

ERIC OLIVER ’88

Democracy in Suburbia

(Princeton University Press, 2001)

ALFRED B. ROLLINS JR. ’42

Roosevelt and Howe

(Transaction Publishers, 2001)

STEPHEN D. SILBERSTEIN, RICHARD B. LIPTON, AND DONALD J. DALESSIO ’52

Wolff’s Headache and Other Head Pain, 7th Edition

(Oxford University Press, 2001)

TRISTAN TAORMINO ’93

Pucker Up: A Hands-On Guide to Ecstatic Sex

(ReganBooks, HarperCollins, 2001)

AMY ZUCKERMAN ’76

Tech Trending: The Technology Survival Guide for Visionary Managers

(Capstone, 2001)

Fiction

KATE BERNHEIMER ’88

The Complete Tales of Ketzia Gold

(FC2, 2001)

ALEXANDER CHEE ’89

Edinburgh

(Welcome Rain, 2001)

GABRIEL COHEN ’82

Red Hook

(St. Martin’s Press, 2001)

CDs

Barbara Johnston ’81 plays drums with her band Peachy Nietszche on God is Def and March of the Disney Robots. For more information, check out www. peachyneachy.com or send Barbara an e-mail at babarouk@aol.com.

Tim Howard ’00 and the Mobius Band (Peter Sax ’00, Ben Sterling ’00, Noam Schatz ’00) sing and play together as Soltero on the CD, Science Will Figure You Out (2001). For more information, go to www.solterosongs.com or write Tim at thoward@wesleyan.edu

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

A New Series: Early Classics of Science Fiction

This new series features scholarly editions of classic English language science fiction and new translations of non– English–language science fiction, accompanied by critical introductions, extensive notes, and bibliographic materials. The series will also include monographs and other scholarly studies that explore science fiction works written before 1940.

The first two books in the series are by celebrated French author Jules Verne (1828–1905), author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Round the World in Eighty Days. In Invasion of the Sea (translated for the first time into English by Edward Baxter and edited and introduced by Arthur B. Evans), Verne imagines a canal that would create a sea in the heart of the Sahara Desert, threatening the nomadic way of Islamic tribes living on the site. The Mysterious Island (translated by Sydney Kravitz, edited by Arthur B. Evans, with an introduction and notes by William Butcher) is the first new unabridged translation since 1876 of one of Verne’s best–known novels, a marvelous adventure story depicting a group of men who have become castaways stranded on a Pacific island during the American Civil War.